What Is TikTok Marketing? Effective TikTok Marketing Strategies

TikTok has been topping the global rankings of the most downloaded and most visited apps. That makes it a gold mine for marketers who love creativity. In this article, The7 walks you through What Is TikTok Marketing? and the 5 most popular social media marketing trends on TikTok today.

What Is TikTok Marketing?

TikTok Marketing is advertising and promotion carried out through the TikTok social platform to market a business’s services, products or brand. TikTok marketing can include different tactics, such as creating organically viral content, TikTok Ads and Influencer Marketing.

Below are the factors that help businesses achieve their business goals through TikTok Marketing:

• Raise the popularity and awareness of your brand
• Build a community around your business
• Drive revenue growth for your services/products
• Receive feedback and suggestions from customers
• Offer customer care services and processes
• Advertise services/products to your target customers

Benefits of TikTok Marketing for Businesses

TikTok was built later than other platforms, yet it has spread trends powerfully and grown at an impressive pace worldwide. Here are the benefits of TikTok Marketing for businesses:

TikTok’s Rapid Growth

TikTok Marketing offers creative and distinctive features, which has earned the app a record number of users. At the beginning of 2018, the app attracted around 55 million users worldwide. By the end of 2018, that figure had jumped to 217 million, and it reached 507 million by the end of 2019. As of 2023, TikTok has more than 1.5 billion users.

According to the latest figures, TikTok is becoming increasingly popular with younger generations, including Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Every day, children spend about 23 minutes watching TikTok video clips, 62% more than on YouTube. TikTok is also regarded as the most successful Chinese technology company at attracting users around the world.

Impressive Revenue Figures to Be Proud Of

TikTok earns most of its income by helping businesses create video ads and displaying them. For this reason, TikTok Marketing offers businesses a variety of ad formats. Each format is said to bring TikTok an average profit of 150,000 USD per day.

In 2018, TikTok earned more than 3.5 million USD from e-commerce. According to the Hurun Research Institute in Shanghai, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, from December 2020 to mid-July 2021, saw the second-highest growth rate, reaching a value of more than 280 billion USD, an increase of 168%.

TikTok’s User Audience

TikTok targets young, modern customers. According to the latest figures, users aged 16 to 24 make up more than 40% of TikTok users. In addition, across all age groups, women outnumber men.

TikTok Marketing understands very well the habits and interests of its users in everyday life. That shows how well it understands the tastes of 21st-century youth. The platform lets people freely unleash their creativity and express their personality through the video clips they post. This psychological insight has helped TikTok win over young people.

Customer Behavior on TikTok

According to research results, users spend an average of more than 90 minutes per day on the TikTok platform. In addition, more than 90% of users open the app more than twice a day. Notably, despite the huge user base, most users only visit TikTok to watch rather than posting personal videos.

Building a Marketing Plan on TikTok

Get Familiar With the TikTok Platform

It’s a mistake to run advertising campaigns on TikTok the same way you would on other social platforms like Facebook or Instagram. TikTok is a different kind of social channel, because its algorithm decides which content to show based on user behavior.

So the first thing to do is explore the features already available on TikTok and study the effects, filters, songs and trends that are popular right now. Pay attention to how music is added, to Branded Hashtag Challenges and to other content that is going viral. You should also make good use of TikTok’s Duets feature.

The next step is to learn the details of TikTok’s algorithm. Understand how TikTok displays and ranks videos in the “For You” feed, because this gives you insight into users’ tastes and content preferences and helps you make suitable recommendations for your brand.

Define Your Target Audience

To reach a specific audience on TikTok, you first need to sketch out a profile and work out whether those users are likely to be interested in your brand. So identify your potential audience before you start producing content, in order to run an effective TikTok Marketing campaign:

• First, take the time to research which users care about your brand’s content on other social media, and compare that with TikTok. If your current target group isn’t on TikTok, you can consider smaller target groups with similar interests.
• Second, study what kind of content your target users engage with and like once you have drawn them in. From there, start developing content ideas for your business’s marketing strategy.

Analyze Your Competitors

Take the time to research whether your competitors are using TikTok, along with their content directions and strategies. Then roll out similar content of your own to compete with the competitors already there.

