The concept of hashtag marketing may seem to be new to some marketers. However, this is just an extension of your social media marketing. If you do it properly, it can help in improving your brand awareness, visibility, and reputation. Most people assigned to social media marketing will be unaware of its immense potential. It will have a direct impact on your lead generation strategy and ROI. Sadly, not many marketers will be aware of doing this appropriately.
What is Hashtag Marketing?
This method is more than adding random hashtags to your post nonchalantly. Luckily, even a novice marketer or a blogger can do this. Hashtag marketing strategy is about promoting your brand and boosting your online visibility and credibility by using a well-researched hashtag. It may appear simple, but there are several grey areas concerning this marketing technique. For instance, since we’ve mentioned that almost all brands will have this marketing strategy, you’ll find it a bit challenging to promote your brand on social media. It will never be enough to promote your business using the most popular hashtags. You want to make sure that you are ahead of your competitors. It means that you may have to evaluate and update your hashtag tactics regularly.
What Are Some of the Benefits of Using Hashtag Marketing?
If you use hashtags wisely, it can help you gather some valuable insights about your target customers, improve your brand awareness and reputation, and boost your business revenue. Using a hashtag is used to be limited on some social media platforms. Today, you can see them almost on major social networking sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. It allows you to reach a wider set of audiences, generate fresh sales leads, boost your social media campaigns, and improve your engagement rate. To experience the biggest benefits of social media hashtag marketing, there are some tactics that you need to accomplish.
What Are the Best Hashtag Marketing Strategy?
Hashtag marketing offers heaps of benefits, but only if you do this right. To help you take advantage of this opportunity, we are listing some of the best ways to do this. As you read this article, you will notice that big brands have started using this tactic. There’s also a chance that you have been employing this unknowingly.
Before you even start to publish your content over the internet, you will begin by researching the right keyword with the high monthly volume search and low competition. It is the first step in ensuring that your content will appear prominently in the Google search result. When you want to know the hashtag marketing process, you can apply the same principle of keyword research. Some hashtags are used more often than others. If you are using Twitter, it will show you the number of tweets on that hashtag in the past hour. Nonetheless, you should also look at the sentiments and the number of mentions related to that hashtag.
When researching the hashtags that you will use in your posts, there are some kinds of hashtags that you definitely want to include in your hashtag marketing. Here are some of them.
- Trending Hashtags- With this, you can guarantee that you will reach out to a new set of audiences and enhance your brand awareness. Nonetheless, you should only use this if relevant for your business. Otherwise, the system might see this as spam.
- Event Hashtags- These are hashtags that are related to big events. For instance, it could be associated with a festival or an event conference. These are also hashtags commonly used during National Holidays and Awareness months.
- Campaign Hashtags- These are the type of hashtags used on a specific marketing campaign.
- Branded Hashtags- These are more commonly seen on social media posts. It bears the company’s name, the product, or the services they are offering.
Choosing the Best Hashtag for Your SMM
A particular hashtag may be trending on Twitter, but it does not necessarily mean that it will bring the same ROI on Instagram. Understand that these are different platforms with different audiences with different interests and rules. More importantly, they have different algorithms. The number of hashtags you can apply to your hashtag marketing strategy will also differ. In Instagram, most social media experts will encourage you to add as many relevant hashtags as possible; the average number of hashtags used by marketers on Instagram is around 20-30.
However, you still need to make sure that these are relevant. How do you do that? Simple, with the help of the social listening tools. Webtudy has a comprehensive guide on what social listening is and the tools you need to use. By choosing the right tool, you can easily filter the noises and focus on the mentions you need for your campaign. It will then automatically analyze the mention and display all the relevant hashtags. With this, you will find the right hashtag to boost your marketing strategy.
