Instagram Hashtag Campaign That Maximized the Brands’ Reach

Who knows that introduced in 2007 by Twitter with the objective of filtering the content easily, Hashtags will receive such a huge response from users.

With billions of users and millions of brands are leveraging them to fulfill their objectives, Hashtags have been a revolutionary element of the social media ecosystem for more than a decade.

In such a scenario of cut-throat competition, a properly executed hashtag campaign could be the life savior of your brand’s social media marketing strategy.

At present, Instagram has been the most popular platform for hashtag campaigns comparatively. 

This holistic guide on the Instagram hashtag campaign will help you master your Hashtag marketing strategy to enhance user engagement and grow your business online.

What is the Instagram Hashtag Campaign?

In the social media marketing context, a ‘Hashtag’ is a keyword or a phrase prefixed by the symbol “#” attached to a piece of content on social media (text, images, videos, etc.). 

While a ‘Hashtag Campaign’ a marketing initiative by a brand that creates a unique hashtag for their social media marketing campaign. The benefits of a hashtag campaign leveraged by brands are;

• To give their campaign an identity
• Build brand awareness
• Let interested users engage with the brand
• Give a common interaction platform to both the users & brand 
• Easily group & categorize the useful UGC around the hashtag, etc.

Introduction to Instagram Hashtag Campaign

Did you know that including just a single hashtag in your Instagram post can attract 12.6% higher engagement as compared to the non-hashtagged posts?

In this constantly changing world, brands are finding it more and more challenging to acquire organic reach.

But brands that are more active on Instagram can leverage the fruitful benefits of Instagram hashtag campaigns. 

Not just are they a great way to enhance engagement, further organic reach, but also help brands to promote their new product launch, spread brand awareness, drive user interaction & engagement, generate & collect valuable user-generated content, increase conversions, and so much more.

Instagram Hashtag Campaigns: The Importance For Marketers

We have curated a list of all the major reasons explaining why Instagram Hashtag Campaigns are important for marketers.

1. Greater Reach & Brand Exposure

Hashtags are not geographically restricted or confined. Therefore the hashtag campaign makes them open to a global audience. 

This ultimately helps in opening the door for a plethora of broader reach opportunities as well as extended exposure for the campaign resulting in maximum brand awareness.

2. Discovery & Visibility

Hashtags enhance the visibility of the campaign with an easy discovery potential. So the use of relevant and targeted hashtags exposes your Instagram posts to a whole new pool of audience. 

Through Instagram Hashtag Campaign, marketers can surely bring in more customers and meaningful results to your business.

3. Social Presence Building

The Instagram hashtag campaign strategy will also help in building a strong social media presence as the extended exposure will bring more loyal followers and opportunities for community building. 

4. Enhanced Engagement & Interactions

As you delegate the power to run the campaign in the hands of users, they become the prime players. 

And while they create, share, and explore content in a hashtag campaign, the user engagement and interaction possibilities grow exponentially with the hashtag campaign.

5. Creating & Leveraging UGC

User-generated content is the most reliable, authentic, and trustworthy form of content. Why? Because it is created & shared by the users based on their real experiences, opinions, ideas, and feedback. 

And when a hashtag is associated with UGC to create a valuable campaign for a brand, it can immensely help marketers in building social proof, attract users, increase engagement, and grow conversions. 

6. Tracking & Performance Measurement

One of the pivotal things achieved via hashtag campaigns is that it easily helps in hashtag tracking and performance measurement. 

It also helps in comparing and analyzing the achievements with the objectives, which will help in more powerful future campaigns. 

7. Increase Conversions & Revenue

The combination of Instagram & hashtag campaigns can unlock the doors to broader & better success opportunities like generating maximum conversions & revenue for your marketing campaigns.

This automatically will lead to maximized returns with minimal investments.

How Many Hashtags Can You Include in Each Post?

Instagram feed might be decked up with amazing features, but it also comes with certain limitations. This social media platform allows only 30 hashtags per post so that people don’t go hashtag crazy. 

More hashtags don’t always mean more traffic or more visibility anyway. Therefore instead of spamming your users, it’s better to use hashtags strategically. 

If you believe what we say, then one well-researched unique hashtag can leave all the 30 recklessly-chosen keywords behind.

Say, for example, if you see two hashtags that are #WinterCoats and #WarmWinterCoats, what looks better to you? 

Well, both the hashtags can be used, but the first one is a more general term; therefore, it is more competitive. 

On the other hand, putting the second hashtag in your feed increases the chances for your content to get discovered by the audience. 

Why because #WarmWinterCoats hashtag is less competitive but highly engaging.

You can also narrow down your hashtag description in order to narrow down the competition.  

