Ever since its initial release in September of 2016, TikTok has been considered one of the fastest-growing social media platforms. It did not take too long before it was considered as one of the most disruptive technologies to ever hit marketing.
As of January 2021, the platform has already garnered 689 million monthly active users worldwide. This is why it is no longer surprising why marketing on Tiktok is a must for businesses.
But what is it really about TikTok that makes it a big hit for marketing campaigns?
The typical social media allows users to express their respective emotions, and showcase what they have or who they are through posts and status updates in different formats such as images, videos, or texts.
Now, Tiktok has changed the typical game.
Because of Tiktok, there is now a new platform that provides a highly engaging way for users to express themselves, their interests, their opinions, and even their personalities. Aside from just plainly listening to music, or watching a plain image or video, Tiktok made an initiative to have a harmonious interplay between the three. People get to listen to songs they haven’t listened to before and watch people they haven’t known until then.
The inner potentials of people in editing videos and posting creative short movies are unleashed. Even with teenagers, they get the potential to publish an authentic output—special thanks to TikTok.
With these opportunities present at hand, marketers get to use TikTok as an effective marketing tool. Presenting product or service offerings has never been this entertaining.
In this article, let’s examine the basics of using TikTok and the different ways in utilizing marketing strategies on TikTok.
How Does Tiktok Work?
TikTok works like how typical social media platforms work; however, one thing that’s different with TikTok is that it has unique features that stand as an edge among other social media platforms.
First, TikTok has a tool where you can make and compose short videos of your own. They may look like Instagram or Snapchat’s stories, but the intricacies of the basic and advanced features of TikTok videos make it different.
Some of the basic features of TikTok are:
- Video Uploading and Editing
- Filters and Effects
- Social Sharing, Likes and Comments
- Notifications
The advanced features of TikTok are:
- Duets
- Reactions
- Hashtags
- Live Video Streaming
- QR Code Scanner
- Geolocation
- Real-Time Analytics
On TikTok, you navigate the videos by scrolling it up and down. Other social media platforms are navigating videos by swiping it from side to side which may seem like a simple feature until you realize that this is actually a better way to navigate videos.
The algorithm of TikTok works great. Your business can maximize the use of TikTok if you know how its algorithm works. Basically, one’s TikTok feed gets influenced by the user’s hashtags, location, choice of music, and liked videos. When creating TikTok content, bank on these kinds of information to ensure better engagement.
For those first timers in TikTok, they get tol select the things they are interested in. It can be education, business, finance, or other aspects. In addition, as a marketer, you can also get the statistics where you get to determine the data of how many users are interested on a certain line; thus, this will give you an idea on the best marketing strategy you can deploy in TikTok.
TikTok also works like a fancy lip sync or short video introduction of a certain concept. Consequently, marketing on TikTok can be done because you easily get to make short videos that have strong positioning strategies. As a marketer, your challenge here is on how you get to make videos with strong positioning strategies.
Why Explore Tiktok Marketing?
TikTok Marketing offers a huge opportunity for marketers to reach millions and millions of daily active users. Through marketing on TikTok, you get to broaden your reach. In this way, you get to increase your potential customers or clients.
Marketing on TikTok has become prevalent nowadays. Aside from the affordable options, you get to immediately catch on to what is trending and trend along with them. With these trendy clips being used as a focal point in marketing, you can showcase your products and services differently.
Marketing on TikTok typically targets the young people, because of its existing navigation features and other tools present in the platform. Other people may cite that there is a negative side, but do you know that there is a positive side to this? Young people are typically known as the energetic ones, and they get to easily disseminate your brand to other people; thus, making use of marketing on TikTok will ensure that you will have a wider reach in different groups of people and will further increase the brand awareness towards other people.
To further explore the basics of marketing on TikTok, you can make use of the best practices and examples listed below.
TikTok Marketing Best Practices
The average time people spend on TikTok on a daily basis is 52 minutes. Just imagine millions of people who have a minute of these 52 minutes to spot your marketing campaign.
TikTok allows the use of innovative strategies in creating marketing videos that are enticing and at the same time, appealing to people. With the wide variety of tools that are available in the social media platform, you get to have tons of ways to make videos that will effectively catch the attention of people in order for them to be aware of the different listings that your brand offers accordance to their needs.
Aside from the text and filter tools, you can also make use of the different sounds and effects that will immediately catch the attention of the larger audience.
Marketing on TikTok becomes more interactive because of its “augmented reality” technology available on the platform making virtual backgrounds possible. In addition, you also get the chance to change your appearance without exerting enormous efforts to build a green screen on your background or purchase expensive equipment to make sure that you achieve the look and feel of most advanced videos.
In this section, you will get to know some of the specific examples that you can use to effectively market your brand to a larger audience.
Leverage TikTok Ads
To do effective marketing on TikTok, leveraging TikTok ads is one way that you can do to boost your visibility in the said social media platform. One unique feature of emphasizing TikTok ads is that you will be able to reach your goal in interacting with your target audience within the day. In-feed ads, trendy or branded hashtags, top view or easily searched ads, branded effects, and brand takeover, are some of the famous types of TikTok ads that you can deploy.
TikTok ads are affordable because of the length of time given to display the videos that you get to show to other people. Even with this restriction, the impact of a creatively crafted video can be very massive.
Should you want to leverage TikTok ads, the first thing that you should do is to create a TikTok ad account. Once your account is validated by their Support team, TikTok offers the best recommendations that you can do to make sure that people get to know what your company offers.
Typically, they get to offer you to run your ads for about nine to fifteen seconds. After such, you get to select an appropriate advertising objective and create a custom audience. In this way, your ad will run according to the interests that people ought to search. If people keep on searching for education and your respective company is about education, you get the chance to run your ad to people who keep on searching the word “education.”
Use the Right Hashtags for TikTok SEO
Always remember that easy searchability of your company is equated to finding the right hashtag for TikTok SEO. Whenever you post your marketing video in TikTok, make sure that you use this tool to optimize your content.
If you intend to have any confusion with using this tool, you can easily use the search section on TikTok. The platform will suggest hashtags that you can use to be given the chance for a better visibility of your content.
If you want to have a wider reach of the audience in the market, you can also use generic hashtags like “#smallbusinessowner”, “supportlocal”, and other hashtags that are commonly used.
Choose your hashtags wisely. You can enter up to 33 hashtags in a single caption. Every hashtag should also have at least 3 characters.
Partner With Other TikTok Influencers
Most marketers in TikTok find it challenging to build their strong empire unless they occasionally tap the help of other TikTok influencers.
For example, if you are a company that sells vitamins and food supplements, you can actually create videos with celebrities who will participate in your respective diet or workout challenge paired with your food supplement and vitamins, and then monitor the changes that are happening.
Through these partnerships with TikTok as one of your main marketing tools, you get to extend your reach and access more followers who can be your leads.
