2021 has been a remarkable year so far. We have witnessed a virus that just doesn’t vanish, and we have seen a literal war–one between the content creators and influencers of TikTok and YouTube. The banter took some ugly turns where many TikTok roasts were banned from YouTube, and on the other hand, a few TikTok accounts have also been banned.
A surge of internet users went on to down-grade the platform ratings of TikTok on PlayStore. Google, however, quickly spotted the spam ratings, and TikTok is back on track again. From the outside, TikTok gives the impression of a platform that comprises hit songs, fancy clothes, and some famous dialogue lip-overs.
But from a marketer’s standpoint, TikTok is a platform where you can promote and grow your business in front of an audience that prioritizes innovation and creativity. In fact, more than 40% of TikTok users age between 16–24, as reported by GlobalWebIndex. Therefore, introducing novel trends for this young user-base can light up your TikTok marketing campaign.
According to HubSpot, the application boasts of more than 500 million monthly active users, and if you hit the right content type and delivery style, your business will flourish for sure.
Even if it is taking time, you don’t have to worry. TikTok isn’t an overnight sensation, and on the same grounds, it’s not going anywhere overnight. While there are a number of social media platforms to opportunize on, TikTok represents a huge market.
Focus on the task at hand, create addictive content, and devise a sustainable growth strategy on the compelling platform.
Below is the complete guide to conquer the unique and trendy platform and grow your business digitally:
1. Follow as well as introduce new trends
TikTok is primarily based on what’s happening elsewhere. A song with hooky lyrics generally leads to a swarm of videos on the same song, albeit with a different touch. Join the juggernaut and upload videos around popular topics and include your venture within the video. The audience on TikTok is very appreciative, and they won’t mind a brand promotion in the video.
Keep in mind that your content should be attractive enough to back up your marketing gigs in the videos, and it shouldn’t have a vague presence. Think: stimulating visual content and videos.
If you’re actively following the ongoing trends and successfully uploading engaging content with eye-catching visuals on the platform, you are on the right track. To spice things up and establish a unique existence on TikTok, try introducing new trends now and then. The approach for the same is quite straightforward.
Follow a hit-and-try method, and don’t shy away from experimenting. Not all trends would gather the desired attention, but you’ll still score points for trying to introduce fresh content and doing something out of the ordinary.
2. Focus on quality and quantity equally
TikTok is a short-video dominant platform where the maximum video length is 1 minute (post combining multiple videos). Therefore, it’s fairly easy to maintain quality while also taking care of the quantity.
You don’t have to encapsulate your marketing content with each post that you share on the app. Rather formulate a structured approach where you know which posts would consist of complete entertainment and which ones would carry your message too.
The average time spent by a TikTok user ranges between 50 to 60 minutes. That’s essentially an hour of opportunity that you have to grow your business in front of a unique audience and justifiably, a unique approach as well.
Creating quality content is the key, and if you take care of that, your campaign will undoubtedly flourish.
3. Collaborate with TikTok influencers
Entering into anyone’s territory is no walk in the park. You need to win the trust of an audience that hasn’t seen you and never heard of your venture. But that’s for every new user.
There’s nothing that can change this process except for collaboration with people who have already cemented their place on the platform.
All you need to do is find a TikTok marketing influencer that holds a similar target audience as yours. A simple example can explain this in a better way.
Suppose John decides to make a move to TikTok and run a TikTok marketing campaign on the platform to spread awareness about his venture and gain handy customers. His product is a mobile application that manages your wardrobe and gives suggestions on buying new apparel too.
Keeping this in mind, John requests a team collaboration with fashion-oriented influencers.
After closing the deal, a campaign of videos is created that is attractive and promotes John’s apparel application very swiftly.
So how did the collaboration help? More than 1 million videos are viewed every single day on TikTok.
It becomes significantly easier to increase reach by collaborating with influencers and making it to the list of trending videos on TikTok.
Not only that, this virtual team collaboration with the who’s who of TikTok will also pave a path that simplifies the journey of gathering the user’s trust.
Unlike other social media collaborations and giveaways, the joint efforts on TikTok often consist of numerous influencers rather than a single activist.
So, you and your product traverse the followers of all the influencers you collaborated with and churn up staggering numbers.
4. Optimize your paid campaigns
There aren’t any marketing tactics that operate without appealing ads on social media. They are an integral part of digital marketing, and if you have any plans of dropping the advertisement approach, drop your plans.
Ads are one of the primary sources of brand discovery, and according to a report 27% of internet users find out about new ventures and brands through paid ads. For TikTok, the numbers hold to their claim, and if anything, they get slightly better because of the versatility that you can add to your brand advertisement.
Technology has positively pushed advertising to the trends of marketing automation. Today, you don’t have to manually run every ad on TikTok to announce your brand on the platform. You can schedule them as per your convenience and the budget that best suits your business requirements.
Moreover, you also get to modify the ad with hyperlinks that redirect to your landing page and a couple of CTA buttons to extract quick action from the user. CTR (click-through rate) and user-engagement statistics validate your advertising campaign, and you can further modify the ad’s appearance to improve conversion numbers. This will help boost traffic to your site overall as well.
5. Get brand endorsements on your account
The first question you’ll have is how will endorsing a brand help you promote your business? Getting brand endorsements is an activity that is associated with influencers who want to monetize their account. But there’s a bigger picture associated with a brand promotion than you think.
A brand that matches your business idea and, more precisely, your offerings can do you a world of good. It adds legitimacy, authenticity, and improves your brand identity as well as authority.
Human nature drives the brain in the direction of authenticity. So, for a marketer looking to exploit the gaming-friendly audience, an endorsement of a giant gaming house like EA Sports or Rockstar Games is the key to the kingdom.
