With over 1 billion active users, TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform today. The former Musical.ly was taken over by ByteDance in 2016, renamed TikTok to become the world’s most downloaded app in 2021. That said, the app’s intuitive algorithm has become the talk amongst marketers who work relentlessly to outperform others in social media marketing.
TikTok marketing has, till date, helped several businesses reach their target audiences and expand their markets beyond bounds. With exponential growth rates, TikTok offers a massive and dynamic audience, anywhere between 10 to 60 years of age, offering remarkable marketing opportunities for brands and businesses.
How to Promote your Business Through TikTok Marketing?
Participate in Trending Content
If you’re new to the camp and don’t know where to begin your content game from, the easiest way is to start from the TikTok Discovery page. This is the best place to find trending content and hashtags. Start typing the keyword relevant to your niche in the search bar, and TikTok will automatically suggest related trending hashtags. Once you have the content idea bucket full, begin creating videos based on one of these trending hashtags, and the TikTok algorithm will make sure relevant users discover your content. This is step number one towards building your brand’s presence on TikTok.
Create Trending Hashtags Challenges
Creating trending hashtag challenges is the most promising marketing gimmick to establish your brand’s authentic self. Brands consider these challenges as significant pillars of TikTok marketing as they trend based on the relevancy of the product or service being promoted. Remember the famous #bigmactiktok challenge started by McDonald’s, which amassed millions of views? This hashtag challenge gave McDonald’s terrific engagement on the company’s official social media handles and provided a significant boost to the brand globally. What is even more interesting is that branding and promotion through TikTok is a highly effective medium to reach out to the maximum people with the least investment. Just get a celebrity or influencer on your media kit and see these hashtag challenges give a significant push to your brand’s message.
Participate in Cross-Promote Challenges
Trending hashtag challenges are an incredible way for brands to reach millions of potential users. And once you’ve reached the pinnacle of a hyper-active TikTok account with thousands of followers and millions of likes, you’re all set to go viral. A TikTok account with viral posts presents a promising opportunity to cross-promote challenges on your other social media handles. You can leverage this opportunity to invite your followers on different platforms to be a part of your TikTok community and see your brand grow beyond horizons.
Run In-Feed Native Ads
Just as good as the ads running through Instagram stories in full-screen mode, TikTok in-feed native ads are an effective marketing tactic for brands promoting on TikTok. You can add your website links therein and showcase the ‘Order Now’ buttons on the ad to divert the viewer directly to your landing page. Although these are skippable ads, there is still a lot of room for creativity to keep the viewer hooked until the end of the ad. You can then trace the important ad analytics to see how it’s performing through metrics such as the number of impressions, click-through rates, total views, and video watch time. A generic In-feed native ad on TikTok is between 5 and 15 seconds long vertical format that shows up on the ‘For You’ page and supports several call-to-actions such as site visits and app downloads.
Run Hashtag Challenge Ads
You might also want to run banner ads that feature a trending hashtag challenge on TikTok. You can put up this banner ad on the discover page and take the user to instructions for participating in the hashtag challenge. Like all other ads, these ads can also be analyzed for important analytics such as number of views, engagements, and click-through rates to see how your ad’s performing in the market.
Feature Brand Takeover Ads
TikTok marketing tools and features are pretty straightforward. You can simply put-up product images, short video clips, and GIFs to showcase your brand’s story and attract your target audience. This is the purest form of marketing on TikTok. You can make these ads category exclusive or run them as a general brand-level promotion. The best part is that these 3-5 second video ads appear as soon as someone opens the app, so there are maximum chances of visibility.
Encourage User Participation
While all the fun, TikTok marketing is sheer hard work and takes a lot of creativity to create engaging content that resonates well with your target audience. The level of engagement with your marketing tactics elicits your marketing success on TikTok. This is where user-generated content comes in. User participation is genuinely the most accessible and engaging mode of brand promotion on TikTok. The catch is to encourage your users to share content featuring your brand and tag you along. So, when you search #nike on TikTok, you are bombarded with unlimited user-generated content featuring Nike shoes – be it wearing them, considering a purchase, or even painting them. This is what we call free advertisement for the brand.
Collaborate with TikTok Influencers
Influencer marketing on TikTok is perhaps the most widely sought and optimal marketing strategy for creating branded content. A whopping 86% of marketers have leveraged influencer marketing to raise brand awareness and generate leads for their brands. Capitalizing upon this opportunity, TikTok has created a $1 billion Creator Fund in 2020 intending to nurture influencers. Under this program, the influencers with up to 100,000 video views over a month are deemed eligible for rewards. The ultimate objective is to build an army of TikTok influencers that can thrive through brand collaborations, sponsorships, and partnerships. So, you can hook up with a few relevant influencers to create enticing campaigns that resonate both with your brand values and the influencer’s follower base. Get them to talk about your product, post about your brand in their video’s description, or drop a link to your website therein.
Go Live Every Now and Then
Like all other social media platforms, it is crucial to post promotional content frequently on TikTok. Better yet, use the recommended times for posting on TikTok to generate the most optimal results. Even so, go live on TikTok consistently and engage with your target audience in real-time. The best time to go live is the same time that your followers are the most active on TikTok. With TikTok’s unmatched reach and penetration, live video streaming on this platform offers significant promotional opportunities for marketers. That said, there’s a lot you can explore in your live broadcasts on TikTok:
- Show Behind-the-Scene (BTS) coverage of your brand and branded events
- Showcase your products and do product launches
- Broadcast how-to-demos about using your products
- Play interactive games with your followers in real-time
- Conduct Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions with your followers
- Interview important, relevant people
It is advised you use a professional live streaming service such as OneStream Live to live stream both pre-recorded and real-time videos on TikTok and multistream the same on other social media platforms simultaneously to make the best out of your promotional efforts.
Curtain-Raiser
TikTok offers a goldmine of opportunities for marketers. If you’ve already not embraced the realms of TikTok marketing, now is the time to become one of the earliest adopters. Don’t underestimate the supremacy of the short 15-seconds (combined up to 60 seconds) videos. Crafted carefully, these short videos have the power to transform your marketing game to grow your brand to heights previously unknown.
Author Bio:
Saba Mohsin is the Digital Content Writer at OneStream Live. She is a progressive researcher about ground-breaking technologies with a keen hindsight on how these can be leveraged for digital success.