If you are building a social media strategy today, it is advisable to consider TikTok. With short-form video delivering the highest return on investment and expectations that TikTok will reach 2.2 billion users by 2027, it is as powerful as any other “big” platform.
What is TikTok Marketing?
TikTok marketing is the process of promoting a brand, products, and/or services to consumers on TikTok. Common marketing strategies on TikTok include creating organic content that leverages trends, using popular hashtags, and integrating TikTok influencers into promotional campaigns.
Why Use TikTok to Market Products?
The biggest difference between TikTok and other social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Instagram, is that the home pages of the latter two platforms are largely made up of people you already know and channels you already follow. TikTok reflects this, prioritizing videos from creators you have not seen before.
TikTok’s user interface is designed to keep people on the app for as long as possible, more so than platforms like Facebook and Twitter. With TikTok, you can also add a “link in bio,” making the platform ideal for marketing and selling.
If you are trying to reach a younger demographic, TikTok is a particularly useful tool – 62% of its audience falls within the age range of 10 to 29 years. Based on this statistic, you can tailor your videos to align with the content that Gen Z enjoys and leverage your understanding of the platform’s algorithm to achieve viral reach.
Here are some benefits of using TikTok to market your products:
1. Every video has the chance to go viral: The Facebook algorithm tends to favor content from friends and family. This means it prioritizes people and content you already know. TikTok reflects this by prioritizing videos from creators you have not seen before. As mentioned earlier, this discovery engine means that every video has the opportunity to go viral, regardless of how many followers you have.
2. People buy what they see: Whether you are using TikTok ads or brand takeovers, or just posting regular videos about your product, you have a good chance of seeing someone buy your product. According to a study, about half of TikTok users have purchased products from brands they see in the app.
3. Influencer marketing on TikTok is huge: With this discovery power, more brands are seeing the value in working with creators to promote products and services. TikTok creators can amass millions of followers. The best part? Niche categories perform well on the platform. To the extent that when a niche comes together on the app, it becomes known as its own space on TikTok, like #booktok, #filmnotok, and #gaytiktok.
4. TikTok works well with Instagram: If you have already built a presence on Instagram, here’s the good news: TikTok has built-in features that connect to Instagram. First, there’s a link button to Instagram on your profile page (which is different from the external link option). This means people can easily check out your Instagram account from TikTok.
Secondly, there’s automatic sharing to Instagram. This means that when you post a video on TikTok, you can choose to automatically share it to your Instagram stories and/or Instagram feed.
“I think
The beauty of TikTok is that it exchanges information with Instagram and YouTube,” says Nadia Okamoto, founder of August. “So, as we grew on TikTok from August, we also grew to 175,000 followers on Instagram.”
How to Create a TikTok Marketing Strategy
To create your marketing campaigns on TikTok, follow these steps to ensure your efforts are focused and your business and marketing goals are achieved. Set up a TikTok Business Account
A TikTok business account is a great way to get familiar with trends and become a TikTok expert. The platform provides a commercial music library for business creators, performance and audience data, and a web-based business toolkit.
Setting up a TikTok business account is easy and is the first step in using TikTok for marketing. Start by downloading the TikTok app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Then register for a TikTok account and follow these steps: Go to your profile page. Click on the hamburger icon in the top right corner, then select settings and privacy. Under Account, click Manage Account. Click Switch to Business Account under Account Control. Choose the category that best describes your account, such as Clothing & Accessories, Electronics, Pets, etc. Complete your profile.
Identify Your Audience
We know TikTok is a popular platform for Generation Z consumers, but that’s not the only age group using it. Generation Alpha is an emerging category of future consumers on the platform, and TikTok usage has also increased among the Boomer category.
