Hashtag Marketing And Raising Brand Awareness

Trying to stand out on a platform with 1 billion active monthly users is a difficult task — and that’s where the value of hashtags come to play.

Hashtags are ingenious. They function as a way to label your content and make it discoverable for people everywhere. The right hashtag can connect you with your audience on social media, help leverage your digital identity, and create a ton of user-generated content. 

But hashtag marketing is not as simple as slapping a “#” on just any word or phrase. Instead, it requires taking careful consideration of how you want to categorize and brand your content.

The concept of using hashtags to tag and identify topics on social media was invented in 2007 by Twitter, and it is now prevalent across the digital marketing landscape. From following hashtags to adding them to your posts and Instagram Stories, there’s many ways hashtags can be used to aid your marketing efforts.

In this article, we’re discussing how you can make the most of hashtags and why they’re crucial for building brand awareness.

Why Use Hashtags?

Hashtags are one of the most universally applicable tools in social media marketing. An Instagram post with at least one hashtag averages 12.6% more engagement than one with no hashtags.

With around 95 million photos and videos shared to Instagram each day, it’s difficult for Instagram to deliver the most relevant content for each user. With hashtags, marketers can categorize each post they publish — and the more relevant your hashtags are, the more likely you’ll reach people with an interest in seeing your content.

Hashtags are like a funnel — they give marketing teams a more specific, targeted reach. To get the most return on your hashtag marketing efforts, start by analyzing two things: what content comprises your top-performing posts, and emerging trends among consumers and influencers.

Here are some of the key benefits your brand should consider using them:

  • Track Performance: Measuring performance is an extremely easy task when it comes to hashtag campaigns — every single post tagged with it is housed in one central feed.

  • Increase Discovery Potential: Hashtags make your content easier to find. The use of relevant, targeted hashtags can expose your social media posts to an entirely new pool of prospective followers and consumers.

  • Increase Your Reach: Hashtags don’t have geographical limitations, making them available to a global audience.

  • Clue You In On Industry Trends: Want to conduct a competitor audit? Looking at trending hashtags can clue in you on what brands in your industry are buzzing about.

  • Attract User-Generated Content (UGC): UGC is one of the most reliable forms of content — it lets your consumers do the marketing for you. Hashtags invite your audience to participate and interact with your brand, ultimately helping you gain social proof, increased engagement, and a loyal base of followers.

Creating The Right Hashtag

What makes a hashtag a hit, and what makes others fail?

A good hashtag should be descriptive and relevant, making it clear what its purpose is right off the bat. 

However, creating a hashtag that’s clearly branded is a common challenge among marketers: Choose too simple of a hashtag, and it may get buried among similar topics. Choose too complex of one, and it could be difficult to recall with ease.

Here are some of our best tips for creating a hashtag that performs well:

  • Be Actionable: Think verbs and call-to-actions, like Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke and Nike’s #JustDoIt. Creating an actionable hashtag increases the likeliness that you’ll see some sort of response from followers.

  • Be Simple: Marketing teams often overanalyze hashtags. When it comes down to it, it’s best to be straightforward and direct with your hashtag. With one glance at a hashtag, it should be obvious what its purpose is.

  • Be Clever: Incorporating an element of humor or entertainment can make your hashtag more fun and easier to recall. A few years ago, Lays released a #DoUsAFlavor campaign. Playing on the word “favor”, they challenged users to brainstorm and share their own potato chip flavors.

  • Involve Consumers: As mentioned above, prompting users to share and tag their own content is a great way to spark conversations among your followers. It also generates social proof, which could gain you followers from their networks.

Types Of Hashtags

From brand-specific hashtags to general ones, there are several types of hashtags that exist. We’re discussing each type in detail to help you build out your hashtag marketing strategy.

1. Branded Hashtags

A branded hashtag is one that is unique to one brand. It acts as a catch-all for any brand-related social activity — whether it accompanies a post by an employee, consumer, brand ambassador, or the company itself.

It can be as simple as your brand name, one of your products, or your slogan. By adding your branded hashtag to each of your posts (or at least the majority of them), consumers will begin to recall this hashtag — and maybe even use it themselves.

Branded hashtags also act as another outlet for discovery. Optimizing your hashtag with phrases or words that pertain to your industry, brand, or product line will make your brand more discoverable.

