I am the community manager for an online professional garment printing and embroidery company. Every once and awhile I will also be in charge of some content writing and marketing initiatives as well. We are in our early stages as a company and as often as it is the case, resources are tight, to say the least. As a result our marketing budget is not anything to brag and write home about.

This leaves me to be creative and seek less conventional means for marketing our services across the Web. The space for printed and embroidered t-shirts is quite saturated with many players in the industry. We currently have less than one thousand inbound links but enjoy medium to high search term rankings for the majority of our core keywords. For “t-shirt printing” we appear in better positioning than the majority of our competitors, which is no easy feat.

We are fortunate enough to receive a steady influx of customers to our website and phone lines. We pride ourselves on our excellent customer service, high quality professional garment printing and, most importantly, our speed of service. Consequently we receive many returning satisfied clients and their referrals. In the past our marketing efforts have been minimal in light of having enough business to sustain us without having to facilitate other channels other than heavy SEO.

However, we have now set ourselves on a trajectory for growth and cannot rely solely on SEO to get us where we want to be. Producing link worthy content for our blog and related social media platforms has been a challenge for us. We are primarily a B2B service but also cater to individuals printing one-off designs and low run orders. Because of this our markets vary greatly by their needs and directing content at specific audiences is not always easy.

I will often stumble across articles online, especially on SEOmoz, claiming to have great success with producing infographics for generating inbound links. We have tried to do this for our t-shirt printing techniques, but could not seem to gain any traction or find an audience that was very keen on reading or sharing the content. Undeterred by our failures, we did not give up on the idea but decided to try something a little different.

Inspired by the idea of creating link worthy content, we decided to jump on the bandwagon and go the meme route. Our team set aside a couple hours one afternoon to plan a meme campaign related to t-shirts and t-shirt printing. We relied on humor more than anything else. We scoured popular Internet meme websites for the most popular memes being used and related them to our business services.

Out of the fifteen memes we created in a blog post, one ended up being quite successful in respect to its viral impact. It was the “Pissed Off Old Guy” meme. You may or may not already be familiar. The title typically starts, “Back in my day,” and then it is up to the creator to come up with the rest. Many of the others did quite well too, but “Pissed Off Old Guy” performed the best.

Our campaign went as follows:

• Posted to 9GAG.com
• Pinned to Pinterest with a description
• Tweeted to our followers with relevant hashtags (e.g. #meme)
• Submitted to Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.
• Posted to Facebook
• Posted to our Tumblr blog
• Added it to our Flickr gallery
• Posted it to our company page followers on Linkedin

Results

• Approximately 14,000 likes on 9GAG and 20 Facebook comments
• 16 likes and 30 repins on Pinterest
• Shared on Facebook 53 times
• Retweeted 30 times
• 150 combined upvotes in various subreddits
• Tumblr post was retagged 19 times
• Doubled amount of daily traffic over the next few days (We receive approximately 300 unique visitors per day. After posting our memes we were averaging around 600 visitors per day for that week.)

Conclusion

While it is difficult to measure the overall effectiveness of our meme campaign, at least in monetary terms, it was by all means successful and valuable in producing natural links without spamming. The beauty was the simplicity and time effectiveness in creating and posting them online. We did not reach mass viral coverage by any means but were quite proud of what we were able to achieve.

We increased the amount of visitors to our website that may have never been exposed to us otherwise. Whether they made a purchase or not, at least they know about us and may think to use our services in the future. All in all we had fun doing it, and if nothing else, it stands as another testament to the power of meme creation for link building.