Learn from the best social media hashtag campaigns to build your brand and grow your business.
Hashtags have been a part of social media platforms for centuries. It was Chris Messina who came up with the idea. An idea to categorize content on social media around keywords. Little did he know this idea would explode in popularity and would become a great marketing tactic.
Yes, that’s what we’re going to talk about in this blog — Social Media Hashtag Campaigns.
We’ll discuss what a hashtag campaign is, its benefits, and what you can learn from some successful hashtag campaigns.
Let’s jump right in!
What are Social Media Hashtag Campaigns?
A hashtag campaign, true to its name, is a campaign promoted with hashtags to increase your reach and engagement. Hashtags help brands take their campaigns to the relevant audience to generate awareness around a brand, its products, launches, events, etc.
The combination of hashtags you use for your social media campaigns has a great impact on their success. You can’t just put all the trending hashtags and expect your sales to boost. Yes, it’ll boost your reach. But reaching people who are not interested in your business isn’t worth the effort.
The hashtags you go for must resonate with your target audience. Only then your social media campaigns will reach the users who are interested in your products/services.
And how do you find relevant and high-performing hashtags? By using the hashtag analytics feature of Radarr, you can compare the performance of hashtags over time. This, when combined with social listening and sentiment analysis, will help you find hashtags with the right intent.
Benefits of Social Media Hashtag Campaigns
While the benefits of social media hashtag campaigns may vary from business to business, based on their industry and their target audience, here’s taking a look at some of the clear advantages:
1. Builds brand awareness
Hashtags allow you to reach a wider audience, an audience that you wouldn’t have reached organically. It helps you appear in front of users who’ve never heard of your branding, increasing brand awareness.
When you want to boost your brand awareness, try putting your brand name in the hashtag. Calvin Klein, a fashion brand, did something similar when they started the “MyCalvin” hashtag campaign.
They made a series of posts with this hashtag to get their audience excited about owning a Calvin. And when their customers came across this hashtag campaign, they joined, spreading it even further.
2. Promote your products, new launches, or events
Leveraging the reach of hashtag campaigns, you can promote your products, launches, or events.
A lot of movies get their hashtag campaigns started while they are in production. This allows fans to get regular updates regarding that movie under the hashtags.
Similarly, when you’re launching a new product or hosting an event, create a hashtag around it. Your audience will be able to discover everything they need to know by searching for the hashtag.
And when the event finally happens, they’ll share posts on their social media account with that hashtag, helping you reach a wider audience.
Adidas started one such hashtag campaign to launch their new Originals line with the hashtag #ORIGINALis. The campaign got so popular that Adidas had to create a separate account for this product line.
3. Boost engagement on social media campaigns
If you manage to create a successful hashtag campaign, it’ll drive engagement like no other. Your existing customers, followers, or relevant audience will want to join your campaign by posting about your hashtag.
Hashtags are meant to spread the word about your brand. Therefore, you must ensure that your hashtag is easy to remember and spell. It should also be unique. If the hashtag has already been used in general conversations, the campaign’s impact will not be that high.
4. Find user-generated content
You can create a hashtag campaign that asks your audience to create and share posts featuring your brand.
You might ask why they would do it. They would do it because social media users love getting featured on a brand’s page.
It’s a win-win! Your customers are happy about you featuring them on your page. And you get to post user-generated content, which is better at converting leads than professional imagery.
7 Best Hashtag Campaigns and What You Can Learn From Them
Creating a hashtag campaign that guarantees success requires a lot of planning and research. But before jumping into the analysis part, let’s get you inspired by some successful hashtag campaigns.
#ShareACoke by Coca-Cola
Whenever there will be talks about hashtag campaigns, Coke’s #ShareACoke campaign will always be mentioned. It’s one of the most brilliant hashtag campaigns ever to exist.
For this campaign, the sticker on the Coke bottles had names and titles that pumped sales and helped the company get a ton of user-generated content.
People shared photos on social media when they got their name. Whenever someone found their friend’s name, they tagged them on social media.
But this campaign won people’s hearts when a couple, Patrick and Whitney McGillicuddy, shared a video announcing their pregnancy using Coke cans with the labels — Mom and Dad.
This campaign worked so well because Coke managed to do mass-scale personalization and add a community feel. Coca-Cola also collaborated with celebrities like Selena Gomez and Ryan Seacrest, increasing this hashtag campaign’s engagement.
#IceBucketChallenge by ALS Association
The #IceBucketChallenge hashtag campaign did two things for ALS Association — raised awareness about ALS and helped raise $115 billion. The cause behind this campaign was its prominent driving force.
ALS Association is a non-profit organization spreading awareness about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and funding related research. Though they didn’t start this hashtag campaign, they got enough attention for it. And by enough attention, we mean attention from George Bush, Bill Gates, and many other big names.
Under this campaign, people had to record themselves while someone poured a bucket of ice on them. They then had to nominate three people to do the same within 24 hours.
The reaction when a bucket of ice was poured on people made social media users laugh. And the humor in the challenge made this hashtag campaign a success.
#ShowUs by Dove
One of the best things about a social media hashtag campaign is that it helps you build a rapport with your audience. It helps you convey what you stand for. And if your target audience like your stand, it’ll do wonders for your business like the #ShowUS campaign did for Dove.
Dove consistently launches new campaigns supporting positive body image, natural beauty, and inclusivity. When Dove discovered that 70% of women feel they are not represented in advertising, they launched the #ShowUs hashtag campaign.
