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You would think print advertising is void of innovation today, but that is actually not the case.

In fact, many brands are finding new ways to merge the digital and physical world through magazine and newspaper ads.

To give you a sense of how businesses today are incorporating print advertisements into their digital strategy, we’ve collected 15 print advertisements that’ll make you rethink the word “traditional.”

Click here to download more examples of exceptional advertising campaigns.

15 Interactive Print Advertisements That Are Still Innovative Today

1. Glacial

If you’ve ever wanted to speed up the beer-cooling process, you’ll understand the allure of this print ad from Glacial. You soak the ad in water, wrap it around the bottle, and put it in the freezer. The print ad was made with salt particles, which reduce the freezing point of water.

2. Nivea

This print ad won the Mobile Grand Prix at Cannes in 2014. The ad includes a wristband you could attach to your child as he runs around at the beach. The app lets you set a distance and receive alerts if the child wandered beyond the limit.

3. UTEC

UTEC, an engineering and technology university, wanted to recruit more students. Instead of placing the smiling faces of young graduates on a billboard, it created an ad that pulled moisture out of the air in Lima, Peru, which sees very little rain each year.

4. Motorola

The brand teamed up with Wired to promote the Moto X’s customization. People could change the color of the phone by pushing buttons.

5. Kontor Records

Kontor Records wanted to get the attention of creative advertising professionals. Instead of mailing out the latest CD, it sent a vinyl record via email to its mailing list with a paper turntable that could be played with an iPhone.

6. Peugot

This print ad for the car brand features a one-page interactive print ad with a front view of the car that asked people to hit the ad. The spread following it included a mini air bag that inflated when hit.

7. Lexus

In 2013, Lexus released an ad that, when placed over an iPad, revealed the car in action with different backgrounds and music.

8. Lladro Lighting

Why advertise lamps when you can give people an ad that transforms into a lamp? Lladro print ads act like a pop-up book, allowing people to create their own lamp shape by mounting the paper in a corner.

9. Ford

To show off the features of the Ford Explorer, the brand published three print ads with interactive elements. The reader could scan a QR code and then line up the phone on the ad to see the car in action.

10. Volkswagon

Volkswagon published a three-page spread so readers could take a test drive. You could download an app and can try out different features, including the “Lane Assist” mode that would cause the phone to vibrate when it got too close to one side of the road.

11. Sonera

The telecommunications company highlighted its 4G wireless speed with a print ad that served as the game board for an iPhone game.

12. C&A

Fashion retailer C&A published a print ad in customized magazine editions that were linked to a person’s Facebook account. Readers could Like their favorite looks on Facebook by pressing the button in the ad. The data was then sent to a leaderboard in the store.

13. Nivea

To promote its sunscreen products, Nivea created a print ad with a solar panel that could charge a cell phone.

Presiding over a 10+ year old blog has a lot of unique challenges. There are some days when it seems like we’ve covered all there is to cover, and others when it doesn’t seem like we can possibly keep up with changing trends and technologies fast enough.

From where you sit, it might seem like we’ve figured it all out — we’re one of the largest and most visited B2B blogs on the internet, we have a team of extremely talented and motivated staff writers, and we still manage to find new stories you want to read on a daily basis.

But growth doesn’t just happen — you have to work at it, and then keep working at it.

There isn’t one magical strategy that will keep your blog growing forever. Your approach needs to constantly evolve to fit your changing needs as a property.

When I joined the HubSpot Blog team in 2016, our editorial strategy looked drastically different than it does now.

About once a month, our entire team would gather in a conference room for a brainstorm session. Armed with coffee and spreadsheets full of topic pitches, we’d spend a few hours going around the room, discussing what we wanted to cover for the month. At the end of the meeting, we’d leave with a solid list of articles to get started on.

For a long time, this process served our interests well. Our team developed a keen sense of what our audience wanted to read, and an extensive knowledge of what we’d already covered. But as our property grew and our audience expanded, it became clear that something was missing.

We could no longer manage our archives and identify topic gaps (areas we haven’t yet covered on the blog) by gut feeling alone. Although we had some processes in place to pinpoint gaps and select pieces for historical optimization on an article-by-article basis, none of these methods were scalable or precise enough to keep up with what our readers were searching for — and those issues starting catching up with us.

Rediscovering our momentum meant completely changing the way we plan, write, and optimize content. In March 2018, we started to see the impact of these changes: a new all-time traffic record across our three blogs — Marketing, Sales, and Service — and a renewed sense of purpose for the future. After months of traffic plateaus and uncertainty, we know where we’re headed now — and we’re ready to share our new strategy with you.

