How to Choose the Best Hashtags for your Next Digital Marketing Campaign
And the best way for your CPG brand to create & grow your own unique one.
In the digital marketing world, hashtags are essential. Not only do they allow a brand to launch initiative campaigns, but hashtags also create unique conversations for long-lasting consumer relationships. For CPG brands — which are product- and customer-driven — hashtag tactics are required to drive user engagement in the long-term. Hashtags should also comply to the overall voice of the brand. Finally, a company should leverage hashtags according to its overall online strategy and to stand against competition. The overall hashtag strategy is part of the brand management — and as with any strategy needs planning, implementation, and execution.
So how do you choose hashtags for your next digital marketing campaign? How do you shine online and launch an innovative campaign with a unique hashtag — that only you and your customers will use, recognize, and share? Let’s explore.
Some Examples of Effective Hashtags for CPG Brands
Businesses use hashtags to grow their online presence and customer base as well to engage with users. Furthermore, hashtags let users find areas of interest or related content. For example, a company or brand needs a hashtag relevant to the specific campaign to market their product, as well as a generic hashtag for the overall company. To announce promotional events and giveaways, businesses will share a specific hashtag with their customers. Let’s study some exciting CPG marketing campaigns.
The American fitness apparel company Born Primitive launched two targeted campaigns with the tags #AthleteDrivenPatriotInspired and #MadeForTheModernSavage to better show the public who they are as a brand, better engage their audience, and ultimately, enhance customers’ loyalty,
Rao’s Homemade, famous for their line of pasta sauces, has continued to innovate and shows the power of creating multiple unique tags for various campaigns, previously creating the #ItsTheSauce tag and more recently utilizing the #DeliciousSpeaksForItself hashtag. This has allowed them to not only keep up with customer engagement, but allows them to bring awareness to their latest projects and gather user generated content (“UGC”) to help additionally promote the brand.
5 Tactics to Grow your Hashtags Online
Keep it Relevant
The best hashtags should be straight to the point and reflect your objectives.
For example, some goals may be to boost followers’ engagement, to increase brand awareness, to highlight a product, to launch a one-off event, or to promote a new offer.
Hashtags should relate to your brand copy, guidelines, and goals for the campaign. Brainstorm with your team and draft some ideas. Pick up a relevant hashtag that represents both your company and illustrates your campaign.
Make it Short and Sweet
A short and sweet message can reach your customers efficiently and provide them with the right information. Find the right balance of words that convey your targeted message while remaining authentic to the brand voice.
On Twitter, hashtags with 18 characters are said to perform best but on Instagram, hashtags with 21 characters are doing better — yet but beyond that amount, engagement may decrease.
Study your Competition
Glance at your competition and see what they are doing: what are the hashtags they are using for campaigns that mirror one of your desired online directions? List all your competitors hashtags to find areas of differentiation.
It’s no point picking up a hashtag the competition has already used since you will “promote” their products. Drive their customers to you with smarter hashtags that truly echo your uniqueness.
Decide if the Hashtags are for Ongoing Events or One-off Campaigns
Choosing the right hashtags also depend whether you use them for ongoing promotional campaigns or specific one-off events that will last for a defined period of time.
For an ongoing marketing campaign, create hashtags that will emanate from a strong brand identity and attract users to follow you over time. Don’t be afraid to be creative and out of the box to find enticing hashtags.
For on-off events, keep your hashtags clear, unique, memorable, and add the name of your event. For example, according to mention.com, one of the most successful hashtag campaign was Lay’s #DoUsAFlavor campaign. The campaign drove followers’ engagement and gave users an incentive to respond, comment, and share.
Make it Conversational
Hashtags are meant to drive engagement and foster communication between brand influencers, marketers, followers, and users. Ensure your hashtags create conversations and bring enough room for discussions. Keep them memorable, bright, and bold by building up a strong headline or words that let your users imagine and dream
Final Tips
Twitter and Instagram share tips on how to use hashtags perfectly.
Remember to stay unique and to build a consistent brand over time. Don’t change your hashtags too frequently. Monitor how your hashtags are performing and discover better ways to build customer’s loyalty through innovative hashtags strategies.