Top 10 Hashtag Marketing Strategies To Engage Your Audience
Social media channels are amongst the most effective channels for brands to deploy their pieces of content to attract, engage, convert and retain the existing customers, as well as, the people who are still prospects.
Hashtag marketing is an impeccable way for marketers to improve the reach of their pieces of content and amplify their brands’ visibility to the target audience groups. However, for this to happen marketers need to execute this online strategy correctly and must continuously monitor and optimize their endeavors using several methods for hashtag analytics.
The best practices for creating hashtags that resonate with people include making your pieces of content visible to your target audience groups in ways that not only properly terms your business purpose but also cast a spells and make the longing impactful impressions to drive the conversions.
No sooner do business people learn about a new social media trend, they discover that someone else is already using it. In such a scenario you need to adopt a strategic approach to hashtags that can be a game-changer for your brand.
In an era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and omnichannel, social media channels are overwhelmingly congested places to be.
Read more on How is Omnichannel Remarketing Effective in Accelerating Conversions.
While Twitter boasts of nearly 500 million tweets sent each day, Instagram is another very busy social channel, with more than 100 million videos and photos uploaded daily.
In the absence of the right approach, your endeavors might just get lost in the crowd, let alone being stand out and make an impact.
Unfortunately, most modern marketers think that anything and everything goes. However, that’s not the case. Using relevant and engaging hashtag strategies is as important as crafting the right messages to be delivered to the audiences through diverse social channels, if not more.
Let’s have a look at how to leverage hashtags to boost your social media endeavors in 2021:
1. Employ Location-Based hashtags to win local audiences
Using location-based hashtags can help you win local audiences. This is specifically useful for local businesses or anyone who wants to attract the attention of the audiences belonging to a specific area.
Employing local hashtags is a strategy that will help you win people from a particular geo-location.
Read more on How to Incorporate Geofencing in B2B content strategy.
This strategy, thus, is highly beneficial for businesses looking to tap into a precise geographic niche & for the local businesses. Also, local hashtags are also an impeccable way to tap into the audience base who might not want to follow you but might be interested in the local presence or activities of your brand.
2. Having Branded Hashtags is a Must
This is one of the most essential prerequisites of hashtag marketing, i.e. having the branded Hashtags of your own. Usually, the branded Hashtags should be short, captivating, and reflect your brand name in a succinct, yet impactful form.
Selecting a brand hashtag isn’t that difficult. All you need to do is perform some research and employ social listening to come up with the interesting hashtags that are already being used for your brand. It might have already been framed by your loyal customers before you could even have thought of it.
Read more on The Philosophy of Social Listening.
Also, employing branded hashtags is like tagging your content to maintain its discoverability in the future, in case you need to do so.
Branded hashtags should be employed on every social media channel. On Twitter, the brands usually prefer using a hashtag for a store location over tagging themselves in their own posts. The shorter character limitations on Twitter compel brands to prioritize the most important hashtags.
3. Community Hashtags should be Used by Larger Brands
Community hashtags can actually be considered to be a part of branded hashtags that can be used as an effective strategy by larger brands to engage with their customer base.
These hashtags include the brand name along with a hashtag reflecting on the niche. They are oftentimes used separately and at times in conjunction with each other.
Using such hashtags inspires customers to follow them as feel like part of a bigger community and hence, a bigger purpose.
Pro-tip: An impactful way to use these hashtags for branding is choosing the same from user-generated content (UGC). Employing user-generated content in these hashtags is largely approved of and adopted by the audiences.
Thus, the purpose of building brand awareness is accomplished with the help of employing community hashtags.
The philosophy is simple, inspire your customers to a bigger purpose, show them various styles and involve them in your branding strategy directly, and they will stick to you as your loyal brand advocates.
4. Chat Hashtags to Communicate With Users Interested in Subject Matter
Chat hashtags are quite popular on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to discuss a topic with users who are interested in reading content that reflects on subject-matter-expertise of their favorite brands. This type of hashtag reflects on important topics and trends and calls for users to directly engage with a particular brand or a subject-matter-expert. Chat hashtags can be employed in individual hashtags as well as wherein the privacy policy of individual users is to be taken care of.
Moreover, marketers can choose from a plethora of industry and audience-friendly chat hashtags. Using brand-explicit keywords helps build your brand equity. The use of hashtags is absolutely free and it’s beneficial in improving audience engagement and optimizing the number of followers.
These hashtags also help users find a particular blog post and thereby increase your website’s organic traffic. The best hashtags are those that are short and fit into the character limit on individual social platforms, for example, the 280 character limit on Twitter.
5. Using Event Hashtags to compel audiences to sign up for an event and accelerate the Event Conversions
Event hashtags are an effective hashtag marketing tactic that can be used for both annual or seasonal events. As an event isn’t forever, event hashtags have a start and end date. Some events also have a hashtag reflecting on the year the event was held to differentiate the events of last year from the current year or from any other time in the future or past.