The Blog Traffic Plateau of 2017

I won’t sugarcoat it: 2017 was a tough year to be a blogger. Between 2014 and 2016, we’d become accustomed to seeing month-over-month traffic growth without regularly switching up our strategy. When 2017 hit, that line started to flatten out, and then — even more alarming — decline. And it wasn’t just us — Unbounce, Wordstream, and WordPress all saw some form of traffic decrease in 2017.

Traffic to the HubSpot Blog 2014 – 2017

To say we were confused would be an understatement. Up to this point, we thought we’d perfected the formula for sustainable traffic growth: Traffic from existing posts in organic search + new traffic from new posts = steadily increasing traffic, forever … right?

It turns out it wasn’t nearly that simple. Our usual protocol for fixing a slump — changing publishing volume, leaning into more clickable topics, historically optimizing a handful of our heavy-hitting posts — wasn’t having a significant impact. This downward trend wasn’t just a temporary dip in our numbers — it was starting to look like the new normal.

So we did what any good content marketing team would do, and cracked open our reporting dashboards to take a deeper look. Unfortunately, what we discovered after many hours of analysis and many coffees consumed wasn’t comforting. Much like the factors behind the mysterious decline of the bee population, there seemed to be multiple culprits converging to create a disaster.

We’d gone looking for a single root cause, and found several macro trends instead:

1. Social algorithms (and users) love native content.

Social media has long been a (relatively) dependable distribution channel for digital publishers, but recent algorithm changes across multiple social networks increasingly favor native content over links that take users off site. The shift makes perfect sense from the social networks’ perspectives — they want users to spend as much time as possible on their network — but it hurts publishers who depend on social traffic.

2. Conversational search is constantly improving.

Google has gotten a lot better at understanding the intent behind a specific query, and as a result, they’re able to serve up extremely relevant pieces of content to meet your exact query. This is great news if you regularly use a home assistant device, but bad news if you’re a publisher looking to capture organic traffic from multiple long-tail keywords with a single, comprehensive piece of content.

Back in 2012, a post on “The Best Interview Questions” might have appeared as a top result in searches for “great interview questions,” “interview questions to ask an interviewer,” and “what questions to ask during an interview.” But in 2018, those long-tail search queries are more likely to result in entirely different SERPs with entirely different top results. This means many of our “ultimate guides” started ranking for fewer long-tail keywords, resulting in organic traffic losses on some of our most highly-trafficked pieces.

3. Featured snippets and other on-page search features are taking a toll on CTR from SERPs.

You’re probably familiar with Google’s featured snippets: those short lists or paragraphs that appear at the top of a SERP and (usually) directly address your query. In addition to featured snippets, there are also a number of other on-page search features that push a piece of content ranking number one even further down your screen.

While these quick answers have certainly made the search experience faster for users, they’re eating our organic traffic — even on SERPs where we hold the number one organic result. People don’t have any reason to click through to a blog post (even if it’s ranking number one) if the answer they’re seeking is already on the top of the SERP. As a result, fewer users are clicking on the number one organic result. Ahrefs found that on SERPs without a featured snippet, the top result received 26% of clicks. When a featured snippet appeared on the SERP, the top result received only 19.6% of clicks.

None of these were things we could fix with a band-aid solution. These shifts called for a massive overhaul of our editorial strategy, and a completely new way of approaching blogging in general.

Our New Editorial Strategy

While these trends were scary for the future of our blog, they weren’t entirely surprising. We’d been aware for a while that future-proofing for Google algorithm changes meant restructuring our site architecture. Back in late 2016, Leslie Ye had begun the tedious and challenging work of transitioning the blog’s internal linking system into a pillar-cluster model. This move was intended to give us an organized way to understand our content gaps, and a cleaner architecture to help posts rank faster and bring in more organic traffic.

Thanks to a blog redesign project (headed up by Carly Stec) that automated this pillar-clustering process across the entire blog, our 10,000+ posts were neatly sorted into the pillar-cluster model by mid-2017. But our process for planning and writing new content hadn’t fully adjusted to work optimally within this new system. We had a much better understanding of where our content gaps were, but we weren’t filling these gaps systematically — we were still largely guessing when it came to the topics we should be writing about on a monthly basis.

We were also suffering from a lack of foresight: we weren’t planning for the search terms that would be popular a few years or even a few months into the future. This left room for other blogs and publications to capture organic green space that would be essential to our sustained growth down the line.

