A guide to hashtag campaigns for marketers

If you're looking for a new campaign idea to help increase engagement and brand awareness on social media, we've got a great tactic for you to try: hashtag campaigns.

Hashtag campaigns help make it easier for your brand's message to spread, so long as they're done properly and make sense for the platform and the audience.

To help you determine if a hashtag campaign is the best idea for your brand, we're going to cover what exactly a hashtag campaign is, benefits of this type of campaign, how to run one and how to track its success.

What is a hashtag campaign?

True to its name, a hashtag campaign is a social media marketing campaign that surrounds a specific hashtag that a brand creates and promotes. This is a great way to generate awareness around a brand, product, launch, event and more.

To run one of these campaigns, your brand would 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.

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.

It’s a great opportunity to further build your brand and increase followers, but you can also use hashtag campaigns as a way to show support for various social issues that reflect your brand mission.

There are a few different types of hashtag campaigns, from event hashtags to product launch ones or even those that simply ask questions surrounding a central topic and get your audience's thoughts and opinions.

Let's cover a few of the benefits of this type of campaign and why your marketing team might want to consider it.

Benefits of a hashtag campaign

Excited to pitch the idea of a hashtag campaign to your team or your boss? You need to share a few of the benefits alongside your idea, and we've got four of them right here.

1. Build brand awareness

Hashtag campaigns are great ways to get the word out about your business to a much wider audience. If you’re a relatively new or smaller brand, consider using hashtag campaigns simply as a way to generate awareness.

A similar example from a bigger brand would be the #MyCalvins hashtag campaign put together by Calvin Klein. For a brand awareness hashtag campaign, you'll typically always want to work your brand name or a highly unique product or service name in there somehow, so that anyone who comes across the hashtag will start to get acquainted with your business.

Take a look at this tweet using the hashtag:

Light layers for now.

The French Terry Embroidered Sweatshirt. By Mak. #mycalvins

Shop summer essentials: https://t.co/hbMPMMEkx9 pic.twitter.com/c3Nge19QKy

— calvinklein (@CalvinKlein) June 22, 2021