What is TikTok Marketing Strategy?
As we’ve discussed, TikTok is growing rapidly in the social space. Just like every other social channel, TikTok can be used as a marketing tool for influencers, creators and brands. In short, TikTok marketing is a perfect tool for promoting your brand. This can be done through paid, organic and influencer efforts, all with the goal to increase brand awareness on the platform.
Looking for a good starting point? Dash Hudson offers a TikTok Insights solution that houses a suite of features to make marketing on TikTok simple.
Who Uses TikTok?
TikTok is a unique social channel in that it is wildly used by a range of generations with over 1 billion monthly active users. While Gen Z is the most active on TikTok and makes up almost half of the user base, there are opportunities for brands to interact with all types of users on this app. In terms of gender statistics, over half of TikTok users are female at 57%.
You might also wanna read about
- Temu Marketing Strategy
- Tiktok marketing strategy for businesses
- Lazada marketing strategy
- Flipkart marketing strategy
5 Reasons You Should Be Applying TikTok Marketing Strategy for Business
Let’s first look at the 5 reasons that TikTok should be in every business’s marketing toolbox. We’ll cover ads, different types of content, and some of the idiosyncrasies that make the platform unique.
1. TikTok Influencers
Influencer marketing has been around for a while now. If you don’t already know what it is, here’s a quick primer: you get in touch with an Instagram influencer who has a sizeable following and pay them to post about your products.
This type of marketing is particularly effective because it comes across more like a recommendation from a friend than as an advertisement. It instills trust in the viewer and makes them more likely to buy.
TikTok influencer marketing takes this to a whole new level. While Instagram marketing is still effective, the platform has been inundated with brands trying to take advantage of the strategy. As a result, there’s a growing number of Instagrammers who just tune out sponsored posts in the same way they’d tune out any other advertisement.
TikTok, on the other hand, is a new platform that is far less salesy. Because it hasn’t been as widely adopted by businesses, it retains more of the personalized flair that Instagram had before it became so commonly used for marketing.
Plus, if your products appeal largely to a younger demographic (13 to 24), TikTok is a perfect fit. A whopping 69% of all users on TikTok are between 13 and 24, with 27% between 13 and 17 and 42% between 18 and 24. So, if you’re trying to reach this demographic, TikTok is a golden ticket.
Overall, the hardest part of getting into TikTok influencer marketing is simply finding the right influencers for your brand. As powerful as TikTok marketing is, you still need to make sure the person you pick is in the right niche — you probably wouldn’t want to use a male fitness influencer to market a new women’s fitness program, for example.
To find an influencer, you can either search around on the platform yourself or use a tool like Influence Grid. Influence Grid helps you sort through influencers by providing information on their stats, including their follower count, views per video, and likes per video. This can help you get a better idea of the types of results you can expect with specific influencers.
More details about 5 Reasons You Should Be Using TikTok Marketing for Business
TikTok Marketing Strategy – Advertising
If you’re looking for a place to start and have some money to invest, this is it—TikTok’s site is full of success stories from brands that started advertising on TikTok, including Aerie, Little Caesars and Maybelline. Similar to Facebook and Instagram, the cost of TikTok ads is based on a bidding model.
Tiktok Marketing Strategy – How to set up TikTok for Business
TikTok opened a TikTok for Business hub in summer 2020 and rolled out TikTok Pro a few months later.
Originally, there was a distinction between the two—one was for businesses, the other for growth-savvy creators—but since both hubs provided almost the same kind of insights, TikTok eventually combined them.
Now, TikTok for Business is the only way to go. With a business account, you can add more information to your profile and access real-time metrics and audience insights.
More details about Tiktok for Businesses here
Tiktok Marketing Strategy – Understand the algorithm
Mastering TikTok’s algorithm is no easy feat. But if you want to level up your TikTok marketing strategy, it’s important to know what the algorithm is, how it functions and how you can make it work in your favor.
There are a few major factors that influence TikTok’s algorithm:
- Video information (caption keywords, hashtags, sounds, effects, etc.)
- User activity (likes, comments, follows, etc.)
- Account settings (geolocation, language, etc.)
Out of all these factors, video information is the one you have the most control over. So use this to your advantage. Make sure to include relevant keywords in your captions and hashtags, and use trending sounds and special effects.
More details about this topic here
Perform a competitive audit
Are your competitors on TikTok? If they are, you could be missing out on the action. If they aren’t, TikTok may be a way to gain a competitive advantage.
