TikTok is one of the leading social media platforms that has emerged recently and has attracted tens of millions of users around the world in a few months. If you are thinking of marketing through TikTok and investing this unique arena of communication in promoting your product or service, then you need a coherent strategy that enables you to reap satisfactory results from your marketing campaign. In this article, we will provide you with golden strategies and steps to ensure an effective and successful marketing campaign.

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What is the TikTok app?

TikTok is a social networking application that specializes in publishing, displaying, and sharing short videos. It was launched for the first time in 2016 in its Chinese version known as Douyin, and soon programmers designed another version intended for users around the world with its current name “TikTok” in 2017. It was not available to users. Until the fall of 2018 when the app merged with another Chinese social networking service, Musical.ly.

The company that owns both the Chinese “Douyin” and the global “Tik Tok” versions is a Chinese company known as “ByteDance”. TikTok users can publish and share short videos, ranging in length from 15 seconds to three minutes, which vary in nature from funny and entertaining videos to educational or awareness clips.

  • There are more than 690 million monthly active users on the app, which is a huge number that indicates the great popularity that the app has gained over the past few years.
  • 6 billion downloads of the TikTok application on both the App Store and Google Play until the end of 2020.
  • 18% of users around the world who go online regularly use the TikTok application, and their ages range from 18-64 years; This means that you have a wide range of customers to target if you want to market your products or services through TikTok.
  • The revenue of the application in 2020 amounted to about one billion US dollars only, and the total value of the application is estimated at 50 billion US dollars.

TikTok features

The application offers several services and features that attracted this large number of users to it, perhaps the most prominent features that the application provided to its users:

  • The huge user base, as you will have the opportunity to reach more than 500 million users around the world, and this in itself is a golden advantage for anyone who wants to promote through TikTok and offer their services or products to customers.
  • The possibility of investing in video marketing to the fullest extent, as the main material on which TikTok services depend, is short videos. So you can focus well on this area of ​​marketing.
  • It provides distinctive promotional and advertising services within the application, perhaps the most prominent of which are Brand takeover services, Biddable Ads, Branded lenses, and other unique tools provided by the TikTok application.
  • The available search algorithms and simple suggestions make the process of selling through TikTok and reaching targeted customers simple, unlike the relatively complex algorithms on which all social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, are built.

Marketing on TikTok

Why use TikTok for marketing, especially since the main goal of the application is entertainment and entertainment? Well, if TikTok is a field for short entertainment and educational videos, why not engage in it with a distinguished list of entertainment videos through which you market your services or products?

In fact, many companies rely on humorous videos to attract customers' attention to their products and gain their trust and admiration. To master the art of marketing via TikTok, you must be familiar with marketing methods and successful strategies in this field.

Marketing methods on TikTok

When it comes to marketing strategies, TikTok does not lag behind its major competitors, such as YouTube and Facebook, so there are many methods that you can rely on. Marketing trends on TikTok include three main directions:

1. Marketing through your own channel

Most entrepreneurs who want to market on TikTok tend to create their own branded channel. Your channel will be your playground through which you can publish any marketing or motivational videos targeting your company's customer audience.

A TikTok channel needs good management, commitment, and dedication to content generation and development. Here are some golden tips that will help you get more followers and fans:

  • You must target the audience of customers who are interested in your product or service. What benefit will you gain from one hundred thousand followers of your channel, most of whom are not interested in what your company offers? How do you attract the right follower base? Well, you simply have to create content that piques their curiosity.
  • Be sure to generate content constantly, and do not cut off from your followers. Continuous interaction with followers establishes your brand or project idea and motivates them to try the product or service that you continue to provide in your videos.

2. TikTok influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the strategies that has shown great success over the past few years and is the most prominent marketing trend pursued by companies in large social media, such as YouTube and Facebook. This method relies on marketing products or services through Pages or people who have a large following or fan base.

Within the TikTok platform, you can ask the influencer to show, hint, or suggest your product to followers through the videos he shares with them on his page. Of course, if you want to get the maximum dose of benefit from this marketing strategy, you must choose the right influencer. Here are some golden points that will make it easier for you to use this method and ensure a successful marketing campaign through TikTok:

  • Make sure that the audience of your chosen influencer's followers includes the target audience of your service or product because the main purpose of influencer marketing is to interact with this segment and entice them to buy the product through influential individuals.
  • Do not impose on the influencer a certain style in displaying your product, as they know exactly how to present marketing ads through their channel, and they have their own style that appeals to their fans. Therefore, it is best to let the influencer choose the way they see fit in presenting your product or service.
  • If you want the influencer to show off the product by using it, the product must be a part that the influencer traditionally uses or relies on, otherwise, your product will look intrusive on the video, and you won't catch the attention of your followers.
  • Professional promotional videos with a high level of montage may seem like the perfect idea to showcase any product. Well, this does not apply to the TikTok platform, most of the followers like simple videos, because the essence of the platform is based on this idea. So leave it to influencers, they know the best way to display videos through their channel.

