For many brands on TikTok, they are looking to break through the noise of other advertisers on the platform and asking themselves “how do brands succeed on TikTok?”. As an official TikTok partner, Mavrck aims to help brands achieve their goals in using TikTok for business. While there are several ways to succeed on the platform, one of the best is boost your growth with a better understanding of TikTok best practices for brands and the TikTok Creative Center best practices. Utilizing these TikTok techniques and 7 strategies to succeed, brands can create and distribute content to connect with their audience in the most efficient and effective ways possible. Learn more about how to use TikTok for Marketing and the Creative Center in the following blog.
How to Use TikTok For Marketing
The best way to use TikTok for marketing is to understand how normal people use the platform, not just TikTok marketing strategy for brands. TikTok is made for entertainment, and consumers look for entertaining content “hand-picked” by their algorithm just for them. Marketers and brands are faced with the challenge of creating content that can entertain and inform their audience to impact the business. Branded content on TikTok should be made for the purpose of entertainment, with the impact on the business being the user sees content is coming your brand name. If you can organically incorporate promotional aspects into the content, great – but the end goal should be to increase brand awareness via users enjoying the media you share.
1. The Basics of TikTok Marketing
Fortunately, within the realm of marketing on TikTok there are many ways to succeed. From our experience, Mavrck has seen many brands take different paths in the creation of their TikTok account and building an audience, but the most successful have been those who took the time to understand the basics before jumping into the platform. By utilizing the basic strategies below, your brand can feel confident and informed when it comes time to take your first steps on TikTok.
Start a Business Channel
The first step for a brand to foray into TikTok is to make an account for your business. It’s hard to build an audience if your brand has no voice on the app. Begin by exploring the app, see what people are engaging with and how people are using the platform. Once you feel comfortable, begin sharing some organic content that speaks to your brand and its people. Experiment, collect feedback, and innovate on the content you share to understand what types of content performs well and how you can improve.
Collaborate with Influencers
Collaborating with influencers is one of the best ways to market on TikTok. Given that influencers have their own following established, brands can capitalize on that follower base to spread their message authentically. It is important to find influencers that match your brand’s voice, tone, and values so the content they create aligns with your brand and their audience is more likely to be receptive to your promotions.
Create Hashtag Challenges
Creating a hashtag challenge gets your brand involved in the conversation on TikTok. Hashtag challenges will entice consumers to create content using your hashtag that can be repurposed and can be an effective way to spread brand awareness. If your hashtag performs well, more users will incorporate it into their videos, even if the content is not related to your brand. This increases the chance of virality on your hashtag and will promote your brand in ways that you may not have considered in planning.
2. Running TikTok Ad Campaigns
One of the best ways to boost your brand presence on TikTok is to run TikTok ad campaigns. Through the use of TikTok’s Ad Manager, brands can launch paid campaigns to target relevant audiences and influence purchase decisions or increase brand awareness. 74% of TikTok users say that TikTok has inspired them to find out more about a brand or product online and 66% of users have said that TikTok has helped them decide what to buy.
For TikTok ads best practices, be thoughtful about the content you create for paid ads, as it should still feel like a piece of entertainment for the users. Brands that create highly produced content often receive poor results as this style of content feels inauthentic and out of place in For You Page feeds. Use trends and challenges that are relevant to your audience to ensure your content is in line with other content that audience consumes.
Best Practices for TikTok Creative
In regards to organic growth on the platform, brands should be familiar with the best practices within the TikTok Creative Center. The creative center provides insights for marketers on trends, ads, hashtags, songs, creators, and videos that help inform strategic decisions on their own TikTok content ideas. Brands can also see what ads are performing well and incorporate those aspects into their own ads to increase the chance of stronger performance. Outlined below are the key components of the Creative Center and organic growth that every brand should be familiar with.