This hashtag campaign, like other successful ones, helped Dove gather a lot of user-generated content. With more than 638k posts on Instagram alone, this campaign was an internet sensation.
Dove created a personal connection with those women who felt left out. Those women felt heard. Other social media users saw how Dove cares about inclusivity. And this personal connection and a good message made this campaign a roaring success for Dove.
#ShotoniPhone by Apple
#ShotoniPhone is a campaign that has become an internet phenomenon itself. This campaign began as a challenge where Apple invited users to share their best clicks. And after doing a review, those shots would get featured on Apple’s social media, billboards, stores, etc.
Instagram has more than 26 million posts under this hashtag, which makes it one of the most successful UGC hashtag campaigns. Moreover, Apple still features #ShotoniPhone clicks on their Instagram account regularly.
The UGC that Apple gets from this campaign helps them leverage the power of social proof. And getting social exposure from 26 million posts without spending a penny is magical!
#HereToCreate by Adidas
Everyone loves personalization. According to a survey, 87% of consumers feel that relevant branded content creates a positive image of the brand.
Adidas leveraged personalization in a unique way for their #HereToCreate hashtag campaign. During the Boston Marathon (2018), Adidas created customized videos for all the 30,000 athletes who participated.
These athletes then posted the video on their social media accounts using the #HereToCreate hashtag. This campaign helped Adidas convert these athletes into their brand advocates.
Because the followers of the respective athletes were sports enthusiasts, they also became Adidas’ target audience. This campaign took Adidas exactly where it wanted to land.
But this campaign didn’t stop at the marathon. Many other athletes like Lionel Messi, Pharell Williams, and David Beckham joined in to share their motivational stories, bringing a positive revolution. It expanded the reach of this social media hashtag campaign.
#WorthSaying By Loreal Paris
Loreal Paris, a famous beauty brand, asked women to raise their voices and post everything that matters to them using their hashtag campaign #WorthSaying.
It showed the world how Loreal is not just about making women feel confident with their beauty products, but it’s also about encouraging them to feel confident about their inner selves.
The campaign got really popular and gained the attention of celebrities like Blake Lively and Jennifer Lopez. They actively participated in L’oreal’s hashtag campaign. In 2018, this campaign was revamped as Loreal Paris partnered with TIFF donating $0.25 for every mention.
#PutACanOnIt by Red Bull
No one knows the art of free advertising like Red Bull. In 2014, they launched the #PutACanOnIt hashtag campaign, which social media users picked up instantly. This hashtag campaign was a perfect example of a campaign that’s innovative, fun, and sparks the creativity of the participants.
All their customers had to do was get a can and think of creative and witty ways of putting it on objects, people, pets, scenes, etc.
Red Bull received a lot of humorous and inspiring user-generated content without having to spend any money. It was their customers who did all the ideation for the posts.
Only people who buy Red Bull could join this campaign. This exclusivity ensured that more and more people bought a can to get an opportunity to showcase their creativity. Similarly, you can also create campaigns exclusive for your customers so that more and more people want to become your customers.
Ready to Start Your Own Hashtag Campaign?
Successful hashtag campaigns have certain things in common. They are simple but effective. You can generate a lot of engagement with them. These campaigns are your solution to leverage social proof with UGC. And unlike paid marketing campaigns, they stay alive to provide you with long-term gains.
But you can’t just start a campaign and expect it to go viral on day one. You must also monitor its performance and how your audience feels about it. How do you do that?
With Radarr’s hashtag analysis and tracking feature, you can analyze what’s working for your hashtag campaign and what’s not. Combining it with sentiment analysis, you can identify how your target audience is reacting to the campaign.
Using Radarr, you can make all your social media hashtag campaigns successful!
Learn how to implement emotion marketing in your growth strategy.
The world is now digital, and most brands have taken their businesses online to keep up with the changing times. As a result, the market in every industry is cutthroat, with no lack of options when it comes to products or services.
In such a landscape, the best way to improve brand visibility and stand out among competitors is to build a meaningful and solid connection beyond that of a seller and a customer.
But most businesses find it extremely difficult to keep up with their audience and customers, let alone build connections on a deeper level!
So, how do brands make emotional connections with their audience?
Today’s blog will show you the best ways to build an emotional connection with your customers that lasts long.
Ways to build an emotional connection
Let’s look at ways to do emotion marketing for businesses and some emotional connection examples:
1. Accept the concept of vulnerability
In the era of social media, overpromising does not work. Your customers can access customer reviews and experiences and unmask exaggerated claims in a few minutes.
On the other hand, a brand’s transparency resonates with the customers, and marketing is all about making your brand relatable. Your methods must be honest, grounded, and personal to achieve that.
When a brand accepts its vulnerability, it drives emotional marketing precisely because the audience can relate to it. It builds trust and drives innovation and enhancements in your services and marketing.
2. A look at the brand’s past
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. Regardless of your products or services, leveraging your brand’s past can make a difference in emotional marketing for businesses.
If you are lucky enough to have a legacy behind your brand, use that in your campaigns. A subtle throwback to the past can quickly get you ahead of the game and stay in your audience’s mind for longer.
3. Join the conversation
According to reports, 96% of unhappy customers won’t communicate their dissatisfaction to you directly. Instead, they will tell friends about their disappointment. Many will post online but not tag you.
So, how do brands make emotional connections? All you need to do is listen to them and incorporate the findings. For that, brands need to have an active presence on social media.
The world revolves around the internet now, and you can use that to your advantage. You can identify trends and track what matters most for your consumers through social media listening.
