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TikTok Marketing Strategy for 2022 to Grow your Brand

Written by
Erin Lawlor
Brand Amplification Manager
Friday, May 26, 2023
Friday, May 26, 2023

TikTok is no longer limited to Gen-Z or dance challenges. We see many brands benefiting from using TikTok effectively as part of their social media marketing strategies to get in front of their audience and advertise their products.

TikTok marketing is using the TikTok social media platform to promote a brand, product, or service. The addictive social media channel is an excellent way to increase brand awareness, build engaged communities, gather informative customer feedback, provide customer service, and advertise products/services to targeted audiences and niches.

In this blog, our brand amplification experts will go over how to set up a business TikTok account, how to define your target audience, how to carry out a social media competitor analysis, social media SMART goals examples, and how to create high-quality relevant content for your brand.

Setting up a Business TikTok Account.

How to create a TikTok business account?

  • Go to your profile page, and open ‘Settings and Privacy.’
  • Tap ‘Manage Account’, and under ‘Account Control’ click ‘switch to Business Account’.
  • Lastly, choose the category that suits your account and from there you will be able to add a website and email to your TikTok business profile.

Now that you’ve set up a business TikTok account, you will be able to add more information to your profile (such as email or website) and access real-time metrics and audience insights.

Scroll and Scroll and Scroll…

Before we dive in on the TikTok platform best practices and create high-value content, you need to get familiar with the social media platform interface, experience and understand its features and the user's behaviours. Spend time on the platform and note down what songs, filters and features are trending.

By doing this, you will be able to start thinking of how you can incorporate these trends into your content to achieve your goals.

Some people type in "trending" in the search bar on TikTok and see what comes up, but it’s not very accurate as it will predict what is trending for you and your aesthetic and algorithm.

Instead, we recommend following profiles such as @wavewyld or @jera.bean to stay up to date with the latest TikTok trends for 2022.

Defining your TikTok Target Audience.

This is an important step as the main reason you are using TikTok to market your business, is to create content that your target audience will be able to relate to and understand.

To define your TikTok target audience, ask yourself these questions:

  • Who am I trying to target?
  • Is my target audience on TikTok?
  • What TikTok Community do I want to be a part of?

It may be that your niche audience, isn’t on TikTok but that does not mean you should rule out using the social media platform.

You will find that there are groups with related interests that could be potential customers/clients, so investigate what types of content they like and engage with and note down ideas of how you can reach out to them. After all, there are over 1 billion users on TikTok (100million European community), so chances are that you will find your target audience engaging with TikTok in one way or another.

TikTok Competitor Analysis.

You may already know who your competitors are in the market and how you and your business differentiate from these, but take your research further and see if they are on TikTok.

This will give you a great insight into how they are marketing their products/services and reaching out to their audience.

Aim to find 4 similar brands and see what has worked for them and what didn’t work.

If you are thinking, ‘how do I find these creators on TikTok’, you can use the ‘Discover feed’ and search for creators either by name, keyword, or a hashtag they may have used within their captions.

Again, more notetaking, but when you are watching their content ask yourself these:

  • Would my audience enjoy their content and stay engaged the whole time?
  • What content does my audience prefer to watch, was it the use of humour, the explanation and demonstration videos or the light-hearted dancing challenges?

Outline your TikTok Goals.

Using TikTok as a part of your broader social media marketing (SMM) strategy means that you need to set goals and ensure that these align with your overall business objectives.

For example, if your business goal is “increase profits in the next 6 months by 15%” or “by the end of the year, to have increased our clientele/customers by 25%”. Consider how you can achieve these overall goals by using TikTok in your SMM strategy. What do you want to gain from using the social media platform? What does success look like from using TikTok?

TikTok has a great tool that can provide you with analytics for your business account. You can access your TikTok analytics by:

  • Go to your profile page and tap the 3 horizontal lines in the top right corner
  • Select Creator Tools and under General, select Analytics
  • Discover the dashboard and view the metrics you can use to measure your goal.

Once you start posting content, set yourself a reminder to view your analytics either every week or every other two weeks so you can see what content does well and what doesn’t. This information will be exceptionally useful to you as you begin to create content and be able to learn what your audience enjoys viewing and what they love to engage with – data-driven TikTok content creation.

Creating High-value Full-screen TikTok Videos (and Frequently).

