Harness the power of internet memes

Everybody has seen those funny little captioned pictures doing the rounds on Facebook and Twitter; quite often they’ll have a fluffy kitten, a dog making a funny face or an old person dancing like nobody is watching. Well, you can harness the power of internet memes for your own marketing efforts and they’re surprisingly powerful.

Think of a meme like a small, cheap, powerful advert. Imagine the print advertising campaign you’d love to run, if money wasn’t an issue, and then simply scale it down to a social media level. You don’t have to be totally polished and with your own products photographed perfectly, you can start on a shoestring and achieve real penetration that drives traffic to your website.

Do not go to Google Images – this is the worst thing you can do as you could find yourself with a big bill for breach of copyright. Instead, take advantage of the remarkable deals on offer at stock photography sites like Dollar Photo Club where every picture costs, yes, $1.

Then come up with an angle; funny is good but if you sell life insurance, it’s not the best way to go. Don’t worry too much about going viral either, 1 million social shares means nothing if it doesn’t bring you a single paying customer. Think about your brand identity and stay congruent with that, reaching 1,000 people who are likely to buy is better than becoming an internet sensation with no real tangible result.

Think of a slogan that will really speak to your customer, it can be your company mission statement or another carefully worded phrase that gets your message across in just a few words. Apply the basic principle of marketing: ‘Pitch to the pain.’

Then get to work on the design. If you have someone in-house, great. If you have an internet marketing specialist then perfect, otherwise get an outside standard web design, SEO or marketing agency to take charge of your campaign, it will be worth the investment.

Make sure your logo and website address are on there, and then just get them out there, regularly, and see what impact they have on your web traffic. You might be surprised at the ROI of what started out as a silly idea.