Orji-Oko Uzor- Introduction
- What is hashtag in digital marketing?
- How do you create a catchy hashtag?
- Benefits of using digital marketing hashtags?
- How do I know if a hashtag is working
- How to use digital marketing hashtags to increase your marketing campaigns
- Conclusion
Introduction
Are you ready to use digital marketing hashtags to increase your marketing campaigns?
When it comes to increasing your marketing campaigns online, digital marketing hashtags are fundamental to attain success. Before now it was known as the pound sign, the hashtag is a means to make your campaigns discoverable, at least when you use correctly. Previously hashtags were first used on Twitter, but now they have become very common on other social media platforms. To master the use of the hashtag will give you a great opportunity to engage your audience. As well was to increase your social impact. It only takes time to learn each platform and pay attention to trends.
When used correctly, hashtags help people who are interested in your topic find what you write about. This help to increase your influence and followers. Nowadays, hashtags are everywhere, it even shows up in the corners of our TV screens when shows and networks gives us their pre determined hashtags to inspire conversation. It’s used to find and connect with your target audience, generate conversation, and build your brand online especially on social media. After you must have used hashtags to connect with your target audience. Then you can create your own hashtag that aligns with your brand, encourage users to talk about you and your business.
What is hashtag in digital marketing?
Digital marketing hashtags are words or keyword phrases that precede by a hash, equally known as the pound sign (#). On social media it’s used within a post to help those who are interested in your topic to be able to find you when they search for a particular hashtag. It attracts attention to your posts and encourages interaction.
When you use a phrase as a hashtag, make sure you spell it out without spaces, such as #growurbiz. It may include numbers certainly not symbols or punctuation. The hashtag might be placed at the beginning, middle or end of your social media post or comment. This makes room for what you have written to be indexed by the social media network. With this strategy, it’s possible for people who are not your followers to find your content.
Hashtag Basics
While it sounds pretty simple to place a hashtag in front of your keyword, there’s other basic information that is relevant to understand when you are trying to be found by using hashtags.
To use them will only make a difference in your marketing campaigns when done correctly. Here are some tips:
- Never get carried away using a hashtag for every couple of words. The amount of hashtags used depends on which platform you are using them. But in most cases, there’s more impact using one or two hashtags than a high number of them.
- Keep your hashtags short and memorable instead of trying to use many words in one tag.
- Don’t try to be too wise or unusual. If you choose to use a tag that no one is searching for, it won’t benefit your marketing campaigns.
- To use hashtags that are more detailed and specific will generate better results than broad or general ones.
- Don’t force hashtags onto every of your post. Rather only use them when they will add value to your post and might likely stimulate conversation and interaction.
- Hashtags will not only attract members of your target audience. But they may equally be used to research your competition.p
How to find effective digital marketing hashtags:
Start with Influencers
There may be a distinct line between a hashtag that is too general and a hashtag that is too complicated or can’t be found. A good place to begin to determine hashtags that are effective is to pay attention to what hashtags influencers in your niche are using.
There are chances you will have a good idea who the influencers are capturing their attention and they may include members of your target audience. But if you are new to a niche, how do you find the influencers? For a specific niche, the influencers are those whose voices are mostly trusted and listened to. Such as celebrities, famous bloggers, and YouTube users.
How do you create a catchy hashtag?
Let’s look at some things to consider that will help you create a catchy hashtag that boosts and accurately represents your brand.
Make it brief but unique
One of the first important rules to hashtags is that they need to be brief. It need to be a few words or a short phrase, so avoid a complex sentence.
Here the difficult part of it is coming up with something unique that fits into that limited character count requirement. When creating a hashtag that will get people talk about your brand. You need it to be something people will always use when they’re referencing you or your brand somehow. When it’s unique, it will always stand out, and you’ll equally gain a lot traction and credit when it gets picked up.
Evoke an emotion
When you need to leave a lasting impression and something worth sharing. You might decide to use your tweet or instagram image and your hashtag to evoke an emotional reaction from your audience. Not only will this catch their attention, it is always enough to push them to share.
