Hashtag marketing is a pretty serious trend right now, as businesses from all over the world are leveraging its features to generate significant benefits.
Whether you’re running a small business, a digital empire, or a nonprofit organization, hashtags can allow you to improve your online presence while enhancing your brand’s reputation.
In today’s post, I’m sharing the benefits of hashtag marketing along with a few effective strategies to optimize your hashtag strategies across various social media platforms. Let’s begin.
The Benefits of Hashtag Marketing
Many successful brands have already tested the power of hashtags in marketing campaigns. Coca-Cola (#ShareACoke), Dove (#MindOverMatter), and Nike (JustDoIt) are just a few successful businesses that have managed to make their hashtags campaigns viral.
Even if your hashtag campaigns don’t get viral, you’ll still reap exceptional benefits. Here are some of them:
- Smart and heavily promoted hashtags can become viral, hence making your business known worldwide.
- You can expand your content’s reach and your brand’s name.
- You can use hashtags as your business’ signature tag.
- Hashtags can help your audience (and not only) sort and separate topics according to their interests.
- You can develop a branded hashtag that everyone will recognize as yours.
- By posting relevant hashtags, users can immediately find and consume the content they are interested in the most. These are generally hot leads, a.k.a. people who will easily convert into customers.
- Hashtags allow you to track your campaigns’ engagement and performance.
- By constantly posting relevant hashtags, you can speed up the development of your followers’ base.
- If you post trending hashtags, you’re likely to increase the search power of your social media profiles.
How to Effectively Use Hashtags
Like any digital marketing strategy, hashtag marketing demands a learning curve. If you’re just starting, consider implementing these tips to improve the efficiency of your hashtag campaigns:
1. Establish Your Goals First
What do you want to accomplish with the use of hashtags? That’s the first question that should be on your mind. A marketing campaign must be specific. Therefore, you can start a hashtag marketing campaign to:
- Improve brand awareness
- Generate feedback
- Make your new product popular
- Generate sales
Establish an exact goal and take it from there!
2. Learn How to Use Hashtags on Various Social Networks
Hashtags are a feature of every major social media network. However, people use it differently across different channels. For example, Twitter encourages a maximum of two hashtags per post, while Instagram favors more than seven.
When I’m talking about “encouraging” and “favoring”, I’m strictly speaking about the quality and success of your hashtags. Here’s a great instructional post that should explain you the differences between hashtags’ use across different channels.
3. Use Industry-Specific Hashtags (Keywords)
To improve your campaign’s exposure, you need to carefully choose the keywords that your target audience might be looking for. For example, if you have a blog about pets clothing, using hashtags like #dogshirt or #catlover will have your content placed in front of animal lovers who search for animal hashtags.
4. Leverage Trending Hashtags to Gain Additional Exposure
When it comes to using trending hashtags, you can proceed in two ways. First, you can post evergreen hashtags that’ll never die (#photooftheday, #makemoney, #lovewins).
Second, you can observe the current trends within your industry and focus your hashtag use on the most popular topics that are discussed at that moment. You can also use Hashtagify to identify and analyze popular hashtags on Instagram and Twitter.
5. Keep Your Hashtags Short, Simple, and Relevant
Hashtags are also considered content. If you agree that “Content is king”, you’ll immediately acknowledge that your hashtags’ quality (content’s quality) is directly proportional with your digital marketing success.
If you hate researching and writing hashtags of your own, instead of hiring the cheapest writing services, go for a freelance professional. You can find various virtual assistants on freelancing platforms like Upwork or Freelancer.com. Quality matters!
Takeaways
Hashtag marketing is surely a great opportunity to improve your traffic, gain additional brand awareness, and, if you get a bit of luck, to make your brand and content viral across various social media networks. Take our tips and tricks into consideration and start building your hashtag marketing strategy as soon as possible!
Samantha R. Gilbert has been working as a journalist at an online-publishing agency in New York, USA for 2 years. She is also professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, modern art and education.