What is a hashtag campaign?

A hashtag campaign is a social media marketing campaign that surrounds a specific hashtag that a brand creates and promotes. Hashtag campaigns help make it easier for your brand’s message to spread by generating awareness, product launch, event and increasing engagement. In order to run these campaigns, your brand has to select a hashtag that best represents the campaign and share content related to and featuring that hashtag. The point is to get your customers to also pick up and start using the hashtag on related content in order to reach an even wider audience.

What are the benefits of conducting a hashtag campaign?

1. Builds brand awareness – Hashtag campaigns are great ways to get the word out about your business to a much wider audience.

2. Promotes your brand – Use hashtag campaigns as a promotional tool to showcase your business’s product and service offerings, as well as upcoming or annual events.

3. Assembles information – Hashtags are searchable, so creating a hashtag for your audience to use in order to hold a discussion about a topic is a great way to accumulate information into one place. You can also ask your audience thought-provoking questions and use a hashtag to keep track of all the responses and discussions.

4. Increases engagement – Successful hashtag campaigns are great for generating user engagement. Since the whole point of a hashtag campaign is getting your audience to spread the word, you need to make sure you make it easy and accessible for your audience to maximize engagement. Think of a very unique hashtag related to your brand name. Don’t go for something common as this will dilute the effect and won’t make much of an impact.

How are hashtag campaigns executed?

Here are a few simple steps via which you can get your way through hashtag campaigns and set your social strategy in motion:

Understand your audience

Make sure you know where your audience is and what kinds of content they like to interact with so that you know what type of hashtag campaign to run. You can do so by studying social media demographics, online patterns and creating a strategy that resonates with your audience.

Define your goals 

Your goals will define the type of campaign you’ll be running. If you want to generate engagement, consider creating a hashtag campaign meant to aggregate information or help your audience have fun with your brand. If you’re looking to increase awareness around your brand, make sure you include at least part of your brand name within the hashtag. And if you’re trying to ramp up sales, keep your hashtag campaign focused on a specific product or service that you can promote.

Simplify participation 

Don’t make it hard to enter or participate. It should be as simple as posting a photo or writing a tweet and including your hashtag. If it’s difficult to interact with your hashtag campaign, your audience won’t do it. Simple as that.

Choose the right platform 

This is the last step for launching your hashtag campaign. You could even launch a multi-channel hashtag campaign that covers all the bases and reaches an even wider audience or choose specific platforms that works for your brand.

So as long as they’re done properly and make sense for the platform and the audience, hashtags campaigns can prove to be a groundbreaking step in your marketing strategy. If you create a successful hashtag campaign, you can reach exponentially more people on social media than you would with an ordinary ad or organic campaign. You can also increase engagement with the followers that do participate and share your hashtag within their own posts.