TikTok is one of the newest and trendiest apps that’s on the market today. With more than a billion users to be found within the website and a fairly young audience of anyone between the ages of 13 to 60, it really is a marketing no-brainer. If your business does not have an account, you are missing out on serious untapped potential.
Many users consider the app to be quite addicting. This is because of its algorithm.
TikTok serves up the next video in an individualized queue. The automated selection aligns with previous activity on the app. This includes accounts followed, videos liked, and how many times a user has watched a certain video.
Companies that use TikTok are limited to the same constraints as any other user. Videos only have the potential to last 9-15 seconds for advertisements and 15-60 seconds for normal videos.
Positively, advertisers can capture the attention of a user without having to compete with multiple other advertisements, as they do on a webpage. Further, TikTok places the ads right between their regular viewing content. They are more likely to not even notice what they are watching is an advertisement until it is finished. This helps maintain their attention, leading to an effective advertisement approach.
But with this addictive app with amazing potential to be an effective advertising tool, there are multiple avenues for using TikTok for business as an effective marketing tool.
Original Content
Creating an original video is a great way for a business to market through the platform.
TikTok includes different features for using the app itself to create videos, edit them, and add different filters or music to them to make them stand out. The app even makes it easy to publish straight from filming onto your account’s page. It has different avenues for which a company can get its content to the target audience. Additionally, there are a lot of third-party TikTok editor apps and tools that can be used to increase the quality and creativity of each post.
Depending on the nature of the brand, they can simply add different original videos throughout their homepage to draw interest.
Creative guests or genuinely funny and entertaining content can sometimes garner enough attention to help bring about more brand recognition and in itself, in combination with other techniques, can help bring about a successful marketing strategy.
Utilizing Virality
Viral hashtags have a way of helping get a video to show up on the home page of TikTok users.
The “For You” page uses the TikTok algorithm to match videos. These may or may not be created by other users they follow. The intention is to help a user find a video they will like.
Creating an original hashtag that has a business’s name in the hashtag can also be another strategy to use this virality as a marketing tool.
Many users will create a sound and put their specific username or artist name in it. Others can use this in their own videos as well. As a marketing tool, posting a sound that can be used repeatedly can be an even more effective marketing tool than a hashtag. Hashtags can sometimes be ignored when there are multiple hashtags listed in a description.
Sharing TikToks to their other social media pages can be a way of gathering more attention to the business, too.
Using Monetized Advertising
A business also has the option to move beyond trying to market its business for free. They can use the monetized advertising feature of the app to get more eyeballs on their products or services.
Every day, TikTok hosts a brand takeover. Branded ads display on a user’s “For You” page. They see them as soon as they launch the app. Users can skip these ads after a few seconds of playtime. However, it ensures at least a partial ad viewing and gets to the largest audience of any other video advertisement on the app.
The next form of video advertisement through the app is native ads. These play between normal user content. They show up in both feeds on the “For You” page and the feed of people they follow. Users can scroll through these ads, which only last for 9-15 seconds.
On the “Discover” page, users can find different hashtags and other users. Some of the hashtags they come across are another form of sponsored content. Businesses and brands can pay to sponsor a hashtag challenge and even a banner on the “Discover” page.
Hashtag challenges often go viral. Users click on them and receive details of the challenge. However, due to the virality of these hashtag challenges, content users will include the sponsored hashtags in videos that are completely outside the realm of the challenge as well to take advantage of the TikTok algorithm and land a spot on other “For You” pages. This can be an effective tool as well for businesses because there are that many more users publicizing your brand.
Influencers
Businesses can also hire different famous TikTok influencers to have a working relationship with the brand.
That might be brand incorporation as deemed by the company or by the influencer’s choice. This may be through adding a link in their bio to the company. They might talk about a product or service. Perhaps they offer a discount on one of their videos or post about a sponsored video in the description.
Influencers often price based on their following. However, using an influencer can also help you target a specific demographic. You can do this by utilizing the demographic data of the influencer’s followers.
TikTok for business is not the only social media app where influencers can be a key marketing strategy. However, it could be the more effective influencer option, depending on the focus your business has.
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