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The key to higher visibility and more online sales via social media is finding the best Instagram hashtags for YOUR skin care business.
Your business mission is unique.
Your product line is unique.
Your audience is unique.
That means you can’t expect great results by copying and pasting someone else’s Instagram hashtag list or completely deferring to the ‘Top 50 Most Popular Hashtags of All Time’.
This post will walk you through the ins and outs of finding hashtags for Instagram posts that are tailor-fit to YOUR specific business and will get you seen by YOUR ideal target market.
Before we can begin to compile possible Instagram hashtags for you, we have to be crystal clear on the actual PURPOSE of your account.
Sounds obvious, I’m sure.
Most business owners want the same things: more followers, more sales, and more engagement overall.
But those ‘things’ come the easiest by having a foundation that guides the content you share and the hashtags you use.
If you don’t have one on the top of your head, spend time writing an overall mission statement for your skin care business to clarify your focus going forward.
Similarly, If you haven’t developed a customer avatar, do not pass go.
Take the time to decide on your ideal target market.
You need to know exactly who you’re selling to, what their needs are, and why they’re following and potentially buying from you in the first place.
A retired engineer and a vintage-grunge college student have very different sets of accounts that they follow: different information, different hashtags, different imagery, etc.
Your target market should 100% guide the overall goal of your Instagram account (as well as every other business decision).
So how does a target market help to set an account goal?
Consider that it takes the average individual seven times to see a product before they decide to purchase it.
This means that posting a photo of your soap, adding a caption that says ‘Buy This Yummy-Smelling Bar’, and then expecting the sales to roll in from new followers is not realistic (…don’t blame the messenger).
And that means we need to be writing content for our current followers (our ideal TARGET MARKET) to stay top-of-mind for when it IS time for them to make a purchase.
They don’t want to be seeing sales pitches all the time (and will unfollow quickly if they do)…they want actual VALUE from you on the regular.
If you need help coming up with content that provides value and variety, check out our social media calendar written specifically for skin care businesses.
I have seen very effective use of the following ‘account goals’:
No matter your plan of attack, by clarifying the overall goal of your account that supports your current followers, content will be easier to come up with, posts will be so much easier to write, and you’ll simultaneously be creating a brand experience for your cherry-picked audience.
If you’re wondering the exact number of hashtags you need, my answer is ‘MORE’.
The entire exercise that we will be going through below isn’t meant to give you hashtag ideas for ONE post.
It’s meant to give you slammin’ researched hashtags for an entire QUARTER (or even a YEAR) – put in the work now for a much smaller workload later.
Considering that:
…that puts us at needing HUNDREDS of usable hashtags for our accounts to use over a long span of time.
If you’ve found your way to this article, I’m sure you’ve also come across the various ‘popular skin care hashtag lists’ or ‘top hashtag lists for beauty accounts’.
I’m also sure you’re wondering why we can’t just look up one of those lists, pick out the best hashtags for your skin care business, and then quickly add them to our posts because ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
Here’s the problem with that:
The words ‘popular’ and ‘top’ also mean HEAVILY USED.
Let’s look at an example.
This website shows a list of hashtags they recommend using to ‘get popular and boost your view’.
Let’s type #exfoliate (the first hashtag they recommend) into Instagram and see what comes up:
It’s not a lie. The exfoliate hashtag is indeed popular!
So popular, in fact, that over ONE MILLION posts have used it (this is the number under the hashtag in the image above).
If you add that hashtag to one of your posts right now, the likelihood of many (many) other accounts using it at the same time is very (very) likely.
This means that your post is getting pushed down further and further as the seconds tick away.
It would be the same as never adding that hashtag at all, which is a wasted opportunity.
Do you see why ‘popular’ doesn’t necessarily equal ‘view boosting’?
As we go through the methods below to find the best Instagram hashtags for YOUR skin care business, we are looking for words that have between 5,000 and 500,000 posts.
The lower limit of 5,000 lets us know that a word is popular enough that people are actually searching for it. Any less than that and you won’t have much (if any) traffic at all.
The upper limit of 500,000 means that the hashtag IS very popular, but you may have a fighting chance of floating on top of the recent posts for a bit.
Any hashtag that we see in our research below that is outside of the ‘Sweet Spot’ (5k – 500k posts) is going to be INVISIBLE to us, deal?
With our target market, account goals, and brand experience in mind, we’re going to start brainstorming some categories and words (no hashtags yet!) that our customer avatar would be interested in and searching for on Instagram.
On a piece of paper, create a table for your ideas – room to list several categories across the top and plenty of space for words/phrases underneath each one.
In the examples below, I will use the ‘New Crunchy Mommy’ as the target market for my all-natural skin care business.
Write down all of the products that are in your skin care line:
Write down the ingredients you use to create your skin care products:
Many individuals who support small handmade businesses also like to shop local when they can. Adding a few mentions of your city and state is incredibly beneficial.
Don’t forget to include any common spellings or location ‘nicknames’:
Write down all of the identifiers of your customer avatar: demographics, psychographics, interests, voice, etc. Include trending words in your niche.
The categories above are to give us some hashtag research ideas to start with – come up with as many topics and words as you can!
Next, we’re going to use your category words in five easy methods of finding the best Instagram hashtags for YOUR skin care business.
We’ll be coming up with a LOT, so make sure you have plenty of paper to continue adding to the same chart you did before (or create a quick Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet).
For every hashtag you write down, also record the number of posts it has been used in (this is the number that comes up when you type the hashtag in the search bar on Instagram).
Remember, we are only keeping hashtags that have between 5,000 and 500,000 posts.
If you want to skip all of the hopping around to different accounts, you can also start with our list that is full of skincare business-related hashtags that are already in the Sweet Spot of 5k-500k.
Of course, you’ll still need to sift through to see which hashtags are relevant to YOUR target market, but it’s a fabulous starting point to save you tons of time!
This exercise should have landed you hundreds of Instagram hashtags that are perfect for your unique skin care business and target audience.
There is literally no end to the amount of research you can do, so it’s up to you to say ‘WHEN’.
I personally do new hashtag research a couple of times a year – if you feel your engagement and growth start to plateau, do a little hashtag refresh.
And remember to keep those charts and spreadsheets readily available – you never know when inspiration will strike!
Christine is a certified aromatherapist, essential oil specialist, and organic skin care formulator. She loves empowering others with tools to make healthy changes and understand where natural options can be woven into the fabric of everyday routines.
