Deep Dive: 🤣 Meme Marketing

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Howdy, Marketer! 

You know the memes – they capture nostalgic moments from history or ephemeral flashes in current pop culture.

They make us laugh, they make us cringe – but can they make us buy?

There’s one guy who’s built his career on memes and he’s got a lot to say on the subject.

This week, my buddy Jason Levin is diving into: Meme Marketing

Today's Treasure Trove

• Can memes get you b2b SaaS customers???

• YC-backed AI SaaS Books Demos With Memes

• YC-backed Accounting SaaS Advertises With Memes

• AI SaaS Gets 90% of Pipeline With Memes

• Without distribution, you die.

Can memes get you b2b SaaS customers???

Yes! It’s called meme marketing and it’s what I’ve bet my whole career on.

My name is Jason Levin and I’m the founder of a meme marketing software called Memelord Technologies and author of Memes Make Millions. 1000s of b2b marketers use my software to find viral new trending meme templates, edit up memes, and go viral to get more customers.

Today I’m gonna show you a few killer examples and strategies of how my b2b SaaS customers use meme marketing to make more internet moolah:

YC-backed AI SaaS Books Demos With Memes

Momentic is an AI SaaS for Quality Assurance (bug-testing software). 

They’re an early customer of my software and have leaned into meme marketing hard. 

Wait, why the hell would a fancy YC company use memes???

Because it works. Memes are some of the highest leverage marketing out there (they’re cheap to make, fast, and are inherently viral). The ROI of 1 meme can be huge in B2B SaaS.

Momentic literally books b2b demos with just memes!!! 

If you’ve got an expensive b2b SaaS product that requires booking demos to get customers, then memes are a killer top-of-funnel way to get more demos booked. Sure it’s not going to close a 7-figure deal by itself, but it will get you in the door. Remember: There’s a reason why every salesperson starts conversations with a joke. Laughter loosens people up and builds trust in business. Memes do that perfectly.

Hot tip: Momentic did a very common strategy here of using memes to show their value prop. For Momentic, their value prop “adapts to ui changes, works everywhere …”. If you run a software for marketers, maybe your value prop is something around helping marketers track customer attribution better. If you run a software for freight and logistics, maybe it’s about helping warehouses not lose products. Whatever the value prop is, memes are a great way to sneakily tell people about it without it feeling like a crappy ad! 

YC-backed Accounting SaaS Advertises With Memes

Fondo is an accounting SaaS that started as a customer and then I invested in them!!

Why’d I invest in them? Because accounting is literally the most boring subject ever (I dropped out of business school for a reason!) and yet the founder David Phillips is able to make it fun and appeal to Gen-Z with memes. No Gen-Z like me wants to be stuck with some boring accountant. I can see Fondo getting acquired by Intuit no problem.

But anyways, this post is not about my investment thesis… This is about b2b meme marketing. So let’s see how Fondo is killing it with memes made on Memelord Technologies.

Here you can see David posted a viral Rick Rubin meme and then plugged Fondo underneath. 

Plugging links underneath viral memes? That can’t really work? Hah yes it can. That’s the same strategy I use to sell books and software and the same strategy Chris Bakke used to drive $3M in b2b sales for his hiring startup Laskie which he then sold for over $100M to Elon Musk (read my interview with Chris here). 

Don’t hate on the link plug. Embrace the link plug.

Here you can see how they do it from the brand account with a good Pokemon meme (this is extra-smart because all the kids like me who grew up playing Pokemon are in their 20s now growing their own startups instead of Pikachu).

Hot tip: Brand accounts are always harder to get traction than a personal account (people want to hear from people). So don’t just post on the brand account and expect that to be enough. Use founder-led marketing like Fondo does with David and his co-founders.

AI SaaS Gets 90% of Pipeline With Memes

1up is an AI software for automating knowledge for sales teams.

Basically, their software helps sales teams fill out proposal requests using AI on their knowledge base. Boring b2b SaaS stuff, but they make it fun with their marketing.

“90% of our actual pipeline comes from meme marketing,” 1up’s founder George Avetisov told me. With a minimum customer lifetime value of $249/month billed annual (and much larger enterprise plans), subscribing to our Memes-as-a-Service plan was a literal no-brainer for them. All they needed were 2 new customers per month. 

It’s why I always say memes are some of the highest leverage marketing.

1 meme can hit massive ROI for expensive b2b SaaS.

Hot tip: LinkedIn is starving for funny authentic content. It’s literally the least authentic place on earth. If you’re willing to be funny, authentic, and take some risks, you can go mega-viral with memes on LinkedIn just like 1up.

Without distribution, you die.

“Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don't nail one, you're finished.” 

- Peter Thiel, Zero to One

There’s a reason I started out my book Memes Make Millions with the above quote. Without distribution, your startup dies. And thanks to AI and no-code making it easier to launch products every single day, this is becoming more and more true. Anyone can launch a product these days, but if you don’t have distribution, you die. 

If I could give you 1 piece of advice, it’d be to stop overthinking your distribution plan. Start underthinking. Start making memes.

Need more inspiration? Check out my gallery of b2b meme marketing examples. 

And if you need a meme team, make sure to check out my Memes-as-a-Service offer. My cracked memelord mafia will get you going viral and getting more b2b customers. 

Wrap Up

Wow – what a post.

But honestly, let’s take a step back and examine what we know as marketers to be the best marketing channel: Word of Mouth.

And these days, nothing is more attention grabbing and shareable than memes. (That’s why I make a lot of them for Marketer Gems 😉 )

✌️,

Tom at Marketer Gems

P.S. Don't forget about the LinkedIn sharing contest going on right now!

Here’s how this LinkedIn contest works:

🔗 Grab a link from one of your favorite issues of Marketer Gems (I like this one)

📲 Head over to LinkedIn

💎 Mention at least one gem you found from the issue

🏷️ Include the Marketer Gems link, tag me (Tom)

💥 Boom! Automatically you’ll be entered to win $100! (You must be subscribed to Marketer Gems)

I’m going to run this campaign for the next THREE WEEKS – giving away a gift card each week. So, you have three chances to win! (Once per week)

A winner will be randomly selected Jan 20, 27, and Feb 3.