December 27, 2021
Last update
12.27.2021
10 MIN.
With over 600 million active users, TikTok is a great channel for brands to connect with their audience. The question now is - how can brands excel on TikTok?
Marvellous
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By now, we’ve all seen the power of TikTok. From viral branded campaigns to musicians rising to stardom on the short videos platform.
And with over 600 million active users, TikTok is a great channel for brands to connect with their target audience.
The question now is - how can brands excel on TikTok?
In this guide, we break down how brands can use TikTok to boost their brand awareness, increase revenue, and the growth tips to help build an engaged audience.
Let's get started.
When using any social media channel as a brand, it's important that you have goals that you want to achieve. So before you invest your money and time on marketing your brand on TikTok, you need to decide what you want to achieve.
The main goals brands can achieve by using TikTok include:
The key is to select goals that best meet your business needs and regularly monitor them. Setting targeted goals ensures that you develop your TikTok strategy with a clear direction. Taking the time to identify your goals will also make it easy for you and your team to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.
Your profile is the first place users will check out when interacting with your brand on TikTok. So it's important that your profile makes a good impression.
The first step to optimizing your profile is switching to a TikTok business account. The business account is optimized to help promote brands on TikTok. It is also different from the default creator profile that you get when you open a new TikTok account.
The business account is specifically designed to promote brands through useful features like:
So if as a brand you are serious about marketing your brand on TikTok, the business account is the way to go.
The next step will be to create an awesome TikTok bio. Here are some tips you can follow:
In simple words, tell visitors to your bio what your brand does. If you have a good content strategy, people will already have an idea of what your brand does from your videos.
But it's not a good idea to solely depend on your videos. What if you post a video that is related to your brand’s culture, but not related to the product or service you offer. Visitors that come across your videos without prior knowledge of your brand need to have an easy way to learn what your brand does.
Here is an example from Vessi:
Vessi’s bio informs visitors that they make waterproof shoes. They even make their bio more interesting with the tagline “CEO of Dry Socks”.
Using emojis in your TikTok bio helps add some personality to your brand. It also allows you to showcase your brand’s products or services without using up the character limit. For instance, if you sell suitcases, you can include a suitcase emoji (👝)
You can also use an emoji to tell people what action to take next. If you want them to follow you, you can use the finger-pointing emoji to direct them to the follow button. You can also use emojis to direct viewers to the link in your bio.
You should always include a call-to-action in your bio. It directs users on what steps to take after viewing your profile. For instance, you can use a CTA to direct your followers to shop from your ecommerce store.
On your business TikTok account, you can add a link to your bio to direct traffic off the platform. You can either include a single link or use a link in bio service to promote multiple links. So with this service, you can include links to your blog, e-commerce store, affiliate links, and other social media sites.
Use a profile picture that people can immediately recognize when they visit your profile. For most brands, the best images to use will be your logo, logomark, or mascot.
TikTok’s algorithm studies the activities of each user and customizes their timeline to make sure they see content they will most likely enjoy. The algorithm is very efficient at showing content that is relevant to each user’s interest.
On the users ‘For You’ page, they see content from videos and accounts they regularly interact with. So if you want to regularly show up on your audience’s ‘For You’ page, post consistently as this will give them more chances to interact with your contact. The more users interact with your videos, the more you show up on their timelines.
One way to make it easy to post consistently is by scheduling your posts. Using a schedule also makes it easy to find the best post times. With a little experimentation, you will be able to find the optimal time to reach your target audience. TikTok also offers a video scheduler that allows you to schedule your videos up to 10 days in advance.
Hashtags play a huge role in boosting discoverability on TikTok. In fact, TikTok’s Discover tab is organized by the popular and trending hashtags on the platform.
The hashtags are used by TikTok to organize content and help users easily search for content on the platform. If you add a hashtag to your video, your video will be organized under that hashtag. So when people search for that hashtag on TikTok, your video will be among the results that pop up.
There are even some articles online that say using certain hashtags like #foryou, #foryoupage, and #fyp can boost your chances of showing up on the For You page. While there is no confirmation from TikTok about this, we know that using hashtags in your videos is one of the best ways to get your content in front of your target audience.
Branded hashtag challenges are a great way to boost brand awareness and generate new leads on TikTok.
One of the most popular hashtag challenge on TikTok was Guess’ #InMyDenin challenge. Guess used the hashtag challenge to promote their Fall’18 Denim Fit collection. The challenge encouraged TikTokers to show off their style while wearing Guess denim.
During the campaign period, the campaign generated 5.5k user-generated videos and 10.5M video videos. Guess saw their engagement rate increase by 14.3% and had over 12k new followers on TikTok.
TikTok is a social platform first of all. So as a brand, it’s important that you socialize with your audience. Don’t just use TikTok to advertise your product or service. Take your time to interact with your audience. When your audience leaves an interesting comment on your post, respond to it. This is a good way to build a strong community on TikTok.
An example of a brand that nails interacting with their audience is Vessi. They respond to almost every comment on their videos.
Your audience is most likely to support your brand when they see that you genuinely care about them and their opinions. In fact, your audience expects you to respond to their comments on social media. A survey from Clutch showed that 83 percent of customers expect brands to respond to their comments on social media within a day or less.