Pick something topical
Is any anything happening in the world that you might hone in on and create a hashtag to help increase your marketing campaigns?
This might not be the case for the majority of hashtags you create to boost your marketing campaigns. when there’s a chance to jump in on a hot topic that’s getting a lot of buzz. This will help you to easily redirect your digital marketing hashtags to include your brand and marketing campaigns.
Sometimes you may want to tread with caution when the subject is controversial. For instance the recent concluded presidential election in U.S. Otherwise relevant topics are normally a great way to get a foothold. The hashtag certainly won’t stick around forever, but it will help you generate some conversations.
Have a digital marketing hashtag for your brand
Creating a hashtag that is specifically for your marketing campaigns , encourage users to live tweet or share their experience. Even if they don’t live tweet constantly, but having a ton of people tweeting pictures or statuses about your brand, tagged with your hashtag. This will instantly give you free promotion.
Incorporate humor or cleverness
Hashtags that are funny, cleverly constructed, or both are more likely to move on quickly and spread like wildfire. When it’s funny or clever, it’s always easily catchy, and users will be very excited to be a part of it.
This is a better way to showcase the personality and fun loving nature to your brand.
Keep it consistent with your brand
When some businesses are operating more informal on social media than they are in person. You still need to make sure that your catchy, clever hashtag still fits perfectly the rest of your brand.
This actually comes down to knowing who your audience is, and to know what tone your business holds across social media. However, you may still come up with catchy hashtags that will fit your brand no matter the kind of business you are into.
Proofread it and look for hidden meanings
You need to always proofread, even when you double check a hashtag that has no potential for grammatical errors.
Benefits of using digital marketing hashtags?
Helping to spread the word about your product or service, certainly you need a source of engagement. Hashtags will continually prove to be a great source for engagement. So when you finally create a digital marketing hashtag for your marketing campaigns.
Optimizing for discovery: Basically hashtags are another organic output for your content marketing. When you optimize your hashtags and use phrases or keywords aligning to your industry, you will be discovered discoverable.
Increasing traffic: Like we discussed above, hashtags will make your brand more discoverable. Once you’re easily discovered, you will likely see a higher social media traffic. Hashtag searches regularly takes on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all the time.
Showcasing your brand advocates: Your own brand advocates are very trusted sources. However, Nielsen has discovered 92% of customers trust brand advocates more than businesses. Hashtags are a great path to help showcase your brand advocate recommendations.
Measuring your efforts: Through using third party social media management software like Sprout Social. You can easily track hashtags within your most important networks. Hashtag analytics will equally give you insights into what’s resonating with your target customers or what’s not working. To have the extra data can make all the difference.
Cross networking: With a nice feature of hashtags will enable you to use them across channels. This will aid your cross channel promotions and make it easier for you to use hashtags for each major network.
How do I know if a hashtag is working
When you are using social media, hashtags are indispensable when your goal is to attract more attention and followers.
Each marketing campaign has to be prepared carefully. While the results needs to be evaluated to know the areas that must be maintained and those that require more work.
Social analytics is one of the most accurate means to measure response and engagement. These will equally explain why some approaches do not work so well.
The question is; how do you if your hashtag is working.
From knowing the initial signs that shows that your hashtags may be falling will help us.
No guarantees
There are many social media products online that promise increased visual appeal and increase in followers. An instance is promoted hashtags. These hashtags cost thousands of dollars and will put ads in the most visible places online. Thereby encouraging people to click to get more details.
However, there are still no guarantees that these will generate the best results.
Low engagement
A company may determine reach and impressions to fully grasp the extent of their online engagement activity. People might do a variety of activity, this depends on the attractiveness of the tweet or hashtag. Such as favoriting, replying, to send a direct message back or to choose to follow the account.
The analytics scores will certainly show the comparisons based on tweets and impressions made. There is equally a timeline that will showcase how much engagement were achieved within a certain period of time.
