Think of all the Instagram users as guests at a gigantic hotel. Your Instagram account is like a room in a building with twenty thousand floors, and there are millions of them. Friends may drop by now and then, but generally, life here is rather quiet.
I’m curious as to where you hang out to make new friends. Perhaps even attract new clients?
Instagram, like any fine hotel, features several public areas such as ballrooms, gardens, shops, restaurants, dog parks, and conference rooms; however, in the case of Instagram, these public areas are hashtags. You can locate the specific people you’re looking for on Instagram; all you have to do is use the appropriate hashtag, which exists for practically every social group, feeling, aesthetic preference, and area of interest.
You may increase your exposure to your target audience and improve your post’s performance by employing a strategic hashtagging approach. Additionally, such individuals will be the best fit for driving your business goals. This is appealing, right? This all-inclusive 5 stage Instagram hashtag strategy guide will help you get there.
Need to determine end goal(s)
Set Your Company’s Goals
Read what Instagram for Business has to say about picking the right hashtags for your posts.
This is sound advice that highlights a basic principle of marketing: success is more likely to be achieved by targeting the appropriate audience with the appropriate message.
Hashtags are a crucial aspect of any Instagram marketing strategy if your business goals include expanding your audience beyond the people who are already familiar with your brand. How crucial is it? Extremely vital. Track Maven found that the number of likes and comments on an Instagram post increased by over 2.5 times for each additional hashtag used (compared to posts with a single hashtag).
Hashtag strategies can help you achieve the following business goals:
My goal as an Instagram Influencer is to increase my following so that I may increase my rates for advertising sponsors’ products.
As a blogger/media outlet, my goal is to increase my site’s traffic and so attract a greater number of advertisers.
To grow my company, I need to find and serve a wider range of clients.
You want to reach people who are ready to engage with you on a deeper level, who will follow you, click the link in your bio, and eventually become paying customers.
You’re not seeking for just anyone; rather, you’re trying to locate a certain group of people, the ones who will become your people.
Locate Your Target Market
Who am I writing for, and what do they care about?
You probably already have a good idea of your target demographic, either from gut feeling, from engaging with your target audience on social media, from talking to hundreds of your customers in the past, or by conducting market research and creating buyer personas.
It’s time to put that understanding to use. Consider the various public areas of the vast hotel that is Instagram, and then ask yourself, “Where are the people I’m looking for?”
Going beyond the one word solution
One good example of a hashtag brainstorming session might be: When you think about how your potential clients may classify the denim jeans you produce for male skateboarders, the words “jeans” and “denim” may come to mind immediately. These are two of the most utilised hashtags today.
Examine Popular Hashtags
Using Instagram’s search function to create a map of your customers’ interests based on the hashtags they use autocomplete
Instagram’s built-in search box has always been the go-to for researching trending hashtags. It’s a straightforward yet laborious procedure. Type a hashtag followed by one of your terms (like the ones we came up with above) into Instagram’s search bar, and the app will suggest additional hashtags based on their popularity and how closely they match your initial query.
Searching for Less Frequented Hashtags
Instagram’s autocomplete for hashtag research has a few flaws, one of which is that it gives a lot of weight to the hashtags it suggests depending on what you’ve already typed in the search bar. The word you started to write a hashtag for is probably not the best hashtag to use. Instagram’s lack of a convenient search function for less obvious hashtags have a lot of potentially useful tags.
Assessing Hashtags
Do more than just use hashtags; learn what they mean.
If you want to know what a hashtag is and if you should use it, you need more information than Instagram’s search box provides (the number of posts to that hashtag).
Assessing the value of a single hashtag:
- Is this hashtag something your clientele would use?
- Is your content going to work with the hashtag? Is it what people who search for that hashtag usually find? If it doesn’t, people won’t interact with it any more just because it’s there, and it could even hurt your brand’s reputation.
- How active of a following does the hashtag have? (Are there many of hashtagged postings with hardly any replies? Is there a lot of interest in the most popular posts?
- Is this hashtag become too popular if so many people are using it? Is it underutilised?)
- Will your postings fare well in this hashtag’s competition? (You should strive to become a “Top Post” if at all possible. Will your post garner enough interaction within a few hours to rival the current top posts? If that’s the case, you might choose to use a less popular hashtag.