Hashtags have been a business go-to for as long as social media marketing has existed, and brands wouldn’t think twice about making use of this vital technique to increase online sales. After all, in a lot of ways, hashtags are the new word of mouth, and they ensure not only that people are talking about you, but that social media algorithms favour your content enough to help your business grow.
However, when it comes to physical marketing, hashtags tend to play a far less prominent role. In some ways, this is understandable – it can seem from the outset that hashtags don’t have much value in out-of-home (OOH) marketing like billboards and fliers. In reality, though, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
These days, hashtags can provide significant value across the entirety of a company’s marketing campaigns. When used well, hashtags can even help to draw offline consumers towards online profiles and products. If you’ve failed to enjoy this benefit when using physical hashtags so far, then it might be worth considering whether you’re making any of the following fatal mistakes.
Mistake 1: Failing to Highlight Physical Hashtags
You should feature hashtags somewhere on the vast majority of physical marketing materials that you commission from an in-person printer or an online print shop, but that alone isn’t always enough to engage. You also need to make sure that they’re fully visible. After all, unlike on social media, hashtags still aren’t an absolute with physical marketing, and small print alone can lead to them being overlooked. Instead, you need to actively highlight your physical hashtags using bold font, bright colours, and generally prominent positioning.
Mistake 2: Failing To Factor an Incentive
Ultimately, consumers who share your hashtags are promoting your brand for nothing. This is true on all platforms, but is especially worth bearing in mind with physical materials that require consumers to go out of their way to share. Without some kind of incentive, it’s unlikely anyone will bother. As such, it’s worth providing incentives like entry into a prize draw, the chance to engage with some form of gamification marketing on your website, and so on. That way, you make it worthwhile for everyone to get stuck into that hashtag campaign.
Mistake 3: Failing to Align Campaign Messaging
Hashtags are a great resource, but they won’t help much if they don’t relate to your campaign messaging. This is true even if some people share that hashtag, as there will ultimately be little connecting it with your brand. Instead, always connect hashtags to your wider campaigns, even when those hashtags appear separately from, say, whatever your brand is up to online. To achieve this, think about things like keywords in your larger marketing repertoire, the specific products your hashtag aims to promote, and even simple things like your wider brand messaging, font choices, and so on.
Hashtags can help the success of your physical marketing materials no end, especially if you help them along the way by avoiding these issues!