Not only will it help you to deliver impactful marketing campaigns, but it will also help you understand their complaints and address them before they escalate. Keeping up with social media conversations will also help humanize your brand.
To make a positive emotional connection with your audience, knowing what type of content drives your viewers the most should be a priority of your marketing team. To understand that, it is vital to monitor what they talk about online, which influencers they follow, and their gender, age, and demographic. This can’t be done without an excellent digital listening platform.
Radarr is a social listening software that will track and collect data on your target market’s trends, popular conversations, likes, and dislikes. Accurate analytics will also give you insights into where your marketing strategy needs the most work.
4. Look for shared values
As humans, we crave connection. Only when your marketing strategy successfully connects your products to life and your audience’s values can it appeal to their emotions.
To build a meaningful brand experience, organizations must focus on the shared values that connect them to their audience and remind them that they are part of something bigger than themselves.
Don’t let them be limited to being your consumers. Your marketing should create an experience that celebrates the values of your audience; invite them to be part of your brand story rather than just consumers of it.
5. Personalize the user experience
The pattern of the majority of your target market may be similar, but every audience is different. While we focus on creating a positive brand experience, another priority should be to avoid the negative ones. Preferences differ, and brands can only be successful as they grow if they personalize the user experience. Remember, if a consumer gets frustrated navigating your site, they will remember it and most likely won’t choose you the next time.
Monitoring customer behavior and preferences will come in handy in this aspect. Social monitoring tools like Radarr can give you real-time actionable insights about your audience response, their interests, and market trends in a fuss-free way.
Whenever your audience talks about something related to your user experience, Radarr will detect it and track the inner meaning of their conversation, helping you build a personalized emotional marketing campaign.
6. The customer is the main character
Most businesses go wrong in one aspect–trying to make their brand the hero of the marketing narrative. This approach can appear narcissistic and won’t incentivize prospective consumers to connect with you. It’s the wrong direction if you want to build long-lasting connections with your audience.
If your goal is to create strong emotional bonds between the customers and your brand, you must make your customer the story’s lead protagonist. Then the next step is to convey how your products and services will solve their problems and lead them to realize their goals and dreams.
7. Build visibility around real people
Businesses survive only by touching people’s lives in today’s competitive market. Make sure you tell stories that make real people and their experiences with your brand visible to the audience. They will have something concrete to believe in.
Leveraging that impact is the best way to solidify your brand’s promise to prospective customers.
Most brands try to build their campaigns by featuring their executives. You can stand out and have more impact by highlighting real customer stories and how your products and services solved their problems. Featuring customer testimonies will lead your audience to relate to your brand and give your their business.
8. Provide customers with solid help
The same old ways of marketing don’t take you ahead in the game anymore. Enough marketing gimmicks describe how companies have had an exceptional year. Consumers expect some real solutions now.
Prove that you are there not to convey hollow words but to create solutions that can reduce their financial burden. Show them your layaway plans through campaigns and make assurances you can keep. Push discount coupons, rewards, extended warranties, etc., that would put your money where your mouth is and help build long-lasting emotional connections and trust.
9. Give your brand a ‘stress-free’ persona
Modern customers make stress relief and mental well-being their top wellness concern. Naturally, they resonate with brands that help alleviate the stress of modern life. That’s one of the aspects marketing teams need to keep in mind to win consumers’ loyalty.
Communicate how your products and services are easily accessible and stress-free and make their lives more convenient. Carry out slow, experimental initiatives to see what builds a solution-oriented and accessible persona for your brand per the brand values, industry, and competition.
When you give your brand a chill and likable image, the chances of people being drawn to services and becoming loyal customers increase.
Radarr’s AI-powered social analytics will give accurate reports detailing your audience’s expectations, demands, and problems in real-time. With such a data-driven approach, you can deliver them through emotional marketing every time your customers expect enhancement.
10. Show off your employees
Your workforce is the backbone of your brand. You use that to promote a grounded image for your business. Your website should be where customers can see the people behind your products and services. Make your employees the face of your brand. Develop features and showcases to put honest workers front and center in your marketing. Remember, even that approach should tell a story.
For instance, if you sell pet care products, you can consider highlighting your employees or audience with their pets and sharing their favorite stories related to your products. Pet parents will resonate with these experiences, building a shared bond.
11. Use sonic branding
We all connect music to different memories, experiences, and people. Similarly, music can also create a long-lasting emotional connection between brands and their consumers. This is one of the best ways to connect with your consumers’ most intimate feelings, memories, and emotions.
Using sonic branding for your business will help create a recognizable, consistent, and effective ecosystem around the entire customer experience. Using voice, sounds, and music strategically can make positive associations and connections across your core market.
Whenever an audience hears those particular sounds, they will remember your brand. It will also be an approach that separates your brand from your competitors.
12. Leverage video content
Now, video marketing has become a top-performing marketing approach, driving more views, increased engagement, and better response than any other social posting option. Reports show that, on average, a regular person spends 100 minutes per day watching online videos.
According to some research, consumers will retain 95% of a message presented to them via video content.
To build a connection between your brand and your audience, you must ensure that every campaign delivers a message that stays with them. There is no better way to achieve that than by leveraging the popularity of video content. It builds instant rapport, can extract a better response from the audience, promote an item and sell it far better than the same old ways of infographic marketing.
13. Use influencer marketing and personality-driven media
Influencers are the buzzword in this digital world and can be your path to connecting with your audience on a deeper level. Personality-driven media is the perfect way to reach out to the audience quickly and impactfully.
