How to Use Meme Marketing to Grow Faster

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Su.

0:20Alright, so we're going to talk about how to use meme marketing to grow faster. So first, let's define what meme marketing is. So Neil, how would you define a meme? What's your favorite meme? You have to define it and tell us your favorite meme. Let's see, a meme, I'm going to actually just Google this. I don't know how to define a meme, but a meme definition, I'm Googling. An image, a video, a piece of text, typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations. So my favorite meme that I saw recently is a picture of a Thai restaurant, and it's closed, and the meme said, strong SEO game.

1:02Like, Thai restaurant's closed all together, like it's out of business, and it says strong SEO game. but I'm in a thread with I don't know how many people but we're all sharing images of strong SEO games so that's our version of a meme and we're just all finding it funny a little bit for us or people listening to this podcast they probably will find that amusing I actually had one that did well on LinkedIn recently where we had a mutual friend that posted one to he posted a meme to Twitter it didn't do that well on Twitter he got like 15 likes or whatever but then I stole his meme and then I reposted it to Twitter.

1:39I think I've shown this before, but I'm going to show it again here. I'm going to show an example. I'm going to share my screen. Give me one second. Here we go. Share screen. Here we go. And we are going to share on move over here. Anyway, point being, the reason I'm talking about this right now, as I pull this up is because we have talked about the LinkedIn channels, one of the LinkedIn company pages getting over a hundred million impressions in a year. And he had primarily grown that channel, the Marketing Millennials channel, using memes, just using really smart memes. And the reason I'm bringing this up right now is because I believe we're going to see more of this happen.

2:17And here's an example of a meme that I posted last week. So five days ago, this one didn't do that well, but you can see I just put things shift quickly because two years ago, everyone was talking about NFTs. People were talking about the metaverse, but that's kind of gone underwater now. And everyone's talking about AI. AI is the new baby now, right? And you have NFTs kind of drowning here. Now, even with Facebook and the metaverse, they're talking about Facebook and AI and what they're going to end up doing now because no one really cares to talk about the metaverse right now. Yep. Look at this one over here.

2:46So I got 3 ,500 likes and then 260 ,000 impressions just posting this meme over here. And that was the one where I kind of just found something that I liked and it ended up going well. So the reason we're talking about this right now is because especially when you are trying to promote something on a channel that has good organic reach, memes do well. And if the meme gets a lot of impressions and you put in your newsletter, for example, you can tend to get a lot of opt-ins that way. And so we wanted to talk about how you could use meme marketing to grow faster. And that was one example of how one page alone built an entire business, leveraging memes first, leveraging good content, the memes, and then they built what they built.

3:27But here's the key to growing faster using memes. And this is where most people get it wrong. With your social channels, you're going to end up thinking, oh, if I post these memes, I'm not going to get any revenue, I'm not going to generate any customers. And that's true. Directly, you will not. The people that watch and share the memes or look at the memes, depending if it's a video or an image, and share it, those people right then and there from that meme, they're probably not going to buy anything from you or sign up for anything. But here's the kicker. The more memes you post that are related to your industry, so you just can't post random memes.

4:02The memes have to be related to your industry. And when you do that and you start building up your follower account, then when you post your normal content, it'll get more engagement than it did previously because you have more followers. And then a small percentage of them, a really, really small percentage of them will convert into buyers, customers. And as you keep doing this over time, that small percentage because you're posting frequently really starts adding up. But that's the key. You post memes to blow up your account. you also post majority of the time your normal content and your normal content is what helps you build relationships with those new followers and then starts converting some of them into customers.

4:41I truly believe if you look at there's people on Twitter. So actually Elon's a good example of this. He uses memes quite a bit. And he said in the past that he is a meme dealer because meme is popular culture. You're leveraging popular culture and you're trying to communicate something. And that tends to do, people tend to resonate with that more. And I'm going to show you the Marketing Millennials page as well. Those of you that are following us on YouTube, make sure you follow us on YouTube. But three hours ago, they posted this one. Okay, well done social media today. LinkedIn, today you appeared in 90 searches this week.

5:10And then the kid is like, this is worthless. And so point being, this one got 3 ,700 likes. And then 23 hours ago, look at this one. Wow. Good reminder for marketers. If you think it's expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur. And this got 11 ,000 likes. Was this anything groundbreaking? Absolutely not. but it's something that people can feel like they're attached to. They want to see more memes from you. They may even want to see more content in the future. But the whole idea of this jab, jab, jab, right hook concept that was popularized by Gary Vee, the whole idea of that one is that for your jabbing, right?

5:44That means you're giving value. So jab, jab, jab, jab, jab. And then the right hook is you go for ask. With meme marketing, I believe you need to jab a lot more. So keep giving memes, keep giving value. And then you can go for an ask every now and then. just be careful though when you're using these memes and jabbing away the memes need to be super super highly relevant to your industry and i know i already mentioned that once but the reason i'm mentioning it again and again is if you start posting random memes even if they start going viral you'll start getting followers that won't engage with your normal content and it can actually screw up your page over time and it can hurt you in the long run so don't get too greedy with me marketing, just because something's really cool.

6:24If you can't adapt it to your industry, don't post it. The final thing I'll leave you with here is if you want to go find the best memes to increase your reach, you can go to the reddits of the world. You can go to Twitter. You can go to Instagram. Your job is to, as a meme dealer is to go scour the web and find the best memes. And by the way, if you're really good at business and marketing memes, you can reach out to myself, hit me up at ericosu on Twitter or Instagram. And Neil and I are always looking for good meme dealers because that's one thing that we think we can level up at. So feel free to hit me up and then you can end up either working for Neil or myself.

7:00And I actually just made that roll up for Neil too. So anyway, you can reach out to me. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and we will talk to you later. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool.io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's marketingschool.io. Until next time, class dismissed.