In 2019, users spent on average at least six hours and 48 minutes weekly watching online videos- a 59% increase as compared to 2016. (Oberlo.com). Moreover, 84% of marketers say video has helped them increase traffic to their website. The most consumed digital content is viral video content as seen post-2018 worldwide according to Oberlo.com
Hence, it’s safe to say the future of digital content over social media is viral video marketing.
One app which is making trends in viral video marketing is TikTok. TikTok is the 2nd most downloaded mobile app in this decade with over 800 billion active users.
Creating 15-30 seconds short lip-syncing videos on TikTok is what it takes to have millions of fans. The only need is to strike a chord with your targeted audience.
Thus, TikTok as a platform is creating new waves in the world of digital marketing. Let’s dig deeper to understand how TikTok can help you generate a higher return on investment and brand awareness in order to meet all your marketing goals.
What is TikTok?
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The Tik Tok app is one of the best social media platforms with huge audiences of millennials and Gen Z used for creating and sharing short videos of 15 to 60 seconds looping videos with any music clips, lip-syncing to movie dialogues, memes, and any other videos.
TikTok acts as a platform for every user to showcase their acting, dancing or mimicry talent and gain millions of followers. There is no surprise that it has become one of the most downloaded mobile apps in this decade.
The Chinese app called Musical.ly, the initial name of TikTok was launched in September 2016. With its growing popularity, its iOS and Android versions were launched to cater to the market outside China.
Musical.ly allowed users to create lip-syncs and duet videos with friends to music overlays. After its huge success, it was acquired by Bytedance in 2017 and merged with their new app called ‘TikTok’. Currently, it serves over 150 markets in 75 languages.
Who Uses TikTok?
TikTok has broken all records and has overtaken Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in terms of the number of application downloads and active users. With over 800 billion monthly active users who downloaded this app 1.5 billion times worldwide.
Surprisingly, this number includes 466 million users straight from India. It is reported that they spend an average time of 52 minutes and open the app up to eight times a day.
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According to the facts, 66% of TikTok users come from 20 to 30 years of age, so it is clear that this app is most popular among adults and teenagers i.e. users belonging to millennials and Gen Z age groups wherein 55.6% of users are male, and 44.4% of users are female.
Why you should incorporate TikTok in your marketing strategy
As the growth of TikTok rises, every marketer and advertiser needs to utilize TikTok as a platform to attract its targeted audience.
It creates brand awareness and a variety of unique marketing opportunities with comedic shorts, challenge videos, etc., which is a great way to engage your target audience. Let’s understand the main benefits of TikTok that stimulate marketers to work with it.
#1 Easy to Use Interface
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TikTok is free to download and use. Moreover, it is effortless to use the app due to its simple user interface that is operable by just anyone.
With a mass audience, the only thing that can get any brand hold of thousands of likes and followers is your creativity and unique ideas. Thus, if you are planning to use TikTok as a promotional platform, your content must be relevant and worthy to trend.
#2 Build Trust Quickly
One of the best ways of marketing over TikTok is to collaborate with influencers. Influencers are public figures with thousands or millions of followers over social media platforms.
Generally, influencers have positive images and their followers tend to follow and relate with brands their idols promote. Generally, this collaboration is barter or monetary. This helps brands get noticed quickly, thus, increasing brand awareness amongst users.
#3 Convey Complete Awareness
Brand awareness can also be increased by creating informative videos. Informative videos generally show your products, the benefits of your products, etc. Moreover, utilizing the influencers you can attract potential customers because influencers can share tutorials of using your products or reviewing your products.
Recommended Reading: The Most Effective TikTok Marketing Strategies for Brands and Influencers
#4 Unlimited Sharing
The power of popularity on TikTok contains thousands of videos on your hashtags. All you need to do is to create the most compelling content featuring your brand and in order to benefit from unlimited sharing and reach.
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How Can Marketers Use TikTok?
With its astounding user base, every marketer should leverage TikTok.
Although TikTok doesn’t hyperlink posts to other websites, it is best to utilize it for brand awareness rather than traffic generation or leads, which is why it is reported that only 4% of the marketers are incorporating TikTok into their marketing strategies.
TikTok has now started to allow advertising which is a huge benefit for advertisers.
Recommended Reading: TikTok Tools to Help You Grow Your Audience
Here are some best advertising strategies for marketing inspiration to utilize TikTok better:
#1 Launch a Hashtag Challenge
Hashtag challenges are meant to bring more traffic to your channel. Create the most compelling hashtag that suits your brand, make a video accordingly with the use of that hashtag and encourage others to take up the challenge.
This challenge not only helps you to facilitate engagement with your current followers but also entices new users to become followers.
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For Example, the Pepsi #SwagStepChallenge set a high benchmark on TikTok. This hashtag challenge grabbed 1,00,000+ video uploads and 30 billion views overall in a year.
#2 Go with Trends in Your Niche
With a rich user base, it is easy to get distracted with challenges and videos on TikTok in terms of followers and likes, thus, it is necessary to establish a proper marketing strategy to put convincing and interesting content relevant to your brand. This will empower your brand with more reliability and stability.
