Memes have become an integral part of our culture and often are the very reason why we browse social media. A recent study found that 38% of social media users follow meme accounts, and a staggering 74% send memes to make people smile or laugh—and 53% send them to react to something. 36% say they send memes to show how they’re feeling, 35% use them as code to someone who will “get it,” and 28% send them when words can’t express how they feel.
By using memes in our marketing, we create an invaluable connection with our target audience and put a smile on their face, helping brands seem more authentic and human.
In this post we will cover the tactics we used to generate leads and sales by using meme ad creatives across different digital channels, mostly focusing on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Reddit.
Our clients: our meme ad experiment included clients from 3 different industries and targeted users in 2 continents. We promoted financial services to UK audiences, IT solutions to UK and US social media users and promoted an international clothing brand across multiple channels in the UK and US.
Creative Assets: compared to standard ad creative assets, we saw a much better engagement across all social media channels and Display network when using popular and recent meme templates. This can be explained with ad fatigue - it happens across all channels and in every industry.
Ad fatigue appears when audiences become overly familiar with ads and are able to recognise it before consciously acknowledging the ad's content or message, resulting in users just glancing over paid content. A standard ad format doesn't capture the user like organic content does, so by using meme ads, we managed to mimic organic content on every platform and capture the users' attention and create a memorable and positive first impression.
Thanks to advanced interest targeting across different platforms, we tailored our our ad content to match our target audience's job titles, interest or create relatable content.
We kept our ad assets fresh, relevant to the target audience and regularly updated the templates and messaging. We found that demographics played a key role when choosing the best meme templates - for instance, audiences aged 45+ did not engage with Rick & Morty memes, but they could really relate to different types of headaches.
One of the biggest benefits of meme ads is easy creation. There are multiple tools and templates you can use to create memes. Considering you understand how memes work and how to use them properly and know your product well enough, you can create tens of ads within minutes.
This allows us to easily conduct large A/B testing experiments and quickly find out what our target audiences relate to and what sales pitch works best for them.
The Results: Our clients got an average of 300% better click trough rates than the standard average platform CTR across Reddit, Facebook and Instagram. The platforms which benefited most from meme content were Reddit and Instagram, with most noticeable difference in performance across all audiences.
Since social media platforms have lower CPC compared to search engines, which helped our meme campaigns generate conversions with much lower cost per acquisition.
Meme marketing is one of the most successful examples of creative content marketing and a proven way to bypass ad fatigue. Memes are an easy way to connect with consumers, generate memorable content and capitalise on trends. Even in B2B marketing, memes can serve as great icebreakers.