Posted by With the increasing use of social media for marketing campaigns, hashtags are becoming more popular nowadays and have helped brands create many successful campaigns. Hashtags have been consistently growing and have helped brands achieve positive positioning and successful marketing campaigns using just hashtags.
Hashtag campaigns are those marketing strategies that are based on hashtags only and help generate popularity and awareness by encouraging users to upload images and videos on social media using their branded hashtags. This also helps the brand gain new followers and user-generated content.
Why are hashtag campaigns so important for marketers?
This little # sign has been growing its value and power in social media and brands’ marketing strategies by the day. Hashtag campaigns in 2022 are so versatile that almost every brand from various industries has been using this strategy to launch new products, increase reach, gain new followers, spread brand awareness, work towards a cause, and collect user-generated content which drives more traffic and conversion rates.
Similar to other marketing strategies, hashtag campaigns also start with a planning phase. This phase involves defining your cause and the goals you want to achieve. Post this it’s important to figure out which outreach channels you want to use and combine them with other social media platforms beyond Instagram.
This initial phase requires you to define and follow the metrics upon which the campaign’s success will be based. These metrics can include, the number of published posts, engagement rate, and overall hashtag reach.
How are branded hashtags created?
First and foremost what needs to be taken into consideration is the mainstream hashtag usage which might result in the overuse of your hashtag. This can cause a negative impact on your campaign. To avoid this, pre-define the value of your hashtag and create a high-quality hashtag.
Once you define what you stand for, the best approach is to figure out a few keywords and hashtags, search them on Instagram, and the number of posts uploaded using the hashtag. This will help you invest in a greater cause and help bring your people together with uniqueness.
Keep in mind that your hashtag must be easy to remember, fun, interesting, and represent brand value. Get different perspectives from your in-house team and take a small survey about their favorite hashtags. This will help your brand have an upper hand in this competitive market.
Let’s look at a few tips to define hashtag content.
1. Involve in what is trending
Involving your content in what is currently trending generates the most natural content. People like and believe what others are doing, if your hashtag campaign goes along with the mainstream content like food, exercise, celebrities, design, motivation, art, etc. it will help you gain popularity faster.
2. Run a giveaway
As non-creative as it sounds, it gives results. People like fun and interesting activities. Giveaways are the best way to motivate users to participate and use your hashtag to enter themselves in your giveaways.
3. Define your unique style
Establishing a unique and new format for uploading images and videos has a tremendous impact on campaign success and engagement. Delivering a fresh approach helps develop a sense of value and aesthetics in users.
4. Involve UGC
Featuring user-generated content is one of the most effective marketing strategies. Giving people attention and credit for their posts encourages more users to use your hashtag and involve themselves in your created community, increasing your reach and user engagement.
5. Start a contest with your product
Planning an interesting and fun contest that will involve people competing using their posts. Feature a product in your contest like unique and different ways to repurpose your product according to their use and posting it online with your branded hashtag will overwhelm the users and create a sense of urgency with deadlines to keep them engaged and enhance your reach.
How to execute a hashtag campaign in 5 easy steps?
Here are the things to keep in mind in order to make sure your campaign resonates with your audience.
1. Utilize your current channels
Optimum utilization of your current channels helps a lot. Use emails, print menus, posters, flyers, and other channels to communicate with your audience.
2. Spread the word faster with influencers
Use even the tiniest possibility to get in touch with an influencer or a celebrity to encourage them to use your product and post genuine feedback on social media using your hashtag. This practice will gain a lot of reach and generate new leads.
3. Target popular hashtags
Find your competition and target audience to figure out which hashtag is currently trending and hop on with it. Create an out-of-the-box post using those trends to stand out in the eyes of your audience.
4. Take it offline
Come up with an only-invite event and invite popular people to the event. Organize this event around your hashtag. Encourage the event attendees to use the hashtag and post images and videos on social media.
5. Get featured by encouraging users to tag you
Use your hashtag campaign in a productive way. This works when you have a long-term hashtag and want to build a community around it. If done in the most efficient manner this can be a great outreach program to help you gain reach.
How to Generate UGC with Hashtag Campaigns?
Use social media aggregators like Taggbox to curate your hashtag posts on a single widget and feature it on your website. Using social media aggregators eliminates the need to have technical knowledge as these do not require using coding languages to embed hashtag-generated UGC in your website or other marketing touchpoints.
The best thing about social media aggregator tools is that you can filter, customize and moderate your content. Display only relevant content and drive traffic to your website.
Conclusion
Hashtag campaigns help build a community and are a powerful source to get people together and spread awareness faster. This marketing campaign generates user-generated content and brings authenticity and reliability to your brand.