A hashtag marketing campaign is a great way to extend your brand’s reach on social media and find new members of your audience. Running a hashtag campaign can be tricky; you need to find one that represents the message you want your brand to share, whether you are launching a new product or event or just want more brand awareness. You want customers to pick up the hashtag and start using it themselves to help you spread your reach. If your campaign is successful, you can reach more people than a normal ad campaign will, and you get user-generated content from them to use in future marketing efforts. Here, we will break down everything you need to know about hashtag marketing campaigns.

Understand the Audience

Who is your audience? No matter what kind of marketing campaign you are running, you need to know the answer to this question before getting started. You need to know how they are, how they think, and what type of content they like. While the demographics are important, you also need to have a customer persona for the audience you are targeting with your hashtag campaign. With a buyer persona, you will have a good idea of their behaviors and can craft a hashtag campaign they will be interested in engaging with.

Clearly Define the Campaign’s Goal

Every marketing campaign needs to have some sort of goal, whether you intend to increase brand awareness, get sales, gain new followers, or boost your engagement. So, you need to know what the goal of your campaign is before you can launch the hashtag campaign.

Increase Sales

If you are trying to get sales, focus your hashtag on a specific product or service you offer. Encourage your customers to share photos of their experience with your brand, especially in regard to the product or service promoted in the campaign.

Boost Brand Awareness

For more brand awareness, put the name or your business in the hashtag, or at least part of it. If you can come up with a fun play on words for the campaign, that can help you gain more interest.

Generate Engagement

If engagement is your goal, come up with a hashtag campaign that will help your customers have fun with your brand in some way. This is where social media photo contests centered around hashtags come into play. When done right, these can be easy to run and highly rewarding.

Make it Easy to Participate

If it is not easy for your audience to participate in the hashtag marketing campaign, they will not do it. How many times have you ignored a campaign on Instagram because it required too many steps? If you would ignore the campaign, your audience will too.

To make a hashtag marketing campaign successful, you need to make it easy for your audience to do so. For example, posting a photo with your hashtag, hitting the share button, or leaving a comment on the post are all simple ways to participate that your audience is more likely to engage with.

If you begin to put too many guidelines on participation, they are less likely to engage in your campaign. For example, do not put in rules about what type of post specifically or ask them to go to a certain location or type of location for a photo; you will not get nearly as much engagement. If you are wondering if your guidelines for engagement are too much, they probably are.

Picking a Platform

The two biggest platforms for hashtags these days are Twitter and Instagram, so they are the best platforms for your hashtag campaign. The two platforms are quite different, so picking the right one can be fairly easy. If you want your hashtag campaign to be centered around photos, you should go with Instagram. For a more conversational or text-based campaign, Twitter is the way to go. You can also launch your campaign on multiple platforms, which will help you reach even more people than limiting yourself to a single platform.

Research Your Hashtag

Once you have your hashtag selected, spend some time on both Twitter and Instagram researching it. You want to make sure it is not being used by your competitors or being used by something completely unrelated to your brand. Try to come up with two or three hashtags, then narrow down your choice based on the use of them by other brands. If your direct competition uses one, toss it. You do not want your customers finding them instead of you. If a group that is not aligned with your brand values is using a hashtag on your list, do not use it. You want one that represents your brand specifically.

Tracking the Campaign’s Success

After your campaign has been out for a while, you can measure its success in a few different ways. Look at how many posts were made with the hashtag and how many people interacted with it. How many likes, clicks, shares, and comments were made about your hashtag. The number of feeds it showed up on and how many views it got. All of these can help you determine your hashtag marketing campaign’s overall success.

The Benefits of a Hashtag Marketing Campaign

Now that we have looked at how to start a hashtag campaign let’s take a look at some of the benefits of running hashtag campaigns.

Promote Your Products or Events

Hashtags are a great promotional tool to showcase your products or services, especially if you are launching a new product or product line. You can use hashtags to announce your new products before they come out, increasing awareness beforehand to help drum up sales at launch.

If your brand has a major event coming up, you can also use hashtag marketing campaigns to promote the event and increase attendance and interest in it.

Increase Awareness

One of the big benefits of a hashtag campaign is to increase your brand awareness, which is why it is often a goal of hashtag marketing campaigns. These campaigns often have a lot of shares, which gets your brand out to many people who you may not have been able to reach previously. It is one of the easiest ways to get word-of-mouth advertising in the digital age.

Gain User-Generated Content

User-generated content is a highly powerful marketing tool, and with a hashtag marketing campaign, it can be easy to get. Then, in future campaigns, you have plenty of content from your users to share, which is word-of-mouth advertising, and can help your brand cultivate authenticity with your audience.