TikTok Marketing Strategy: 5 Tips You Shouldn’t Miss
If you don’t have a solid TikTok marketing strategy yet, you’re not alone. Even though the platform is one of the hottest social media apps available, many brands are struggling to use TikTok to their advantage. That means there’s plenty of opportunities for your brand to jump ahead of the competition and start going viral.
We’re going to walk you through five tips you can use when developing your TikTok marketing strategy. You’ll learn the basics about the platform, finding your target audience, analyzing your analytics, and growing your TikTok account.
What Is TikTok?
The history of TikTok is a quick one. It was developed in 2017 by the Chinese company ByteDance. The platform merged with Musical.ly, another social media video platform, and was released in the United States shortly after that. The app has become massively popular in a short period of time.
As of mid-2020, TikTok had been downloaded more than 2 billion times across the globe. In the United States, there are more than 100 million monthly active users.
One reason some brands are reluctant to invest in TikTok marketing is that they think the audience demographics aren’t a great fit for them. TikTok users skew younger—48% of adults in the United States between 18 and 29 years old use TikTok. However, 20% of individuals in the 30- to 49-year-old age group and 14% of 50- to 64-year-olds use the platform, too.
Users love TikTok for its short-form videos that give anyone the chance to go viral. Videos can be between five and 60 seconds long, and users can set their videos to a wide range of music. Plus, there are filters, effects, and hashtags that help get content trending.
Within the platform, you can create a business account and access TikTok for business. Doing this allows you to see metrics and insights about your audience. There are also a few e-commerce features for brands to use.
5 Tips To Improve Your TikTok Marketing Strategy
1. Determine Your Target Audience
As you’re planning your TikTok marketing strategy, you’ll want to consider your target audience. Yes, we know it’s tempting to jump in and start making random videos on TikTok. But, this is a step that you’d also take when planning a traditional marketing strategy and you shouldn’t overlook it.
Take time to analyze your current customers or buyer personas. Ask yourself a few questions about these customers to help you figure out who to target on TikTok.
- Find a few sample members of your audience on the platform. What kind of content are they interested in? What kind of content do they post themselves?
- What content do your customers respond to on other platforms?
- What does your sales funnel look like? How will TikTok move your potential customers closer to making a purchase?
- Is your potential audience already interacting with your competitors on TikTok?
Once you’ve determined your target audience, you’ll be able to consistently tailor your TikTok videos and hashtags to the right people.
For example, GoPro knows their audience craves adventure, so they use TikTok to post videos of some pretty amazing physical challenges like cliff diving and extreme mountain biking.
2. Connect With Influencers
Working with influencers is one of the best ways to get your brand in front of your potential customers on TikTok. Think about this:
- Banner blindness is real. This is when people mentally block out banner ads on websites. People can get ad fatigue, too, and won’t pay attention to your ads after they’ve seen them a few times.
- In today’s world, most people trust “regular people” more than they trust businesses. Influencers are seen as regular people on social media.
- Most people, especially women, use social media to find out about products and will make purchases based on influencer posts.
- For every dollar spent on influencer marketing, brands can see $6.50 in return. Some earn up to $20 on the dollar!
You can start looking for an influencer to work with by using the tiktok user search tool on the discovery page. Look for specific influencers, and watch some of their videos to get a feel for how they work with brands.
Just like you analyzed your target audience on TikTok, you’ll also want to analyze your ideal influencer. Smart brands choose influencers who align closely with their brand. You’ll want to find an influencer who is in your niche and understands your brand’s products.
For example, TikTok influencer @yogabeforecoffee uses her videos to inspire healthy living and mindful exercise. She was a perfect influencer choice to promote Daily Harvest’s food delivery.
When your brand and your influencer are a good match like this, it makes your influencer seem more credible to your audience. Plus, if your influencer is in a similar niche as your brand, their followers are likely to be interested in your brand, too.
Having an influencer create a TikTok while using your product is one of the most popular ways to work with influencers on the platform. The arts and craft company Cricut partners with influencers, like @katiefeeneyy, who use their products. This strategy works well because the arts and crafts industry is very visual.
Check out these additional ideas for marketing your brand via an influencer:
- Influencers can create a video while they’re unboxing your products. This is a smart way to give users a wide view of your brand and products. TikTok influencer @charli_elise used this strategy when promoting subscription boxes from FabFitFun.
