In an age where peer-to-peer recommendations through social media are more important for consumers than expert reviews and tests, #hashtags have become a powerful marketing tool for the likes of concert venues, museums, zoos, amusement parks and more.
Let’s take a closer look at Kolmården in Sweden and how they harness the power of hashtags in their consumer social media marketing with the help of green children’s carts, among other things.
Kolmården is a wildlife sanctuary, zoo and amusement park with about 700,000 visitors annually. They offer something for all age ranges and all demographics, which in turn means that their consumer marketing is very broad. They want to attract everyone, plain and simple.
The marketing people at Kolmården have done a great job engaging their visitors and even before entering the park, you’ll see posters and signs saying:
Share your best photos
#kolmården
Visitors can also grab a green children’s cart and roll their bags, coolers or children around the scenic hilly mountain park while they look at and photograph animals, scenery and their kids having a fantastic time on a roller coaster ride, watching a show or maybe enjoying a huge ice cream. These carts are also fitted with stickers saying:
Tag your photos with #kolmården
as a constant rolling reminder to all those snap happy park visitors. The cool thing about these carts from a marketing perspective is that there are hundreds of them being pulled all around the park at any given time, parents take pictures of their kids sitting in the carts, and as soon as they look at the side of their cart, they are reminded that they should add the hashtag to the photo they are just about to upload to Instagram. And it works. Like a Swiss watch.
The #kolmården hashtag is currently sitting at 93,330 mentions on Facebook and 62,654 tagged photos on Instagram (and another few thousand mentions under #kolmarden – which may be from international visitors without funky Swedish characters on their smartphones.) Just imagine the promotional power these mentions, images or video clips have and the engagement this content will get from family and friends.
But, that’s not all. The crafty marketing team at Kolmården also came up with a wordplay hashtag for their family seal show: #sälfie. ‘Säl’ is the Swedish word for seal and Kolmården decided to set up a pirate flag selfie photo wall right by the entrance to the show amphitheater. Needless to say; it’s a big hit with the kids who’ll gladly pose and make pirate faces, which in turn is a big hit with their social media crazed parents. Simple and brilliant.
All in all:
Smart, fun, inexpensive, and something all parks and venues could do to boost their consumer marketing and attract new visitors through the social media generation’s word of mouth.
Well played, Kolmården. Well played.