Memes are everywhere. Essentially, they’ve taken over the internet. They’re fun, quirky ways of expressing ourselves. But, they’ve definitely moved on from being something you’d just share with your friends. Now, businesses (including PUSH) are getting involved in meme culture.
Yep, that’s right – we made a meme to talk about whether you should make your own. To meme, or not to meme? That is the ultimate question. Sorry Shakespeare, that was awful… In fact, I could probably have made that into a meme, but I won’t. You’re safe for now. The point is, we’ve really got behind the new culture, which is – creating vaguely funny, relatable images based on popular topics. All it takes is one cartoon, or image to go viral, and before you know it, everyone’s creating memes adding their own captions.
Do you need to make memes? No, of course you don’t. But, should you? Absolutely, I mean, they’re funny, right? They’re simple, and you can turn a trending image into something that relates back to you or your business within minutes. It’s essentially a free and easy way of making yourself relevant. You want to be relatable within business. It will help your audience know you’re human and understand the world of a normal person. No one wants to be involved with a business that seems to be run by robots. Instead, they want to see your personality.
How are memes beneficial to a marketing strategy?
Believe it or not, they’re a great tool to add to your marketing bank. They’re easy to read as they don’t contain too much text. But, also, they’re easy to look at. Your audience have probably seen the meme you’ve chosen bouncing around the internet already, and it’s likely they’ll appreciate you getting involved. They don’t need to study the image. There’s nothing they can really learn from viewing your image. Instead, they’re just a fun, comical way of passing the time.
They get your point across quickly and in a light-hearted way. If you’re a small business struggling to reply to your messages quickly – make a meme about it. People will take the humour and understand. They might even hold off from dropping you another DM. Their main design is to be relatable. So, targeting them at your audience is a perfect way of getting their attention. Popular content dies out quickly. In a world that relies on social media, trends are often updating and moving along. If you can jump in while the topics are still hot, you stand a better chance of getting your content seen.
Browse the World Wide Web to find topics that work for you and your audience. If you’re a beauty business, you’re probably not going to discuss gardening, are you? So, try and find content within your niche. Think, how can this relate back to my current followers and potential new followers? What jokes are hot in the press right now? Have there been any big statements made within your niche? If you can get behind one quick enough, it’s a free way to possibly grow your social accounts. Find the hashtags that relate back to the meme and use them in your post. This will get you extra brownie points!
What to avoid in the meme world
Firstly, don’t offend anyone. I mean, anyone. It doesn’t matter who you’re trying to get at, it doesn’t look good from a businesses point of view. You need to be really careful if you’re putting out jokes online because once up, you can’t take them down. Not completely anyway. You might delete the meme, but if it’s upset someone, they’ll likely have copied it. The thing with the internet is, you’ll always be held accountable for your actions. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic thing, but, words can be twisted.
Something you might have meant as completely innocent can be turned into something else if you’re not careful. It’s important to consider this before making memes. Will this be taken out of context? Could it possibly be offensive to a certain group of people? I mean, surely as a business and a person, you’re not looking to upset anyone? Instead, just stick to topics you know about. Even misinforming people on a topic can offend people. So, try and only make relatable memes about things that do in fact relate to you.
Be careful what topics you involve yourself in as a whole. Especially areas such as politics. Stating your opinions on something so controversial isn’t a wise move for the majority of businesses. So, don’t get caught in that trap. Regardless of your opinion on large topics, you need to try and stay neutral. That’s not to say you can’t join in with running jokes and themes, or personalise things such as politics to your own brand. For example, if an elections coming up, you could easily make a meme about why your audience should vote for you, but keep actual candidates out of it.
How to create the perfect meme
There are so many different ways you can start creating memes. You can choose your own ideas, images and make your memes from scratch. Using websites such as Canva, EDIT or software like Photoshop. You can easily put together various pictures with a witty pun and away you go! Alternatively, you can pinch a meme online and use one of these websites to write over the text. This isn’t stealing, don’t worry. All memes circle round the internet, they all start somewhere. In fact, the whole idea is to adapt them further.
Our favourite method is top secret… Ok so it’s not, we simply use a meme creator. Meme creators are brilliant because they make the process super simple. In minutes, you can have a bunch of images ready to be posted to your social channels. There are thousands of images to choose from. Within these options you’ll see examples of how other people have used them. This might give you some inspiration for how to adapt them to your business. Or, perhaps you might want to start from scratch. Sometimes we head to the website with an idea in mind. We know which meme we’re looking for, and we know what we want to say. Other times, we need inspiring.
Here’s how to use imgflip to create yourself a meme 
You can make your meme private like we have if it’s something you do not want to share publicly.
