If you are building a social media strategy today, it is advisable to consider TikTok. With short-form videos providing the highest return on investment and TikTok expected to reach 2.2 billion users by 2027, it is just 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 TikTok marketing strategies include creating organic content based on trends, using popular hashtags, and integrating TikTok influencers into promotional campaigns.
Why Use TikTok for Product Marketing?
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 flips this, prioritizing videos from creators you haven’t seen before.
The TikTok user interface is designed to keep people in 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 sales.
If you are trying to reach a younger demographic, TikTok is especially useful – 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 millennials enjoy and leverage your understanding of the algorithm to generate viral reach.
How to Create a TikTok Marketing Strategy
To create your marketing campaigns on TikTok, follow these steps to ensure your efforts are focused and achieve your business and marketing goals.
Set Up a TikTok Business Account
A TikTok business account is a great way to learn about trends and become an expert on TikTok. 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, create a TikTok account and follow these steps:
- Go to your profile page.
- Click the hamburger icon in the top right corner, then select settings and privacy.
- Under account, click on manage account.
- Click switch to business account under account control.
- Choose the category that best describes your account, such as clothing and accessories, electronics, pets, etc.
- Complete your profile.
Define Your Target Audience
We know that TikTok is a popular platform for millennial consumers, but that is not the only age group using it. Generation Alpha is an emerging age group of future consumers on the platform, and TikTok usage has also increased in the boomer demographic.
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 live geographically? Even knowing just the country can help. But if you have a local business or just 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 confident that your target customer is at a specific point in their life.
- Gender:
- Interests: What are their interests/hobbies/passions? These interests help guide potential content ideas and target the audience (like cooking, dancing, yoga).
- Profession/Industry: In what industry do they work and what jobs have they held? This might not be relevant, depending on your brand.
- Income Level: What is the income range for this buyer? Are they price-sensitive or are they willing to spend more money on premium products?
- Relationship Status: Are they single, actively dating, or married? This may be relevant if you’re in the wedding industry, for example.
- Favorite Sites/Apps: What kind of sites do they bookmark? Do they browse Instagram or Pinterest daily? Are there specific apps they can’t live without?
- Motivations to Purchase: What reasons might this person have for buying your product? Do they want to wear a status symbol or work despite a busy schedule?
- Purchase Concerns: Why might they choose not to buy your product? Are they worried about quality?
- Other Information: Anything else that hasn’t been mentioned but is worth noting, such as education, life stage (parents with newborns), events they attend, etc.
What is the gender they identify with? This may be unimportant or essential, depending on your brand.
Understanding the Competition
On TikTok, you have two competitors: your business competitors (who you may have already identified) and your content competitors. TikTok, like other social media platforms, is filled with people and brands alike, so you’re not just competing with other businesses but also with other creators.
Look into your business competitors and see if they have a presence on TikTok. If they do, check out the types of things they post that receive high levels of engagement. This can provide you with insights into what their audience enjoys, which may be somewhat similar to what your audience likes. Just remember to create unique content for yourself – no stealing ideas here!
Then spend some time looking at TikTok content itself to see what’s already out there in your niche. Look up hashtags, join groups, see popular posts, and find topics relevant to your brand. Note any intersections of these posts with your business competitors.
Defining Your Promotion Strategy
In addition to investing time and effort in creating your TikTok profile and videos, you can enhance your TikTok marketing efforts using influencers and paid ads.
Influencer marketing puts your brand and products in front of another audience, which serves as social proof. Influencer marketing is big on TikTok, especially since it is a creator-focused platform, like Snapchat. Earn money from brands you love with Shopify Collabs.
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Peace Out Skincare, an e-commerce company using Shopify, collaborated with an influencer to promote its acne treatment line. The brand provided its products 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 one day. The video continued to spread for months after its original post, driving ongoing sales after that initial spike.
To work
With TikTok influencers in your marketing strategy, research influencers on the platform to see who engages with your industry and audience. Reach out to them directly via messages on the platform and send them free products in exchange for a video to try them out and provide honest feedback. This is great for marketing as well as for product teams.
Regarding paid ads, TikTok Ads Manager gives you access to a range of tools that can help you increase the visibility of your ads to a specific audience. Omolola Jewellery utilizes 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 couldn’t visit the physical Omolola store.
10 Tips for TikTok Marketing
Once you’ve defined your strategy, it’s time to execute your plan. Keep these good practices and tips in mind when creating and publishing your marketing content on TikTok.
- Be authentic
- Be direct
- Get the right equipment
- Keep things simple
- Engage in the comments
- Master the trends
- Consider accessibility and clarity
- Take advantage of features
- Post regularly
- Join creator groups
1. Be authentic: With so much noise on TikTok, it’s important to be genuine and stand out with your content. You don’t want to post videos that feel like sales pitches – that’s not what users are looking for on TikTok. TikTok users want entertainment or information, not sales.
Before starting your marketing efforts, spend some time on TikTok. Once the algorithm learns what you like, it will present you with quality content that may inspire you, boosting creativity in your videos.
TikTok is designed to feel like a community of individuals sharing relevant and authentic content. Your page may be less brand-centric than your other social media channels, and that’s okay because most content is filmed, edited, and uploaded on smartphones.