Whether or not your competitors are on the platform, find at least three to five similar brands or organizations and see what they’re up to on the app. Try to learn from what’s worked and what hasn’t worked for them. If it’s helpful, use the S.W.O.T. framework to identify each competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Because TikTok is a creator-led platform, don’t rule out including TikTok stars and influencers in this exercise. Find personalities that specialize in your area of expertise, from cosmetics to medicine or education and literature.
Set goals that align with your business objectives
You can create TikToks just for fun, but it’s better to have goals in mind that can be tied to your overall business objectives.
Whether you plan to reach a new audience, improve brand image, promote awareness for a product, or develop stronger customer relationships through engagement, it’s important to back your efforts with a rationale. Consider using the S.M.A.R.T. goal framework, or another template, to set goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
Like most social platforms, TikTok provides analytics for Business accounts. To access your TikTok analytics:
- Go to your profile page and tap the three horizontal lines in the upper right.
- Tap Creator Tools, then Analytics.
- Explore the dashboard and find the metrics you can use to measure your goals.
More about Perform a competitive audit
6 Tiktok Marketing Strategy Takeaways
- Find your niche: Regardless of your brand’s industry, there is likely a community for it on TikTok. Find your niche by deep-diving into trending hashtags and exploring relevant brand and industry keywords.
- Show your brand’s human side: Humanize your brand by featuring real people and sharing user-generated content from fans. That includes your own employees! This can be as simple as giving office tours, providing product tips, talking about areas of expertise…or even featuring pets interrupting meetings.
- Use Tiktok’s unique features: Take advantage of TikTok’s native features. Music and sounds from the TikTok library increase the likelihood of your video being shown in a FYP. Additionally, keep inclusivity in mind. TikTok’s accessibility features and captioning options are easy to implement and incredibly accurate.
- Repurpose your video content to promote your channel: Don’t just wait for people to discover your TikTok channel, spread the news and cross-promote on your other social channels. TikTok videos are easy to export and can add new flair to your omnichannel content strategy.
- Partner with creators: Partnering with creators is a great way to expand your audience with an authentic touch. Just make sure you give them creative freedom to actually be creative! To learn more about the costs of partnering with creators and marketers’ best practices, check out our data on the creator economy.
- Learn what works best for you: Just because one video does well and brings in new followers, doesn’t mean your next video will strike a nerve—and that’s okay! Take note of the variables that differentiate high-performers and flops, and use your findings to inspire your next TikTok.
More details about these 6 Tiktok getaways
Use the Right Hashtags For TikTok SEO by Neil Patel
If you want people to find your content on TikTok, you need to put some thought into TikTok SEO.
TikTok SEO simply means you’re optimizing your content so it’s found by people when they’re using the search feature on the platform.
Perhaps the easiest way to go about this is by using relevant hashtags whenever you post a video.
If you don’t know what hashtags you should use, type in a relevant, broad keyword within the search section on TikTok. When you do this, TikTok will suggest a range of hashtags associated with what you typed.
If you want to reach a broad audience, you might use relatively generic hashtags. A generic example of the hashtag shown above might be “#socialmediamarketing” or “#smallbusinesstips.”
There isn’t a limit to the number of hashtags you can use for a video. However, your hashtags will appear in your video’s caption, and captions are limited to 100 characters.
Therefore, you might just want to focus on roughly two to three hashtags, as this will give you some space to write a description for your video.
More details about Use the Right Hashtags For TikTok SEO by Neil Patel
Tiktok Marketing Strategy – Use influencer marketing to your advantage
TikTok is huge and only getting bigger. Keeping up with the trends and understanding the ins and outs of TikTok marketing is no small feat. Businesses could benefit from reaching out to TikTok influencers for help in promoting their brand. Influencers already have a community of followers. They have often done an excellent job at creating a niche target audience. As with influencer marketing on any other platform, finding the right influencer for your brand is key.
If your brand aligns with an influencer’s audience, that influencer would be an excellent resource for promoting your product or service. With these established niches, you can easily find influencers in your space. There are endless unique communities and content niches within the platform.
People are becoming increasingly disillusioned by the performative nature of the internet, particularly on social media. The future of the creator industry holds space for creators who can build and maintain a genuine connection with their followers. One of the most effective forms of influencer marketing today would be collaborating with content creators on TikTok who have already established their audience.
Whether a celebrity sharing a recipe or a professional athlete sharing their dance moves, there is a place for most kinds of content on TikTok. This gives your brand the highest potential reach. The goal of TikTok is for people to share their raw, genuine experiences, which results in more relatable content.