Identifying influencers and personalities whose media presence aligns with your brand can be the face of your brand on social media. You can also consider partnering with show hosts on podcasts and radio to create genuine connections between your brand products and consumers.
Marketers can work with such personalities to onboard them, create mutual equity in the product, and tell a personal, positive, and emotion-based story that resonates with your consumers.
For this, you need sentiment analysis and trends monitoring, and for that, you need a reliable and efficient tool. To help you in this endeavor, Radarr provides the best-in-class social listening software without burdening you with repetitive manual tracking of online conversations.
14. Create a sense of belonging
People need a sense of belonging. Thus, to create a strong emotional bond with your audience and customers, brands must make something of a fellowship in the community.
Successful brands often focus on making people feel they can belong to the community the brand represents by purchasing from or engaging with it. Brands that create a sense of belonging to a community have the power to create strong emotional connections with their customers.
Conclusion
Building positive customer relations beyond the surface level is all about understanding what your customers expect and need. This can only be done by focusing on audience insights through sentiment analysis. This not only improves your marketing but also helps in developing better customer support.
But tasks like tracking the sentiments and opinions of your customer base are tricky, with a lot of room for error – and without accuracy, these have no use. This is where Radarr can help you.
This social and digital listening platform offers you the finest features and cutting-edge AI technology. The software enables you to utilize social media intelligence services to create a customer experience that blooms a meaningful bond with your audience.
To effectively leverage sentiment analysis in marketing, book a demo today.
The only list of the best social media marketers you need to follow.
Social media has become one of the go-to channels for businesses and brands to reach their target audience. From introducing them to what the brand has to offer, keeping them engaged with educational content to turning them into loyal customers, social media platforms offer an opportunity to optimize the entire customer journey and lifecycle.
But that’s only possible when you get your social media strategy right. This is where the importance of learning industry best practices and keeping up with the trends comes into picture and we like to learn from leaders in the space!
Follow these social media marketers to level up your strategy
While there are a number of other social media marketers and influencers in the industry that you can learn from, we like to follow a bunch of those that we have seen grow using various platforms and creating authentic content.
As a keynote speaker, Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and digital marketing and content guru, she is the Head of Content at MarketingProfs, a company she founded over 20 years ago that offers marketing education and training.
Robert is an author, keynote speaker, marketing expert, and founder of The Content Advisory. If you want to grasp the future of content and marketing, you should follow him.
He is a well-known digital entrepreneur, digital strategist, marketing blogger, best-selling book, and one of the top social media influencers. Forbes named him one of the “Top 20 Influential CMOs” of 2017.
He is the Chief Marketing Officer at Orbit Media, which he co-founded over 20 years ago. He has a lot to say about SEO, analytics, and website optimization since he has excellent marketing instincts.
He is the one who created and managed the Facebook community “The Social Media Geek Out,” which has over 13,000 members. He also started a podcast in 2019 featuring social media heavyweights, including the originator of the hashtag, and now serves as the head of marketing for Pinterest’s Global Business.
She is the Queen of Reverse Engineers and the source of most knowledge about new social media features. Follow her if you want to know her next Instagram filter, whether she will rebuild Facebook features, or what features LinkedIn will add next.
She is so knowledgeable about social media that Facebook engaged her to deliver seminars as part of its official “Boost Your Life” training series. She is a Forbes Top Social Media Influencer, the author of “New Relationship Marketing” and “Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.”
He is the founder and CEO of “Foundation,” a B2B content marketing business. He was also a co-founder of Hustle and Grind. Ross has a sizable online following and frequently tweets on SaaS, marketing, and growth.
He is the creator of RazorSocial, which provides B2B enterprises with digital marketing guidance. What distinguishes him is his technological background: his career began in the computer sector; therefore, social media tools are his primary emphasis. For a social media marketing tool evaluation, see RazorSocial’s blog.
In the 90s, she created GoGirlsMusic, a forum for female artists that might be regarded as an early effort at a specialized social network. She went on to become a social media marketing expert, moderating multiple Twitter conversations and presenting at events all over the World. Her audio session on the future of vanity metrics will help you grasp the direction of Twitter and social media in general.
He is a well-known global speaker, blogger, digital strategist, and educator. He specializes in workshops on marketing and social media. He co-hosts The Marketing Companion, one of iTunes’ top ten marketing podcasts. His online popularity may be deduced from the fact that in 2017, he was the leading ten most retweeted marketing personality and the seventh most cited CMO on Twitter.
He is a web pioneer specializing in digital marketing and online customer care. He hosts the Social Pros podcast, widely regarded as the most fantastic marketing podcast. He also developed Convince and Convert, which has assisted several businesses in increasing their sales and profits.
He works as an SEO consultant in digital marketing. He also writes a column for Search Engine Land. He also established his own business, Bowler Hat, in Central Birmingham (UK). His blogs and published articles on his digital marketing approach, SEO, content, and marketing ideas. As a result, he may broaden his marketing expertise online.
He is a social media blogger and Agorapulse’s brand ambassador. He created The Social Media Hat and the Blogging Brute blog, which discusses the newest social media trends, strategies, and growth hacks. In his emails, he shares life tales that perfectly transition into social media management suggestions.
He is well known as the inventor of Moz, an SEO tool. He spends a lot of time talking about the shortcuts and fallacies we have in social media marketing and leveraging social data. He also blogs on what it’s like to be a modern digital marketing professional.
