Marketing Meme: How to Grow Your Business with Funny Memes (With Case Study)

Memes are more than quickly-consumed photos, GIFs, or videos that make you laugh. When used tactically, memes can be a great marketing means to help you connect with the target audience, build brand awareness, boost sales, and even tap into a new market.

If you are new to marketing meme, in this post, we will walk you through what meme marketing is and offer successful examples of marketing memes by different brands and actionable strategies for you to select and create memes to market your brands on social media.

Here is what you will learn：

What Is Marketing Meme?

Marketing meme or meme marketing is the latest marketing trend that uses funny and relatable memes ( images, GIFs, or videos) to stay connected with the target audience to promote your brand, products, and services.

Marketing meme: the latest marketing trend for brands.

Why marketing meme works for businesses is that nowadays memes have become a hugely popular language used on the web. People love seeing and sharing any viral memes that are fun and relatable. Check the 6 best free video meme makers.

For digital marketers and content creators, you can make most of the people’s love for a trending meme and align it with your brand’s image for promo and sales. Read on to find out how big and small brands apply meme marketing to their sales process and brand promotion.

5 Success Stories of Marketing Memes by Brands

Whether you are running a big brand or a brick-to-mortar store, to connect with the target audience, you need to listen to their needs and communicate in their languages. While the funny memes people use daily offer you a huge opportunity to build your brand awareness at zero cost.

Here are some of the successful examples of how marketing memes work for different brands:

1. Netflix

As one of the hottest online platforms for movies and TV series, Netflix offers you a textbook example of how to use memes for marketing on its Instagram account.

Netflix markets her brand with memes from a screenshot of his Bridgerton.

Instead of finding trending meme templates, Netflix frequently interacts with followers with memes made straight out of the screenshots and clips of the hotly-discussed movies and TV shows on Netflix.

In this photo meme above, Netflix used a screenshot of the Emmy-nominated drama Bridgerton and poked fun at a scenario when a new Bridgerton episode is released, people are in no mood to hang out with friends. You barely see any visible ads placement in this marketing meme, yet it is so funny and resonates with the binge-watchers.

2. Tinder India

Tinder is a US online dating app and its Indian branch applied the popular “Distracted Boyfriend Meme” and came up with a creative twist on Tinder’s billboard to promote the company’s new brand campaign “Adulting Can Wait”.

Tinder used memes to market its new brand campaign.

Again, in this marketing meme, the hard sell is avoided and the company skillfully used a young man’s eyeing for a lovely lady to advocate the idea of cherishing the pre-adulting stage, which perfectly aligns with Tinder’s new brand image.

3. Telfar

Another classic marketing meme example is from Telfar, a luxury and unisex purse brand based in NY. In the meme below, Telfar stitched two hilarious purse-robbery scenes together from the movie “White Chicks” to show the quality of its purse and the brand loyalty of devoted Telfar buyers. Such a witty and masterful use of meme marketing.

Telfar applied hilarious film screenshots as marketing memes to the sales promo.

4. The Living Potion

As a perfume brand devoted to delivering the experience of luxury scents to every customer, The Living Potion seized the opportunity of Drake’s newly-released “Certified Lover Boy” album cover and photoshopped the original cover with 12 ladies of different races and skin colors to promote Living Potion’s extensive perfume and scents for different ladies. Another epic success story of marketing memes.

The Living Potion marketed her brand with a creatively twisted meme.

5. KFC

When the premiere of the Hollywood blockbuster film Godzilla vs. Kong grasped so many people’s attention in 2021, KFC posted a funny monster-fight meme on Twitter as a metaphor to claim his dominating place in the American fast-food chains. As expected, this marketing meme went viral on the internet.

KFC’s success story of marketing memes

7 Actionable Strategies for Marketing Memes

Having discussed the success stories of how different brands boost their brand awareness by marketing memes, now we’d like to walk you through 7 actionable strategies to create a marketing meme for your brand.

1. Know Your Target Audience

The very first step for marketing meme is to identify your target audience.

2. Select Memes That Align with Customer Value and Your Brand’s Idea

The worst mistake many brands made is randomly picking a trending meme template for their brand. In this case, you are very likely to put your brand’s image and idea in jeopardy, esp. controversial memes concerning race, violence, and sexual equality.

What you can do is:

Check the origin of a meme by Knowyourmeme

Knowyourmeme also offers video memes, photo memes, GIF memes, and viewers’ comments on the trending memes. Pretty handy for marketing memes strategies.

3. Be Humorous, Relatable, and Subtle

Memes are made to entertain people and trigger emotions they can relate to. So are the marketing memes.

Netflix masterfully used humorous and relatable memes for marketing.

4. Use User-generated Memes for Marketing

UGC (user-generated content) serves as perfect social proof for your brand. It allows your customers to participate in your brand’s growth and create genuine and growing engagement on your social media.

Netflix reposted Starbucks’s meme for marketing on Instagram.

See how even Netflix uses Starbucks ’ marketing meme and tag to achieve a win-win brand promotion.

5. Free Online Sources for Memes

Don’t randomly search memes on Google. Here, we would like to offer you 4 reliable and efficient ways to find trending and free memes and meme templates.

6. Decide Where to Post Your Marketing Memes

With Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. so many social media to choosing from, how do you know which platform works best for your brand? Here are 3 solutions you may use.

7. Don’t Overdo It

Though technologically it’s extremely easy to create memes for marketing, you are not expected to bombard your target audience with unrelated memes daily on IG and Twitter. Otherwise, they will become spam.

Easily Create Custom Marketing Memes for Your Brand

Once you’ve found the best timing and the ideal memes for marketing, the next step is to put your thoughts into creating a custom meme. An easy-to-use tool you can use is FlexClip, a feature-packed video, and meme maker online.

Create mareting meme video by FlexClip

Create Now

All you need to do is：

Preview

Before And After Meme

Use This Template

With FlexClip, you can easily upload images, GIFs, and videos from your PC and mobile phone and customize meme fonts, color schemes, and captions with styles.

The user-friendly tools like image background remover and picture-in-picture effects and speed controls, filters, masking, and royalty-free GIFs, videos, photos, and music assets, elements will get your creative juices flowing.

Finally, you can easily pass the beta meme to your team via a clickable link, or Google Drive or Dropbox and get candid feedback from them. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Frank /

Passionate about photography, video-making and travel, Frank is a seasoned copywriter and a beloved father of 2-year-old daughter at FlexClip. He is always keen to share his latest discovery about video marketing and tricks to relive your memories through videos and images.