With this in mind, we made the decision to focus all our efforts behind stabilizing and growing our organic traffic. If our existing content was slowly but surely losing clicks to featured snippets in search, and our new content wasn’t consistently earning as much traffic from promotional channels like social, we needed to offset those losses. And that meant zeroing in on organic green space in a big way.

This led us to create three guidelines we now use to determine what net new content we create:

1. Does this topic have search volume, or will have search volume in the future?
2. Does it fit into our pillar-cluster model?
3. Is it duplicative (is there a piece of content on this topic that already exists)?

If no one is searching for a topic, and we don’t anticipate the search demand to grow in the foreseeable future, there’s no long-term benefit in covering it. At least for our blog, posts created without a clear keyword in mind tend not to produce sustainable traffic after their first month of publication.

To rank these days, your site usually needs both depth and breadth on a topic — in other words, you need to cover a concept or subject at a high level, then dive deeper with specific, detailed posts. Using the pillar-cluster model (more on that here) makes our content much likelier to rank than if we published an individual post that targeted one or two keywords. If a blog post doesn’t fit into an existing cluster, it’s probably not worth our time and energy to write it.

As you can probably imagine, we’ve covered quite a bit of ground in our 10+ years as a blog. Some overlap is inevitable, but writing on the same exact topic more than once — even if the takeaways are ultimately different — can lead to self-competition in the SERPs. And if we’re already ranking highly for a topic, our efforts are better spent creating a piece of content for a SERP we’re not on at all instead of piling on where we already have valuable real estate.

If a topic doesn’t meet these three guidelines, we won’t create content around it. There are a few exceptions of course — The Marketing Blog’s news program (headed up by Amanda Zantal-Wiener) and thought leadership on topics we think our readers need to hear about — but for the most part, this organic-first strategy represents an enormous shift in the way we plan our editorial calendar and create content. Posts created with an organic goal in mind don’t always pay off immediately, but organic is the only type of traffic that can consistently pay off month over month.

The Editorial Process in Action

Adopting an aggressive organic-first approach required a serious mindset change for our team — one that required us to put aside our obsession (some would even say addiction) with quick wins, and instead put our primary focus on sowing seeds for the future. We weren’t going to publish a post with no strategic organic potential, even if we knew it would bring in a satisfying spike in traffic.

Ultimately, the temporary traffic from a quick-win post brought us nothing of value in the long run. To truly grow, we need to keep our eyes on the organic gaps in our pillar cluster model.

A big part of seeding for the future also means educating ourselves on emerging topics: subjects our readers aren’t too concerned with right now but that will eventually become trending search terms, like the nuts and bolts of artificial intelligence, or practical applications for blockchain. These are the technologies people will likely be searching for in droves in the future, and we want to get out ahead of the competition and position our blog as a resource right now — and earn the traffic when the search volume spikes.

So how exactly do we select which topics to cover? We’ve talked about the reasons behind our new strategy, now let’s see what this process actually looks like on a quarterly basis.

Stage One: Planning

We’ve partnered internally with our SEO team to create a blog taskforce of sorts, headed up by our former Sales Blog Editor and current Sr. SEO Strategist Aja Frost. Each quarter, Aja conducts in-depth keyword research across our three onsite blog properties (Marketing, Sales, and Service), taking into account both gaps in our existing topic clusters, and emerging topics we haven’t yet thoroughly constructed content clusters around.

The resulting quarterly report includes well over 100 post suggestions broken down by topic clusters for each blog. Here’s what our completed “Advertising” cluster looks like on the report:

Stage Two: Execution

Our Multimedia Content Strategy team handles the creation of each cluster’s pillar page (the long-form piece of content that serves as a broad, foundational resource on the subject), and the Blog team owns the production of the supporting blog articles that delve deeper into specific subtopics. Most of the articles need to be written from scratch, but in some cases, we already have a blog post in existence that just needs to be updated to include a fresher, more exhaustive take on the subject.

SEO optimization has always been a consideration for our team when writing posts, but under this new strategy, its become a top priority. Before a single word is typed on a first draft, our writers already have information from our SEO team on the keyword(s) to target, section titles (H2s) to include, and featured snippet sections to work into the copy.

Here’s an example of a typical article assignment on our editorial calendar:

Targeting featured snippets with consistently formatted sections has removed some (but definitely not all) of the guesswork when it comes to ranking for featured snippets. Matthew Howells-Barby, HubSpot’s Director of Acquisition, has stressed that clean and consistent code is a significant factor in winning snippets.