She is the best-selling author of the “Everyone Can Do It” marketing book series and a recognized e-commerce and customer service expert. She educates her audience on how to sell on social media, answer client problems on Twitter and Facebook, and keeps you updated on the latest technologies and trends.
Her information is highly beneficial to freelancers and those considering becoming freelancers. She discusses how to find your first customer, schedule work, negotiate contracts, and other topics.
Web Ink Now by David Meerman Scott attempts to raise awareness and promote your brand in a real-time world. He is a marketing, social media, and newsjacking writer.
Forbes magazine named her one of the Top 20 Female Social Media Influencers. She has worked with various notable businesses to help them expand online throughout the years, including Oracle, Hootsuite, Agorapulse, and ZEEF. She also contributes to social media Today, Wired, Kissmetrics, Forbes, and The Telegraph as a columnist.
He has several feathers in his hat as a digital marketing specialist, keynote speaker, and author. He is the best-selling author of Optimizing: How to Attract and Engage More Customers Through the integration of Social Media, SEO, and Content Marketing.
He is the creator of Wordstream, the World’s most popular paid search marketing platform. He has written for big sites such as Wired, Huffington Post, CNET, The Wall Street Journal, and Search Engine Land, in addition to his internet marketing blog.
She is a social media trainer, an international keynote speaker, and a specialist in internet marketing. She is the CEO of Marketing Nutz, which assists various firms in becoming known on the internet. She was designated one of Forbes’ Top 10 Social Media Power Her Influencers due to her popularity.
The Webbiquity B2B Marketing Blog covers B2B lead generation, online presence optimization, social media, influencer marketing, SEO, and search engine marketing. He is the editor of Webbiquity, has been named one of his 50 most prominent B2B marketing executives.
He is best known for his award-winning blog. He is an internationally famous author, speaker, and contributor to Network TV News. His 60 Second Marketer is a website that gives blogging tools, tips, and tactics to hundreds of thousands of marketers. If you’re seeking intimate ideas on marketing science, you can’t go wrong with The 60 Second Marketer.
He has been a Top 50 Social Media Power Influencer twice a row by Forbes. One can learn social media, influencer marketing, and social selling, as well as the digital transformation of sales and marketing from him.
Due to John’s excellence, he has been on the list of 10 Most Influential PPC Experts in the World thrice consecutively. His writings teach business growth, SEO, Content Strategy, Marketing, and more.
He is the founder of BloggingWizard, an excellent resource for learning how to start a blog. He is a must-follow for someone who wants to learn about blogging tips, startup content, and marketing advice.
She is the founder of Blogsmith. She shares insights on social media, advertising, SEO, content strategy, and other disciplines you can’t afford to miss.
He runs Moss Media, where he publishes high-quality blogs tailored to meet the requirements of businesses and individuals. His Twitter is a must-follow if you want to learn about SEO, content marketing, and writing.
She is LiLi Marketing Service’s co-founder. She is a B2B and content marketing thought leader who shares her knowledge on SEO, Social Media, Market Research, and other related topics.
She is KoMarketing’s Senior Director. She shares her experiences regularly on social media, copywriting, marketing communications, and online marketing strategy, along with a few other related areas.
He is Agorapulse’s Head of Strategic Partnerships. He is a published author and well-known blogger. He will teach you the fundamentals of networking, social media marketing, and strategic collaborations.
She Consulting is the inventor of the renowned Twitter ContentChat. With over 20 years of expertise, she seeks to provide firms with the skills they need to implement a content strategy. She focuses on content and social media marketing strategy and execution, as well as marketing best practices.
He is the principal and founder of Marketingthink Consulting and has worked for companies such as HBO, IKEA, and Cognizant. His innovative work in social media makes him a must-see. He discusses marketing operations management, content marketing, and innovation.
She is a worldwide marketing, social media, and content marketing strategy influencer. She is an expert in influencer marketing, digital marketing, social strategy, content marketing, community management, business development, and other fields.
He is a brand development consultant, positioning specialist, and strategist who shares customer experience, technology, marketing, social media, and sales knowledge.
He is the CEO and founder of Stryde, an e-commerce marketing firm that works to enhance website traffic and revenue growth for its clients. He specializes in e-commerce marketing, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and web analytics.
She works as the Director of Global Social Media at Oracle, where she shares marketing-related information. She is also an accomplished blogger, speaker, and photographer.
He has been chosen as a New York Times best-selling author. Furthermore, President Obama named him one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under 30. He is a Crazyegg and Kissmetric co-founder. He has a large online fan base, and his site Quicksprout teaches people about internet marketing in a fun and straightforward approach.
He brings you the latest and most up-to-date social media marketing tools, trends, and resources. You’ll learn about essential social media strategy insights, original ideas for your work, tech tools, the most recent social media tactics, and online marketing strategies to help your business thrive.
She is a renowned Twitter influencer, blogger, and digital marketing specialist. She maintains the site Inspire to Thrive, which discusses the newest social media trends and how to market a business online. She is one of the “Top 10 Twitter Influencers.” Follow her if you want to improve your blogging and Twitter marketing abilities.
She is a well-known digital marketing and social media consultant. She teaches novice bloggers how to make money online and has worked with several companies and enterprises to enhance their online sales and revenue. You may stay up to speed on social media and content marketing by following her blog “Successful Blogging.”
She has been blogging for over ten years. An essential digital marketing resource for bloggers and online entrepreneurs is raelyntan.com, with more than 100 articles on establishing, growing, and monetizing your blog and online business.