You’ve done all the research and you have got an idea in mind of who your target audience is, what they like to view and engage with and what your aims of using TikTok are.

Now it’s time to start creating that content.

Start by breaking down your content into three types:

  • Short – videos that are 15 seconds or shorter
  • Long – videos that are up to 1 minute – potentially 3 minutes
  • Trending – content that uses a particular trend but is relevant to your brand

Having a mix of different forms of content will help keep your TikTok growing, and the TikTok algorithm will work in your favour by pushing content out to the right people.

Now is time to look back at the notes you made when analysing your TikTok competitor's content, and identify what special elements make their TikTok videos work well (or not so well).

Were they using text on the screen? Is it clear to see that viewers engage more with shorter or longer videos? What environment are they in when they are filming? What is their hook to draw viewers into the video?

When you start recording your videos, make sure that you are optimising content for views and growth. The video’s hook is essential and is the most important element to think about when creating your high-value content. If you are reading this and thinking ‘what do they mean by hook’, we can explain.

A hook is the first few seconds that you have, to grab the viewer's attention and keep them watching the rest of your video. The three main ways to do this are:

  • A synopsis hook – Explaining to the viewer what they can expect from the video. Not recommended for storytelling TikTok videos.
  • A curiosity hook – You may ask a question that stimulates the viewer and makes them want to know more.
  • An empathetic hook – You create an emotional draw from the view and pull them in.

Don’t be discouraged if you create a few TikTok’s and they don’t go viral. As mentioned before, there are over 1 billion users on TikTok, that is a lot, and we mean A LOT of content that is going out onto the feed.

We advise that you keep up with your posting ethic and aim to create several new videos a week, this could be that you may post similar content but change one or two variables, e.g., the song used or the filter.

This way you will be able to see what works and what doesn’t. Posting consistently on TikTok is crucial and is the main factor in keeping your videos alive and distributed.

It is very helpful if you don’t create yourself a content calendar (and stick to it!). This could be an overview of the month, and you make notes of what you want to post and when.

This will help you stay consistent and view what you have already posted so you aren’t recreating the same content.

TikTok Hashtags and Captions.

You are probably already familiar with the use of hashtags. The importance they have on other social media channels (such as Instagram) and TikTok is no different.

Any hashtags that you are wanting to use will be shown on the user's screen when watching your videos, so you want to make sure that the hashtags are relevant and try not to use any more than 5. Avoid using any of the generic hashtags such as #viral or #fyp as you can imagine, 1 billion users are most likely using these, and it will be very difficult to find your videos amongst the rest.

Also, the hashtag challenge helps people find different TikTok challenges and trends as well as relevant TikTok influencers.

The use of captions is there for the TikTok Discovery feed, so create relatable and searchable captions that can help your TikTok be found. A bit like TikTok SEO.

The use of captions not only helps with making your TikTok more accessible, but it can encourage users to engage with your content.

The content and captions go hand in hand, by optimising both you should be able to get your point across and drive the growth you are wanting.

Lastly, enjoy creating the content, TikTok is a great and fun tool to use within your marketing strategy. Remember you must stay true to your brand. You need to be unique and authentic, it’s easier said than done but don’t repurpose content, try and put your twist on it.

TikTok Ads Manager

For brands looking to take their TikTok efforts to the next level, we strongly advise adding TikTok advertising in your social media marketing stack.  

Before creating TikTok Ads, advertiser profiles must meet the requirements and be approved for TikTok Ads Manager platform use.

Advertisers can choose between awareness, consideration, and conversion (covering the whole funnel).

The ad platform has a friendly user interface, and looks similar to Facebook Ads Manager.

There are 5 different types of TikTok paid ads:

  • in-feed
  • branded hashtags
  • top view ads
  • branded effects
  • brand takeovers

We’ve seen that the top-performing ads for smaller businesses are often in-feed ads. These are non-intrusive paid ads that show natively within a user’s feed and have an organic look. Brands have the choice to avoid showing ads on its organic profile (Dark Ad) or boost organic post to a targeted audience as a (Spark Ad). If you don’t know which one is right for you ask us.

These are some of the proven TikTok strategies that we use at Alphageek and that you can start using today to amplify your brand presence and tap into your target audience effectively.

Start creating TikTok videos today to connect with your customers and position your brand personality as top-of-mind.

Social media marketing moves fast, but TikTok is updating its algorithms even faster. If you don’t want to get left behind contact one of our media experts today.

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