Although it didn’t happen overnight, the rise of TikTok took many marketers by surprise. With an estimated 900.7 million monthly users worldwide by 2024, the video-sharing app is currently the third-largest social network after Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. But in terms of time spent on social platforms, TikTok still holds the attention of Gen X and millennials, earning more than 45 minutes of their day on the app.
If your brand is looking to reach adults under 45 on social, it may be time to beef up your TikTok growth strategy. We’ve got some tips to help you keep up with the trends, collaborate with influencers, engage with your target audience, and optimize your videos to get seen and drive viewers to take action.
Check out these ideas to help you harness the power of TikTok marketing.
Design your TikTok strategy 2023
By definition, a strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve your overall aim. So you’ll need to define your goals for content marketing long before you start posting on TikTok.
Set your goals
Start by confirming your brand’s goals for TikTok. Are you trying to boost brand awareness or loyalty? Are you hoping to use the platform for polls to gather information for product development? Would you like tutorials to drive traffic to your e-commerce site? Are you aiming for app downloads, case studies, or trials?
You’ll be using metrics and key performance indicators to measure your content’s performance, so ensure they align with the goals you’ve set to determine if you’ve reached, surpassed, or fallen short in your efforts.
Confirm your brand identity
Ensure that everyone on your team understands what your brand is all about — from its values to its voice and style — long before you start determining the kind of content you want to create and share. Why reiterate what your brand stands for and how it wants to be perceived on TikTok?
It only takes one whiff of inauthentic content or performative posts to lose viewers (and possibly followers).
Not sure how a brand identity translates on social? Consider these general TikTok marketing examples and how they might showcase your brand’s values:
- Working with LGBTQ+ or BIPOC influencers
- Creating videos in languages other than English
- Featuring employees in unscripted videos about the company
- Allowing an influencer to take over your brand’s socials for a day
- Sharing unscripted reviews from real customers
- Speaking up on important social justice matters
- Creating humorous videos that mock “old-school” traditions or approaches
- Parody videos that poke fun at your industry
Create a content calendar
Knowing what days and times to post will require some research into your target audience, but you can start filling in your content calendar’s topics and types to get a visual of how the next month or quarter might look.
Brainstorm on a variety of types of content that might engage viewers, from unboxing videos and dance challenges to video tutorials and contests to gather user-generated content. Be sure to include relevant keywords, five or six branded, niche, and trending hashtags, and a call to action to drive viewers to follow the journey your brand sends them on.
Develop your content assets
Using your content calendar as an outline for the type, topic, and timing of your pieces, your team can begin creating marketing assets that you’ll have at the ready. A few considerations:
- Your videos should be shot vertically to optimize them for smartphone viewing.
- Keep your videos short. Nearly half of all TikTok users say videos more than a minute long were “stressful,” and one-third watched videos online at double speed.
- Boost engagement by including captions, hashtags, filters, and stickers.
- Incorporate TikTok’s trending songs and sounds once in a while. By using the business option on your profile, your brand will automatically be limited to licensed music that you have permission to use.
- Search-optimize your videos for TikTok by using hashtags and keywords in your caption, description, and headlines.
- Generally, for every post promoting your brand, you should share three pieces of non-promotional content. These non-promotional videos might be funny, entertaining, awe-inspiring, or helpful in ways that don’t appear to directly tie to pushing your brand.
Partner with influencers
Collaborating with the right content creators can help your brand reach new audiences, boost its perceived authenticity, build loyalty, gain followers, and drive viewers to take action.
As you’re looking for influencers to help drive TikTok growth in 2023 and beyond for your brand, focus on their niche, not the number of followers. Celebrity and mega influencers might have tons of fans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have their followers’ trust or attention. In addition, it’s generally true that the more popular the influencer, the more they’ll charge for brand collabs.
Learning from your TikTok efforts
Did your TikTok growth strategy pay off? The only way you’ll know is by looking at the data.
Your analytics will do more than tell you if your efforts were productive in terms of gaining followers, boosting awareness, and reaching your target audience. The data you gather about what types of content performed best, which calls to action drove traffic to your intended destination, and which types of content led to conversions.
Your brand may also be able to form insights from the data you’ve collected regarding new avenues to pursue product selection and development, feedback for customer service, potential segmented opportunities to retarget your marketing efforts, and ways to shorten the sales cycle.
Use these tips for guidance as you begin planning, implementing, and measuring the results of your TikTok growth strategy. It’s a platform that’s ripe for the picking if you’re looking to reach younger audiences who value humor, diversity, equity, and transparency. If your brand is ready for the challenge, you may just find TikTok to be your new favorite marketing tool.
Influencers:
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Marketers:
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IZEA MANAGED SERVICES
Strategy and execution from the company that launched the industry.
IZEA MANAGED SERVICES
Strategy and execution from the company that launched the industry.
IZEA MANAGED SERVICES
Strategy and execution from the company that launched the industry.
IZEA MANAGED SERVICES
Strategy and execution from the company that launched the industry.