He is a well-known social media blogger and a digital marketing strategist. He operates the blog Blogging Thing, where he aims to “provide a forum for bloggers from all walks of life to improve their abilities, learn how to monetize their site, and, most importantly, generate material that matters.” You may learn about social media by following his blog.
He is an industry thought leader and author. He routinely shares his ideas and learnings from driving the digital strategy for Cornett and its brand portfolio on his website, JasonFalls.com. He delivers comparable insights, advice, and ideas for agency and brand marketers navigating the ever-changing seas of the social and digital World.
Conclusion
We hope you find this list of Social Media Marketers beneficial in your quest to become a better marketer. Which marketing influencers on social media do you follow? And did we leave somebody out that you absolutely adore? Please leave a comment below; we’d love to hear from you, and we’ll keep this list updated in the future.
Learn what a social media marketing funnel is and how to use social insights to set it up.
When it comes to social media marketing, most of the tips you see online are around understanding your audience, creating content for them, staying consistent with the channels, optimizing your hashtags and so on. But what about the one crucial piece that can make or break your success – leading your target audience from social media to your website, where you can actually drive conversions.
This is where the complex topic of creating a social media marketing funnel comes into play. In this article, we’re going to talk about what a social media marketing funnel is, the five stages of the marketing funnel, how to create content for each stage and how to set one up for your business.
What is a social media marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is typically defined as the path or the journey a consumer travels through – from the initial stages of discovering your brand, learning about your business to making a purchase and the lifecycle after.
Using the same definition as base, a social media marketing funnel is one that defines the path of a consumer from the moment they discover your business on a platform, how they continue to engage with your content to when and how it leads them to make a purchase from you. In this funnel, all the touchpoints are on the various social media platforms that your business is actively reaching out to the target audience on.
What are the different stages of a social media marketing funnel and how does social listening fuel each?
If you ask social media experts across different industries, they may have different opinions about how a marketing funnel works on social media. But having worked with leading brands across the world, creating social media campaigns – paid and organic, we have found that the base of a good social media marketing funnel consists of 5 key phases or stages:
1. Awareness
Consumer surveys and studies have found that 1 in 3 consumers discover new brands, products and services on social media.
Awareness is the stage wherein they do not know who you are, what you sell or what value you have to offer. This is the initial touchpoint wherein hard sales pitches don’t work; this where making a good introduction becomes important.
At this stage your social media efforts should be focused on introducing your business through the challenges, goals and objectives your consumers want to achieve and can accomplish via your products/ services – all without pushing them for sales.
Use social listening to identify what your target audience is talking about in the industry, their opinion on your competitors and how they feel about what they have at hand. Use that as your guiding light to create content that entices them into your funnel. At this point, tapping into trends can also help reach your target audience.
For example, here’s how Indewild creates content for those who are entirely new to skincare routines, before even introducing their products to them:
2. Consideration
Once you have worked on your brand awareness on social channels, the next step is to move your acquired audience further down into the funnel. This is where you need to align your social media marketing strategy to take into account the ‘consideration stage’ of the funnel.
At this stage, your audience is looking for more specific information around your brand, its products and services. This includes them looking into the reasons and reviews on why you are better than the competitors.
This is where you should make use of social listening to identify market gaps and run a thorough competitor analysis. Leveraging the information you gather, present content that is not just educational in nature on social media, but also one that positions you in a better light. Now this can include strategy breakdowns, success stories, case studies, testimonials (text and videos), interviews, product tutorials and similar content.
Here’s how Sephora creates guides on Instagram to fuel their consideration stage in the social media marketing funnel:
3. Action
Once you have nailed the consideration stage, the audience you have gathered on social media will become receptive to campaigns that are targeted at direct selling. During the consideration stage, we recommend making use of social analytics to track the data on your organic and paid campaigns to see how your nurtured audience is responding to them.
A social media analytics tool like Radarr can also help you identify the elements of a campaign that drive engagement or conversions. This also helps you visualize and see if you’re reaching your business goals and objectives from the earlier stages of the social media marketing funnel.
At this stage, we also recommend setting up retargeting ad campaigns to keep engaged audiences enticed with what you have to offer. This way you can optimize your ad campaigns for better ROAS as well to streamline your advertising spends.
Here’s an example of how Victoria’s Secret targets their audience on social media at the action stage – they leverage demographic based offers to run targeted campaigns.
4. Engagement
Oftentimes, businesses tend to focus on the marketing funnel up until conversion (action). But with social media, you have the chance to tap into the opportunities that the post-purchase journey of a consumer has to offer.
Owing to the increase in the number of options available to consumers, it is important to keep them engaged even after they make a purchase from you. It is crucial that you use social media to also continue to nurture the relationship you have with them, and stay on top of their minds amidst all the competition.
You can do this by creating a brand community on social media with a simple hashtag. Encourage your followers and customers to share their purchases and experiences on social media using the hashtag, and use social monitoring to keep a close watch on what is being shared on these channels.
Hashtag campaigns are a great way to initiate a chain of consumer content, and at the same time, make them all feel like a part of a community. But the one big part to making this community a success is actually engaging with what the community shares. From a simple thank you to giving consumers shoutouts, keep the community going with a little motivation by improving your social media response rate.
Here’s an example of how GymShark has created a community on social media that not just gives them authentic content, but also helps its consumers find their motivation amongst one another.