Hashtags are now being used to describe social media posts. It makes it relatively easier for the audience to find content discussing the particular topic. Since its inception, it has been a blessing for most sales and marketing teams. With this, it will be easier to reach out to the audience, find out what they are discussing, and prevent a crisis. While that may sound easy, you need to look for trending hashtags, especially if your main objective is to promote your content and boost your brand reach and awareness. Following the trend in your social media hashtag marketing is necessary to stay on top of the competition. If you are using social listening tools, it should be relatively easy for you to find the trending hashtags with a simple analysis. Staying on top of the discussion on social media sites will also help you determine the trending hashtags.
If you are investing your resources in learning what is hashtag marketing, you want to make sure that it is done properly. One way to do this is to have a goal and measure the KPI related to your goal. For instance, if you want to improve your brand reputation, you will probably focus on social sentiments. Those who wish to enhance their brand awareness need to track the social media reach and the mention volume. Those who need to increase their engagement and lead generation strategy should look for the number of shares, comments, and mentions according to category.
By monitoring the performance of your hashtag marketing, it would be easier for you to determine if your campaign is a success. You will also decide whether it needs to be altered to achieve your desired result. It would be relatively simple to understand what is working and what is not by assessing the result. This will not be your only campaign; there’s a chance you will be launching a new campaign in the future and need the result to improve it.
Checking the Hashtag Sentiments
Before choosing the hashtags you will use to market your brand, you should also conduct sentiment analysis. With this, you can understand how the online audience feels about your brand. It could also help you be aware of your online reputation. Are they saying good or bad things about you? There are also sentiment analysis tools that you can use to track this. Sentiment analysis helps you avoid crisis and ensure that it will be smooth sailing for you. By focusing your sentiment analysis on the hashtag that you are planning to use, you will understand if the audience has a negative perception of that hashtag. Remember that having a high volume is not always an indication that it is appropriate for your hashtag marketing strategy.
Promoting Your Brand Hashtag
It is not unusual to see a company using the name of its brand on its social media hashtag marketing. Apart from the name of the brand, you should also consider using hashtags related to a particular marketing campaign or activity. There are at least two reasons why it is helpful to choose a dedicated hashtag. Well-though branded hashtags will make it easier to reach out to your existing audience. It would be easier for you to spread your message on the platform with this. The hashtag will circulate fast into your social network and will eventually reach those audiences who might be interested in your service or product. Second, it is easier to measure the campaign’s performance when using dedicated hashtags. You can monitor the shares, likes, and comments. You can compute the estimated reach without using complicated analytic tools.
When conducting a hashtag marketing strategy, it may be an excellent idea to diversify it. For instance, we have already mentioned brand hashtags; in our case, we could be using #reputationtreatment as an example. For the campaign hashtag, you can add this to your specific campaign posts. This will make it easier for you to measure the success of a particular campaign. You will also understand which platform is gaining traction and interest among your target market.
Listening to Your Audience
When using social media, you will be required to be social. It might seem so obvious, but many marketers have neglected this part. They mainly looked at it as a powerful marketing platform. However, you won’t build engaged and loyal followers if you don’t interact with them. The secret in converting an audience into a brand ambassador is to listen to what they have to say. With this, you will develop content that centers on their discussion. Adding the right hashtag to this kind of post will make it easier for your target audience to find the content they want. Having meaningful interactions with your audience is a good way to foster long-term relationships that will deliver heaps of benefits.
Dealing with Customer Complaints
Another good way to use hashtag marketing is to react to the customer’s negative feedback in a timely manner. You will be surprised that customers will complain regularly. Sometimes, it is too trivial that it only requires a simple response to address their complaint. However, if you fail to address even an insignificant negative comment, it can lead to a social crisis. Negative feedbacks are not necessarily. It can be a source of information on improving your offerings. You can prevent a disaster and turn around the situation by responding to them.
Using hashtag marketing is more than just plugging a hashtag into your social media post. They must bring true value to your campaign. With many people using this marketing strategy, it should convince you that it helps them attain their goals. With so many benefits that it offers to your company, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t develop a strategy for your brand.