His team created a simple code our writers can use when formatting sections of copy for paragraph or list snippets. Not only has our team started incorporating featured snippet sections into all our new posts, but we’ve also historically “snippetized” hundreds of posts from our archives to help Google surface them more frequently.

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve likely encountered these snippet boxes before:

While there’s unfortunately not a 100% guaranteed formula to win featured snippets, this method has helped our team capture more than 6,300 featured snippets as of June 2018.

In addition to optimizing our articles more intentionally for featured snippets, we’ve also adopted a more aggressive historical optimization approach in 2018. Our team has had a historical optimization strategy in place for several years now, but it’s been years since we’ve had a full-time human dedicated to making sure our existing content is performing optimally in search.

Braden Becker, a Senior Staff Writer on the Blog team, has taken on the task of monitoring the organic performance and optimization of our 10+ years worth of archives as a full-time responsibility. Each month, Braden works with our SEO team to develop an update strategy that works with the new content clusters we’re producing. He selects posts for updating largely based on their individual monthly organic traffic — “the better they’re performing, the higher the potential benefit once I optimize them,” he explains.

Stage Three: Analyze

Once a month, the Content and SEO teams meet to discuss our progress, dig into the numbers, and plan for the next few weeks. We examine organic traffic numbers across our three blog properties, report on featured snippet attainment and loss, and discuss new ways we can adapt to Google’s ever-changing algorithm.

The biggest shift in our reporting method under our new organic-first strategy has been a mental (and, I’ll say it, emotional) one. Although we still report at a monthly cadence, we’ve had to largely abandon our fixation with month-over-month growth, and instead focus on broader trends over longer periods of time.

When I first joined the Blog team, month-over-month growth was the ultimate goal. If the end-of-month traffic number beat out the previous month, we considered it a success; if that number was in the red — a lost month. No matter what, the slate was wiped clean on the first day of the next month, and we started the race all over again. This short-term mentality led us to become so focused on hitting monthly numbers, we ended up neglecting the bigger picture: our blog’s health and continued growth over time. Enter the traffic plateau of 2017.

Under our new editorial strategy, we’re more focused on seeding for the future — and that means letting go of our monthly traffic goals. An article we publish this month on “How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy for Virtual Reality” might not have a ton of search volume right now, but we’re betting it will sometime in the future. It might be many months before we see the rewards reflected in our traffic numbers, and we have to be okay with waiting, knowing we’re setting ourselves up well for the future.

As a result of this strategy, our team’s mindset has gone from “We’ll do anything to smash our monthly traffic goals” to “Stick to the plan.”

Getting out in front of future search terms and filling gaps in our existing topic cluster structure will pay off more than watching the monthly traffic numbers rise over a few well-timed, clickable posts.

What challenges is your blog facing? How are you approaching growth in 2018? Talk to us @HubSpot.

Here’s a hard truth: your cover letter might have almost no impact on whether or not you get hired. A hiring manager might gloss over it, or not bother reading it at all.

But under certain circumstances when a recruiter is unsure if she wants to move forward with you, it counts big-time.

Cover letters are important regardless of the size of the company, but can be used differently depending on the company’s recruitment goals.

Madeline Mann, Director of People Operations at Gem HQ, says cover letters are crucial if you’re applying for a position at a small-to-medium company: “For us little guys — the companies who hire dozens instead of hundreds; the start-ups looking to change the world with team members who are equal parts talented and passionate; the tribes where each new person immediately sends ripples through the culture — we read every cover letter, and make our interview decisions based on them.”

Even if you’re applying for a position at a larger corporation, writing a cover letter is still important. Our recruiters at HubSpot have said they often use cover letters when they’re on the fence about a candidate. They use the cover letter to decide if they’ll move forward.

Claire McCarthy, a recruiter at HubSpot, says a cover letter is, “your opportunity to showcase your business acumen and written communication skills. Cover letters can just as much disqualify you as a candidate as they can sway me to move you forward.”

At the very least, as Jodi Glickman, a communications expert and author of Great on the Job, points out: “Not sending a cover letter is a sign of laziness. It’s akin to making spelling and grammar mistakes in your resume. You just don’t do it.”

Ultimately, a cover letter differentiates you from other candidates beyond the content of your resume. It can prove your enthusiasm for a company, showcase how well you’ll fit into the culture, or explain gaps in your resume.