To define your audience on TikTok, describe as much as you can to paint a picture of the people most likely to convert into customers: Location: Where do your ideal customers actually live? Just knowing the country can help, but if you have a local business or want to serve a specific area, you should isolate those locations. Age: What is the age range of your customers? Keep this as broad as possible unless you are completely sure that your target customer is at a specific point in life. Gender: What gender do they identify with? This may be irrelevant or essential, depending on your brand. Interests: What are their interests/hobbies/passions? These interests help provide potential content ideas and audience targeting (such as cooking, hip hop dancing, yoga). Occupation/Industry: What industry do they work in, and what job titles do they hold? This may not be very relevant, depending on your brand. Income level: What is the income range for this ideal buyer? Are they price-sensitive, or are they willing to spend more on premium products? Relationship status: Are they single, actively dating, or married? This may be relevant if you are in the wedding industry, for example. Favorite websites/apps: What kind of sites do they keep in their favorites? Do they browse Instagram or Pinterest daily? Are there specific apps they can’t live without? Buying motivation: What reasons might this person have for purchasing your product? Do they want to wear a status symbol or exercise despite a busy schedule? Purchase concerns: Why might they choose not to buy your product? Are they concerned about quality? Other information: Anything else that hasn’t been mentioned but is worth noting, such as education, life stage (parents with infants), events they attend, etc.
Understanding
The Debate
On TikTok, you have two competitors: your business competitors (who you may have already identified) and content competitors. TikTok, like other social media platforms, is filled with both people and brands, so you are not only competing with other companies but also with other creators.
Look at your business competitors and check if they have a presence on TikTok. If they do, observe the types of content they post that garner high levels of engagement. This can give you insight into what their audience enjoys, which may be somewhat similar to what your audience likes. Just remember to create unique content of your own – no stealing ideas here!
Then spend some time looking at TikTok content itself to see what exists in your field. Search for hashtags, join groups, check out trending posts, and look for topics relevant to your brand. Do you notice any overlaps between these posts and your business competitors?
“What we really understood from TikTok is that the algorithm and how the platform works is completely different from Instagram, where you need to be very careful about how many times you post in a day,” says Nadia.
Defining Your Promotion Strategy
In addition to investing time and effort in creating your TikTok profile and videos, you can enhance your marketing efforts on TikTok using influencers and paid advertising.
Influencer marketing places your brand and products in front of someone else’s audience and acts as social proof. Influencer marketing is huge on TikTok, especially since it is a creator-focused platform, much like Snapchat. Earn money from brands you love with Shopify Collabs.
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The Peace Out Skincare brand partnered with an influencer to promote its acne product line. The brand sent their products as gifts to TikTok influencers, two of whom collaborated on a video. The video garnered 12 million views, 2.4 million likes, 60,000 shares, and $15,000 in product sales in just one day. The video continued to spread for months after its initial post, driving ongoing sales after that initial spike.
To work with TikTok influencers in your marketing strategy, research influencers on the platform to find who fits your industry and audience. Reach out to them via direct messages on the platform and send them free products in exchange for a video of them trying it and an honest review. This is great for marketing as well as for product teams.
Regarding paid advertising, TikTok Ads Manager provides access to a range of tools that can help you increase the visibility of your ads to a targeted audience. Omolola Jewellery uses a mix of organic posts and paid ads on TikTok to reach new audiences. This has been particularly helpful in supporting her business during the pandemic when customers could not visit the physical Omolola store.
10 Tips for TikTok Marketing
After defining your strategy, it’s time to implement your plan. Keep these best practices and tips in mind when creating and posting your marketing content on TikTok.
1. Be Authentic: With so much noise on TikTok, it’s essential to be genuine and stand out with your content. You don’t want to post videos that feel like sales pitches – that’s not why users are on TikTok. TikTok users want to be entertained or educated, not sold products. Spend some time on TikTok before starting your marketing efforts. Once the algorithm learns what you like, it will present you with quality content you may find inspiring, enhancing creativity in your videos.
2.
Live Streaming: One way to build a human connection with your audience is to leverage the live streaming feature on TikTok, which allows creators to engage directly with followers through live broadcasts. Live streaming is one of the best ways to stand out on TikTok. The app will send a notification to your followers that you’ve started a live stream, and your stream will be pinned at the top of their For You page. With millions of creators currently on the platform, this real estate is invaluable. TikTok heavily promotes the live streaming feature, and it’s very easy to do.
3. Get the Right Equipment: Videos should be shot directly from the TikTok app on a smartphone. You have access to many beauty filters and lighting options within the app, which can compensate for poor lighting or lackluster backgrounds. You can shoot TikTok videos using more professional equipment and editing tools, but often the time needed to create that content isn’t worth the results.
4. Keep it Simple: You can’t fit a whole novel into a tweet, and you can’t fit a full movie into TikTok. To keep content digestible, your videos should be short and straightforward. Stick to short videos that showcase information at a high level, and add deeper 60-second videos to explain details further. If the topic is highly important, you can break it down into multiple short videos to keep audience watch time and re-watching high.
