It’s no secret that TikTok has emerged as one of the most powerful social media platforms, with more than a billion monthly active users. For this reason, it’s also become a very popular platform for marketing that businesses use to put forward their products and services.
If you own an eCommerce store, not using TikTok for marketing can be a missed opportunity. However, to effectively use the platform and get high levels of engagement, you’ll need a solid TikTok marketing strategy. In this article, we’ll talk about how you can build one and reap the power of TikTok marketing.
TikTok Marketing: Explained
Ever since its launch in 2017, TikTok has come a long way. In 2023, TikTok emerged as one of the most popular social networking channels.
When you bring your business to TikTok, there’s a sure shot that you’ll bring in more customers because:
- 44% of TikTok users have discovered a new company as a result of TikTok marketing,
- 35% of users have purchased on the platform.
To support eCommerce businesses to grow and benefit from the platform, TikTok has even launched some great ad features that can be accessed with a business account. Plus, let's not forget TikTok videos can rapidly reach a huge audience via the platform's virality factor, resulting in exponential growth and improved brand awareness.
Develop a TikTok Marketing Strategy
If you want to tap into the potential of TikTok for eCommerce Business, you’ll need to have a plan to connect with your audience. That’s where a marketing strategy comes in. Here are steps to drafting a strong TikTok marketing strategy:
Define Your Target Audience
A good TikTok marketing strategy begins with knowing your audience. Understanding their background, passions, and habits can help you create content that speaks to them.
We already know that TikTok is majorly popular amongst a younger demographic, making it a natural fit for brands aiming to reach the millennial and Gen Z markets. So if you have an eCommerce store, such as an Etsy print on demand business, you can use TikTok to reach a wide audience under the age of 50.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1095186/tiktok-us-users-age/
Given this information, you need to narrow down based on who your brand will interest and what kind of content they’re likely to engage with. To define your target audience, you can do the following:
- Identify the age range, geographic area, and primary language of your target audience with your brand's preexisting audience research.
- Define their pain points to figure out their interests and find out which TikTok category or subculture they fall into. For example, it can be beauty, tech, automobile, etc.
- Check out the “Followers” tab in the TikTok analytics to get insights into your current audience’s demographic.
- Carry out hashtag research to figure out what your intended audience is mostly interested in viewing.
Understand What You Want to Reach in Marketing
Once you have defined your audience, it’s time to define your marketing objectives. Determining your end objective can help direct your strategy and plan your content. Some of these objectives can be:
- Building brand awareness
- Creating an engaged community around your industry
- Increase sales
- Get customer feedback
- Use it as a medium of customer service
- Advertise your brand
Setting objectives that are not Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, or Timely (SMART) will be a waste of time and effort. Use the TikTok analytics tool provided with the business accounts to find and set metrics to measure your goals.
Create a Roadmap for Engaging Content
You don't need to post studio-quality, highly edited-videos to gain traction. TikTokers will find themselves watching your videos if they are interesting, entertaining, or helpful. However, the actual challenge is in creating fresh video content regularly.
Creating a roadmap can help organize the process of making engaging. You can do that by creating a TikTok content calendar, where you mark days with specific videos to create and post. There are several tools offered by Loomly, Hootsuite, Brandwatch, etc.
Here are a few tips to plan your content to make it engaging:
- Get inspiration from other users and your competitors that get high engagement in the type of content you can produce.
- Engage users by asking them for recommendations on what they’d like to see on TikTok on other platforms, such as Instagram or Snapchat.
- Check out the “Content” tab in the TikTok analytics to get insights into which videos you previously posted got the most engagement. See how you can incorporate that more in other content.
- TikTok analytics can reveal when your followers are most active and help you determine the best times to post online.
- Follow viral trends or sounds and use relevant hashtags.
We advise you to keep diversity in your content conservatory. You could find some ideas that have been posted lately, but you can republish them later, some of them are brand new ideas that are better on specific days, or you get some user-generated material.
To make your content collection more manageable, you may divide it up into multiple sections, such as content that:
- encourage people to visit your website,
- produce leads,
- promote the core principles and tenets of the firm,
- is user-generated content.
Understand How TikTok Works
While we often make the mistake of recycling the same marketing plan on different social media platforms, it’s important to understand that TikTok is unique in the way it works. It’s a platform that works only on short videos (not long ones like YouTube, nor accompanied by image content like Instagram).
If you want a success bringing marketing strategy for TikTok, you need to familiarize yourself with how it works. Here are a few tips to get started:
- Explore editing features and filters that you can use in your videos.
- Find out what’s trending, be it a style or sound.
- Research the trending hashtags.
- Learn more about the ranking algorithm of TikTok and see how you can optimize your content to reach more audiences and win more engagement.
Learn More About TikTok Community
Gaining traction on TikTok requires familiarity with the platform's user base and culture. Learn as much as you can about the leading creators on the platform. You can even dig into how influencers in your niche engage their audience. If you want to reach more people and build stronger relationships with them, you should:
- interact with the content of other users,
- take part in challenges,
- and partner with influential people.
From the highly literary BookTok to the active rug-tufting subreddit, TikTok has a niche for everyone. Find the people you'd like to mingle with, then study their most popular profiles to discover the hashtags, formats, and allusions they use that you can use in your posts.
Learn More About TikTok Campaigns
TikTok provides business accounts with several alternatives for marketing and advertising campaign. Businesses may reach their desired audience on TikTok using a variety of ad formats, such as:
- In-feed ads
- Brand takeover ads
- Top view ads
- Branded hashtag ads
- Branded effects ads
- Collection ads
Like Instagram's Ad Manager, the TikTok ads platform streamlines and automates the whole advertising cycle, from ideation to distribution to optimization. You can simply use that by creating a TikTok ads account.
Set Clear Strategy For Your Account
Creating a successful marketing strategy on TikTok calls for considerable dedication and forethought into your account's future. Use the above steps and plan for:
- how often you'll publish,
- what you'll create videos about,
- and determine the general tone and style you'll use.
Interact with your target market by replying to their comments and messages, and monitor your success metrics regularly with TikTok analytics so you can adjust your approach as needed.
Conclusion
TikTok provides a one-of-a-kind chance for companies to connect with a sizable audience and increase their visibility. Successfully promoting your business on TikTok requires formulating a solid content plan by identifying your target audience, providing interesting content catering to them, and making use of the platform's capabilities and campaigns. Keep in mind that you'll need originality, honesty, and knowledge of the platform's dynamics to thrive on TikTok. Aim to create an original and memorable brand on TikTok as you embark on your marketing strategy.
Learn how to embed your TikTok feed on your website.