But that’s only if you write a good cover letter. Otherwise, the cover letter wastes your time, and the hiring manager’s time. To ensure your cover letter demonstrates exactly why you’re an exceptional fit, we’ve compiled powerful tips from experts in the recruiting and career development field.

1. Address the hiring manager personally.

Claire McCarthy, a recruiter at HubSpot, says, “Specificity is key. I can spot a generic ‘fill in the blank with company name’ cover letter from a mile away.” That specificity should start early, with an appropriately addressed letter, which says, “To [Hiring Manager’s Name].”

Here are a few ways to find out who is hiring for a certain position:

• Reach out to any contacts you have at the company and see if they can tell you.
• Email or call the company, and ask who is hiring for position X.
• Do some sleuthing on LinkedIn or Google. Type in [hiring manager + company X] and see what you find.

At the very least, you’ll want to address “The Hiring Team” instead of “To whom it may concern.”

These little touches go a long way towards proving you’ve put genuine effort into this cover letter, and aren’t simply sending out generic ones to every company you find online.

2. Stand out from the start, and don’t fall back on a generic introduction.

John Lees, a UK-based career strategist and author of Knockout CV, told Harvard Business Review: “People typically write themselves into the letter with ‘I’m applying for X job that I saw in Y place.’ That’s a waste of text.”

Your cover letter introduction is your one shot to capture the hiring manager’s attention and ensure they don’t throw it away. No pressure, right?

Claire McCarthy seconds Lees’ point, explaining that as a recruiter, she already knows you want the job — it’s why you applied, isn’t it? She urges candidates to instead use the introduction as space to explain why you’re qualified.

Start off by saying something direct, dynamic, and persuasive. Lees suggests saying something like this: “Before you read any further, let me draw your attention to two reasons why you might want to hire me …” See? This sentence sets you up to share critical information the recruiter needs to read early on.

The exact contents of your introduction will vary depending on what you know of the company culture: a tech start-up, for instance, could invite a more candid or creative introduction, whereas a financial position probably deserves more stiff professionalism. You’ll need to do your research to ensure your tone fits their brand.

3. Address gaps in your resume — or risk seeming suspicious.

No one has a completely linear career path. Most employers won’t fault you for having career setbacks or gaps, but it’ll look suspicious if you’ve got a full six-months unemployment on your resume and can’t explain it.

Bart Turczynski, a career expert and editor for Uptowork.com, suggests using your cover letter as a chance to fill in those gaps in your resume that could otherwise raise an eyebrow.

Turczynski says, “use the cover letter to share what you did during that gap time. Think of any courses, [or] workshops you might have attended in that period.”

It’s likely if you don’t address it, a recruiter is going to be skeptical of your work ethic. It’s important you explain what you learned or how you pursued professional growth during an unemployment period. If you took off time to travel after college, you don’t have to hide it — own up to your own life story and explain how the opportunity to travel positioned you to be more successful, long-term.

4. Answer the three critical questions a hiring manager might ask herself.

Jenny Foss, Founder and CEO of JobJenny.com, writes three questions hiring managers will be looking to answer when they read cover letters:

1. Can he or she do this job?
2. Do we like him or her?
3. Do we think he or she is going to fit around here?

Your resume partially answers the first question, but it doesn’t answer the second or third. When you’re up against plenty of people with similar skill sets, your cover letter needs to convince the hiring manager you’ll be the better fit than the rest of the pile.

First, do extensive research on the company’s culture. In your cover letter, you want to try to match their tone — do they come across as goofy, relaxed, fast-paced, or conservative?

For instance, if the company seems incredibly results-driven from their About Us page, you might adjust your tone to reflect how focused and disciplined you are, with points like, “Over the past year as digital marketing manager at Company A, I’ve generated $30k+ in revenue, increased organic traffic to our blog by 14% …”

However, if the company seems more playful and relaxed, you might use a tone that sounds similarly fun-loving (check out 8 Impressive Ways to Start a Cover Letter, with Examples for some ideas).

Answering Foss’s question two — whether you’re likeable — is harder to address. It’s often difficult to come across as likeable through digital correspondence, but you want to be authentic and use friendly and respectful phrases.

For instance, you could convey a general good-naturedness via email correspondence, with phrases such as, “At your earliest convenience,” “Have a great weekend” and, “I look forward to hearing from you,” etc. Stay clear of sounding pushy or frustrated, and remain humble by focusing on past achievements (“I’m a fast learner … I got two promotions in seven months”), rather than sounding boisterous (“I’ve always been smart.”).