But there’s one thing that you must remember while using the hashtags that the effectiveness of hashtags keeps changing. 

For example, the hashtag that you might have used in 2019 wouldn’t work in 2020 because Instagram keeps expanding its hashtag features.

You can understand one of the game-changing hashtag updates made by Instagram in 2018. 

This update helped users to follow hashtags or unfollow brands within hashtag feeds. 

With this, Instagram changed the way we view or find hashtags. It also affected how people respond to & interact with the hashtags. 

So start finding out what works best for your brand by testing & analyzing the results.

How To Create A Brand Hashtag Campaign

Here is a detailed guide that will make you a pro in crafting a successful hashtag campaign strategy for your brand. Come, let’s delve into.

Do Your Hashtag Research Properly

To use hashtags effectively and efficiently, you need to do proper research as it is much more than just adding a pound sign(#) in front of the words you like. 

Brainstorm your ideas, analyze the competitor’s strategy, learn about trending topics, see the lengths & complexity of your existing industry hashtags, and much more similar steps before deciding a hashtag. 

1. Relevancy & Creativity 

Relevance & creativity are highly crucial for users to be intrigued and engage with the hashtag campaign. 

So, find relevant keywords to your campaign objectives or brand values, add creativity, infuse some interesting or memorable elements, etc.

Relevancy, along with creativity, will help in attracting the users to use your brand’s hashtag and engage more with it, leading to enhanced Instagram hashtag marketing campaign performance. 

2. Don’t Overuse Hashtags.

Excess of something can sometimes be detrimental. Going overboard with hashtags might seem tempting, but it will cause an adverse impact on your hashtag campaign strategy. 

Reports indicate that the optimal use of hashtags must be limited to 11 hashtags per post. 

Using excessive hashtags will lead to misguidance & dissimilarity among the audience engagement & their responses. 

Also Read – Embed Instagram Slider Widget On Website

3. Integrate Rewards, Contests, & Giveaways

Social media users love engaging in activities the words like rewards, gifts, contest, giveaways, etc. are associated with. Therefore, brands can leverage it to promote their Instagram hashtag campaign & user engagement.

Just be loud and clear about the kind of content entries you expect from your audience. 

Also, do specify the Instagram hashtag to be used while submitting the entries along with highlighting the benefits they will get out of it. 

If you just offer your users to feature them on your official Instagram profile. 

In return, you get loads of user-generated content for your brand that you can use for your brand marketing.

4. Learn from the Influencers

Studying the Instagram hashtag marketing strategy of the influencers of your industry helps you direct your actions in the right direction. 

This is how you can bring them positive user engagement and avoid the mistakes they made.

You even get an idea of the best performing hashtags of your industry, which you can use for your campaign. So, learn from them and beat them at their own game.

5. Consistency, Communication, & Community

You must stay consistent with your hashtag and give users some time to discover, engage, and interact with your campaign. But also, don’t be rigid on using the non-performing hashtags.

Also, keep interacting and communicating with the audience, which is engaging with your campaign. It will help in building a loyal community around the brand and campaign, which can be leveraged in the future. 

6. Creating or Choosing a Brand Hashtag

The most crucial strategy for a hashtag campaign is choosing the right hashtag for your campaign. So follow these following simple steps:

• It should be unique, precise, & brand relatable
• Simple & easy to understand for an average user
• Add a little creativity & interesting element 
• Don’t make it abusive, offensive, and disrespectful
• Conduct a review & test run before going through with it

Every Brand Should Use These 8 Types of Hashtags

Choosing the right hashtags can be dicey, so to make things clear for you, we have curated a list of 8 types of hashtags. 

1. #Branded Hashtags

As the name suggests, a branded hashtag represents a specific brand only and therefore, can be used across all the social media platforms. Some of the popular examples of branded hashtags are as follows; 

• #HaveAbreak- Kitkat
• #JustDoIt- Nike
• #Nintendo- Nintendo 

2. #Campaign Hashtags

These types of hashtags are more impactful when used in UGC campaigns.

You all must know about the #ShareaCoke Campaign launched by Coca Cola. In this campaign, the beverage brand used a specific hashtag to encourage users to participate.

3. #Niche Hashtags

If you want to connect to a specific audience, then these types of hashtags are just perfect for you. Especially for small-to-medium sized businesses, niche hashtags work excellently.

Niche hashtags help in engaging the audience, cutting down the competition, increases purchase from you, etc. 

Popular niche makes your content fall in the pool of tremendous competition. So, don’t settle and niche more by adding a descriptive term.

For example, as a marketer, you want to reach a large audience with niche hashtags, then instead of using #marketing, you should opt for #BestContentMarketingTip, #ContentMarketing2020, and more.

