5 Reasons Branded Hashtags Should be Part of Your Marketing Strategy
By: Kate Ford
Do you currently use hashtags every time you post on Instagram? If not, you are missing out on important potential engagement with your brand!
An Instagram post that utilizes at least one hashtag will, on average, do 12% better than a post with zero hashtags. Branded hashtags, in particular, are a great way to drive brand promotion and organic engagement. Let’s dive into five reasons why creating a branded hashtag will help drive engagement with your brand and company.
Quick Reference List:
Expands your audience
Keeps all your content organized and easy to find
Allows customers to become advocates for your brand
Creates organic traffic for a campaign
Hashtags Help Provide Analytics for Your Content
Branded Hashtags Help to Expand Your Audience
People search for content via hashtags, follow hashtags, and use hashtags in their own content. Whenever you use a hashtag, your post will pop up on the page for that hashtag specifically. Similarly, if you use a hashtag in one of your stories, your story then has a chance to be featured on the hashtag page as well.
Using a mix of generic hashtags along with a brand specific hashtag will help your company to be more easily discovered. A more generic hashtag will help your content to pop in general searches while a branded hashtag will allow users to follow your content specifically as well as use your company hashtag in their posts. That means that their followers can see your hashtag and have the ability to click on it - leading them to a hashtag page and potentially seeing more of your content.
And just like that, your audience reach doubles from one user interacting with your brand.
Make All Your Content Easy to Find
As we mentioned before, having a branded hashtag makes your content easy to find. It is a unique tag for your business and allows you to collect all of your content under one, promotable tag. Potential customers and followers have the ability to search for your hashtag, see all your content, and also see how other users engage with your brand. Similarly, you as a company also have the ability to see how people are interacting with your products or services both on and off your social media pages.
Make it Easy for Customers to Promote Your Brand
A branded hashtag also makes it easy for customers to promote your brand organically and get them involved with your products or service offerings. Empowering your customers to be brand advocates for your company is a HUGE win! People are more likely to trust what other users have to say about a product or service than the company itself. Hashtags are a great way to showcase these recommendations as well as build your online community of supporters.
Create Organic Traffic for a Campaign
Branded hashtags also make it really easy to start publicizing a new promotion, giveaway, or campaign for your company. Just look at Coca Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign. This campaign launched in 2014 and is still running today. Coca Cola encouraged users to share their experiences (and bottles of Coke with their name on it) online using this hashtag. As a result, Coca Cola saw a 7% increase in consumption of their product.
Social Media campaigns are also budget friendly while still reaching a large audience - perfect for small business looking to drive brand awareness and sales. Facebook Advertising still offers the best ROI and costs just a fraction of traditional media spend. Similarly, Instagram is a platform that many users utilize to discover new products.
Hashtags and Analytics
Hashtags Insights are also a great way to discover what your audience connects with and what misses the mark. It is important to optimize which branded and generic hashtags you use when posting to make your company easily discoverable and increase your organic traffic.
Instagram features an incredibly useful way to track the number of impressions that come directly from hashtags in each post under the View Insights feature. You can also track Hashtag analytics through services such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite. Developing a list of best performing hashtags will help you to optimize your profile and get your Instagram set up for success!
Final Tips
Make sure to follow your own branded hashtags to help track content that is being shared using your hashtags
Make your branded hashtag easy to read
Proofread your hashtag! There is nothing worse than creating an entire campaign around a specific hashtag and then realize there is a typo (or an inadvertent, inappropriate word) in your hashtag
Make sure your hashtag is unique to your brand
Request a FREE Digital Ad Audit and Strategy Call
If all of this sounds overwhelming or out of your wheelhouse, you are not alone! Business owners have a lot on their plate and often, marketing falls to the wayside. If you and your team are looking to focus on operations and hate keeping up with the latest trends, consider setting up a free advertising strategy call with Social Cookie!
During the call, we will go over your marketing needs and see if our services would be a good fit for your brand. Plus, you will receive a Free Digital Ad Audit after the call! Each Ad Audit analyzes your latest ad campaign and provides tips on how to make your ads more successful in the future.
Interested in a chat? Book a Call and start getting your questions answered today!
Sources and Further Reading:
Chacon, B. (2021, January 1). The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Hashtags in 2021. Later. https://later.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-using-instagram-hashtags/
Jepma, W. (January 2019). Why You Should Use Branded Hashtags for Your Business. Market Veep. https://blog.marketveep.com/why-you-should-use-branded-hashtags-for-your-business
Newberry, C. (2020, June 23). The 2020 Instagram Hashtag Guide - How to Use Them and Get Results. Hootsuite. https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-hashtags/
York, A. (2019, October 10). How to Create a Hashtag For Your Brand. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/create-a-hashtag/