5. Don’t waste time repeating the contents of your resume.

Wasting a recruiter’s time by repeating information already on your resume is an easy way to lose their interest — plus, it’s depleting space you could be using to convince them you’re the most qualified candidate.

Vicki Salemi, a Monster career expert, says, “Recruiters are looking for a cover letter that highlights your professional achievements, like the fact that you got promoted two times in three years, you earned a coveted award within your industry and/or you possess a unique skill set. Think of it as a ‘best-of’ roundup of your career so far.”

Notice Salemi mentioned professional achievements such as promotions or awards: while those achievements might be listed on your resume, they aren’t explained or highlighted. Use your cover letter as a chance to explain more in-depth.

For instance, your resume might say “Event planner, Two years”. But your cover letter could take it a step further: “I dealt with the nuts and bolts of the event planning process, and I have increased my leadership skills and my teamwork skills exponentially. I increased event retention and was recognized as the ‘event planner of the year’ at my company.”

See? Your cover letter lets you provide critical background details about your experiences, showcasing how you’ve learned and grown from past roles.

6. Prove your values and passions align with the company’s.

Passion is a major indicator of success, as well as long-term company loyalty. It’s often challenging to display passion in the rigid format of a resume, so your cover letter is a good opportunity to show your excitement for the position.

Madeline Mann, Director of People Operations at Gem HQ, says: “The other important ‘why’ in the cover letter is, ‘Why this company?’ It is a huge bonus in the cover letter if there is any mention of geeking out on our technology, cultural tenets, or our mission. These candidates are the ones who understand, at least on a basic level, what we are building and why it is important, and are enthusiastic about it. This gives them an edge because our small start up runs on passion and thirst for knowledge — if you don’t get excited about complex bleeding edge technology then you won’t have nearly as much fun as everyone else.”

The easiest way to prove your ability to do a good job, apart from writing a list of skills, is to show recruiters you understand the company’s bottom line and crave the opportunity to help drive success. This is more convincing if your values align with the company’s, or if you care deeply about the company’s overarching goals.

7. End with your elevator pitch.

To write your closing statement, Claire McCarthy recommends thinking of yourself as a lawyer: “You’re making a case as to why you are a qualified candidate for this position, and why the recruiter should move you forward. What’s your value prop? What will you bring to the table, and what’s going to set you apart from the pack?”

This is your chance to dig into skills or experiences that might not be obvious from your resume. With your closing statement, you want to speak confidently about how you envision your future at the company and in the position to which you’re applying. This is an opportunity to paint a picture to show the recruiter the connection between your past success at Company Y and your likely future success at her company.

Be blunt. Claire recommends saying something like this: “As the most junior rep at my Boston-based company, I worked West Coast hours and hit 125% of my annual quota in 2017, and plan to take this track record of success, and commitment to my craft to Company X’s sales team.”

Essentially, your closing statement should be your elevator pitch for why you’re best suited for the role. Take all your prior experiences and relate them in a convincing argument for how you’ll succeed next.

Success Kid. Old Spice Man. Rage Comics. These days, memes are spreading like wildfire all over the internet, and clever marketers are jumping on the opportunity to use these viral pieces of content to their advantage.

And honestly, who doesn’t love a good meme? They’re funny, clever, and great for social sharing. As a marketer, “memejacking” — or hijacking popular memes to describe a certain situation — can be a great way to create fun, engaging marketing content that shows off your brand’s personality and likability.

And we could always use some more content. In fact, the image we used above is a memejacking just for marketers. Keep reading for more meme examples, as well as tips for how to memejack your own.

What’s a Meme?

Let’s take a step back for a second for all you marketers we lost at the mention of the word “meme.” First of all, just to keep you from sounding ignorant at your next marketing meeting or cocktail party, meme is pronounced “meem,” rather than “meemee” or “mem-ay,” as one anonymous HubSpotter here has been known to mispronounce it.

A meme is quite simply a concept, behavior, or idea that spreads, usually via the internet. Memes most commonly manifest themselves in a visual such as a picture or a video, but it can also take the form of a link, hashtag, a simple word or phrase (e.g. an intentional misspelling), or even an entire website.

Why Memejacking Is Awesome for Marketing

Memejacking for marketing is helpful for so many reasons. We’ve touched on a few of these already, but let’s elaborate.