5. Engage in Comments: TikTok’s algorithm is great at putting your video in front of potential followers, but that’s only half the battle. Once you grab someone’s attention, it’s your duty to engage them. Comments on TikTok are a great place for conversation, engagement, and explanation. Whenever you can, jump into the comments and connect with your viewers. You can also like comments that you want to acknowledge but do not require a written response.
When responding to comments becomes time-consuming and takes a lot of effort, handle them collectively. Create a document to analyze recurring comments and types of comments you can reasonably respond to. Then, reply to the recurring comments in a long video, live stream, or video response.
TikTok also includes a generous filtering feature to make your life easier, as it automatically removes comments that contain certain words or phrases.
Comments are an important part of the TikTok experience, and there is no excuse not to engage with every comment until your channel grows to the point where that isn’t possible. Few brands do this, and you will stand out.
6. Navigate Trends: Before posting content, check out TikTok’s Discover page and see if you can produce content that aligns with today’s TikTok trends or hashtag challenges. Doing so will appease TikTok’s algorithm and can increase your follower count.
While we do not recommend using these hashtags if your video is completely unrelated, they can be a great way to understand what is trending on the platform and give you an idea of how to better shape your content strategy.
Trending hashtags change daily and are a prime example of what makes content on TikTok fresh and engaging. While creating post drafts is perfectly acceptable, having an idea of what’s popular is an excellent way to showcase relevance and appear more human to your followers.
If
If you notice a trending TikTok sound appearing on your For You page several times, think creatively and see if you can use it in one of your videos. You can always add it to your favorites for future use while you continue to brainstorm.
Examples of TikTok Marketing
What does great marketing on TikTok look like? Get inspired by five examples of e-commerce businesses that are thriving on TikTok and generating sales.
1. Send A Friend: Send A Friend is a store that allows you to send beautiful stuffed animals anywhere in the world. With the link in bio feature, Send A Friend managed to grow to $5 million in sales within two years. Send A Friend leverages the trend “TikTok made me buy it” but also shares content created by its followers and customers.
2. Beardbrand: In the personal care space, Beardbrand has a strong presence on various social media platforms, including Instagram and YouTube. On TikTok, however, it makes sure to use the platform’s title effects and thumbnails. Adding helpful content like beard styling tutorials adds value and keeps followers coming back.
3. HeyPixelCo: HeyPixelCo creates T-shirt designs and sells planners, templates, and free digital gifts. What makes HeyPixelCo a bit different is how it documents the brand’s journey from idea to reality. The link in the bio also takes you to a dedicated landing page aimed at introducing you to the brand and guiding you either to its store or a series of small business videos.
4. Sud Scrub: A popular type of video on TikTok is personal hygiene – think of the satisfying hacks and transitions. One brand that has capitalized on this specific type on TikTok is Sud Scrub. Sud Scrub sells one product: an exfoliating soap designed to outdo traditional loofahs while keeping itself clean. What makes Sud Scrub successful on TikTok is how the team responds to comments with full video replies in creative and educational ways.
5. Dr. Squatch: Another brand succeeding in the personal care space is Dr. Squatch, which makes organic, handcrafted personal care products – although it’s best known for its soaps. Dr. Squatch takes a more entertaining approach to TikTok content, using the Sasquatch character and popular sounds or videos.
In an interview with Modern Retail, marketing chief Josh Friedman said the brand began experimenting with TikTok at the end of 2019 and saw tremendous growth, with some videos reaching over 100 million views. The company reported a 400% growth over the years 2019 and 2020, exceeding $100 million in revenue. Now is the time to create your own TikTok marketing strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions about TikTok Marketing
Is TikTok good for marketing?
Yes. If you are trying to reach a younger demographic, TikTok is a useful tool – 62% of its audience falls within the 10 to 29 age group. As one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, TikTok has become popular across all age groups, and you are likely to find your target audience on TikTok.
How can I market on TikTok?
Marketing on TikTok involves having a strong digital marketing strategy for your videos on TikTok, a defined target audience, and an understanding of the marketing content that works on the platform. When using TikTok for business, keep these best practices in mind: be authentic. Get the right equipment to create videos.
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