Hashtags have become a great tool for marketers of all kinds, mostly due to their exceptional benefits. Twitter was the first social media channel to incorporate hashtags, and the others have followed. Nowadays, hashtags are a universal social media tool that can help businesses improve their performance by attracting various audiences based on relevant keywords.
Whether you’re running a digital enterprise, a small business, or you’re simply a marketer who’s looking to improve his marketing efficiency, hashtag marketing is surely the way to go, as it can easily improve your brands’ awareness while giving you the benefit of extra traffic.
In today’s article, we’ll cover the most important benefits of hashtag marketing, along with several useful tips and tricks that should improve the performance of your future hashtagging. Pay attention, take notes, and take action!
Examples & Benefits of Hashtag Marketing
Some of the greatest brands have developed viral hashtag marketing campaigns out of simple yet catchy ideas. For example, Coca-Cola has launched one of the most successful viral hashtagging campaigns named #ShareACoke. Hashtags have played an incredible role in this campaign, allowing the twist to become viral.
If you’re not a Coca-Cola customer, here’s what their bottles looked like:
#ShareACoke with your friends, family, colleagues – a massive hit. Obviously, the names were written according to each country.
A second example is a charity campaign that you’re probably already aware of. #IceBucketChallenge was another massive hit in the world of hashtags. Social media networks were the perfect environment for this challenge to thrive because every person who would comply with the challenge had to comment #IceBucketChallenge and nominate three more friends or known ones through tags. Celebrities went along and so the campaign immediately became viral!
Obviously, not every hashtag campaign will become viral, and there’s no guarantee that you will ever reach virality. However, the benefits of hashtags don’t present themselves only if the campaign goes viral. Using only a limited budget or no budget at all, here are some of the great benefits you can reap:
- You can improve your content’s reach, placing it in front of many interested prospects’ eyes.
- If you intend to, and if your campaign is planned and executed properly, there’s always a possibility that your hashtags to go viral.
- A hashtag can be used as a tagline (motto) and can be turned into a branded hashtag.
- By leveraging a branded hashtag, you’ll be able to differentiate yourself from any other business.
- Hashtags allow you to differentiate and segment your content based on various topics, demographics, and interests.
- You can attract a lot of “hot leads”, which are individuals that are very close to becoming anyone’s customer in case a good offer is presented. For example, #BestFurnitureNY is a hashtag with a buying intent. People that search for it are already ready to buy something.
- Hashtags are a great way to track your social media campaigns’ performance and engagement.
- Posting relevant hashtags on a regular basis will improve your social media following in a gradual way.
- By leveraging trending hashtags, you’re able to reach people that you would have never been able to reach otherwise (on a constant basis)
- If you study the hashtags that your target audience regularly posts, you’ll get valuable insights about their interests, needs, or problems. Simply put, you’re able to gain valuable intelligence that’s coming from your target audience’s mindset and posting behavior.
Tips to Improve the Power of Your Hashtagging Campaigns
Every type of marketing campaign has a learning curve. A hashtagging campaign can always fail, but that’s no problem. Failures are part of the entire process, so you’d better figure out a way to make peace with them. Perceive them as valuable lessons that’ll improve the performance of your future marketing campaigns.
Here are some tips to improve the power of your hashtags:
1. Establish Precise Goals Before Anything Else
Every marketing campaign should start with a well-defined goal. Every business is trying to improve its marketing performance in various ways. If your main business target is to familiarize the masses with your brand’s name, then you’re looking for brand awareness. If you want your marketing campaigns to generate quick profits, then your hashtag campaign’s goal is different, so the strategy is also different.
Some of the most common marketing objectives are:
- Improving the brand’s awareness
- Generating B2B clients
- Promoting a new product or service
- Improve the traffic/leads/sales
- Whatever it is, make sure you outline it. Align your actions with your objective and stick to your goal until you’re satisfied with the results.
2. Leverage Industry-Specific Keywords
“If your target audience is made of young tech professionals, IT people mostly, you should create hashtags with the language they use every day. Use industry-specific keywords and your targeting will improve. If somebody finds your content through a relevant hashtag, they’re likely to dig deeper to find out more about your brand.” – Gary Tracy, Marketing Manager at EssaysOnTime.
3. Take Advantage of Trending Hashtags
A trending hashtag is a popular keyword (or a set of keywords) that many people engage with at that moment. When it comes to improving your exposure through trending hashtags, you can proceed in two ways:
First, you can use evergreen hashtags (#makemoney, #catlover, #love). Second, you can do your homework and discover the most relevant and trending hashtags within a specified niche by using professional hashtagging software like Hashtagify.
4. Your Hashtags Should Be Relevant, Simple, and Short
Keep your hashtags relevant, simple, and short. They’re supposed to be that way, so don’t reinvent the wheel. For example, #GreatDave is much better than #HereIsTheGreatDaveShow. Hashtags are considered content. And, as you may have heard, “Content is king”. Keep your content’s quality high and your target audience will love you for that.
Takeaways
It is quite understandable why most successful businesses are currently still using hashtags to generate extra awareness and multiple other business benefits.
Hashtag marketing is not rocket science – once you get used to it, after a few failures perhaps, you’ll be able to create a better marketing performance on every social media channel. If you lack results when you first begin, that’s because nothing comes easy, especially in today’s highly competitive digital marketing environment!