Being first will secure a competitive advantage in the market if your competitors aren’t on TikTok yet. However, you should still study and observe the activity of at least 3 to 5 similar brands on the app.

From there, analyze their strengths so you can learn from them and apply them in your own marketing strategies, and draw lessons from the weaknesses in their campaigns. In addition, if your competitors are already on TikTok, use the S.W.O.T model to identify their weaknesses, strengths, threats and opportunities.

Set Goals That Match Your Conversion Objectives

You shouldn’t treat TikTok as a purely entertainment medium if you’ve decided to do business on the platform. You need to set goals for your brand’s marketing tactics so that your marketing goals always stay tied to your business objectives.

Whatever goal you build your TikTok Marketing campaign around, whether it’s improving brand image, reaching new audiences, raising awareness or building connections around a service/product, supporting your business objectives remains the most important thing. Using the S.M.A.R.T model is an effective way to set goals for your TikTok marketing activities.

Here is the S.M.A.R.T model:

• Specific: Clear and well defined
• Measurable: Can be measured
• Achievable: Possible to reach
• Relevant: Connected to your objectives
• Timely: Done at the right time

Post Videos Consistently

Building a plan and sticking to it when posting content is the key to a successful communication strategy on TikTok. Activities like uploading new videos or going live (Livestream) all need to be planned. Plenty of tools, such as TikTok Scheduler, can help you get started with planning.

Track, Analyze and Evaluate Results

Another important step in TikTok Marketing is evaluating and analyzing how effective your strategy is. This is how you find out whether your strategy is succeeding. You should regularly check the progress of your activities and compare them with your goals.

If your marketing tactics aren’t delivering the results you expected, you need to review and adjust your plan, for example by changing the time you post videos or the type of content. With the research data from TikTok, you can also track your own workflow.

Also, just like other social channels such as Facebook or Instagram, TikTok provides Business accounts with data for analysis and research. So follow these steps to access TikTok Analytics:

• Step 1: Go to your profile and tap the “…” icon at the top right =>Click Creator tools

• Step 2: Select Analytics =>Find the metrics and explore the Overview section to measure your goals.

A/B Testing TikTok

There is no exact formula for creating a trending video on TikTok. However, you can leave some “breathing room” in your TikTok Marketing strategy to experiment, get creative and catch trends. If your campaign hasn’t succeeded yet, keep going and don’t be discouraged, because results will improve in the next test. If your brand suddenly goes viral, keep building similar content.

5 Effective Marketing Strategies on TikTok

KOLs and Influencers

Many brands today use Influencers or KOLs to promote and market on TikTok. This TikTok Marketing campaign helps businesses promote their services/products to more target audiences through highly influential people such as actors, singers or beauty bloggers.

TikTok Ads

TikTok advertising is also a popular marketing tool used by many businesses and individuals. Thanks to its wide reach and low cost, a brand’s services/products become known to many consumers through the Ads that appear when users open the app.

>>> Learn more: TikTok Advertising Services That Are Reputable and Effective in 2024

Personal TikTok

As on other social platforms, you can create a personal TikTok account for your business or for yourself. Create fun, funny and engaging video clips that attract plenty of followers, which makes it easy to reach them and promote your brand’s services/products to as many people as possible. This approach can deliver highly optimized results without costing much.

Brand Takeover

Brand Takeover is a TikTok Marketing campaign that shows your ad content to users every time they open the TikTok app, with ad clips lasting up to 5 seconds. If users click, they are directed to the brand’s destination page or landing page, making it easier to reach customers.

Hashtag Challenge

Hashtag Challenge is a form of advertising built around a trend, challenge or craze attached in the form of a hashtag. With this type of ad, all TikTok users can join the campaign, which helps businesses reach the largest number of customers.

Tips for Effective TikTok Marketing

Set Up TikTok for Business

First, you need to download the app from Google Play or the App Store to create a TikTok for Business account. A useful tip is to use your phone, because the desktop interface is harder to use. Once the app is downloaded, complete your user profile by following TikTok’s instructions.

If you want to build your brand or grow your product line with TikTok, the most important thing is to link your other social media accounts to your TikTok profile. This makes it easier for users to find and engage with your business’s brand and products. Setting up a complete profile with full information from the start will help TikTok verify you and distribute your services/products better.