It’s simple. You see a game offered by a random TikToker, and then you see one offered by a legitimate account with a good number of followers and, most importantly, collaboration with companies that have delivered cult-classic games. Even if you end up securing endorsements of mid-sized gaming houses, your offerings are placed above the rest of the lot.
That’s not the only positive of getting brands to your account. The algorithm of TikTok automatically promotes content that has big names attached to their posts, and your reach takes a massive leap.
You get all of that and more through genuine collaboration with a brand that puts similar stuff on the table like yours. Some endorsements also take care of paid advertising, and that’s literally the epitome of reach you can ask for from a brand. Utilizing the same for the benefit of the company as well as your venture lies in your hands.
6. Explore the world of TikTok hashtags
TikTok hashtags are different and unique. Not only do they drive traffic that searches for similar content, but they also invite the user to participate. There’s no existing method for customer engagement that tops their own participation. They read about stuff, they understand it, and to end it all, they create their stuff on a trending hashtag or even better, a hashtag you introduced into the game.
TikTok is growing at an unprecedented speed, and it has already raked in some astonishing numbers. The application is available in 155 countries and it also sports more than 74 languages.
Therefore, hashtags you create and bring in for a particular segment of the audience will take a boom any moment and spread like a virus (harsh but true!) through culture or a country.
There are several ways to explore these hashtags and use them for your brand’s awareness and marketing campaign. Below are some of the strategies that rock with respect to hashtags on Tiktok:
- Hashtag as a challenge: TikTok sports numerous challenges coming in from different geographical locations, and for the betterment of the world, without any discrimination on any grounds. TikTok users and celebrities take up those challenges and upload videos on the same. A challenge can be anything from a cooking trick to a high kick. Even though these videos are for the same challenge, the users give it their own touch, and on TikTok, improvisation is king. So, you have the opportunity to formulate a hashtag for your venture and start a trend on the platform. If there’s a hashtag challenge that inclines with your business idea, upload creative content on the same and makes the most of it.
- Hashtag as a cause: Don’t promote your brand excessively in all your posts and give the audience an impression of hard-selling. No one’s buying that on TikTok. You can start hashtags that stand up for a noble cause, and even if there’s no space for pushing in your brand message, it’s alright. The good in you will pay off and a loyal fan base that follows you on every step will soon develop. You have a tonne of priorly published videos on your venture, and many will also follow the streamline of uploads soon. The newly found follower-base will act as your immediate target audience, and on a bigger note, you stood up for a cause worth the attention.
- Hashtag in its traditional style: You know the drill when it comes to the regular inclusion of hashtags in all your posts. People search for content, and if your post includes similar hashtags, your videos pop up. Viewers watch the stuff, and if their requirement aligns with your supply, you score a customer. If not, there’s still no harm with hashtags keeping in mind that relevance is critical. A hashtag that redirects to a piece of content that has no distinct connection with the hashtag you included leaves a bad impression. Avoid such unpleasant scenarios and use hashtags to improve reach, and grow your business by notifying the audience about the quality of your content as well as your offering.
7. Share your content
The efforts you’ve spent burning the midnight oil and investing in TikTok marketing and content creation deserve not only applause but also a share. Now, sharing should be done from both ends, of which you have control over one end. And that’s sharing your best pieces of content and productive working across various social and professional media.
It boosts your views and satisfies the TikTok algorithm. Have confidence in your content, and don’t think twice before sharing the stuff you have created with immense will and dedication.
Be it any social media or professional media platform, quality content always has a room for existence. You can include reference links to your videos on highly professional platforms such as LinkedIn and directly upload videos on your brand’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. WhatsApp is never behind when it comes to sharing content and bringing in more productivity. You can forward links to your work and upload them as your status too.
The other end of sharing is dependent on the onlookers, the audience. If they like what they see, there are high chances that they’ll share it too. The reason? TikTok’s policy of keeping the content short and effective.
When a user shares a TikTok video, the receiver usually watches it because it’ll cost him/her 15–30 seconds. It all finally boils down to the quality of content and also the nature of it. Highly engaging content with a message that consists of impetus and clarity swiftly serves your purpose.
When you share content, you get a mixture of organic and referral traffic. But when your audience shares your work, you get a swarm of organic traffic that consists of your potential customers. So, set your priorities accordingly and foster content that fuels business growth.
Get the most out of TikTok marketing
The controversy around TikTok is often for the brainless content that the platform contains. Not shying away from that, it does have videos that are straight-up nonsensical.
Then again, is there a platform that is free of such material? All the social media giants have users and uploaders who post garbage now and then, and the only solution is to ban them. However, focussing only on the negatives and discounting the efforts and hard work of other content creators is just an opinion that is being treated as a fact.
TikTok is a growing platform with an ever-so-growing audience that practices remote work, and on the financial front, the application is pulling-in some of the biggest names in the industry. Even some eCommerce businesses are using TikTok to promote their products online.
Brands are actively organizing TikTok marketing campaigns, and the numbers are only bound to increase. According to ContentStudio, TikTok has amassed 800 million monthly active users, and the digits are still heading in the North direction. It is also the fastest mobile application to achieve this feat and a marketing strategy on TikTok is no more an experiment, but rather a necessity.
TikTok has an enormous user base, and different users imply different tastes. So, all you need to do is cook the perfect dish comprising all the flavors the audience is looking for, and your marketing campaign will do just fine.
Collaborating with influencers will increase reach, and securing brand endorsements will increase your brand’s authority and quickly establish legitimacy. The application offers some unique features and also appreciates novel content so you can come out of the virtual boundaries and post something meaningful and creative. The growth of business on TikTok is underrated, and you’ll understand that after you’re done with your TikTok marketing campaign.
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