They’re Already Viral

A concept doesn’t exactly get classified as a meme if it’s not fun, engaging, and wildly popular. That’s why memes are so great for marketing. Rather than creating something from scratch and crossing your fingers that it “goes viral,” you’re leveraging an idea that is already successful.

They Make Great Social Media Fodder

You’re aware of all the fuss about visual content lately, right? Visual content is practically made for social media sharing, and because memes are usually visually oriented, they make great fodder for your social media accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

They Attract Traffic, Likes, and Links

Because memes are so share-worthy, they’re fantastic for generating traffic and visibility to your social media accounts. Memes attract likes, repins, comments, and shares like crazy — making it more likely that your social content will gain traction in social media and spread.

And when memes are used on your own website/blog, you’ll reap the benefits of traffic and inbound links, too.

They’re Quick and Easy to Create

For inbound marketers, content creation is a daily task. Because so much of your marketing campaigns depend on content (and fresh content, at that), having some easy-to-create types of content at your disposal is a marketer’s dream come true. Memes offer just that. They’re easy and usually take little time to create.

8 Meme Examples and How to Successfully Jack a Meme

In addition to the few examples we shared in the introduction to this post, check out some of the most popular memes of the past decade to get a sense of what memes can be about. We included some captions just for marketers on the memes below …

1. Kermit: But That’s None of My Business

At just the right moment, Kermit the Frog becomes a hilarious template for passive aggression. The caption below the picture of Kermit always stays the same; it’s the subtle gripe above Kermit that makes this meme yours. The meme might help you express your audience’s typical challenges — but that’s none of my business. 

2. Futurama Fry: Not Sure If

You don’t need to be a fan of the TV show, Futurama, to appreciate the look of suspicion on the face of Fry, shown above. This meme is known by its opening phrase, “Not sure if …” It allows any user to memejack the rest with a caption that describes a funny, perhaps exaggerated uncertainty among their audience. 

3. Be Like Bill

Simplicity is the source of the funny in this meme. Meet Bill, an adorable stick-figure model for the behavior you know your audience would endorse. All you have to do is describe him in three lines, all leading up to “Be Like Bill,” the last caption on every iteration of this popular meme. 

4. What People Think I Do

Some memes are designed to identify with the reputation struggles of your audience. The one above speaks for itself.

When HubSpot memejacked the “What People Think I Do/What I Really Do” meme for our Facebook page, our sales-themed meme generated an impressive 453 likes, 57 comments, and 256 shares, while our marketer version accumulated a whopping 460 likes, 53 comments, and 337 shares.

5. Success Kid

Success Kid is a meme that has stood the test of time. There’s no requires text on this one — it’s a template for any extreme stroke of luck you know your audience would resonate with. The caption above doubles as a true story: the smallest changes to your call to action (CTA) copy can change its appeal tremendously.

6. Buzz Lightyear: Everywhere

The characters above need no introduction, but this meme might. With his arm around Woody, Buzz Lightyear offers a gesture of optimism (or sarcasm, depending on how you play this one) for your audience. For marketers, the right lead magnets can generate more leads than you ever thought possible … Buzz’s words, not mine.

7. Boromir: One Does Not Simply 

You might recognize this handsome soldier from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But Boromir, son of Denethor, is much more than a warrior of Gondor. In the scene above from the Fellowship of the Ring, Boromir explains how “one does not simply” walk into Mordor, an evil region of Middle Earth where few have survived.

Everyone has their own version of Boromir’s grave warning. In marketing circles, Google might as well be Mordor for search engine optimization (SEO) specialists.

8. Puss in Boots: Old Spice Man

While most memes are very easy to hijack, some can be a bit more complicated if elements like video are involved. For example, DreamWorks featured its Shrek-based character, Puss in Boots playing the Old Spice Man in the above trailer to promote the 2011 movie spinoff, Puss in Boots.

However, even memes that have originated as videos have been successfully adapted into images, as evident by the Old Spice Man meme, which originated as a series of videos. But hey, if you have a talent for video and feel you can hijack that popular new video meme, go for it!

How to Make a Meme: Best Practices for Memejacking

Because memes are often very simple (like the one I created by hijacking the ‘Y U NO’ Guy meme), they’re usually simple creations. Some basic knowledge of a photo editing tool like Photoshop (or hey … even Microsoft Paint can sometimes do the trick) can come in handy when hijacking brand new memes. But you’ll find there tons of meme templates out there, like Meme Generator, quickmeme, and Make a Meme — all of which make it extremely simple to hijack popular memes.

