More and more brands use TikTok for marketing purposes, aiming to reach younger audiences at a broader level through short videos. The platform also offers instrumental features for businesses, such as in-app shopping, live streaming, and branded hashtags.
With TikTok becoming a new trendsetter among marketers, the rising question is: How can you make your brand stand out in the sea of competitors? That’s why you’re here! We’ve curated a simple guide to TikTok marketing, along with 15 strategies for you to try.
Why TikTok for Marketing?
TikTok stands as the swiftest growing social media, securing the top position as one of the most downloaded apps. With over one billion monthly active users, TikTok’s user demographic spans a broad spectrum, encompassing Gen Z and millennials.
If your target market is young audiences, TikTok has much to offer. TikTok reports that half of its users (50%) purchased products during brands’ live streaming sessions. If you’re considering collaboration campaigns, TikTok is home to micro and macro influencers.
In terms of engagement, TikTok also stands as one of the most engaging platforms for social media users. TikTok takes the lead with a remarkable average engagement rate of 4.25%, while as a comparison, Instagram shows a mere 0.60% average engagement rate.
Not to mention, when it comes to influencer marketing on TikTok, the average engagement rate soars to an impressive 15.86%. With remarkable statistics, TikTok marketing is a strategy to execute for every digital marketer.
Essential guide on TikTok marketing in 2024
With a vast pool of audiences, mastering the art of TikTok marketing can be challenging. You might wonder: How to start TikTok marketing? What is the first step to jumping on the bandwagon?
Before learning the 15 strategies of TikTok marketing, let’s discover the most essential factors when you leverage the platform. These include content authenticity, trends, and formats.
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Create authentic and creative content
Invest in creating innovative content that you produce yourself. Add value to your content by infusing informative messages and entertainment.
Craft content that reflects your brand’s personality. You don’t need to make your videos cinematic and overly polished. Instead, focus on capturing your brand’s essence naturally and compellingly.
Craft TikTok-preferred content
TikTok’s algorithm loves specific content formats. Short, punchy videos between 15 to 60 seconds are ideal. Add music, sounds, and effects that match the mood of your content and resonate with viewers.
Leveraging text overlays to highlight critical messages or punchlines enhances viewer engagement, especially when the video is soundless. Remember that TikTok users love content that evokes emotions, such as laughter, inspiration, or empathy.
Moreover, the vertical 9:16 aspect ratio is the most suitable for TikTok videos. This aspect ratio ensures that your videos fill the screen correctly when viewed in portrait mode on mobile devices.
Join trends and challenges
Trends and challenges are the heartbeat of the platform. As a marketer, you must monitor ongoing trends, including songs and popular hashtags within the TikTok community.
Consider your brand into these challenges to elevate visibility and engagement. Customize your content to keep it authentic. Following trends showcases your brand’s relevance and spurs user interaction.
15 TikTok marketing strategies
Now, we come to the main discussion of this article. Using TikTok for marketing doesn’t merely mean creating and posting content on the platform. Your journey starts from identifying your target audience to creating videos and optimizing your content.
If you’re looking for ways to build an online presence and expand brand awareness on TikTok, we’ve created the list for you. Here are 15 strategies to keep in mind when embracing your marketing journey on the platform.
Strategy 1: Identify target audience and competitors
Understanding your target audience requires you to research their demographics, psychographics, and online habits to create content that resonates with your intended viewers. The big question is, “How can you do that?”
Let’s start simply. Create a detailed profile of your ideal viewer by considering their age, gender, location, interests, hobbies, and lifestyle. You can use TikTok’s built-in analytics and other social media tools to gather data on your audience demographics and psychographics.
Study how your target audience behaves on TikTok. You will understand their motivations, challenges, and preferences. Also, find answers to these questions: What types of content do they engage with the most? When are they most active?
Along with audience research, identify brands or creators in your industry that are successful on TikTok. Analyze their content strategy, the type of videos they create, their frequency of posting, and the engagement they receive. This research inspires and helps you see what resonates with your target audience while maintaining content authenticity.
Strategy 2: What do you want to achieve? Set your goals!
Some brands use TikTok to build branding, grow brand awareness, generate leads, and make sales—so what is yours? Defining specific and measurable goals ensures that your efforts are purpose-driven.