4. #Location Hashtags

Any brand with a physical location like cafes, restaurants, or a brick-and-mortar local business can drive local customers to their venue by using Location Hashtags. 

Why? Because these hashtags bring a lot of visibility to your brand by making it appear in the local search results.

5. #Event Hashtags

To get the attention of the target audience, you can drive traffic & increase followers on your social media handles by using the specific Event hashtags. 

These hashtags can act as mini super-heroes both for offline & online promotions.

6. #Industry Hashtags

Last but not least, Industry hashtags are ideal for those who want to build a reputation within their industry. 

But make sure your industry hashtags don’t get unnoticed in the search results. For e.g., #Journalists, #Chef, etc. are popular industry hashtags.

7. #Daily Hashtags

This category of hashtags includes everyday hashtags such as #MondayBlues #FridayFun and more. These hashtags are very basic in nature and can be used as per your mood. 

8. #Acronym Hashtags

Gen Z is quite popular to use Acronym Hashtags such as #OOTD i.e., Outfit Of the Day, #YOLO i.e., You Only Live Once, etc. 

The 3 Golden Rules of Hashtags

Be it any social media platform like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc; there are 3 basic but most important rules of hashtags that every brand must follow. 

• No Use of Spaces, Symbols, etc.- The use of spaces, symbols, or punctuation within the hashtag phrase will affect its functionality. 

• Should Be Used In Public Posts- Make sure that your hashtags are used in public posts so that they can appear in the search result. 

• First Word Should Be in Caps- Most people write hashtags in small letters, which is not the right way. 

So, the first letter of every word in a hashtag would be in CAPS i.e., #AlwaysCapTheFirstLetter. This helps users understand the meaning of hashtags easily. 

Most Popular Instagram Hashtag Campaigns

1. Nike Uses Iconic Slogan As Hashtag- #justdoit

Nike is a smart player in the market, and it proves it again when it initiated its Instagram Hashtag Campaign with an all-time motivational mantra #justdoit. 

It also appears on its t-shirts, custom tote bags, other products, and billboards all over the world.

As a statement, it helps the brand to create a brand image that conveys it as competitive, vigorous, direct, powerful, and inspirational. 

The campaign resulted in inspiring people who helped them grab 15,857,590 posts over Instagram. 

2. Warner Bros Relaunches Mortal Kombat 11 With #MKKOLLECTIVE

Warner Bros relaunched its much loved online game Mortal Kombat 11 in one of the unique ways to create a huge buzz among the game lovers and participate. 

The company built a digital hub for its fans and lovers to build a community by sharing their original and innovative content related to Mortal Kombat franchise over multiple social media platforms like Instagram using the hashtag #MKKOLLECTIVE.

People enthusiastically contributed to the game’s official website by submitting artistic UGC entries related to the game and, in return, got featured on the embedded social feed on the website.

3. Coca Cola Spreads Kindness With #RefreshTheFeed Over Social Media

On its way of becoming the most optimistic brand of all, Coca Cola launched an Instagram Hashtag marketing Campaign with the #RefreshTheFeed with the mission to embark on kindness and spread optimism. 

In that direction, the brand refreshed its entire Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter profiles. It encouraged users to submit their creative and optimistic content entries to spread positivity over social media platforms. 

This initiative helped the brand to establish itself as a brand rooted in optimism, upliftment, and connection with the users.

Best Solution For Instagram Hashtag Campaign 

Now that you have studied the benefits and how to create a hashtag marketing campaign. We have an all in one solution to create, manage, and share hashtag campaign for marketers, i.e., Taggbox

Taggbox is a UGC platform and social media aggregator that helps marketers to build trust, increase engagement, and grow conversions. 

Offering brands solutions to discover, curate, and display user-generated content across all marketing channels, Taggbox helps in creating result-driven campaigns effectively and efficiently. 

This easy to use tool is also compatible with various website building platforms. 

Leverage this platform to create a hashtag campaign, easily create a live Instagram hashtag feed by customizing & moderating it. 

Also, let it add branding & promotional elements to your content and display it perfectly as a UGC feed on the website, in events, digital signages, email marketing, and many more channels. 

The platform also provides easy hashtag tracking and insightful analytics for your campaign. 

WRAPPING UP!

Instagram Hashtags are a great tool to connect with people, build a community, spread brand awareness, and generate user-generated content on the platform. 

Being a deciding factor in building or breaking your hashtag marketing campaign, the difference between using efficiently and over-using hashtags must be understood. 

Therefore, as a brand looking forward to marketing itself on Instagram must keep clear of their Instagram Hashtag Campaign strategy and plan things accordingly. 

Don’t shy away from embedding the user-generated Instagram hashtag feeds on your website and see for yourself the amazing results in terms of your website performance.