Brand promotion on TikTok is the buzz of digital marketing nowadays. Who would have thought that this lip-syncing app called TikTok would emerge as a social media favourite in the wake of a global pandemic?
With most of the world under stringent quarantine restrictions, more people flocked to TikTok to ease their boredom. More influencers and celebrities joined the app, even publishers and famous companies, to the delight of the TikTok community.
These brands, especially those that have long picked up on TikTok’s potential, took the opportunity to promote their brand too. This phenomenal social media platform now has an 800-million-strong monthly active user base and 115 million downloads in March 2020 alone.
Image Source
TikTok is now the leading social media platform as of date. It has ceased being just for teens or millennials. Know how to promote your brand on TikTok and even go viral. Discover how its algorithm works to optimise the app for your brand.
What is TikTok and How Does it Work?
TikTok was founded in 2016 and launched in 2017. The following year, it merged with the lip-syncing app, Musical.ly. It is now more popularly downloaded than Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
TikTok allows users to create short videos on loop, with fun effects, transitions, musical overlays, AR filters, and text. Hashtags can be added just like other social media platforms. Hashtags make it easier to search for videos or trends, especially those that go viral.
The platform also has a tab for challenges with themed hashtags. It can be a dance challenge for an already trending song or dance craze. You can make the challenge all about users rendering their version of an already viral video shared on other apps. Users lip-sync to the audio and add their creative twist in acting out the scenario.
Another challenge can be a duet with another TikTok user, even from across the globe.
Celebrities also post their challenges at times, like Jimmy Fallon. In 2018, he encouraged his viewers of The Tonight Show to compete in his #tumbleweed challenge.
Video Source: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
As more and more companies come to TikTok, it is being used for
brand positioning. The Branding Journal describe
brand positioning is the act of designing your company’s image and what you are offering to occupy a distinctive place, or brand territory, in the mind of the target market.
Even brands you never thought would be on TikTok is now leaking into
brand territory, according to HubSpot’s Social Media Community Manager, Krystal Wu. The Washington Post, for instance, has more than 54,000 followers and uses TikTok to post less severe content, like BTS (behind-the-scenes) at the newsroom and funny anecdotes off-cam.
This year, McDonald’s becomes the first big-named brand in New Zealand to use TikTok. It gave the brand an impressive organic social reach of almost a million views and 90,000 likes. Viewer engagements and social sharing are also high for the first 15 videos. The conversion is translated where it matters, effectively increasing the demand for McDonald’s Spicy McChicken range across New Zealand.
Superdry, an international clothing store with a branch in New Zealand, also launched a TikTok campaign with NZ influencers Born Bred Talent. It is to boost the agency’s presence in the NZ market. TikTok is an excellent place to accomplish that since there are 1 million new Australian and New Zealand TikTok users since the pandemic. They started the #SDMyWay challenge, celebrating individuality and encouraging users to inject their personality into the brand. Since user-generated content (UGC) is also a powerful marketing tool, the campaign took off.
So, how do you promote your brand on TikTok? Check out these tips below to optimise this app for your brand:
1. Master How TikTok Works
The key to successful brand promotion on TikTok is to enter the community and trend organically. Users recognise when they are being marketed to. They can distinguish between what is authentic and what is fake.
Master how contents are made on TikTok and best to engage with the audience. Practising social media etiquettes will help you establish brand territory in TikTok much easier.
For You Page
You will see on the
For You Page what is currently trending by top video creators. What is unique about TikTok that can be optimised for influencer marketing is that you do not have to follow so many users just to have a great user experience. Much like the YouTube app, you can watch trending videos whether you are subscribed to the channel or not.
Following Page
The following tab shows you the latest video created by those TikTok users you follow.
Discover Page
In the
Discover Page, you can explore the trending challenges available that you can create a video for.
2. Create Engaging and Fun Content
Video content is more engaging than traditional text or image content. Even something as corporate as a resume is now getting a revamp through
video resumes that get people hired faster. In TikTok, you do not need highly polished videos to trend. You can use mobile photography and videography to create and edit your content.
The key is to make fun videos that create an impact and generate buzz in the community. Originality is also a selling point. The more distinctly unique your video version is, the better.
You can look at tutorials other TikTokers make to showcase how they use filters and features together to create specific effects and transitions. User reaction is a useful guide if your videos are working and are liked by other users.
3. Be Creative with Your TikTok Marketing
Be in the community for the sake of being there. If you just produce a video every time you have something to sell, the audience will grow tired of you.
So, it is crucial to keep your presence and engagements consistent. Like and follow other brands. Comment on those that follow you if they respond to challenges you post. Collaborate with other users and influencers on trending challenges. Do takeovers with different brands and allow them to do the same with yours.
All these strategies improve your TikTok marketing even more. For your campaigns to work, work on building your reputation and influence within the app. Encourage user-generated content more often.
For example, if you are a food business, ask users to create content featuring their signature dishes.
If you are a travel company, you can ask users to send in their most memorable trips, or maybe recreate the memory by creating a video. In this way, even if there are still travel restrictions across borders, you keep your audience hopeful for the time they can get to travel again.
You will be a top of mind brand because you did not stop engaging with your audience even during the pandemic.
4. Optimise TikTok Advertisement
Brands can now advertise on TikTok.
Advertisements on TikTok can come as Infeed Native Content, Brand Takeover, Hashtag Challenge, or as Branded Lenses.
- Infeed Native Content: It is like Instagram or Snapchat story ads and supports website backlinking and app downloads.
- Brand Takeovers: This type of ads allows brands to take over TikTok for the day. Brands can create images, videos with embedded backlinks to landing pages, GIFs, or hashtag challenges.
- Hashtag Challenges: Hashtag promotion to get more engagement.
- Branded Lenses: It is like Snapchat’s 2D and 3D glasses for faces and photos.
TikTok ads can help you reach more users. Used with precise targeting, you can cater your ads even further to reach your intended market for more successful brand positioning. When your brand territory is precise, you can get more conversions out of your TikTok ads.
Conclusion: Optimise TikTok for Better Brand Promotion
TikTok may have started as an app for just teenagers to do lip-syncing, but it has evolved into an efficient content marketing tool. The mere fact that digital marketers and social media influencers now use this platform to promote their brands and businesses is proof that it works.
More and more businesses realise that TikTok is a great platform to promote their brands and increase their exposure with their target audience. Surely, we will see more brands flock to TikTok because of this.
TikTok, as a social media platform, has much room for growth, but as it is, it is already shaping culture and relevant conversations.
Author’s Bio:
Mayleen Meñez worked in media for almost seven years in TV, radio, and post-production as a Graphic Artist/Editor. Finding her true passion for NGO and community development work, she devoted 15 years as a coordinator and teacher, travelling both in the Philippines and countries in Asia. She homeschools her three kids and reinvents Filipino dishes in her spare time. Writing has always been a hobby and pursuit, and she recently added content writing with
Softvire Australia and
Softvire New Zealand up her sleeve, while preparing for her next adventure in the nations.