Defining your goals helps guide your content creation and strategy. For example, if you want to raise brand awareness, creating short explainer videos is an excellent idea. But, will they be suitable for making sales? Not necessarily, because try-on or tutorial videos drive better sales.
Each video you create can align with your overarching goals, allowing you to accurately measure the success and impact of your TikTok marketing efforts. This strategy enables you to measure ROI and make data-informed decisions to refine and optimize your approach.
Strategy 3: Upload high-quality and valuable videos
TikTok is a visual platform. Videos with poor quality won’t be attractive and engaging. Creating high-quality video content with clear visuals and compelling delivery is crucial to ensure your videos won't be scrolled away.
Learn how to upload content appropriately, such as using preferred resolutions. As previously mentioned, the 9:16 vertical aspect ratio is the most suitable size for TikTok videos.
On top of that, in a platform where attention spans are short, the quality of your videos can make or break engagement. When your videos consistently offer value, viewers are more likely to follow, share, and engage with your content, leading to increased visibility and growth.
Strategy 4: Create a content plan
Creating a content plan helps you maintain a consistent and cohesive presence on TikTok. This strategy involves outlining a schedule for when and what type of content you’ll be posting.
Start by determining how often you’ll post videos daily, weekly, or another frequency. Then, brainstorm the themes, topics, or challenges your videos will revolve around.
Consider using online content planning tools such as StoryChief that offer collaboration features. These tools help you streamline the content creation process and help you maintain an updated workflow with your social media team.
Moreover, a content calendar helps you stay organized, ensures a steady flow of content, and prevents last-minute scrambling. It also allows you to align your content with relevant trends, events, and promotions, maximizing your brand’s visibility and engagement.
Strategy 5: Invest in educational how-to videos
When talking about video styles, there are plenty of options. But if you want to keep your feed valuable, investing in content like how-to videos, tutorials, tips, step-by-step guides, and product comparisons is content worth your consideration.
Sharing valuable knowledge helps you gain authority. Educational content has the power to attract viewers who are actively seeking solutions or information, leading to higher engagement and trust. It’s also a way to foster a sense of community by helping your audience learn and grow.
Keep your videos short and sweet because people hate long explanations naturally. You can be straightforward with your messages and include a clear CTA at the end of the video to evoke a response and drive viewers to do the desired action.
Strategy 6: Collect and share user-generated content
Let’s say you’ve made sales, and your product or service successfully satisfied customers. Then what’s next? If you’re thinking of gathering their ratings and reviews on your product, you’re on the right route.
Ratings, reviews, and testimonials in written or video format are user-generated content. This type of content is a goldmine for building authenticity and connection. Better still, UGC attracts customers more significantly than brand-made content.
Motivate your followers to create their videos featuring your products, services, or related themes. You can host a giveaway or offer other rewards to encourage customers to create and share UGC content.
Then, showcase this UGC on your TikTok account, as it highlights your satisfied customers, engages audiences, and inspires your broader audience. UGC acts as social proof, demonstrating real-life experiences and positive interactions with your brand. This strategy can attract new customers and build a loyal community.
Strategy 7: Create content that follows trends
TikTok is an ever-changing platform with trends shifting quickly. Trend integration involves creating content that aligns with prevalent challenges, hashtags, or themes circulating on the platform.
You can also use trending songs on TikTok for your videos. This strategy capitalizes on TikTok users' current conversations and interests, making your content more likely to be discoverable and engaged.
Why do you need to follow the trends? Trends allow you to stay relevant on the platform. You also demonstrate your brand’s relevancy and cultural awareness, leading to increased visibility and engagement. Yet, infuse your brand’s unique voice and perspective into the trend to ensure authenticity and stand out.
Strategy 8: Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing becomes necessary if you want to reach a broader and new audience in a short span. It requires you to collaborate with popular content creators who have a significant number of followers.
From micro to mega influencers, they can create content that features or promotes your brand’s products, services, or messages. When viewers see influencers they trust engaging with your brand, it lends credibility and authenticity to your marketing efforts.
