TikTok marketing

TikTok marketing is a strategy that involves creating short-term video content for TikTok to promote and sell products. The approach helps increase brand visibility, reach a target audience, establish communities, expand reach, and grow a business.

In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of TikTok for business and review its difference from other social media. We’ll also show you how to grow your business with this social media network and provide some effective tips.

Why is TikTok important for business growth?

According to statistics, with its one billion monthly active users,TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms nowadays. Since the network has many users from different geographics, age groups, and backgrounds, it helps businesses expand. Let’s find out how the platform empowers them to do it.

The following reasons make companies want to implement TikTok marketing.

• Expansive user base. TikTok’s audience is vast and diverse. You can find people from different age groups, locations, and backgrounds. With TikTok, your business can reach potential customers worldwide.
• Engaged audience. With the platform’s algorithms, you can quickly communicate your message to the audience and reach a vast number of people. Your task here is to create highly engaging content. This way, your product and content can become viral without any investments.
• User-generated content. On TikTok, users often create videos related to product and brand recommendations. It’s time to encourage your audience to make such reels. You can run a contest, challenge, or campaign to stimulate customers to promote your product to get valuable prizes.
• Brand awareness and recall. Interesting, useful, and engaging videos are easily promoted. When customers find something interesting for themselves in your videos, they’ll remember your brand. More and more people will find out about your company and recall it in the future.
• Cost-effective advertising. TikTok promotes good videos based on algorithms for free. So if you succeed in creating something viral, your target audience will see it. There’s no need to pay for this type of promotion.
• E-commerce integration. The platform is becoming more and more suitable for businesses. Now it provides e-commerce integration. You can add "Shop Now" buttons to encourage in-app shopping experiences. It makes buying and selling easier for customers and business owners. Buyers can complete the purchase without leaving the platform.
• Promotion across multiple platforms. TikTok video format is easily shareable with other social media networks. So, if you want your customers to see your content across various channels, you can do it in no time. As a result, more people see your video and find out about your brand.
• Many advertising options. In-feed ads, branded hashtags, and challenges are the advertising formats you can use to attract new customers. The platform allows you to promote your product through the network and reach your target audience. It results in higher brand awareness, better site traffic, and more purchases.

Now that you know the reasons to consider TikTok marketing for your business, it’s time to compare TikTok with other social media networks.

How is TikTok different from other social media?

In this section, we’ll unveil some unique features TikTok offers its users. These differences help businesses promote products, establish trusting customer relationships, and encourage brand awareness. Let’s find out about it in more detail.

• Short-form video content. Since the platform is designed for short video content, its users can create videos from 15 seconds to three minutes in length. This video length is suitable for fast, engaging, and visually captivating content. Customers find out something interesting, useful, or important within seconds.
• Vertical video orientation. since TikTok is a video-focused platform, it has a vertical orientation. This format allows mobile users to enjoy the platform’s videos and hold their phones as they used to when watching video content.
• For You Page (FYP). The platform’s FYP is a page where users can find videos they might like based on TikTok’s algorithms. TikTok analyzes the history of videos watched, preferences, and interactions and offers similar content. It allows users to explore new videos and creators related to the topics discovered before.
• Vast music library. The platform offers a great library of music people can use for their videos. Audio-driven content works better for user engagement and activity. Besides, various challenges and trends helped different artists promote their tracks. Music added to stunning videos often becomes popular among TikTok’s international audience.
• Content discovery. With “Discover” and “Trending” sections, TikTok enables users to find popular videos people prefer to watch. Content discovery helps followers explore content beyond their circle of interest. This way, they can find something helpful and valuable for other areas of life.
• Innovative editing tools. TikTok perfectly suits amateurs and professional social media creators because of the tools it provides. The platform’s editing tools and filters help create videos and edit them without any special skills or knowledge.
• Challenges and trends. TikTok gained popularity thanks to its challenges and trends where users upload videos with their dance covers. When participating in such challenges, users feel like a part of a community and are eager to stay in it. Besides, trends encourage users to create user-generated content, which is especially useful for brands.
• In-app features. With in-app features, TikTok encourages engagement. In-app shopping, live streaming, and reaction creation invite users to complete purchases, participate in events online, and leave their reactions under specific content. These features let users complete specific actions within the platform. As a result, more active users are on TikTok.
• Live streaming. With TikTok live, users and creators can communicate in real time. This feature allows creators to connect with followers and communicate the necessary message to their audience. Real-time interaction encourages trust and awareness.
• Easy shareability. Videos created for TikTok can be easily shared on other platforms. So, if you want to increase your reach and establish visibility, you can add the videos to your Instagram or Facebook account.

