The popularity of the social media platform TikTok has grown enormously. Its easy-to-consume, 15-60-second long has attracted 1 billion active global users. The platform had previously amassed 732 million monthly active users in just 5 years, beating Facebook’s long held record of 7 years to reach that goal.
Since TikTok’s rise to popularity, businesses have been tapping into using TikTok for marketing. The app provides brand managers with access to a wide selection of resources, all within the in-app video editor. These include selfie filters, graphics, music and other easy-to-use capabilities that allow users to create content in a short amount of time.
To take advantage of the market and consumer demand for video, individuals and businesses can start investing in TikTok for business marketing. Several benefits and strategies are available to help professionals improve their impact on the platform.
Why TikTok for Marketing?
In addition to being an effective marketing tool for creating video content, taking advantage of TikTok marketing can provide businesses with opportunities to build brand awareness and sell to customers directly within the app.
Some TikTok social media marketing benefits include:
- Make more sales: TikTok’s algorithm has helped many businesses make sales, touting a 500% increase of in-app purchases in April 2019. The increased trend of consumers shopping online is unlikely to slow down.
- Connect with audiences: Professionals have been using TikTok for marketing to drive connections and create content that their audiences can relate to. TikTok users spend an average of 413 seconds on the app per session, more than social platforms like Snapchat, Pinterest and Facebook.
- Increase social engagement: TikTok has the highest social media engagement rates per post, regardless of a profile’s follower size. These high engagement rates outweigh those commonly seen on YouTube and Instagram profiles.
- Exposure to a diverse audience: Many age groups frequent TikTok. The majority of TikTok users are young adults —22.4% of TikTok users are between ages 20-29 and 21.7% of them are between 30-39 years old, allowing brands to reach these key demographics.
Using TikTok for Marketing is Simple
While TikTok might seem daunting to the first time user, the platform offers user friendly capabilities for business accounts. In addition to providing a basic profile to post content, the TikTok platform provides users the ability to track performance and audience metrics. It also includes an innovative Business Creative Hub that aims to inspire creators with ideas for content creation.
Marketers can use the following TikTok social media marketing strategies to improve their brand’s online performance:
- Create Call to Actions (CTAs): Marketers can create call to actions (CTAs) in multiple areas on their TikTok profiles. They can include links on their profile bio, on posted videos and even in the description of TikTok live streams.
- Use TikTok for Advertising: Paid advertising on Tiktok can be used to create in-feed ads, including “top-view” ads that appear when a user first opens the application.
- Connect with TikTok Microinfluencers: Users with a strong follower base, also known as “micro influencers,” can be hired to advertise a service or product offering. Like on Instagram, TikTok influencers have a great impact over their followers, enticing them to click on a link or buy a product. They’re used so often that even influencer databases exist to help brands find the best influencer.
- Join the Branded Hashtag Challenge: The Branded Hashtag challenge provides businesses with the opportunity to increase engagement by using a hashtag to ignite competition. The hashtag usually prompts users to complete a challenge and then use the hashtag in the description to enter a contest. TikTok reports that branded hashtags provide median engagement rates of up to 17.5%.
Lastly, don’t forget to leverage other social media channels to support your TikTok efforts. Content from TikTok can also be reposted and shared to other platforms like Facebook or YouTube with captioning to increase SEO. For example, TikTok itself has a YouTube channel that’s dedicated to posting TikTok compilations.
Make Your TikToks Accessible
TikTok recently introduced an auto-captioning feature to their platform in April 2021. While many disability advocates are thrilled by this news, it’s worth acknowledging that for guaranteed accessibility on TikTok, these built-in AI captioning features usually don’t provide equity to individuals with disabilities.
Misspellings or grammatical errors can occur often when the TikTok video is low quality or when a speaker has an accent that’s not recognized by the AI.
Providing high-quality captions with human fact checking is best practice when sharing content online. Deaf and hard of hearing audiences represent a significant part of the TikTok community, so ensuring that captions are accurate will be key to reaching this potential customer base.
To ensure better accessibility, creators should also pay attention to the way they write their hashtags. Capitalizing the first letter of each word, which is known as the “camel case” style, is also considered best practice. This ensures that hashtags are accessible to users of screen readers, as well as individuals with learning disabilities like dyslexia.
Join TikTok’s Business Community
Even a business that’s just starting its TikTok marketing journey can reap great benefits. Statistics reveal that creators with a following of 15,000 or less generate higher engagement rates of up to 17.69%, more so than profiles with bigger followings.
For effective TikTok digital marketing strategies utilize the tips above and rely on Verbit’s closed caption services and AI transcription tools for your videos to boost video engagement. Reach out to the Verbit team to learn more about taking your social media game to the next level.