But, ensure to research relevant influencers suitable for your brand. It’s best to work with niche-specific influencers, such as beauty enthusiasts, fashion gurus, or tech savvies, as they’ve built credibility in their respective fields.
Regarding rates, it costs between $151 and $793 per post by micro and macro influencers. However, mega influencers with over one million followers set higher rates, around $1,034 per post. So, mind your budget when considering influencer marketing.
Strategy 9: Create a short series of content
Developing a short series of interconnected videos is an effective strategy to maintain consistent engagement and keep viewers returning. This series could follow a storyline, offer a step-by-step guide, or explore a specific theme across multiple videos.
For example, if you're a construction brand, you could create a seven-day series of home-building progress videos. You can show the before-after of all rooms of the house. In each video, you can make a timelapse and give a few tips on how your business works on the house. Your content is not only informative but also interesting to follow.
You encourage viewers to return to your profile and engage with your content over some time. A series creates a sense of continuity and lets you dive deeper into a topic and maximize the value you offer to your audience.
Strategy 10: Be Interactive with polls and challenges
Interactivity is key to engaging your TikTok audience. Using features like polls and challenges encourages participation and creates a sense of community.
Polls enable you to ask questions and gather insights from your viewers, making them feel involved in your brand’s decisions. Conversely, challenges involve creating a specific task or theme for users to replicate in their videos.
You can get creative with this type of content. For example, content like ‘this or that’ and multiple choices. This strategy fosters user-generated content, increases engagement, and spreads brand awareness as users participate and tag your brand.
Strategy 11: Create collaborative campaigns
Collaboration can amplify your brand’s reach and credibility. Partnering with other TikTok users, brands, or influencers on joint campaigns allows you to tap into their existing audience while sharing the creative load.
For instance, you could collaborate on a challenge, a duet, or videos highlighting both brands. This strategy introduces your brand to a new set of viewers, builds cross-promotional opportunities, and adds an element of novelty to your content.
Strategy 12: Sustainability and social responsibility
In an age of conscious consumers, showcasing your brand’s commitment to sustainability and social responsibility can resonate deeply. Create content highlighting your eco-friendly practices, charitable initiatives, or ethical sourcing.
You can attract consumers who align with your values and paint your brand as a responsible and ethical entity. TikTok users often appreciate brands that contribute positively to society and the environment, making this strategy a way to differentiate your brand.
Strategy 13: Share behind-the-scene content
Sharing a peek behind the curtain humanizes your brand and fosters a sense of authenticity. Sharing behind-the-scenes content provides a glimpse into your brand’s culture, processes, and people.
Share how you make your product, your store condition, or how your employees pack the orders. This content can build a connection with your audience and spark their curiosity.
Strategy 14: Optimize your TikTok videos
Optimization ensures your content is discoverable and enjoyable for your audience. This strategy involves using relevant and trending hashtags, adding viral songs, and showing high-quality visuals and compelling titles.
Hashtags are tools to make your content appear in users’ feeds. Use trending and brand hashtags to help your content reach a broader audience. Moreover, crafting attention-grabbing captions and text overlays enhances engagement, especially when viewers have their sound off.
You must also experiment with music and sound effects that resonate with your audience’s preferences to make your videos more memorable. Consistently optimizing your videos based on user behavior and platform trends increases engagement and social sharing.
Strategy 15: Monitor and analyze key metrics
Data-driven decision-making is essential for refining your TikTok strategy. One of the marketers’ jobs is to monitor metrics such as views, likes, shares, comments, and follower growth.
Analyzing these metrics provides insights into what content resonates the most with your audience. Pay attention to the demographic breakdown of your viewers to ensure you’re reaching your intended target audience.
Refine your strategy based on these insights and focus on what’s working. Adjusting your plan and discontinuing approaches that yield less engagement. For more comprehensive analytics and suggestions, you can use third-party analytic tools.
Grow through TikTok marketing strategies
TikTok has the potential to grow significantly as a marketing channel. Its rich features have captivated digital marketers and business owners seeking new opportunities.
From live streaming to shoppable posts and interactive features like polls and challenges, TikTok provides a versatile toolkit for creative brand engagement.
But we can’t forget that the platform has a dynamic edge. So, ensure you follow the content trends and align them to your content to stay relevant and competitive.
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