Now that you know the features that make TikTok stand out among other platforms, we’ll proceed to the next section to unveil how to grow business with TikTok.

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How to grow your business with TikTok?

You can reach multiple business goals when using TikTok — one of them — business growth. We’ll provide you with a detailed guide on attaining this objective.

1. Set up a business account

If you already have a personal account, you’ll only need to switch to a business account. If you don’t have one, the first thing you should do on TikTok is to create a business account. Once you do it, you can access essential features such as analytics and TikTok ads. You get an account on TikTok and explore insights into your content performance and users’ activity for free.

2. Develop your content strategy

Think of your content strategy and the goals you want to achieve with it. Your strategy should align with your company’s mission, goals, and personality and resonate with your audience. Make sure you create valuable, interesting, and appropriate content for your audience segment. Since TikTok is a separate platform with its features and peculiarities, you need to develop a unique strategy different from your Instagram and Facebook.

Below, you can check out the elements your content strategy should cover.

Attention-grabbing thumbnails

A thumbnail is a small version of a video that helps viewers recognize specific video content. With its help, users can understand the content of the video before watching it.

Make sure that your thumbnail can grab users’ attention. Consider using special platforms like Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Pixlr, or Snapseed to customize it. Your thumbnail should be visually appealing. For this purpose, we recommend using high-quality images that align with your brand.

We recommend you use 1280 x 720 pixels or 1080 x 1080 pixels aspect ratio to prevent cropping in your TikTok videos. When all the necessary edits are done, save your thumbnail as JPEG or PNG.

Short and engaging videos

When creating videos for TikTok, keep in mind that the platform appreciates short, full-of-context videos. They need to be useful, engaging, and interactive. Your video should range between 15 seconds and three minutes. Since TikTok supports horizontal and vertical video, you can use any of them. However, 9:16 is the preferred aspect ratio for vertical video, while 16:9 is common for horizontal video.

Your video should be in MP4 or MOV format, clear, well-lit, and visually appealing. Users pay attention to the usefulness and quality of videos they watch.

Captions and text overlays

Captions and text overlays are important elements for followers because they help improve accessibility, engagement, and storytelling. To make text overlays work for your business, ensure they are short, concise, and easy to read. Captions allow you to emphasize key points of your video, highlight specific things, or write down some things to remember.

Since many people explore TikTok in public places, they often watch videos with sound switched off. When you add text overlays, you increase accessibility. People can still watch videos in a loud environment and understand your message without the sound.

Music and soundtracks

Adding music to your videos is essential for engagement since it makes your video dynamic, emotional, and enjoyable. Moreover, if you use trending songs, you increase the chances of being discovered by a vast audience. Music can set the mood for your content and establish emotional connections with users. This way, you can grab the attention of the right audience and deliver your brand message.

3. Consider trends and challenges

If you want to boost user engagement and your brand’s visibility, you should monitor TikTok's newest trends and challenges. When some of them align with your brand, consider participating in such campaigns.

4. Use TikTok advertising for promotion

TikTok has a wide choice of advertising tools for product promotion. The platform has the following features: in-feed ads, branded hashtag challenges, branded effects, topview ads, and others.

• In-feed ads are a type of video advertising around 60 seconds in length that users can see within the For You Page feed. This full-screen ad format has a call to action. After a user clicks the button, the ad redirects this potential customer to your brand’s site or app.
• With branded hashtag challenges, you encourage the creation of user-generated content related to your product or company. Consider creating a special hashtag for your challenge and inviting users to participate. Encourage your prospects with special offers and prizes for their video content. Your hashtag will appear on the Discover page, so it won’t be a big deal for users to find your challenge. The benefits of branded hashtag challenges include brand awareness, popularity, expanded reach, etc. If your challenge goes viral, you can bring your business to the next level.
• Branded effects empower you to design custom augmented reality effects, stickers, and filters for TikTok users. If your followers often use these stickers for their content, they promote your brand. The more people see your filters and stickers, the more TikTok users become aware of your product.
• Topview ads are short videos users see once they open TikTok. The visibility of such an ad format is high, making it a perfect tool for a concise message.

5. Encourage user-generated content

TikTok is a perfect platform for user-generated content. Since people have a high level of trust in customers, this content will be a powerful promotional tool for your products. We recommend you initiate some challenges and encourage existing clients to create videos related to your company. This way, you’ll establish word-of-mouth promotion through video content.