Participating in TikTok’s authenticity, rather than mimicking it, will drive your brand to success. The platform provides the perfect opportunity to increase awareness of your brand. While using TikTok should not be your only marketing strategy, it can significantly help grow your business.
More details about Use influencer marketing to your advantage
Tiktok Marketing Strategy – Creating a community
The TikTok algorithm encourages businesses to engage with subcultures or the existing communities with shared interests. Unlike Instagram or other social networks, most of TikTok users’ time is spent on the ‘’For You’’ page, which displays content that’s coming from accounts that they’re not following already. So when you manage to tap into an existing subculture, the app amplifies your content to the right audience.
Initially, your objective is to create attention-grabbing content that holds the viewer in. The first thing that users will notice is the caption of your video, so it should be interesting enough to keep the viewer from scrolling. The next step is starting off the video with a surprise element, which will further guarantee higher engagements. It goes without saying, follower activity will give you the best time to post your content. Make sure to pick the times when your followers are most active on the app.
Keep in mind, your social media presence should reflect your authentic brand identity, and people are more likely to trust brands that have a genuine persona. In fact, 21% of the app’s users say that they feel more connected to brands that mingle with other people’s posts, in the form of comments. Comment on other content creators’ posts to create hype around topics you’d like to contribute.
Tiktok Marketing Strategy – Focus on engagement more than anything:
It’s quite understandable to have sales growth in mind when thinking of your TikTok marketing strategy. But since fun and entertainment factors come first for TikTok users, you can’t be too hard on them. Instead of pushing your ads and promotional content everywhere on the platform, try to be part of the trends on the platform and be fun and entertaining.
Create a community of engaged and active users, grow awareness about your products by partnering with influencers, review and answer people’s comments, schedule entertaining posts, and most importantly always monitor your analytics to assess your campaign’s success.
More details about Ways to grow your business on Tik Tok
Tiktok Marketing Strategy – Be authentic to build your community
If you want to be successful on TikTok in 2020, then you need to be authentic.
Yes, I did just use one of the most overused words in the last few years.😬 However, being “authentic” is really going to help you build relationships with your audience.
Don’t push sales. Think about the fun, creative elements of your brand and the ways you can express those through TikTok content.
It goes without saying that the better you know your ideal customers and clients, the easier it will be to create content that they love and can’t resist sharing.
However, another way to get inside the head of the TikTok community is to spend some time on the platform, browsing through videos to see how people are using the platform.
Create a community around your unique content so that when the time is right to push your product/service, you’ll already have a fanbase excited to learn more about your offer.
New York artist Amber Vittoria uses her Instagram account as a portfolio for her beautiful artwork, whereas on TikTok she takes viewers behind-the-scenes, flipping through her sketchbook and drawing live.
Share stories and provide value
There’s lots of different kinds of TikTok you could create, but if you’re looking for specific suggestions then focus on telling a story and/or providing educational content.
In the same way that sharing value is key to growth on Instagram, if you share value on TikTok you will become the go-to resource in your industry.
And you get bonus points if you can add a fun spin to that value and education. 😉
The most successful TikTok accounts are those that show people how to use the products that they love.
Travel, fashion, interiors and food brands are all well suited to this tutorial-style content, but other industries are using this strategy successfully too.
For example, did you know that English Heritage is on TikTok?
More about these tips Be authentic to build your community
Tips and tricks that will help you create a successful TikTok marketing campaign.
1. Take Advantage Of Existing Trends
TikTok’s algorithm prioritizes content based on popularity and the number of views.
Therefore, marketing teams should utilize trending hashtags and memes to create relevant content appealing to their target audience.
Unlike advertising set up on other social media platforms, TikTok requires your team to be engaged to keep up with the latest trends.
Users on this platform will seek out content under trending hashtags that can help introduce your brand to a new audience.
Leveraging existing trends can expand your creativity and tap into content that you already know successfully draws in viewers.
Kraft took advantage of the popular Duet challenge on TikTok and the use of the hashtag #KraftMacMeSkip to engage with their audience, attracting over 6 million views.
2. Find A Balance Between Entertainment And Promotion
While TikTok offers an opportunity to inform and entertain your target audience, there is also the necessity to promote your brand.
If a video appears to be too much of an advertisement, viewers will skip over it.
It is important to inform and entertain first, bringing in an audience to engage with your videos when just starting.
After you have a following, bring in more promotional posts, including tutorials with your product, people interacting with merchandise, or exclusive offers.
By balancing entertainment and advertising, you can foster a connection with potential buyers.
More about Tips and tricks that will help you create a successful TikTok marketing campaign.