The genius of Meme marketing in music

Meme marketing has become a must have for marketing teams across most sectors globally.

Simply jump on Seek or Indeed and you’ll see heaps of jobs looking for marketers or social media gurus who have “An ability to pinpoint when a meme is officially dank” (yes, I did a search this morning and this was the description of the first job ad I read).

It’s no secret that we use a lot of memes and ‘meme like content’ to market artists, tours and festivals at The Brag Media, we’ve been doing it pretty consistently for the last 2 years however in 2019 it’s proving more successful than it’s ever been. 

The way memes are cutting through algorithms and collecting audience data is at an all time high both in terms of effectiveness and ROI.

Memes have the ability to do 3 things incredibly well;

1. Collect audience data for everyone who is interested and engaged in a certain topic or genre.
2. Connect a song to an artist, or a personality/face to an artist name. 
3. Inspire fan consideration and interest. 

To best explain how this works, I have outlined some recent examples of each below.

1. Collecting Audience Data

Any good digital marketing funnel requires a good piece of content at the top of funnel to collect the data set of the demographic most likely to convert at the bottom of the funnel.

To explain this simply, please see the way our funnel works for almost every campaign we run at The Brag Media.

At the top of the funnel is where we create and publish an “awareness” piece where the sole objective is to catch an engaged demographic we want to re-target to further down the funnel. (conversion piece).

Memes or “meme like content” are extremely effective for catching he exact audience you need for selling tickets, or marketing a new single/album to. 

Below is an example of a “music history” content piece we ran for Grinspoon on their tour announce day. We created a montage of video clips, with meme text around it and it reached 331,363 unique people completely organically.

We used this piece to catch a data set of engaged Grinspoon fans. Not Grinspoon fans who happened to like Grinspoon’s facebook page years ago, but fans who genuinely love the band today.

With over 300k people reached we can now use that data set to segment those who engaged with the post the most (watch time, comments, likes, shares etc) and then re-target that most engaged segment for ticket sale conversions further down the marketing funnel.

This allows us to waste almost no money with our marketing efforts. After all, if you’re an Australian who watched at least 50% of this Grinspoon video, you obviously love Grinspoon, so we will sell a lot more tickets per dollar spent on targeting that audience, than a generic Grinspoon interest targeting campaign.

Also as a bonus, the post itself converted tickets on it’s own before we did any re-targeting, just read some of the 800+ comments.

2. Connect a song to an artist, or a personality/face to an artist name

Memes were the main driver in the campaign we ran for the Ruby Fields EP.

Ruby had her hit single “Dinosaurs” all over radio, but we wanted to ensure people were connecting the follow up single “Climate” to her, and that people simply recognised her face so her songs weren’t independent of her as an artists. 

To tackle the “Face/personality to artist name” goal, we ran a meme competition across Tone Deaf, encouraging people to create Ruby Fields memes, which we shared on our socials and culminated in this the below article;

Then to tackle the “Climate” goal, we created a memed “fake film clip” of the new single which drew people in whether they knew the song or not.

3. Inspire fan consideration and interest. 

In anticipation for writing this article, I posted the below Skegss meme on Saturday morning.

I believed the meme was funny and relatable enough that people would engage with it whether they knew Skegss or not.

Straight away, two of the first few comments proved this point;

The post organically reached over 32,000 unique people. 

Meme marketing is super effective for music campaigns

Marketers and artist managers who are smart with meme marketing can turn their artists or festivals into brands and capture real equity within the business. 

Memes should not be discounted as just a fun thing that fan clubs and kids do, they should be integral to every good marketing plan or you are simply going to be left behind. 

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.