Brands like Chipotle and Wendy’s are excellent at swapping carefully crafted commercial messages with genuine engagement with their followers.
2. Be direct: One way to build a human connection with your audience is to use TikTok’s live streaming feature, allowing creators to connect directly with followers through a live broadcast. Live streaming is one of the best ways to stand out on TikTok.
The app will notify your followers that you’ve started the 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 promotes the live streaming feature heavily, and it’s very easy to do.
Take notes on frequently asked questions and update your list after each live stream. Do your best to respond to all relevant questions during the live stream and make sure to thank followers who “gift” you stickers/emojis, as they hold small monetary value.
Scheduling is also important. While spontaneous live streaming is great, sticking to a live stream schedule will help build a community around your broadcasts. Some excellent formats include Q&A sessions, behind-the-scenes videos, casual hangouts, “work with me” sessions, tutorials, and interviews with special guests.
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 in the app, which can compensate for poor lighting or fancy backgrounds.
You can …
Filming TikTok videos using more professional equipment and editing tools, but often the time needed to create this content isn’t worth the results.
Sound is something that should not be compromised. While the standard iPhone microphone may be good, high-quality audio contributes to increased views and potential shares.
4. Keep things simple: You can’t condense a full story into a tweet, nor can you condense a full movie into TikTok. To keep content digestible, your videos should be short and to the point.
Stick to 15-second videos for high-level information sharing, and add deeper 60-second videos to explain details further. If the topic is extremely important, you can break it into multiple 15-second videos to keep view and rewatch numbers high.
Think of each TikTok video as a unique story you’re sharing with your audience. If the content is too little, viewers may feel unsatisfied; if the content is too much, you may lose interest.
If the average video on the “For You” page lasts between seven to ten seconds, a 60-second upload will seem like a film—something many users don’t have the patience to watch.
5. Engage in the comments: Comments on TikTok are a great place for conversation, engagement, and explanation. As much as possible, join in the comments and connect with viewers. You can also like comments you want to acknowledge but don’t warrant a written response.
When your posts become popular, and it takes too long to respond to comments, address them collectively. Create a document to analyze recurring comments and the types of comments you can reasonably respond to. Then, respond to repeated comments in a long video, livestream, or video reply.
TikTok also provides a generous filtering feature to make your life easier, automatically removing comments that use certain words or phrases.
Comments are an important part of the TikTok experience, and there’s no excuse for not engaging with every comment until your channel grows to a point where that’s not possible. Few brands do this, and you will stand out.
6. Master the 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 satisfy the TikTok algorithm and can increase your follower count.
While we don’t recommend using these hashtags if your video is completely off-topic, it can be a great way to understand what’s trending on the platform and give you ideas on how to shape your content strategy better.
Trending hashtags change daily and are a prime example of what makes content on TikTok fresh and engaging. While creating drafts is perfectly acceptable, having an idea of what’s popular is an excellent way to show relevance and appear more human to your followers.
If you notice a specific trending TikTok sound appearing on your “For You” page multiple 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 continuing to brainstorm.
Examples
On TikTok Marketing
What does great marketing on TikTok look like? Get inspired by five examples of e-commerce businesses that are achieving great success on TikTok and driving sales.
1. Send A Friend: Send A Friend is a store that allows you to send beautiful stuffed animals anywhere in the world. Thanks to the “link in bio” feature, Send A Friend has grown to $5 million in sales within two years. Send A Friend leverages the “TikTok Made Me Buy It” trend, but it also shares user-generated content from followers and customers.
2. Beardbrand: In the personal care space, Beardbrand has a strong presence across various social media platforms, including Instagram and YouTube. On TikTok, however, it makes sure to use the platform’s signature effects and visual captions. Helpful content like beard styling tutorials adds value and keeps followers coming back.
3. HeyPixelCo: HeyPixelCo creates t-shirt designs and sells digital planners, bundles, and free gifts. What makes HeyPixelCo a bit different is how the brand documents its journey from idea to reality. The link in their bio also takes you to a dedicated landing page aimed at introducing you to the brand and guiding you either to their store or their small business video series.
4. Sud Scrub: Personal hygiene is a popular type of content on TikTok – think satisfying hacks and transitions. One brand that has capitalized on this trend is Sud Scrub. Sud Scrub sells one product: a scrub soap designed to outperform traditional loofahs and keep 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: One of the successful brands in the personal care space is Dr. Squatch, which makes organic, handcrafted personal care products – though it is best known for its soaps. Dr. Squatch takes a more entertaining approach to TikTok content, using Sasquatch characters and trending sounds or videos.
In an interview with Modern Retail, marketing head Josh Friedman said the brand experimented with TikTok at the end of 2019 and saw quick success, with some videos reaching over 100 million views. The company reported 400% growth over the years 2019 and 2020, reaching over $100 million in revenue. It’s 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 is between 10 and 29 years old. As one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, TikTok has become popular across 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 TikTok videos, a specific target audience, and understanding what marketing content works on the social media platform. When using TikTok for business, keep these best practices in mind: Be authentic, get the right equipment to create TikTok videos, go live using TikTok features, keep content simple and straightforward
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/tiktok-marketing%20
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