In your posts, you can also use your captions to interact with your community. Use your posts captions to ask questions. You can even ask them to leave their thoughts about your video in the comments. This simple action can help boost engagement.
Including UGC in your content is another great way to engage with your community. When your audience sees content created by other fans, they will be more inspired to engage with you. There are even stats to support this. Research from Comscore shows that including user generated content in your social strategy can increase engagement by 28%.
One of the best ways to curate UGC is by encouraging your followers to share videos of their experiences with your brand. Just remember to ask for their permission before posting their videos on your TikTok account.
Going live on TikTok is a great way to engage with your audience in real time. It also gives brands a chance to share more of themselves through a longer-form video.
Here are few ideas you can use to while on a TikTok live:
Note: Unlike other social media platforms, there are some requirements you will have to meet to use the live feature on TikTok.
First, you will need to have 1,000 followers before the live broadcast option will be available. As soon as you reach this number, it might take a few days before it shows up. So don’t worry if the feature does not appear immediately.
Secondly, there is an age limit for starting the live session in TikTok. You will have to be 16 and above to start a live session. And you can only receive virtual gifts if you are 18 and above.
Hosting a giveaway is one of the best ways to organically grow your TikTok account. If there is something that customers love more than a good sale or discount, it’s a chance to win free stuff.
A properly executed giveaway campaign will also help boost your brand’s awareness and engagement. Beyond asking your audience to follow your account for a chance to win freebies, include additional requirements like sharing the post to a friend, liking the post, and commenting. These additional actions increase the discoverability of the post advertising the giveaway. The more people that see it, the more engagement you will receive.
Choosing your prize: When selecting the prize to give winners, avoid using generic prizes like an iPhone 12 or $500 in Amazon vouchers. By giving away generic prizes, you might attract people that are not your target audience. Random people will participate for a chance to win and forget about your brand once the campaign is over. Instead, choose prizes that your audience will love; prizes that are related to your brand and product.
Giveaway details: There is a 150 word character limit on TikTok video descriptions. So you can’t use it to properly explain the giveaway details. The good news is that TikTok videos can last up to 3 minutes now. So you have enough time to explain the giveaway details in the video.
Here are some of the information you should include:
TikTok has a ‘Playlist’ feature that enables TikTokers to group their videos into themed collections.
In the example above shared by social media expert Matt Navara, we can see that the feature allows users to create a dedicated collection of video clips. You can name the video clips whatever you wish and display it on your profile.
Using the feature is also straightforward. Tap on ‘Sort videos into playlists’ above the videos on your profile, name your playlists and add your videos to it. Or you can select the video you want to add to the playlist, tap the share icon at the bottom of the screen, tap ‘Add to playlist’, then ‘Create a playlist’. After saving it, Visitors to your profile will be able to see the playlists.
The playlist option gives brands an opportunity to create longer TikTok content and also boost engagement on videos. You can use the playlist to share product tutorials. For instance, you can create a playlist sequence based on how people will use your products with each clip continuing with the next. Not only will this feature help you build a stronger connection with your audience, it will keep people on your profile longer.
Note that the Playlist option is not available yet for all creators. TikTok is gradually rolling it out to all users.
TikTok recently rolled out a Q&A feature on all business accounts. The feature allows viewers to ask questions through your profile, comments, or during your live videos. You can then decide to answer the questions sent to your profile or comment using a video or text. These features are another great way brands can engage with their audience.
Here is how you turn on the Q&A feature:
First, click on the three dots at the left top corner of the screen.
Click on Creator tools
Select Q&A on the next page and tap on “Turn on Q&A”
After you turn on Q&A, a prompt will show up on your profile just below your videos.
Collaborating with influencers is a great way to promote your brand to a wider audience. The key is to work with influencers that are relevant to your brand and industry.
Don't partner with an influencer just because they have a huge following. Yes, you will get a lot of views. But these views will not bring you any business because the viewers are not interested in what you have to offer.
For instance, a brand that sells tech-related products should partner with a tech influencer. Partnering with an influencer in the fashion industry will now help the brand reach its campaign goals.
To make it easy for brands to connect with relevant influencers, TikTok created the Creator Marketplace.
On the Creator Marketplace, brands can search and connect with over 1,000 influencers. You can search for influencers based on factors like follower count, location, topics they post, audience demographics, etc.
The final but one of the most important TikTok for brands tips we can give you is to regularly track your TikTok analytics. If you want to know if your TikTok marketing strategy is working or not, you need to monitor how your content performs.
On the TikTok Business account you get access to a ton of analytics data that you can use in improving your TikTok performance. And if you're looking for a neat dashboard where you can visualize all your social analytics in one place (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok), Iconosquare might be the better option for you. Try out the 14-day trial without ever entering your card details until you're ready to commit!
Regardless of your business goals, TikTok is a great platform to help your brand reach millions of people. The trick is to ensure that you consistently post content that your target audience will enjoy.
Building a TikTok account for a brand is not simple, but the tips in this article will help you get started.
Which of these tips will you implement in your strategy?
Will you host a giveaway or more Live videos?
Hi! I'm Marvellous, huge fan of Iconosquare as a product, and determined to help experienced social media marketers thrive in the various aspects of their career.
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