Use Content Creation Tools

To create professional and creative video ads, you need to choose the right content creation tools. For people just starting out with TikTok Marketing tactics, picking the wrong tools can make creating video ads quite difficult. Here are a few tools that can support you on TikTok:

The CapCut App for Video Editing and Creation

If you’re interested in TikTok, you’ve surely heard of CapCut more than once. Easy-to-follow tutorials and a simple interface are among the tool’s strengths, making it easy to create unique and vivid visuals.

Canva, a Professional Video Editing and Photo Design App

Although still unfamiliar to many people, Canva is designed for both mobile and desktop versions, so you can easily use it to create more engaging videos. Three great features of Canva are effects, replacements and filters. Best of all, Canva also has another great feature: the ability to add graphics, text and video.

Read TikTok’s Copyright and Policies Carefully

Like other social apps, TikTok Marketing comes with its own policies. In particular, apps and social platforms related to music all have points that call for special attention on trademarks and copyright.

Trademark Issues

Trademarks are an especially important issue. If you use the images or logos of major brands without permission, TikTok will rate your channel poorly and treat you as an impostor. At best, TikTok will limit your channel’s engagement; at worst, you will be blocked entirely.

Copyright Issues

Compared with trademarks, music copyright has always been a thorny issue for online music platforms and music publishers. Many people believe that using or repeating songs many times in TikTok videos reduces engagement with the original songs and videos.

In practice, though, it isn’t affected much, because the singers themselves call on everyone to use their songs in TikTok videos. That means you can use songs that are already on the market, but don’t overdo it. Most importantly, they may only be used in short video clips under 1 minute.

Analyze Your Target Audience Carefully

The first step to making a video-based TikTok Marketing campaign highly effective is to take the time to research your target audience before creating content for your posts. Review and analyze channels on other social media platforms, or channels that make content similar to yours.

The customer group you’re targeting may not open TikTok often, but there may be secondary audience groups that directly influence this main group. For example, if your potential audience is young children, an effective TikTok Marketing campaign needs to focus on ages 25 to 35, who may be the family members or parents of your main customer group.

Push Your Videos to Trend

Choose the Right Posting Time

The time slot in which you post TikTok videos is very important because it affects how much attention you get from customers. According to recent research, the way to make TikTok videos trend is to post at the following golden times:

• Morning: 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. is when people wake up and tend to scroll TikTok a lot.
• Noon: 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. is when people take their lunch break, so they often have plenty of free time to use their phones.
• Evening: 7 p.m. to midnight is when people usually relax after a day of work and tend to look for apps and social channels that fit their entertainment needs.

Make the Most of Hashtags

In every TikTok Marketing campaign, hashtags are an indispensable element. Setting up hashtags helps your videos improve visibility and get more views and engagement. However, don’t overuse hashtags. To increase popularity and get results for your video, choose hashtags that fit the video’s content.

Use Trending Music

Using trending music is a way to help your videos reach more customers more easily. At any given time, certain songs are widely searched for and popular, so if you use those clips, your videos are more likely to trend.

Build a Quality Channel Instead of Reposting

The algorithm on TikTok Marketing always prioritizes videos with creative and fresh content. So instead of reposting other people’s videos, building your own channel will deliver better results and achieve your goals more sustainably. In addition, investing brainpower in the content creation process also shows your business’s professionalism and commitment. This builds a good impression and trust with potential customers.

Roll Out TikTok Ads

TikTok is expected to keep growing even more strongly in the future. It will be a perfect app and space for promoting and marketing services/products. All ad content is edited by content creators before being uploaded to TikTok, so the videos feel as relatable and authentic as possible.

In addition, TikTok is working to blur the line between advertising and entertainment. This makes watching ads still feel very enjoyable and comfortable for users. It shows that the potential for advertising brands’ services/products on this platform is huge.

Today, TikTok Marketing is a new marketing trend in an era of rapid technological progress. With the information shared above by The7, we hope that applying this promotional campaign will bring brands many benefits now and in the future.

>>>> You can also check out more articles on the same topic:

• What Is TikTok? The Most Effective Marketing Tool of 2024
• What Are TikTok Ads? Tips for Running Effective TikTok Ads in 2024
• How to Improve the Performance of Branded Hashtag Challenge Ads