- Create an original song for your brand and have your influencer use it. Elf Cosmetics created a song for their Eyes Lips Face campaign and worked with influencers to make it go viral. Their hashtag has now been used billions of times!
- Have your influencer kick off your brand’s hashtag challenge. Mucinex used this strategy with their #TooSickToBeSick challenge during the lead up to Halloween 2019. One influencer’s video was liked more than 840k times!
- Set up your influencer to use your brand’s products for something that’s trending on TikTok. For this strategy, your product makes an appearance in the video, but it isn’t the star. Red Bull used this strategy perfectly when one of their influencers used their drink to hop on the trend of “magic” drink pours.
3. Utilize TikTok Analytics
When you’re implementing your TikTok marketing strategy, you want to be able to see what works and what doesn’t. Using TikTok’s analytics is the best way to do that.
To access TikTok analytics, you’ll need to have a pro account. If you don’t have this kind of account, go to “manage my account” and tap “switch to pro account.”
If you’re looking to access your account’s analytics on the desktop, hover over your profile icon and click “view analytics” from the menu. You can also access analytics on mobile by clicking the three dots in the upper-right hand corner of your profile page and tapping on “creator tools” or “business suite,” depending on what type of pro account you selected.
As you post content and interact on TikTok, you’ll see the data appear on this dashboard. Use this data to your advantage! Compare your follower growth, analyze which content gets the most engagement, and keep an eye on your TikTok community. Take these insights and adjust your marketing strategy to maximize your success. This is the very definition of working smarter not harder!
4. Study The Algorithm
TikTok’s For You feed automatically populates with videos that the platform thinks the user will like. This feed is controlled by an algorithm and that algorithm is the key to making your brand a success on TikTok.
If you can study the algorithm and figure out how to make your content appear in more feeds, that’s more potential followers and customers for your brand. But, this is easier said than done. TikTok has said that a variety of factors come into play on the For You feed algorithm.
The algorithm will populate content based on the user’s interactions. Essentially, TikTok wants to show users more of what they love. If a person likes a video or shares it, the algorithm is going to put more content like that on their feed. TikTok even takes into account how long people watch videos, especially if they watched it all the way to the end.
Hashtags also influence the algorithm. If a user creates or watches a video with a specific hashtag, more videos with that hashtag will show up in their For You feed. The same is true for sounds.
The algorithm also takes into account the user’s country setting, language preference, and device type. TikTok also points out that their algorithm doesn’t give preference to accounts with higher follower numbers or past history of viral videos. So, content from a newbie or individual with low-performing videos can still be seen on the For You feed.
A few quick tips for cracking the algorithm: keep your videos short and punchy, use hashtags to your advantage, hop on TikTok trends, and post when your followers are likely to be logged in to the platform.
5. Utilize Trending Hashtags, Sounds, And Filters
Like we mentioned briefly above, using trending hashtags, sounds, and filters can get your content discovered quicker and give you a better chance of ending up on users’ For You feeds. Whenever a user likes a video, the algorithm will show that user more content that shares the same hashtag, music, or effects.
The secret here is finding out what’s trending. Check out the trending music on the “sounds” tab in the video editor, and analyze what sounds your followers are listening to. You can use the same strategy to find trending filters and effects—find them in the video editor. On the discover tab, pay attention to trending hashtags and topics.
Some of the most popular hashtags refer to the For You page: #fyp, #foryou, andn #foryoupage. Many popular hashtags are also niche-specific. For example, #art, #gaming, and #fashion.
Here’s a great example. TruClean Rug Spa may not seem like a logical fit for TikTok, but they’ve built a 414k following, partially due to their genius use of hashtags and sounds. For this post, they’ve used a Britney Spears song and a few popular hashtags.
Influencer Riley Cahill used trending hashtags, filters, and sounds to boost her post to over 1m likes.
Fenty Beauty takes advantage of the popular hashtag #tiktokmademebuyit.
@flynnridertiktoks used a trending song, “Nobody” by Mitski, to push his video to more than 100k likes.
Use These Tips In Your TikTok Marketing Strategy
Now that you have five new tips for improving your TikTok strategy, put them to work! Start by getting to know your target audience on the platform. Then, study and analyze how your content performs and make tweaks to get your content on the For You feeds of your audience. Go to the next level by partnering with an influencer and tailoring your content to match TikTok trends. Experiment to see which tip is most successful for your brand!