Negative feedback
Some users will be very direct in voicing out that your digital marketing hashtag is irrelevant, uninteresting or bad. Some brands has made terrible mistakes to introduce hashtags that sparked a lot of ridicule. Online flames have erupted in the past because of badly made hashtags. When conversations are no longer happening or when people are becoming unruly, it is best to stop them.
No response
Most times, hashtags might be introduced without making any mark at all. The only people that may respond may only be your immediate family and friends. One of the major reasons might be that there are already many others existing with the same name. Making online users might not to able to distinguish what it is truly about.
Online users attack you instead
The marketing campaign may result to a complete turnaround when online users target you and talk about bad experiences and drawbacks. It’s best to immediately bring down the hashtag before further damage will result.
How to deal with this problem
The very first thing to do is to control the damage done by bringing down the hashtag altogether. Some brands are always quick to respond to the situation by removing the posts immediately. And then send out an apology to their social media fans. Others quietly will remove the posts and keep quiet, and wait for the commotion to subside.
When marketing campaigns do not receive much engagement, check the results using social media analytics. Determine the best times when tweets are heavily responded to by online users. As well as to know the right words to use to attract attention.
How to use digital marketing hashtags to increase your marketing campaigns
Boost organic reach of your posts
Since Instagram implemented a new algorithm, it’s made it a lot difficult for users to increase the organic reach of their posts. When you add to the growing number of users on Instagram, it’s mostly impossible to cut through the noise.
So the best weapon in your arsenal, outside influencer marketing, are digital marketing hashtags. Basically, they will help Instagram categorize your content, and get it in front of its intended audience.
Using relevant hashtags. Your tags will connect you to your target audience. Not just someone who is willing to trade likes and follows.
Create branded hashtags
Probably this is the most important thing you will do for your campaign. Branded hashtags are those hashtags that contain the name of your brand. But they may equally contain your company’s slogan, name of a particular product, or one of your campaigns.
Join trending topics
Trending topics will benefit your marketing campaigns to a great extent, since they will engage an insane number of readers. The right hashtags for a trending topic will get your product, service, brand, or marketing campaigns in front of a massive audience. They will even be seen by people who aren’t part of the audience you are trying to target. Thus resulting in better awareness of your brand.
It’s very possible to use hashtags to join trending topics in one of two ways. Or you can simply wait until a topic related to your niche becomes very popular, then use the right tags.
However, while this will get your campaigns in front of the right audience. Sometimes your niche might not be the source of many trends. You might equally use hashtags which aren’t closely aligned to your industry.
Join a conversation on social media
This one is pretty likened to joining a trend. It is very important to join a conversation that will be taking place on social media by using the right hashtags.
Promote contests and giveaways
Contests and giveaway will always boost your user engagement like nothing else. People like to compete, but even more than that, they really love discounts and free stuff.
When you are doing giveaways, it’s much better to do different smaller ones than one massive giveaway. This will assist you build a good momentum on social media.
On the other hand, contests will result in a ton of user generated content with your hashtags in it. Meaning better awareness about your brand.
Raise awareness about a particular topic
Hashtags which always spread awareness about a crucial topic not only have the capability to go viral. But they equally result in many user generated content. You, as well as the community, will be spreading awareness about your own business at the same time.
Build a community around a hashtag
Hashtags will help you build your brand. Which is just one little step from building a community. When you’re successful to coin the right digital marketing hashtag for a specific marketing campaign. Your followers will not only be able to discuss via chat or messages. But equally connect with one another by using your hashtag.
These communities will help you connect to some amazing and wonderful people. Both in your industry niche, which will aid your business, together with outside of it. They may share the same Goals, missions and values as yourself, and that is something that is very priceless. Ultimately, every one of you will use this community and create a great movement that will be able to do something good.
Just be sure that the hashtag you will choose is original and not already in use by some other brand, group, or community.
Conclusion
As you can see, hashtags will help you increase your marketing campaigns in different ways. As the team at Urbizboost can attest, you only need to invest a little time and effort. And you’ll be able to connect with your target audience easier than ever, and equally grow your company in the process.