It’s no secret that TikTok is a trendy platform these days but to put it in perspective—TikTok reached one billion users in 2021 and is expected to reach 1.8 billion by the end of this year.
While the platform, which seems to produce a new dance trend every day, is most popular with the younger generation, it’s gaining traction with a wider pool of users. Here is a quick breakdown of user demographics:
- 57% of TikTok users are female, and 43% are male
- Roughly 43% of TikTok’s global audience is between 18 and 24 years old
- 32% of TikTok users are aged between 25 and 34
TikTok is a great way for brands across all industries to connect with current or future customers, however only if it’s used correctly. A poor TikTok strategy is much worse than no TikTok strategy at all. Let’s explain the benefits and how to make TikTok work for your business.
Benefits Of TikTok For Businesses
Digital marketing changes every day, but one thing remains true-you need to go where your customers are. These days more and more people use TikTok during their lunch breaks, while they drink their morning coffee, and even while they work out at the gym. TikTok is popular in part because it provides the instant gratification we’ve all come to crave from social media platforms. For example, a TikTok showing a home makeover before and after is about as soothing as it gets. This social platform is good for more than HGTV-esque home makeovers, however. Brands in all industries can benefit from a solid TikTok strategy. Here are some of the most important benefits:
- Increases brand awareness: TikTok offers several avenues to advertise your brand. You can work with influencers, run TikTok ads, and use hashtags and branded stickers to put your brand out there.
- Promote products: The best thing about TikTok marketing is that it feels casual and friendly. This unassuming nature makes product marketing more effective. You can plug your products by partnering with influencers, creating helpful and entertaining content, and more.
- Grows your audience: TikTok is one of the best platforms to reach a global audience and grow your customer base. It can also help you reach customers that don’t use other social platforms as frequently.
- Attracts new fans: TikTok can help you build strong relationships with your audience because of its personal nature. TikTok trends can also help you attract new customers that find you through hashtags.
Using TikTok For Business
The most important thing to remember when crafting a TikTok, or any other social media, strategy is that you must be consistent. Posting a new TikTok once every six months is not going to get you where you need to be. In fact, it’s better to not have a TikTok account at all. Before embarking on your TikTok journey, ensure that you have the bandwidth to post once per day. Now that we have that out of the way, here are some tips for making your content work for you.
Create Content That Resonates With Your Audience
The amount of content on TikTok can feel overwhelming. Just opening the app bombards you with a near-endless reel of videos. To stand out in this sea of videos, you need to think about what kidneys of content your audience cares about. What challenges do they have? How can you help them? For example, if you own an interior design company, you may want to provide tips for maximizing small spaces or redecorating a child’s bedroom.
If you are not sure what to post, look at hashtags relevant to your business and see what other popular TikTok’ers are posting. If you’re new to this platform, try emulating what works well for others as you slowly find your own voice.
Add Some Bells & Whistles
TikTok allows users to add some flair to their clips with music and effects. Adding the right music or video effect can enhance your message. Just remember not to add anything that will distract from your message. To add music to your videos, just click “Add Sound” at the top of your recording screen, and browse their library of audio clips in categories like trending, recommended, and genres. You can save music to the Favorites tab to use later if you’d like, too.
Here are some other video editing features that can help your video pop:
- Flip: Switch between your phone’s front and back cameras
- Speed: Adjust the speed of your videos to speed them up or slow them down
- Filters: Apply color or contrast filters
- Beautify: Add beauty filters to modify facial features
- Effects: Add overlays, face transformation effects, background changers, voice changers, interactive effects, and more
- Templates: Drag and drop your photos and/or videos into pre-made templates
- Other video editing features include trimming your videos, stitching several videos together, and more
Automate Your Posts
Like we said earlier, not posting consistently is worse than not posting at all. To help yourself be consistent, we recommend planning your posts out for the next week and scheduling them with an automation platform, like Hootsuite.
To get the most out of your posts, follow these tips:
- Write a description: TikTok descriptions are limited to 150 characters, so keep them short and sweet. Remember, you can always add captions to your video, too.
- Add hashtags: Adding the right hashtags can help your videos appear in front of the right people. Look at trending hashtags and other industry-specific hashtags.
- Tag friends: If you’re collaborating with another brand, content creator, or influencer, you can tag them with the “@” symbol.
- Add links: If you have a TikTok Business account, you can add a link in your bio. In your videos, you can then ask users to perform an action, like browse products or make a purchase via the link in your bio.
Advertise on TikTok
Finally, paid advertising can help you catapult your brand to TikTok success in a shorter amount of time. There are several ways to advertise on Tiktok, including:
- In-feed ads: These ads appear as full-screen videos between users’ scrolling activity, so they may not even notice it’s an ad.
- Brand takeovers: These are ads that show up as soon as users open the TikTok app. Brand takeover ads can be 3-3.5 second videos but are more expensive than in-feed ads.
Learn more about how Kurv Agency can help you harness the power of social media here.