3. Explore the Existing Trends
In the Creative Center, brands have the ability to explore which trends are relevant on TikTok. Take some time to understand what is popular or trending on TikTok and why that is the case. Once you understand what people care about on TikTok, you can begin to ideate on how your brand’s voice can join the conversation. If you find a trend that is relevant to your brand, be sure to add your own spin to the trend. When brands join a trend they run the risk of seeming inauthentic or “cash-grabbing”, so be sure that your content includes originality that makes it entertaining and informative for your audience.
4. Use Variety to Promote Your Product
It is important to make your ad stand out from other content. By including a variety of sounds, colors, filters, and people, your ads can speak to what is best about your product or service. Try to create a mix of sounds and filters that are original or trending so your ads have a unique spin and still contribute to themes that are already popular.
Your goal is to encourage engagement on your content, whether that be through comments or user-generated content. The more people that want to participate with the content you’ve created, the better!
5. Good Call-to-Actions
A good call-to-action has two major parts – significance and seamlessness. With significant calls-to-action, the content speaks to the ask of the consumer. If your CTA is to drive consumers to your fashion website, the content should highlight the products you wish to promote using fun and engaging methods while displaying value. This could be shopping hauls, OOTD, or “get ready with me” styles of content that align with other popular trends of showing off fashion.
The second major aspect of a good CTA is seamlessness, or making things easy for the end-user. If you’re looking to drive traffic to a website, include shoppable features in your ad so the consumer can easily click and shop. The best CTAs incorporate both significance and seamlessness to provide a pleasant experience in the content and make things simple for the consumer to buy or participate in.
6. Timing is Everything
Timing is a huge challenge for brands on TikTok. As the content community on TikTok is more casual and colloquial, users are hyper-aware of “what is in” and “what is out”. Essentially, assume that everyone on TikTok understands which trends are hot right now and which trends have been played out. Your goal should be to post trending content just before its peak popularity, and in doing so your brand will feel more authentic and in tune with the conversations.
Brands need to be cautious about the timing of their trend content. If you join the trend too late, it will reflect poorly on your brand image, making you seem “out-of-touch”. If brands jump on trends too early, they risk creating content with trends that aren’t popular enough yet and this might negatively affect the performance and reach of your content. There is no exact answer on when to post trending content, but brands can analyze comments and sentiment to see if the audience still loves this trend, or is starting to get tired of it.
7. Be Authentic on Posts and Have a Sense of Humor
How do I make my brand stand out on TikTok? TikTok has a different set of rules for which content performs well. On Instagram, content is taken seriously and efforts are made to make imagery look professional and impactful. TikTok content is much more casual and authentic, where less attention is given to what content looks like and more to how authentic it feels.
Being a nebulous concept, the best way to summarize this idea is that TikTok users want to see humanity. They care more about the person behind the screen than the brand themselves. In this theme, create content that highlights the people that make up your brand and don’t be too serious if you want your brand to stand out. Users want to see brands that are able to laugh at themselves and have the flexibility to create content that is entertaining and not only about business.
How do Brands Succeed on TikTok?
Brands should use TikTok because it presents the opportunity to connect and resonate with their audience in a unique and genuine way. In the past, brands have used social media to show their consumers the value of the products and services they provide. TikTok allows brands to break through the fourth-wall in advertising and display the humanity behind the marketing. The platform fosters an environment of unprecedented creativity that gives companies the freedom to take risks and become more than the products they sell.
On TikTok, brands can succeed and differentiate themselves through entertaining content and transcend the transactional relationship of marketing to become a more trusted voice from the perspective of the consumer. The most valuable currency online is trust, and brands now have the chance to build that trust in a way that doesn’t require massive production for content or million dollar budgets, but through the people that comprise the business.
Marketing on TikTok is about creating authentic content that inspires conversation. The aptly named TikTok Creative Center enables brands to flex their creativity by giving marketers the tools and knowledge they need make impactful and informed content. While it may seem daunting, any brand regardless of vertical has the capacity to build an audience on TikTok. The goal of this blog was to provide tangible strategies that can be incorporated into your campaigns right now and transform your TikTok account into a widespread TikTok presence. If you’re still hungry for more knowledge, check out our Ultimate TikTok Guide for every morsel and tid-bit you need to be a force of nature on TikTok.
