Brands cannot underestimate the power of TikTok anymore. That’s because TikTok’s organic reach is unparalleled as compared to other social media platforms. The app has had an immense impact on video and culture in today’s world. Businesses everywhere and in all domains are looking to get engagement through TikTok marketing.
Now if you’re thinking about how your brand can ride this organic wave, improve TikTok engagement rate, and how to use TikTik to promote your business, this article is for you.
What is TikTok marketing?
In simple words, TikTok marketing is the practice of using TikTok to promote your brand, product, or service. Influencer marketing, TikTok advertising, and creating organic content are three essential parts of TikTok marketing for business. It can help you:
- Increase brand awareness
- Getting feedback from customers and audiences
- Selling products and services
- Advertising your offering
- Providing customer service
The fact that TikTok’s user base is rapidly growing makes this social media platform a great opportunity for brands to reach new and larger audiences. Let’s see the benefits of TikTok for businesses to know if it’s worth investing time and money in the platform.
What are the benefits of TikTok for business?
Here’s why this marketing channel is becoming a powerful option for marketers.
1. International audience
TikTok is popular in more than 150 countries, and millions of people consume content on this platform. This platform connects you with people worldwide and takes your business in front of them.
2. The high volume of Gen-Z users
In the United States, TikTok has 100 million monthly active users with 32.5% of users between the age of 10-19 years and 29.5% between 20-29 years. It has more than 800 million active users globally and TikTok has been downloaded over 2 billion times.
3. Video marketing strategy
According to research, 88% of people would like to see more videos from businesses. TikTok is perfect for promoting your brand with creative and engaging videos and expanding the reach of your existing video content. By analyzing your TikTok watch history and creating engaging content, you can improve your strategy and expand the reach of your existing video content.
4. Ads are seen more favorably
TikTok ads are seen as less intrusive than other social media ads, which means they’re perceived more favorably by users. Advertising on TikTok is more authentic, fun, and trustworthy, compared to other social media channels.
5. High engagement rate
The most popular videos on TikTok get millions of likes and comments. If you can create content that resonates with this audience, your brand could see significant benefits from the exposure. Based on the infinite scrolling interface and the fact that an average user spends 14.3 hours a month on the app make TikTok’s engagement rates are the highest of any social media platform.
6. Budget-friendly for brands
As the platform relies on bite-sized videos that include music, graphics, and lip-sync, it is an easy and budget-friendly way for brands to create trending content and incorporate product promotions in the videos.
The common misconception about TikTok is that it is an app with frivolous content for teens. The truth is, users, are flocking to thousands of communities that involve entertainment, tutorials, how-to guides, and beyond.
What is the TikTok engagement rate and how to calculate it?
The engagement rate is the number of people who interact with your content. It’s an important indicator of success for any social media platform, and TikTok is no exception. On the contrary, it’s even more so on this app because many users can engage with video posts such as likes or comments.
You can calculate your TikTok engagement rate by dividing the number of likes, comments, and shares divided by how many views you have.
TikTok Engagement Rate = (Total Number of Likes + Comments + Shares/Total Number of Views) * 100
How can brands use TikTok marketing?
Although TikTok has a huge audience, it is important to consider whether your potential audience will be on the app. However, if your target audience isn’t using TikTok, you need to consider if they will be likely to sign up in the near future.
That said, although TikTok has a majority of Generation Z users, what’s notable is that most social media platforms started with a younger audience. A case in point is Instagram, which was initially used by young adults. Today, it has a diversified audience and over 2 million businesses use it as a marketing channel.
The benefit of getting onboard the TikTok marketing bandwagon is that you’ll get a head start on your competitors. You grow an audience before the platform is saturated with promoted content and businesses.
Let’s see the 3 ways in which you can market your business on TikTok and improve the engagement rate.
#1. Work with influencers in your niche
One way to boost your TikTok marketing strategy is by working with influencers in your niche. A successful influencer marketing strategy involves finding the right set of creators, setting KPIs, and chalking a plan of what you would want to achieve together.
Major brands like Redbull, Chipotle, Calvin Klein, and Sony Music among many others have started working with influencers on TikTok to expand their reach.
The bottom line is that you must be clear about why you’ve chosen an influencer, what you want to get out of it and how you will measure the impact of collaboration.
Once you acquire new users with TikTok influencer marketing, you’ll need to retain them and a TikTok marketing plan comes to your aid.
You can also add top trending keywords, branded hashtags, or industry-specific buzzwords to social listening. Once added, you can filter a list of influencers that are actively talking about it. Filter the average engagemt, followers, or impressions.
#2. Create engaging and original content
The first approach to TikTok marketing is going down the DIY path. The best part of using TikTok is that you don’t need to create high-quality professionally filmed or edited videos. You can use your smartphone to come up with ways to repackage your promotional content in the TikTok format.
What you need for an effective TikTok company marketing strategy is engaging, fun, and original content. However, this kind of content is not possible for all businesses.
Ensure that your marketing is aligned to overall goals and the brand strategy. If your business is in a serious industry, focus on providing in-depth blog posts.