Some recognized, high volume hashtags include:

2. Community Hashtags

Community hashtags connect like-minded users around a specific topic. There are two primary types: brand-specific community hashtags and generic community hashtags. We go more in depth on these hashtag types below:

  • Brand-Specific Community Hashtags

For a brand to create a vibrant community of followers, it needs to create a vibrant community within. Activewear brand Lululemon has long been known for their community-based marketing approach — and they made a hashtag to prove it.

The backbone of Lululemon’s marketing efforts is something they call “#thesweatlife.” They define this with two meanings: (1) a life in pursuit of sweat, fun, and stretchy clothes, and (2) a social collaboration to share inspirational pictures of this lifestyle. This community-based marketing approach has been extremely effective. So much so, their hashtag #thesweatlife has accumulated over 1.2 million Instagram posts from brand loyalists worldwide. 

  • Generic Community Hashtags

While brand-specific community hashtags tend to work more in your brand’s favor, it doesn’t hurt to include generic ones when they align with the content you’re posting. 

These hashtags are especially useful for smaller businesses looking to build a following as they can help make you discoverable by a specific niche or location.

Here are some examples of community hashtags:

3. Campaign hashtags

When brands launch a new campaign — whether it’s to promote a new product or simply build brand awareness — they often generate a hashtag to accompany it. Here are a couple examples:

In the summer of 2014, Coca Cola launched would be one of the best-performing marketing campaigns in the company’s history. They simply swapped out their logo for 250 of the most popular names in the U.S. This technique was genius — after all, who doesn’t love finding their name on things?

The hashtag for the campaign is as simple as it is powerful: #ShareACoke.

The “Share A Coke” slogan is a call-to-action, encouraging the sharing and gifting of the personalized Coca-Cola bottles.

What’s more, Coca Cola collaborated with celebrities including Selena Gomez and Ryan Seacrest, which helped turn the campaign into a viral sensation. The magnitude and success of this campaign has kept the hashtag — which was introduced in 2013 — alive even today.

In an effort to gamify being in quarantine, Lucky Brand is challenging users to play their #WinFromHome game.

On Instagram, the denim and lifestyle brand posts daily challenges for users to take on, using retro-themed playing cards. From power squatting your pet to tanning under a lamp, the challenges consist of fun, off-beat activities that are all possible at home.

People are encouraged to post pictures of themselves doing the challenges with the #WinFromHome hashtag for a chance to win prizes — ones that will be awarded to their favorite essential workers. Clever, right?

4. Holiday Hashtags

Otherwise known as less popular holidays and “National Day” hashtags, hashtag holidays give brands a great opportunity to connect with their followers. A quick Google search can clue you in on hundreds of these.

Here are some successful examples from top brands:

Take note that these hashtags don’t have to directly relate to the product or service you’re selling. By identifying days that resonated with their mission statements and values, these brands leveraged hashstag holidays successfully.

5. Product hashtags 

Some brands will go as far as incorporating hashtags that name a specific product. Starbucks takes this approach often, adding hashtags to their popular beverages that now link to thousands of posts. 

Take a look at the examples below:

A common strategy for hashtag marketing is leveraging trending hashtags.

These hashtags — which often consist of popular cultural topics like #GameOfThrones or #PokemonGO — allow brands to join bigger, fast-paced conversations. They may also be hashtags with temporary lifespans, like #EarthDay and #WorldHealthDay, or trending challenges that have become popular.

Here are some trending challenges that many brands joined in on through social media:

The Dolly Parton Challenge began when the country singer posted a collage of how she would portray herself on four different social media platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder.

When the meme ended up becoming a viral sensation, brands raced to cash in on the viral challenge. Among these brands were Heineken, Chevrolet, and Dunkin’.

Participation in this challenge was a great way for brands to show their humorous and clever sides.

The ALS awareness campaign — dubbed the “Ice Bucket Challenge” — is quite possibly the most successful viral charity drive of all time.

Like the name suggests, the challenge encouraged people to pour a bucket of ice water on themselves or donate $100 to ALS research.

To show their support for the cause, several brands accepted the challenge. These included Samsung, McDonald’s, and Old Spice — who cleverly vowed to make a “dough-nation” to the ALS association.

Conclusion

When it comes to hashtag marketing, there is an enormous amount of creativity — from successfully naming the hashtag to planning its execution. In addition, leveraging hashtags that already exist is a great way to join trending conversations and show commitment to causes you care about. When used correctly, hashtags become an integral part of your social media marketing strategy.

Social Media, Content CreationGuest UserHashtags, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, UGC, Awareness