‘We’re willing to try everything’: How a startup snack brand is leveraging meme culture to reach shoppers

By Kimeko McCoy

As the social media advertising space grows more saturated, a startup snack brand is betting big on its organic meme strategy to stand out from the competition and build brand awareness.

Like many brands, Muddy Bites is using the strategy to diversify its media mix away from Facebook and Instagram. Per Jarod Steffes, CEO and co-founder, Muddy Bites dedicated an estimated 90% of its digital ad spend in Q3 to Facebook and Instagram. That spend has since dropped to 60% of budget in light of rising data privacy concerns, Facebook’s global outage earlier this month and steadily rising costs. He did not give exact figures.

“Facebook’s only going to get more and more expensive,” Steffes said. “We really want to be able to expand our budgets and try new things, while we’re still young and really can try some of that stuff.”

Currently, the brand has eight paid ads running across Facebook and Instagram, including at least two memes, according to Facebook Ad Library.

That being said, the three-year-old, Iowa-based snack brand has started experimenting with TikTok with paid ad units and influencer marketing as well as finding ways to translate its current Instagram-based meme strategy into TikTok’s short-form video format.

Over the last year, Muddy Bites has stayed up on internet culture, leveraging in-house, organically created memes across Instagram. Some of the brand’s memes riff off of pop culture happenings, but many of them leverage screenshotted tweets featuring the product.

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Muddy Bites even created an official mascot Twitter handle in September to create branded memes. In terms of the meme strategy on TikTok, the brand has leveraged its static Instagram content with trending TikTok sounds. But per Steffes, Muddy Bites wants to work with TikTok influencers on memes to help attract a bigger audience there.

“We’re so early on Tik Tok as an ad platform that we’re willing to try everything,” he said.

Since launching a presence on the platform last September, Muddy Bites …read more

Source:: Digiday