For example, to create my meme for this post, I conducted a Google search for “Y U No Guy Meme Generator,” and came across MemeGenerator.net’s tool, enabling me to create the meme pictured at the top of this post.

Once you pick a tool you like, you can either select from the blank memes in the tool’s gallery, or upload your own. Then, you’ll have the option to customize the text on the top and bottom of the image you’ve selected.

Then, download your newly branded meme and post it on the channel of your choosing. Just be sure to add additional context if the meme is being shared alongside a larger story or campaign.

Ready to do some memejacking of your own? Here are our top memejacking tips.

Try to Jump on it Quickly

The most successful instances of memejacking for marketing occur when a meme is at its tipping point — it’s started to spread wildly, yet few have hijacked it. This is your memejacking sweet spot, since memes can start to feel old after everyone and their mother has hijacked it.

To stay ahead of the curve and stay on top of trending memes as they start cropping up, browse social bookmarking sites like Reddit or StumbleUpon, which are known to surface up-and-coming memes before more mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In fact, just staying well connected online and abreast of the latest news can keep you on top of the latest breaking memes.

Understand the Meme

Before you memejack, make sure you’re well educated about what the meme means and implies. The last thing you want to do is offend your audience or memejack something you wouldn’t have if you had fully understood the connotations of it. Luckily, the folks at Know Your Meme are usually on top of the popular memes, their histories, and their claims to fame so you can determine whether a meme is appropriate for your audience.

Ask Yourself, “Will Our Audience Appreciate It?”

To piggyback off the last point, understand that using memes will only be successful in your marketing if your audience appreciates the particular meme you’re hijacking. If your audience doesn’t have any connection to the meme, doesn’t understand it, or doesn’t think it’s funny, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been wildly popular among a general internet audience.

Make Sure it’s Relatable to Your Brand

Most importantly, make sure your memejacking isn’t at the expense of being relatable. The way you hijack your meme should have something to do with your brand, industry, etc. If it’s a stretch to create a funny meme that relates to your brand, then it’s probably not worth doing. The most successful memejacks are those that cleverly incorporate some essence of the brand — its industry, messaging, mission, slogan, etc.

Remember, posting content about subjects related to your brand often generates the most engagement. In other words, posting content unrelated to your brand — like the latest internet meme that can in no way be aligned with your brand — just isn’t going to cut it.

Be Funny/Witty/Entertaining

The most successful examples of memejacking have entertainment value, so while it’s critical to make sure your audience can relate to it, don’t aim to be serious. The tone should be funny and/or witty, so use language and copy that achieves those goals.

Align With the Original Meme’s Core Components

Make sure your memejack sticks to the original meme’s format, style, and includes the same components. Otherwise, you’ll have a memejacking #FAIL on your hands. Remember the meme above that HubSpot hijacked on our Facebook page — the ‘What People Think I Do/What I Really Do’ meme? Take another look at our ‘Marketers’ version. It appears to be missing the critical ‘What I REALLY Do’ frame, doesn’t it?

While this oversight (luckily) didn’t really affect the success of our meme, we did feel a bit silly about it when a commenter called us out on it. Whoops!

How to Spread Your Memes

Once you’ve created a meme to use in your marketing, what do you do with it? Well, as we mentioned earlier, memes make for really awesome visual content to use in your social media marketing efforts. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Here are some great ways to make the most out of your funny new meme:

1. Share it on Social Media

Plain and simple, plant your meme in prime sharing environments — social networks. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are perfect social networks for memes because they’re all sites where visual content thrives. Post your meme to your Facebook and Instagram pages accompanied by a witty remark or brief description, and pin it to an appropriate pinboard on Pinterest (perhaps you can create a board dedicated to memes).

You can also share it on Twitter, in addition to other niche social networks you might have a presence on — just don’t let meme creation detract from the primary reason your audience might follow you on these more versatile channels.

2. Use it as a Visual Element in Other Website Content

Don’t just share your meme on social media. Create a blog post that presents a situation your meme reflects perfectly — just remember to still add a call-to-action to the post so you can optimize it for lead generation and convert any visitors into leads. This will also give you something to link to when you share your meme in social networks.

3. Optimize it for Social Sharing

If you do decide to put your meme on your website — either in a blog post or on another web page — be sure to optimize that page for social sharing. Make it easy for your visitors to share your meme themselves by adding social sharing buttons, particularly for visual social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

This will help to extend the reach of your meme, as visitors will share it with their own personal connections in social media, getting visibility for your meme beyond your direct network.