Digital Marketing Using TikTok in 2023
With over 11.2 billion active users and an extremely high organic reach, TikTok has taken the center stage in the social media world. Over the span of just a few years, it has made its way to compete with big social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. When TikTok was relatively newer, the audience of active users mostly comprised of gen Z, but the demographic now is updating and growing at a much faster rate. TikTok now has become a must-have app for everyone across the spectrum of age, including millennials, gen z, and even gen x. now the question arises: What is the importance of TikTok for people who create content and perform digital marketing for brands?
Why Does TikTok Matter for Marketers and Creators?
It is rightfully said that, if you were to teach a complex, and detailed concept to a large group of people, with varied backgrounds, ages, intelligence, and interest levels, and you’d want it to make sense to your audience, you’d need to weave a story. People want to consume stories and engaging content to be convinced, just like always. And TikTok gives you a platform to discover and share your stories with a highly engaging medium – moving images and clips. You open the app, and you see people go from performing their day-to-day routine to performing on the world’s biggest stages.
Everything on TikTok is about creating stories that people can follow along with and that retain their attention span. On the other hand, as a creator or a marketer, you also want to grab the attention of your audience by providing them with something that holds appeal and upholds your brand’s values. Tiktok, for brands, serves as an amazing lead generator in the sales funnel. Marketing itself hasn’t changed, just the way it's packaged and presented has evolved greatly. Hence social media marketers have to chart out their strategies as per the changing tides of social media and TikTok is full of immense potential.
How to Work Around TikTok as A Marketer?
The key to Tiktok is to spark intense curiosity about what you're doing, how you're doing it, or some unique offer you're promoting to your viewers. Think about what Henry Ford said at the beginning of the age of automobiles and vehicles: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This speaks volume about the latent demand that is always present in the market but need to be brought to the surface. Now making that latent demand surface, even by retargeting and remarketing, is extremely difficult in this age, across all social media platforms. But TikTok gives you the ability to build that demand from scratch by letting you inculcate the awareness of your product in your viewer’s mind.
Some Tools That TikTok Offers to Creators
Tiktok gives you tools like catchy intros, open loops, quick facts/entertainment, close loops, and outros that lets you showcase your brand or product with easily consumable short clips. You can hype your launch by documenting behind the scene, creating informational clips, and using hundreds and thousands of formats to get closer to your goal. On TikTok, it's extremely easy to push your viewers to check the link in your bio, then get the email, and then perform your previous job of working them up the value ladder.
Useful Tips for Creators and Marketers for Promoting Businesses On TikTok
There are so many stories of businesses that strengthened their brand image and acquired huge ROI through marketing their products or services on TikTok. But one important thing to keep in mind is that there are no best practices or systems set in stone when it comes to TikTok. It has the highest organic reach than every other social media site and you can’t reap any benefits from it if you handle it with a cookie-cutter approach. Nevertheless, there are several tips and tricks for your brand to gain traction on TikTok.
Familiarize Yourself with The App by Acting as A Consumer First
Being a creator, it’s extremely important for you to put yourself in the user’s shoes first, in order to fully understand their thought process and the app dynamics. Acting as a consumer would help you understand and recognize the type of videos that are popular, the speed at which trends take shape, the importance of tools like sounds and transitions, and the way other businesses are making use of the app. As a creator, you need to spend a considerable amount of time on TikTok to understand the patterns that get resurface and how you can chart out your own brand’s campaign.
Incorporate Trendy Audio and Sounds
One of the major reasons behind the popularity of TikTok is its audio feature. Tiktok lets its users put audio behind each clip that they can either extract from any existing clip or browse from the collection of thousands of audio on the app. Using trendy audio, helps you get the most interactions and views. Now more than ever, adding audio to your clips has become more important than adding hashtags.
Post Consistently
Posting quality content is important, however during the initial stage of your TikTok marketing journey, TikTok actually tests you. Hence you need to be consistent in your posting if you want to drive results. So at first, post at least once a day. Tiktok actually makes it quite easy to have a “viral” video. It’s not a proven formula, but if you post decent content at least once a day, one of them is bound to “blow up.” Remember, 90% of the creators on TikTok go through a period of trial and error before they start getting engagements and views. So be patient.