5. Advocacy
This is the social media marketing funnel stage where you have made the sale, ensured a great experience and continue to keep the customer engaged. Now it is time for you to nudge them to participate in word of mouth promotions for your business, referring your brand in their network.
While positive customer reviews and testimonials on social media definitely act as content that advocates your brand, you should also tap into the power of influencer marketing.
With the help of social media analytics and social listening, identify user profiles that have a strong influence in your industry and have made an interaction with your business as well. Reach out to these consumers/ influencers, engage them in campaigns that are focused on using their voice to promote your brand amongst their friends, family and followers.
Here’s an example of how Fenty Beauty collaborates with its existing customers to turn them into influencers for the brand.
Do you really need a social media marketing funnel?
Think about the number of social media platforms and channels a business needs to be on as of today.
With the digital landscape growing by the day it’s obvious that new channels will soon get introduced into the ecosystem. As a business, you may have to continually expand your strategy to cover new platforms and not having a social media marketing funnel in place is as good as not having a plan on how to use them to fuel business growth.
A social media marketing funnel is what adds a customer journey on top of your strategy to help attribute business goals achieved to every effort made on social media.
Not sure where to begin?
We say, it’s time to first identify which social media platforms your audience is engaging with actively and then analyze your campaign success to understand their intent, interest and preferences – you can do this with the help of a comprehensive social media audit.
This is where Radarr’s social listening, monitoring and analytics tool can help.
Learn more about social commerce and how it can fuel business growth.
It is becoming increasingly important for all types of businesses to be on social media.
Interestingly, until now, companies were using it as a channel to boost brand awareness or run marketing and advertising campaigns.
However, with the advancements in technology, it is now possible to create an end-to-end buying journey on these platforms. Brands can now reduce the sales cycle or the number of steps it takes for their audience to engage with them via social commerce.
In this article, we discuss the future of shopping, the benefits of social commerce, and tips to make social commerce work for your brand.
Social commerce, also known as social shopping, is the intersection of e-commerce and social media. It is a way for businesses to engage with customers in an increasingly seamless and integrated way, using the latest in technology to create an end-to-end buying journey for their audience.
Social commerce can greatly benefit your business by allowing you to:
Reduce the sales cycle for your audience. Instead of them needing to go through multiple steps in order to engage with your brand — like visiting your website or downloading an app — they can simply access it via social media.
Create a seamless shopping experience for your audience across all online channels.
In addition, this new way of selling enables businesses to engage with consumers in a way that previously was not possible as it allows them to send direct messages or reply via comments in real-time, which gives them an opportunity to show off their values of customer experience.
The rise of social commerce
Increasingly, consumers are expecting a more seamless shopping experience and they are starting to get it from retailers that have been aggressively building their social commerce capabilities.
Let us look at some stats that highlight why social selling seems like a promising retail avenue for brands of varying sizes-
According to Accenture’s report, social commerce sales were worth $492 billion in 2021.
The same report estimates the value to reach $1.2 trillion by 2025.
The highest sales opportunities come from apparel, accessories, electronics for consumers and home decor.
59% of the audience even stated that they would purchase from small businesses on social media versus through online shopping.
The top social selling platform in the U.S. is Facebook with 56.1 million buyers.
Benefits of social commerce for businesses
If you are still on the fence about setting up your store on social media, here are a few reasons to sway your mind:
1. To make shopping a social experience
By creating a channel for your audience to shop via social media, you make the experience social and interactive. They can directly share your post with their close friends to ask for their opinions instead of switching between platforms. They can also get immediate reviews from the comments section before making a purchase.
Consumers can also get the latest product updates from brands they love and share their product experience via stories, pictures or videos and tag the brand.
2. To shorten the customer journey
The problem with the customer’s buying journey is not in the first and last steps; it is what happens in between that matters. In between is where your customer’s eyes could go to your competitors.
Look at it this way, why should they buy from you instead of your competitor? So, it is important to cut down your customer’s journey time by keeping them on your page for longer and making purchasing easy. Improve your chances by offering an incentive for checking out fast, such as free shipping or a coupon code.
When customers can easily click through to your social media shop, they are more likely to make a purchase on impulse.
3. To increase your revenue
Having a social storefront is also a great way to increase your web presence, which is vital for growing an online business. It also drastically speeds up the transaction process for a purchase.
In fact, 70% of shoppers turn to Instagram to find new products. With such a staggering percentage of people open to shopping directly through social media platforms, it is only natural for growing businesses to set up a social shopping channel for existing and new audiences.
And apart from your existing channels, if you can find success (in terms of sales) on another platform, why wouldn’t you want to explore it further?
4. To gather data
Since most of your target audience could be spending hours on social media each day, you get a focus group to collect insightful data.
With most of your product catalog displayed on your social pages, followers and profile visitors can give their validation and feedback in the comment section and through likes and shares.
You can also make use of features such as question and answers and audience polls to know where your audience stands. This could be especially useful for small businesses that do not have dedicated resources to assess such information.
5. To target large demographics
Social media is still the best strategy for engaging with existing customers and potential customers, and setting up a social media storefront is a great way to reach untapped audiences that fit your buyer persona and drive more traffic to your online store.
With millions lurking on these platforms daily, it gives brands a great opportunity to collect frequent feedback from people. How? Right from photos, reels and carousels that garner likes, shares and comments to polls on stories, brands can gather plenty of insightful data to get the ball rolling.
If your target audience is millennials and gen-z, then you would be happy to know that 54% of gen-z and 58% of millennials prefer discovering new products on social media over online searches, according to Statista.
