Trying to market your insurance agency is often a tough task, but when you look at the techniques used to make memes go viral, it helps you better understand what methods of marketing you can use to increase traffic to your agency’s website and ultimately attract clients.
An Internet meme is a cultural symbol (often portrayed as mimicry) that goes viral, such as posting captions over a photo of Grumpy Cat or uploading videos doing the Harlem Shake. Other meme examples include Charlie Bit Me and LOLCats. Most often, memes are humorous. But what can an insurance marketer like you learn from memes?
1. The Core of a Meme is the Audience
For a meme to go viral, it has to connect with an audience. Without this key feature, no one is going to share it, and therefore, it won’t gain any attention.
From this simple idea, marketers get a better understanding of the fact that they must define who their audience is and then create content that this audience will enjoy.
This goes for any type of content on your agency’s blog, social media accounts, written material, advertisements, etc. If you want to gain exposure, you have to first focus on how to relate to your audience.
2. Viral Content is Almost Always Time-Sensitive
People often share content when it relates to current events, debates, or ideas when they’re popular. This means that you have to stay on top of these ideas and catch on quickly before the subject loses popularity. The more popular a subject you can relate to your agency’s marketing campaign, the faster your content will spread.
3. Sharable Ideas are Clever Ideas
People don’t like boring ideas that have either been over-done or simply don’t elicit an emotional response. Every meme that ever spread came with a clever idea. Most often, this idea is clever in the way the meme creator presents it, either by the words he or she chooses or the images that support the content. In your agency’s marketing campaign, the way you present your ideas is often equally as important.
GE, for example, gained 12,000 followers on Pinterest through one of its marketing campaigns by using clever ideas. In the memes, GE uses photos of Thomas Edison, and the overlapping words showed clever pick-up lines that related to the invention in the photo. One such meme showed Edison leaning on a phonograph with the overlapping words, “Hey Girl, I heard you liked music, so I invented the phonograph.”
4. Simplicity is Key
People like simplicity. If you’re looking to make your content go viral or attract clicks through advertisements, then you’ll want to keep it simple. Many Internet memes simply show a photo and include a one-sentence caption. Other times, memes are short video clips that people don’t have to take long to watch (generally under five minutes).
Try to not go too in-depth, place too much visual information on advertisements, or make your content or videos too long for your audience.
With these ideas in mind, insurance marketers like you can get a better idea of how to advertise and how to make content that goes viral.