TikTok Marketing - 5 Useful Tips For Business

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1 Now let’s look at these 5 tips to get you started:

1.1 1. Research

1.2 2. Create fun content

1.3 3. Work with TikTok influencers

1.4 4. Use hashtags

1.5 5. Advertising with TikTok

TikTok which originated in China, is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service. It is used to make and share a variety of short videos in many genres; dance, comedy, education and makeup tutorials etc. The videos have a duration of 3 to 60 seconds.

TikTok eventually came out with an international version in 2018 and though low in initial download numbers, it caught up soon worldwide and became 9th in the ranks of social networking sites. As of 2020, it has 689 million active users worldwide.

The mission statement of TikTok is to capture and present the world’s creativity, knowledge and precious life moments from the mobile phone directly. As such, it empowers and enables everyone to be a content creator; sharing their interests, passion and creativity through their videos.

Its user-friendly functions combined with this unique feature of TikTok; it is more of an entertainment platform so it makes content creation and shareability easy. Anyone can be a content creator and due to the time duration of videos, consumption is crazy high; making it a force not to be reckoned with whilst competing against social media giants like Youtube, Facebook and Instagram.

So what can TikTok do for businesses? The largest demographic of TikTok users is between the ages of 16 to 24 but is not limited to only Gen Z as there are users from other age groups using TikTok actively. Because it is more of an entertainment and visual platform, it would benefit certain industries greatly like fitness, makeup, skincare, dance, baking and filmmaking etc.

Now let’s look at these 5 tips to get you started:

1. Research

This is a mandatory prior work that every business needs to run through before planning, writing and creating the type of content suitable for their target audience. Like social media channels, you need to do some research on trending topics or what your competitors are doing so you know what topics or themes to use for your videos. To be prepared is half the victory – Miguel de Cervantes.

2. Create fun content

Tiktok’s main attraction is fun and creativity so in order to attract viewers, you need to create fun videos. And because Tiktok encourages people to create and share content with their mobile devices, creating your content is so easy and the least expensive. It also comes across as authentic when you use your mobile phone, making people feel connected to you as you build their trust with your branding.

If you watch enough Tiktok, you would realise some of the highly popular videos are those with pets or children so if you have a pet or child, you can try creating videos with them as your cast. You will be surprised at how viral these videos are! Nothing complicated, just do a simple theme and weave your branding into the videos – this is what you call the TikTok magic!

3. Work with TikTok influencers

The number of TikTok-specific influencers might not be many yet, but they will be in time to come and you can work with them to widen your reach on the platform. It also depends on the modus operandi of your business or your target market.

If your business includes the Chinese market, you can work with Chinese influencers to promote your branding as TikTok originated from there and they have many influencers who can easily help you spike brand awareness and conversion rates.

4. Use hashtags

Another way to promote your business is to launch a hashtag challenge. A hashtag challenge is when you encourage TikTok users to create or recreate content and add your branded hashtag to it.

What do we mean? Eg. The brand, Guess, was one of the first companies to launch a hashtag challenge. They encouraged TikTok users to film themselves wearing Guess’ new denim line with the hashtag, #InMyDenim. That was how the hashtag challenge trend started because it not only promotes your branding, but it also drives user interaction and engagement.

5. Advertising with TikTok

Similar to Facebook, they offer a few ad formats and they include:

Infeed Native Content: This type of ad is similar to Instagram story ads and supports multiple features like website clicks or app downloads. They play between user content; are between 9 to 15 seconds long and include buttons.
Brand Takeovers: The brands’ one day of monopolizing TikTok by creating images, videos or GIFs (Graphics Interchange Formats) with embedded links to landing pages or hashtag challenges. Only one ad can show in that slot for the specific category per day.
Sponsored Hashtag Challenges: As you know, hashtag challenges are always a traffic-driving strategy so your business can pay to sponsor a hashtag challenge and obtain a custom banner across the Discover page so millions of users can see and join in, viewing the challenges with your branding promoted in the background.

In conclusion, if your business is targeting a younger audience or if it is more to the beauty, fun or even fitness genres; using TikTok as one of your marketing channels will definitely make sense. It is all about practice and personality is also one X-factor in TikTok success. Combined with fun interactive content and marketing strategies, you are going to ace that TikTok game!