6. To sell to a highly personalized audience
Because of the in-built performance insights you get on these platforms, you can run ads and target an audience that is highly personalized. For instance, Instagram lets you run ads on posts, carousels, stories, reels and the marketplace. They also let you target your ads based on age range, gender, location and more.
Tips to make social commerce work for you
Once you have your business set up for social commerce, here are some of the tips you can follow to make it work in your favor:
1. Optimize your sales and customer service
If there’s one thing that holds the most value in making social commerce work is optimizing how you respond to customer service and support requests. But as per statistics, a typical netizen will make use of at least 2-3 channels on average to reach out to a brand for assistance.
The only way to stay on top of all conversations is to be able to monitor all the ongoing conversations proactively. This is where social listening and monitoring tools like Radarr come into play, helping you keep track of conversations on one dashboard to improve response rates.
Additionally, leveraging technologies like chatbots can also help streamline the number of conversations you need to respond to. You can automate responses to specific queries to only handle complex issues manually.
Whether you’ve been running an online storefront for years or you’re just getting started, customer satisfaction is key.
One of the best ways to ensure that your customers find a great experience when they view your products is to respond to all of their questions, comments, and concerns. It’s not always easy to engage with customers because you required dedicated resources earlier, but with tools like Radarr, you can streamline the entire process.
When you engage with your followers frequently, you’ll find that you can build a loyal fan base. The more you engage with your customers, the more they’re likely to purchase from you in the future.
Social listening for eCommerce tools is an excellent way to increase your brand’s exposure and maximize your social media presence. They are used to monitor feedback on all social platforms. In-depth evaluation of user data from social platforms is how companies stay ahead of their competition.
By monitoring what people are saying about your brand and your competitors, you can keep track of feedback and take criticism in stride, instead of letting it hinder your marketing strategies.
Manually tracking conversations can be difficult and time-consuming, but tools such as Radarr are available to make the process more manageable. By using tools to monitor social media, you’ll be able to offer your customers a better product and presence in the marketplace.
4. Push for reviews
If you are a new brand, positive reviews can be the difference between struggling to sell and boosting your revenue.
Most online shoppers consider reviews before making a purchase. So, every time you make a sale on social media, encourage your users to share their reviews via direct messages, comments and on stories. This step can even be automated through emails, chatbots and proactive social listening to identify your happy customers.
Use the social proof you receive and share it in a dedicated story highlights section or as a carousel for profile visitors to see.
With the data you receive from the platform and from additional smart tools you use, segment your audience and target specific audiences to visit your social media storefront. This includes netizens who feel happy, unhappy or neutral about your brand and what it has to offer.
Additionally, we do recommend segmenting your audience based on their interactions and purchases from your business. The idea is to identify common patterns and categorize similar consumers together to form segments that reflect similar choices and purchase preferences.
6. Use social analytics to price your products
Social analytics for e-commerce brands is a way to get information about individual products. This information encompasses anything from how many people like the product to how many people are talking about it. Once you have a considerable amount of data concerning your product, you can adjust your pricing and your discount schemes based on how your product’s performance.
Also, with this information at your disposal, you can better understand which products you should create ads around to boost sales. Remember — the best businesses use social analytics to get the most information possible from their marketing efforts.
This is where social media analytics tools like Radarr come in handy. They help you process multiple data points to understand your audience, their response to your current pricing, their purchase motivations, trends and interests, and optimize it for more favorable outcomes.
7. Make use of image analytics to sell better
Shoppers don’t want to miss out on any key detail, so if a product does not have a picture or if it is not the best quality or even evokes the right emotion, they may be more likely to leave and go to a competitor’s store.
Using the right images with your products is vital to selling them. Image analytics allows you to know which product images attract the most attention. You can then use these analytics to your advantage to grab the attention of potential customers. For example, you can improve the quality of your product images by running them through a filter or classifying them based on content. You can also make sure your brand messaging is clear and on-point.
8. Use sentiment analysis to understand consumer emotions
Sentiment analysis and social media go hand in hand. With the boom of social media and the rise of social shopping, there is always a platform to learn more about your consumers. However, there are few ways to truly understand how people feel about the product you promote.
What if there was a way for your company to have an unrestricted idea of what people are saying about their product on social media? Well, by using the sentiment analysis tool by Radarr, you can see how people feel about the product you are promoting. Not only will it help you learn more about your consumers, but it will also help you adjust the growth of your social media store according to their needs.
With Radarr, your business can gain insight into how consumers feel about buying the products you are promoting on social media.
Social commerce examples from global brands
While there are a number of brands using social commerce to fuel their business growth, here are some we have seen succeeding with the integration.
1. Jordan
Nike ran an exclusive launch sale on their Jordans on social media, giving their audience an ability to learn more about the collection and also pre-book the product. They integrated the use of social media and ecommerce to simplify how consumers moved from the platform to making a purchase – all without leaving the channel.
As we mentioned before, positive customer reviews play a huge role in succeeding at social commerce. Dollar Shave Club does this well by dedicating a Pinterest board to feedback they receive from buyers. They have set up a smart ecommerce integration to lead Pinterest users to make purchases of products with more positive reviews.
Does your brand care about social commerce?
Social media is a great way for your brand to generate revenue and interact with customers. With social commerce, brands can even create a community and get consumer support.
With a majority of millennials and gen-z frequenting sites like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat, your business can enjoy a wide audience.
But how do you get even ahead of your competition? Use a social media intelligence tool like Radarr to gain in-depth brand insights!
