Despite being one of the youngest networks in the social media industry, TikTok has never stopped amazing its audience and brands. With the latest features rolled out, the platform offers great scope for content creators and brands to make the most of it, and as a result, present compelling content to keep followers engaged.
Brands like Red Bull, Kroger, Levi’s, Elf Cosmetics, Chipotle, HP, Gymshark, NBA, Guess, and many more, are leveraging this platform to reach out to younger audiences. More than 60 percent of TikTok users fall in the age bracket of 16 – 25 years, and over 689 million users are active on this platform every month. All these facts clearly point out that irrespective of the industry in question, TikTok is a great place to gain brand visibility, engage with the audience and strengthen the brand’s reach.
In this blog, we’ll discuss top strategies that successful businesses are using to establish and strengthen their brand presence on TikTok, and discover how they’re amplifying their brand reach among a younger audience.
There’s a lot that goes into developing a TikTok strategy for brands that you should know about!
Branding Strategies To Grow Your Business On TikTok
1. Pick a niche
TikTok is a content-rich social media app. If you’re wanting to use this platform to promote your brand initiatives and products, you need to strategize and develop content that captures audience attention. But, the first step to creating great content is identifying a niche where you have experience and share your knowledge. A great way to get content ideas is to check what your competitors are doing and try to out beat them. Also, you need to check how your audience is responding to your content and create content accordingly.
2. Create viral content
Storytelling is the key to creating viral content on TikTok, and this platform offers abundant features to accomplish this goal. Text overlay is one such feature that helps you relay stories to your audience, arrests their attention, and stops them from scrolling to other videos. Plus, it helps you cater to audiences with special needs, including ones with speech & hearing impairments. Another strategy paramount to successful TikTok branding is the number of posts on the platform. Posting once a day is great, but posting three to four times daily helps you stay on your audience’s mind and get the brand visibility that you’re looking for.
3. Trend with TikTok effects
Millions of videos are uploaded every single day on TikTok, and if you have to stand out from the crowd, you need to do something different. TikTok offers a range of visual effects and sounds that can help you create unique content, unlike any other platform. Find various options in the ‘Effects’ tab to create different types of content with diverse effects and increase your views dramatically.
Still skeptical about TikTok’s popularity? Here are some mind-blowing TikTok statistics that might help change your mind!
4. Increase views with TikTok duets
TikTok duets allow you to feature an existing video and reply to the contents in video side by side on the same screen. Identify videos or creators that allow duets, check if they align with your content strategy, and create an appropriate and engaging reply to that video. When done well, duets can transform into viral trends and duet chains across the platform that helps you get more views for your videos. You can create duets alongside brands, friends, influencers, or even yourself as long as the video is pre-existing on TikTok.
5. Get started with engagement hacking
All social networks encourage massive user engagement, so does TikTok. Also, followers engage more often with your posts when you like and reply to their comments and queries on TikTok. So, in addition to focusing on creating content, you also need to reply to your followers and address their concerns regarding your products promptly. Also, leave meaningful comments on the videos for those you follow as it also helps you get noticed by more audiences.
6. Use TikTok hashtag framework
Being a hashtag-rich platform, TikTok makes it easy for users to find the content they’re interested in, in the easiest way possible. You can find trending hashtags and those that are relevant to your niche by checking for them in the ‘Discover’ tab and you can find a list of videos with the view count, in a single place. For instance, if you’re looking for dance videos, type ‘dance’ in the ‘Discover’ search bar and you will see various hashtags, the respective view count, and videos associated with them as well. Including hashtags in your content helps you gain more followers, increase your content reach, and identify competition easily.
Influencers on TikTok have aced the hashtag game and you can take a page from their book!
7. Launch compelling TikTok competitions
Hosting a hashtag challenge is a fun and interactive way to advertise your brand on TikTok. Most brands that have made it big on TikTok including Chipotle, Kroger, and Target leveraged hashtag challenges to create interest in their audiences. Not only does this strategy help you amplify your brand awareness but also bolsters your engagement manifold. Chipotle’s #boorito campaign for Halloween and Kroger’s #TransformUrDorm made audiences fall in love with the brand and supercharge their sales.