#3 Work with Popular Creators
Popular creators on TikTok have millions of followers with high engagement, and they are artistic people who create quality content that can go viral in a matter of days
As a social media marketer, you must work with creators by convincing them to create a video that is themed with your brand or features your products in their videos. Additionally, you can strike deals with them to post the first video of your hashtag challenge.
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For Example, Club Factory, an online shopping website promotes its offers with #teentigada popular creators who draft their content that infuse the offers of Club Factory.
#4 Use TikTok Ads
TikTok introduced its ad program to help brands increase engagement with its users. It offers brands and marketers to create five different types of ads which include:
- In-Feed Ads
- Brand Takeover Ads
- TopView
- Branded Hashtag Challenge
- Branded Effects
With a variety of different ad options to choose from, it can be difficult to decide which ad format is best for your brand or company. So it’s important to test different ads with different ad campaigns and see which one performs the best.
Checkout our list of Additional TikTok Marketing Strategies
How to Use TikTok?
TikTok is moving towards becoming a versatile app, and its popularity can make it more profitable than other social platforms.
Thus, to understand its easy-going functionality, let’s start with the basics.
First, install TikTok from the App Store or Play Store, then log in with your Email id and get registered.
After registering you will be redirected to the main feed of TikTok where you find two pages side-by-side named ‘For You” and ‘Following’.
The main feed named ‘For You’ contains seamless and endless streaming of popular content, just scroll down, and you will see new and exciting videos.
While you scroll, you can follow all the user accounts you want to engage with, and as per the norm, other account holders must accept your following request.
Also, you can like, comment, and share any video streams on the screen.
When you swipe right from the main feed, you will redirect to a supporting feed named ‘Following’ where you can see, like, and comment on the videos of your followers. TikTok has a very user-friendly interface, and it is easy to use and navigate from one feed to another feed.
Apart from these basic features, here are some main features that TikTok offers to its users:
#1 Create Videos
TikTok allows you to create a video within the app, or you can upload it outside the app. To record a video within the app first, you must choose the time of the video, whether it is 15 seconds or 60 seconds.
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If you want to share more than 60 seconds of video, you need to collaborate multiple videos from your draft, but you can share a video of up to 5 minutes and not more than that in any circumstance.
#2 Attach Music
TikTok users can discover any content or music by simply clicking the right corner of the video which contains the tract of that video, and it will work as a search option for that track and get all video made with it.
It is a simple way to join the most trending track and increase the possibility of ranking high. You can also browse your most suitable track from your music library and stay connected with TikTok.
#3 Set Filters and Effects
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Every user wants to create a video as effectively as possible and to fulfill this need, TikTok has video editing tools with different filters and impressive effects.
You can also elevate your videos by putting a variety of stickers, emojis, text, time effects and transition that helps you to make your video attractive.
#4 Set Captions and Hashtags
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A caption tells everything about your video, viewers first see your caption and then move to your video content, so you must add a caption precisely with relevant hashtags that limit with not more than 140 characters in each caption.
This caption not only describes the content of the video but also helps you to rank up high in your niche with the creative use of hashtags.
#5 Create Duets
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TikTok has a very noticeable feature of making duets that allows you to share your videos with your admired ones. This feature is mostly used in making dancing and singing videos on the same track, but some users use it to give their reactions to a specific video.
#6 Live Streaming
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Once you reach 1,000 followers on TikTok, then you will unlock the ability to stream live video. Wherever you go live on TikTok, it automatically gives notification to your followers. If they are offline and if they are online, your live video notification is shown on the top of followers’ feed.
People can share your live video that results in your potential audience growth on TikTok. When your live video is done, it vanishes entirely from the app.
#7 Add Bio and Links
TikTok doesn’t allow clickable links and swipe up features, but you can add a link or URL in your bio very easily. It’s still just like a caption and your bio is limited to 140 characters including standard text, emojis, hashtags and website URL, but one thing!
It is not clickable at all.
#8 Verification of Accounts
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TikTok has its policy of verification of accounts just like other social media platforms. They keenly absorb the users who are subsequently generating quality content and elevate their content among billions of users.
After they are satisfied with the study, they verify the account by labeling that user with “Popular Creator” and provide a blue badge or a tiny blue tick right to the profile picture of the user.
#9 Track Your Performance
You can track your content’s success by viewing how many people view your video, how many reacted to the video, and how many duets are made with your video. Although it doesn’t provide any statistical data about your video’s engagement.
Things to Consider while Using TikTok
As you open TikTok to make a video, you find several options of trending tracks and hashtags crawls in front of you but to make your content useful you must consider the below-mentioned points:
- Identify your audience and target only them
- Choose trends that are relevant to your niche
- Keep looking for the best inspiration
- Create a spunky twist in your content
- Make your audio clip trending
- Keep yourself engaged with a targeted audience
- Provide appreciation to actual potential
- Develop a training sequence with your product
Conclusion
TikTok has emerged as a powerful social media platform in recent years. With its staggering growth, every marketer should ride the wave of viral video marketing to gain a competitive advantage over others.
TikTok plays a prominent role in the life of the young generation, hence, it can be utilized to nurture them, build a strong and positive impact of your brand that can help you convert them into customers.