6. Measure TikTok marketing success

To determine whether your TikTok marketing strategy works, you need to monitor your key performance indicators. These metrics include engagement metrics, follower growth, conversion metrics, reach and impressions, hashtag performance, audience demographics, and video completion rate. Pay attention to likes, comments, shares, views of your videos, click-through rates, website traffic from TikTok, conversions, number of challenge participants, and user-generated content.

With a business account, you have full access to TikTok analytics, so make use of it. Dashboard for TikTok Pro accounts provides information about your account performance (follower demographics, views, and engagement).

Now that you know how to grow your business with TikTok, it’s time to explore the 10 most effective TikTok marketing tips and examples.

10 Most Effective TikTok Marketing Tips with Examples

TikTok, along with its features, is a powerful tool for business owners. However, to reach the necessary result, you need to be wise in using the platform to your advantage. In this section, we’ll uncover 10 outstanding TikTok marketing tips with examples.

Use trends and challenges

TikTok empowers you with useful tools like trends and challenges that help increase brand awareness, expand your customer base, and grow revenues. By running challenges, you can make your video go viral and establish great visibility.

Ocean Spray is a cranberry farmer corporation combining more than 700 small businesses. This corporation is an amazing example of a company successfully running its "Cranberry Dreams" challenge. After creating the viral video, the brand drastically increased searches and sales. All these businesses experienced a spike in sales and Google searches. They achieved brand awareness, visibility, and high revenues.

Below, you can see a screenshot of the challenge that went viral.

Encourage user-generated content

User-generated content is always a good idea for product promotion. Your existing customers are the best sources of information about your brand. They can showcase your products, share their thoughts, and talk about their experience. Videos with recommendations will encourage trust and increase sales.

Below, you can see tricks from Rhode’s customers.

Partner with TikTok influencers

Collaboration with opinion leaders allows your brand to expand your reach and deliver your message to the audience that aligns with your buyer persona. Influencers can showcase your products on TikTok and talk about its benefits.

Below is an example of such collaboration between Lays and TikTok influencers.

Respond to comments under your videos

Increasing engagement and activity under your videos is a must. TikTok algorithms pay attention to your videos’ likes, comments, and shares when promoting content. Moreover, when you respond to users’ comments, you establish the feeling of a community that shapes around your brand. We recommend you interact with your followers to boost engagement and build trust.

For example, Charli D'Amelio, a media personality from the US, often replies to her followers’ comments.

Use trending music

Consider adding trending music to your videos. It increases the chances of gaining popularity on TikTok. Popular music helps establish emotional connections with viewers and provides your videos with a specific mood. People usually stop scrolling videos when they hear songs that sound familiar. It will help grab users’ attention and encourage them to watch your videos.

Below, you can see how famous TikTok dancer Addison Rae uses trending music for her videos.

Publish how-tos and tutorials

TikTok format is perfect for how-tos and tutorials because people often use the platform to learn something new. By sharing step-by-step tutorials, you increase the chances of being noticed by a larger audience.

Below is an example of a short cooking video that teaches how to cook chicken Alfredo with broccoli.

Deliver content in an entertaining manner

If you want to instantly grab users’ attention, consider finding an entertaining and joyful way to communicate your message. Your videos should be fun and interesting.

For example, SmashingPencils provides videos on color mixing.

Share educational content and tips

Videos with value are always a great way of promoting your product. Informative and educational content helps you expand your reach and deliver your message to the right audience.

For instance, Clean That Up! provides users with cleaning tips and product reviews.

Create your branded hashtag

Custom hashtag means additional visibility for your company. Consider adding branded hashtags to your videos to make it easier for users to search for your videos and share them with others. Besides, more TikTok users can discover your content if you use a special hashtag. TikTok hashtags allow creators to reach audience segments that search for specific topics.

For instance, Colgate customers can find the company’s videos on TikTok using its hashtag #Colgatesmile.

Design a custom effect or filter

Branded effects and filters from TikTok allow you to establish visibility and present your company to new prospects. When using your effect, users can spread awareness about your brand and make it popular.

For instance, Rare Beauty created the Rare Beauty Bracket Filter to celebrate the third Birthday of the brand. The effect helps customers identify their favorite Rare Beauty products. The filter is both entertaining and educational.

Congrats, now you know what TikTok marketing is and why it’s essential for modern brands. Hope that our tips and examples will inspire you to develop an outstanding strategy for your company’s TikTok.