Event hashtags compel users to sign up and create conversions around an event. These hashtags are equally beneficial for live events, requiring participants to be present in physical form, as well as, for the execution of effective virtual events.
Read more on How Virtual Event Marketing Benefits B2B Businesses.
Event hashtags can be employed by brands to live Tweets. A company might use the hashtag of another brand for sharing information. This helps brand awareness when conference attendees search on the hashtags and the name of the company is reflected.
Posting before an event is a good strategy to educate your audience about the event and expose them to the event hashtag at the same time. The potential attendees can discover the content related to the events they are interested in, using the event hashtags and sign-up for the event.
You can also educate your audience on things such as how to participate in virtual events and lectures and make the most of the community participation by using the event hashtags with video tutorials to resolve the doubts of audiences.
6. Campaign hashtags to keep a record of contest entries and decipher conversations around a marketing campaign
Campaign hashtags are used as a part of a marketing campaign or a contest. These hashtags are an essential strategy, helping marketers track contest entries and measuring conversations around campaigns.
The campaign hashtags may or may not have the brand name in them; however, the conveyance of a campaign slogan or message is the most important thing.
Before framing campaign hashtags employing the philosophy of social listening becomes important.
Research should be done to figure out whether particular hashtag campaigns have been formerly used. Also, the campaign hashtags should be unambiguous and look good in diverse iterations.
7. Sharing Content-Specific Hashtags to Optimize Your Content for Search
Content-reflecting hashtags may or may not be specifically trending or popular or specific to your brand. They are simply the tagged words that resonate with your blog posts. Suppose you have written a post that resonates with the topic “Digital Marketing.”
In such an instance you can use #digitalmarketing on social media platforms. While brands may have all rights reserved when it comes to using the brand keywords; content-based keywords are more generic in nature and cosmopolitan in use. Marketers can also use hashtags for social platforms such as those containing ‘Instagram,’ ‘Facebook’ etc. wherever required to double-down the effect of their content-reflecting hashtags. It’s also an important strategy to spark meaningful conversations with target audience groups by demonstrating your expertise on relevant topics.
8. Employing Trending hashtags to make your content go viral
Employing trending hashtags is yet another hashtag marketing strategy for marketers. Similar to other viral content trending hashtags are fast-paced and can provide magnanimous exposure to your pieces of content to make them tend across the news feeds of maximum customers and prospects on social media platforms. Tending hashtags perform specifically well on platforms such as Twitter.
This strategy, however, is ephemeral and unpredictable and needs to be timed correctly. Marketers should be careful not to jump into using the trending hashtags without researching why they are trending in the first place.
Don’t risk using controversial hashtags that can adversely impact your omnichannel reputation management framework. Ensure that the trending hashtags that you plan to use authenticate your brand ideology and vision and provide opportunities to boost branding before you jump into employing them in your social media strategy.
Read more on How Omnichannel Reputation Management Assists in B2B Branding.
Holiday Hashtags to capitalize on holidays for branding
Certain holidays such as Christmas, Veteran’s Day, Independence Day, and Black Friday use their own hashtags. Employing holiday hashtags correctly can boost your social media marketing (SMM) strategies across multiple channels on the web. You can make the most of the holiday hashtags by creating specific pieces of content around the holiday to boost brand discoverability.
However, if using holiday hashtags with marketing content, marketers need to take care that their content is still relevant after adding the holiday hashtags.
10. Call-to-Action Hashtags to Invite Users to Perform a Specific Action
The call-to-action hashtags encourage people to perform specific actions involving brands. This hashtag concept involves starting off with a verb such as “share” or “talk.” These hashtags have few short words that give additional instruction. For example, a digital marketing organization can employ the hashtag #talkaboutdigitalmarketing. The hashtag compels users to take action if it gains traction. People feel like they’re contributing to a specific cause. Such hashtags inspire a sense of purpose/participation and encourage the target audience groups to take quick actions.
Wrapping Things Up
Hashtag marketing strategy is all about finding the right set of hashtags to resonate with your content on diverse social media platforms, in a way that optimizes the reach of the specific pieces of content and boosts the marketing and branding endeavors.
Keyword analysis tools can be used to research the most specific keywords for a brand. Also, trending user-generated content (UGC) can help brands frame an invincible hashtag marketing strategy.
On Twitter employing the advanced search option can help marketers connect with popular keywords and hashtags, as well as discover, how and by whom they are being used. On Instagram, the users can type a hashtag in a search bar which instantly reflects the number of “Top Posts” and “Recent Posts” aligned with a particular word or phrase.
Competitive benchmarking is an absolute imperative when it comes to employing the right hashtag marketing strategies. Examining your competitors’ strategies helps you derive if there is any minute trick you are missing while employing hashtags in your social media marketing mix.
Equally important for marketers is conducting industry analysis and employing social listening to deduce what their audiences are talking about and what is relevant to them, that they would like to discover.
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