Plenty of brand memes get likes without moving a single metric that matters. The ones that actually convert tend to share a few structural traits.
The joke and the offer are the same sentence
If the punchline and the product message are two separate ideas bolted together, the humor usually wins and the offer gets ignored. The strongest converting memes make the product the punchline itself.
One caption, one idea
Memes trying to communicate a feature list rarely perform. The format rewards a single, sharp idea — save the detail for the landing page the click leads to.
A visible next step
A meme with nowhere to go — no link, no clear account to follow, no obvious next post — ends the interaction at the laugh. Even a soft, in-character call to action in the caption keeps the moment moving somewhere.
Format familiarity over originality
Counterintuitively, a meme using a format the audience already recognizes tends to outperform a completely original visual joke, because the audience doesn’t have to spend effort decoding the format before they can enjoy the content.
None of this replaces having something genuinely funny to say — structure only helps a good joke convert; it won’t rescue a weak one.