Why Dog Memes Are Better At Marketing Than Your Brand
3 Ways Your Startup’s Marketing Is Missing The Mark
I have a lot of respect for dog memes. Many dog meme Instagram accounts are demonically good at leveraging a couple of key marketing non-negotiables that a lot of brands miss the mark on.
So many startups do the content marketing thing on social and send out emails every week, but don’t do it well.
They are good at completing the task, but not great at excelling at the task to the point that they’re seeing viral growth and conversion magic.
Dog meme accounts excel at this.
Maybe this post is an excuse for me to share all of my favorite dog memes — either way, this is a win-win for the both of us.
Here are the 3 key things that dog memes leverage to boost marketing virality and conversions for their content.
Relatability
Dog memes really flex their muscles when it comes to relatability. They know which points to hit for the moment, and what their target market wants to see.
Coronavirus memes? We’ve got 3 this week to commiserate with you.
Got the Monday scaries? We’ve got a video queued up perfectly capturing your misery.
When you create content that relates to your audience at this moment, they:
- Have a reason to seek out your content every week rather than scroll past it.
- See you as a relatable social media friend that they connect with.
- Categorize your voice as relevant.
Your customer would much rather purchase from a friend who makes them laugh, connects with them, and “gets it” than from a suited up salesperson who only knows how to talk business.
If you’re a small business, I don’t want you to apply this takeaway and turn into a meme account. Instead, sprinkle it here and there throughout your content to connect with your audience and foster relatability.
Shareability
Your content shouldn’t be created for you, it should be created for your audience.
A lot of businesses focus on creating good content for their brand when they should be thinking a couple of steps ahead on how they can create potent, shareable content for their audience.
If you’ve created content that your audience wants to share and send to their network, you’ve hit the content jackpot.
To become a master at content marketing, you have to get yourself into the mentality of how can I create content that other people want to share for me?
Leveraging a content formula that has the potential to 10x your audience reach through volunteers who distribute your content for you is where you want your strategy to be in order to maximize your marketing dollars.
A lot of dog meme accounts have an audience north of 50K because of this simple tactic — they prioritize shareability over valuable content.
Are the funniest, most shareable dog memes touting some new, deep narrative that other dog meme accounts aren’t sharing? Nope.
Many of the most shareable content pieces, especially on platforms like Instagram aren’t sharing anything groundbreaking. They are mostly recycling what’s tried and true — simple, easy to digest content that provokes laughter, relatability, or confirmation.
To mimic this for your brand, sprinkle shareability posts into your content plan to leverage the audience-boosting benefits of it. Don’t dumb down your brand completely though and retain posts that showcase the value and unique perspective that your brand has to share.
Personality
Have you ever gone to a dinner party and wildly connected with the person who you deemed to have no personality or a personality you didn’t like?
We connect to other people through their personalities. We want to be around someone who has passionate beliefs, strong likes and dislikes, and a specific demeanor that we like being around.
If your customers love winding down with a bottle of wine and chocolate, they’re going to connect with a personality that likes doing the same.
If your customers prioritize health and wellness and would never be found near alcohol or refined sugar, they’re going to gravitate towards a personality that has made those same choices.
Showcasing your brand’s personality as it relates to your target customer is the best way to create a potent marketing strategy that’s niched down and works.
If you don’t want your audience to scroll past your content every time they see you, define your voice and personality. It’s worth carving out a niche that’ll leave out some people rather than being the dinner guest that no one connects with.
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