3. Use of paid advertising

Starting the TikTok application using some paid ads in the form of promotional short videos since 2019. Now the platform has an officially funded advertising system so that users, individuals, and companies, can market through TikTok and place their own ads.

The types of advertisements that the company has included in its acceptable list include the following:

  • Brand takeover: The meaning of this term is advertising material that is similar to the nature of the platform on which it is published, and in the case of TikTok it will be limited to short videos.
  • In-feed native video: This type refers to publishing promotional videos for companies by the company that owns the application and suggesting them to users, in a similar way to what Facebook and YouTube do.
  • Branded hashtags: It is the most popular type adopted by many companies and entrepreneurs who want to market on TikTok, and it includes promoting a specific product or service through the famous challenge system “hashtag challenge” within the application.

TikTok Marketing Strategies

As we mentioned, there are three basic directions or methods for promoting through TikTok. Of course, you are not obligated to choose one of the methods, as many companies employ the three methods to promote the brand through TikTok.

Whatever method you choose to manage your marketing campaign, you must master it and understand the keys to success in it. Below we will list for you the most important golden strategies to ensure satisfactory results from marketing using the TikTok program:

1. Generate interactive content

As we indicated, the vast majority of TikTok users are from the golden generation, or as they call it, Generation Z and this generation in particular loves interactive things, loves challenges, and responds to interactive content much more than traditional content.

So you should think about how to motivate this large audience of potential customers, and the main way that you will ensure a wide interaction is by producing videos that encourage customers to interact with your products or services.

One of the distinctive experiences, for example, is a restaurant in China, which included in the list of available orders an order entitled “Your Special Order”, in which the customer can order any combination of foods he wants. Then, customers started ordering their own food, filming it, and posting it on their TikTok accounts, and soon, because of this option, this restaurant became famous not only locally, but also internationally.

2. Use the right hashtags for SEO

It is no secret that the searches conducted by users, whether on search engines or through the search engine within the means of communication, are the main source of likes and follow-ups. Therefore, taking into account the SEO element in the hashtags that you link to your videos is very important to attract new followers to your channel.

How can you improve the SEO of videos on TikTok? Well, it's simple, all you have to do is choose the popular hashtag for your content. If you do not have the slightest idea about the appropriate hashtags for your content, you can simply use the search engine of the TikTok application and write any word related to the content of the video, and the popular hashtags will appear to you in this context.

There is no limit to the number of hashtags you can include with your video, but there is an upper limit of 100 characters you can type in a video post.

Hashtag marketing is essential, so you should focus on two or three popular and frequently circulated hashtags around the topic of the video while leaving room for writing an appropriate and interesting description of the video. Don't fill your video description with hashtags without any phrases because that would be too traditional and not set you apart from other marketers.

3. Be quick to keep up to date

Here, by developments, we mean “Trends”, which are the topics that are circulated and spread widely within a short time among users. This strategy is very important, especially if there are trends related to the product or service that you are targeting through the TikTok marketing campaign.

As if new challenges arise around a specific activity in which the device, tool, or product that you adopt plays a primary or even subsidiary role in achieving it. In this case, you will have in your hands a golden marketing paper that you should never lose. Keep in mind that trends are quick to appear, sudden, and ephemeral as well, so you need to be quick and responsive.

4. Maintain a constant pace of interaction

You must permanently link your followers to your channel if you want to break that psychological barrier they have towards your product or service. It takes a lot of persistence and patience to win customers, especially loyal customers. So you have to manage your channel properly. Try to publish videos regularly, and make sure to diversify and not make your channel a single type of video.

The second tip here is to make sure that the content you post on your channel is interactive. It is not enough to impress the followers; Since you can get more than that, how? Well, interactive content drives followers to share videos with others and interact with them, and this will bring legions of followers to your primary content source, which is your channel.

5. Hire professional marketers

If you do not want to enter the world of TikTok marketing and learn the correct strategies for successful employment on this platform, the best solution for you is to seek the help of professional marketers and content managers specialized in e-marketing and publishing professional and thoughtful content on social media.

Although marketing through TikTok is still in its prime and has not reached the level of its giant competitors such as YouTube and Facebook, the successes achieved by many companies and entrepreneurs by promoting the brand through TikTok suggest a very promising future for the field of marketing using the TikTok platform.