8. Get rapid growth with TikTok influencers
TikTok influencers are well-known for the intriguing videos they create for their audiences. Collaborating with influencers on TikTok not only helps you amplify your brand awareness but also saves you the time you would personally invest in through promotions. Both product-based and service-based businesses can opt for this approach as it maximizes their audience reach to GenZ and Millenials. If your marketing budget permits, leverage the power of TikTok influencer marketing to power up your sales and revenue line.
There are many brands that aced TikTok, take a look at how they went about it!
9. Advertise your brand on TikTok
Compared to other social media platforms, TikTok is relatively new to advertising. Its unique advertising options opened up an avenue of opportunities for businesses around the world to take advantage of its massive user base. This social platform offers the following types of advertising models that businesses can benefit from:
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Native in-feed ads: They work just like any other traditional ad. From adding a link to your landing page or website to ‘Order now’ buttons and more, these ad formats are skippable and can be used in many different ways.
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Hashtag challenge ads: If you’re looking for a targeted audience base, hashtag challenge ads are something that you can’t ignore. When you use this option, your target audience will find a banner ad that will lead them to a new page that has all the instructions related to your hashtag challenge when clicked upon. This is a great way to create branded user-generated content on TikTok.
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Brand ads: One of the most efficient ways to drive website traffic, brand ads use a mix of content like videos, GIFs, and images that are linked to a landing page or a hashtag challenge.
TikTok allows two types of targeted advertising:
- Interest targeting allows you to select audiences based on their preferences and showcase your ads to them. These ads work just like Facebook ads.
- Behavioral targeting allows you to target specific audience groups based on their behavior in TikTok in the last one or two weeks.
10. Run campaign in collaboration with other creators
All businesses want to expand their reach to their target audience. Partnering with other content creators who are in the same line of business on TikTok helps you accomplish this goal quickly. For instance, if you’re running a cosmetic brand, finding a makeup content creator who has a great following on TikTok, striking a deal, and collaborating with that TikTok brand is a great way to speed up your marketing efforts.
11. Be quick on trends
From popular challenges, songs, video effects to hashtags, TikTok is a place that is led by trends. But how can you identify these trends in this humongous video library? Hashtags are the answer! Identify trending hashtags and how they can align with your business marketing strategy and use them accordingly.
12. Leverage TikTok shoutouts
If you’ve just started your TikTok journey or you’ve been here for quite some time but are still unable to gain proper traction, you can leverage shoutouts. Identify TikToker’s who offer shoutout services and allow them to promote your content and TikTok account to their followers. But before you approach them ensure that they have massive followings and great user engagement. Doing this will help you gain even more followers, increase your brand awareness and brand visibility.
13. Stay authentic and have fun
Unlike Instagram that requires your pictures and videos to be refined, TikTok is not all about posting polished content. You don’t have to be worried about creating and posting crystal clear videos but ensure that your personality shines through your content. Practicing this ensures that you stay authentic, have fun, and connect with your followers better.
14. Maximize the social media network effect
Being present on TikTok is great, but you can also leverage other social platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook to promote your TikTok content. Cross-promoting your TikTok content helps you increase your follower base gradually, establishes your brand credibility, and helps you maintain brand consistency across all platforms.
15. Evaluate your campaign performance
Running TikTok campaigns is great, but tracking your posts and evaluating their performance is equally important. By using an analytics tool you identify what works the best for your brand and identify loopholes you will have to fix to ensure that your business is achieving the set marketing goals on TikTok. Basing your business decisions on this data that you retrieve from evaluating your performance will help you outperform your previous campaigns.
To get access to analytics on TikTok, you first need to switch to a ‘Pro’ account that is available for you at zero cost. Once you do it, you will gain access to the analytics dashboard where you can view your audience demographics, average watch time, total views, total play time, traffic sources, and more. With this data, you can improve your content strategy, identify when your users are active the most, and grow your influence.
If you want to tap into the next generation and build your brand for the future, now is the time to get started with TikTok marketing. Apply these strategies and study the platform consistently to understand the latest trends to provide the best content to your followers and outperform your competitors.
You can always use TikTok for Business, which has a midas touch and works wonders for any business.
Though we’ve equipped you with insider information on how to grow your brand on TikTok, you might still be struggling to get started or worried about stunted growth. We are more than happy to help! AtisfyReach, our AI-based platform, helps brands establish a robust online presence and provides tailored influencer marketing solutions to skyrocket their growth.
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