Alternatively, if you are an eCommerce business focussed on sustainability, leverage trending videos, how-to’s, hashtag challenges, and other types of video content aimed at adding value to your audience.
#3. Run ads
TikTok recently introduced opportunities for advertisers, enabling you to reach your target audience in less than 24 hours.
There are five distinct types of ads on TikTok:
- In-feed ads
- Branded hashtags
- TopView ads
How can TikTok fit into your overall marketing strategy?
#1. Conduct audience research
Audience research is a powerful aspect of TikTok engagement rate and TikTok marketing. You could reverse engineer the process in the following way.
Start looking at the hashtags you know your audience finds appealing. See the videos appearing under these tags and identify what they have in common. It could be a specific audio or editing style of video format (for example, tutorials, product launch, or just funny videos).
Besides the standard evergreen content, you could hop onto trends for 20-30% of the time and put your spin on them.
For example, Skincare brand Dermalogica shares skincare tips on its TikTok account. Occasionally, products are also highlighted. By building tips around their product ranges, they cater to both educational content and product promotions.
Keyhole’s TikTok analytics helps you understand how your posts are performing, how engaging your profile is, and how often your videos are getting likes and comments.
#2. Follow trending creators
One simple way to find new TikTok trends is by following creators who are the first to jump on the latest content trends. Once they post a trend, within 2-3 days you can create your own version of it before it becomes a saturated video.
Start by identifying and following these creators. Constantly follow their feed to ensure that you aren’t missing out on what they post.
Once you’ve chosen TikTok creators, Keyhole lets you vet influencers, their engagement rate and understand the share of voice.
#3. Perform a competitor analysis
Use TikTok to see what other businesses are doing on this platform. If there is a brand or product similar to yours, analyze their content strategy, see what has worked for them and what hasn’t.
Additionally, TikTok is a creator-led platform, so don’t miss out on analyzing TikTok stars. Find influencers who specialize in your area of expertise. This can range from cosmetics to education, literature, and economics.
Create a comparison group using Keyhole to see how you rank against your competitors and how you can gain more followers.
#4. Set goals
Before you start creating videos for TikTok, set some goals. This could be anything from increasing sales by a certain percentage to getting more followers within six months. Make sure your TikTok marketing strategy aligns with these objectives and measure results along the way so that adjustments can be made when necessary.
#5. Perform regular audits
It is important to perform regular audits of your TikTok account just like any other social media account. This will help you track how well your content is performing and whether or not changes need to be made to the type of videos you’re creating or the way in which you’re promoting them.
#6. Post regularly
TikTok serves each of its users with a personalized mix of content on the app’s main interface, called the For You page.
Videos suggested on the For You page can be from big accounts as well as small ones. They have one thing in common, mostly, they are not older than a couple of days.
For best results for TikTok for business, understand where your audience is located (time zones) and post when they are online. Also, TikTok recommends posting 1-4 times a day.
Furthermore, to figure out a posting schedule that will satisfy both TikTok’s algorithm and your fans, monitor your performance until you find an optimal posting frequency.
Taking it a step ahead, TikTok analytics by Keyhole shares recommendations on how to increase views, recommendations, and comments based on your most popular posts.
#7. Use relevant hashtags
Like other social media networks like Twitter and Instagram, TikTok users rely on hashtags to search for videos and clips by subject. When you click on the “Discover” tab at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a list of videos as per the trending hashtags.
The benefits of hashtags for TikTok marketing strategy in 2022 are:
- Amplifies the reach of your content
- Identifies competitors and influencers
- Gets more followers
You could also try making your videos stand out in slightly less popular categories to boost the TikTok engagement rate. Otherwise, your videos are more likely to get swamped in the content sea. As with all types of marketing, your videos should appear to people relevant to your campaign, so don’t focus on hashtags only because they are popular.
Keyhole’s social media reporting tracks your top hashtags by engagement and suggests the optimal number of hashtags to use in your next post based on historical performance.
#8. Hashtag challenges
Hashtag challenges are highly popular in TikTok as they are an excellent way for businesses to increase both engagement and brand awareness. For example, you could set up a challenge for users to share videos of themselves attempting your challenge along with adding your chosen hashtags.
The best part is that a good hashtag challenge encourages users to talk about your brand even on other social media sites.
McDonald’s had a #bigmactiktok challenge wherein fans had to select a Big Mac chant genre, then dance and record the video.
#9. Add clear descriptions to the videos
While TikTok’s videos can be up to a minute long, you don’t have that long to get your message through. Your videos should be visually appealing and creative.
At all times, you’d want to use a clear description of what the video has to offer to the viewers. Consider wording it in such a way that people would feel like commenting.
Alongside this, a good description also helps with SEO. Because you’d want TikTok to know what your video is about when it indexes the clip. Don’t forget to add important keywords as long as they make sense and don’t seem like a random collection of words. Adding short snappy descriptions is a good way to increase the TikTok engagement rate.
Lastly, Keyhole’s TikTok analytics analyzes which video affects your audience liked, disliked, and how often you should use these effects in your posts. You can easily create a social media report using real-time & accurate data.
Learn and test new TikTok marketing strategies
TikTok is evolving at lightning space, bringing a new era of marketing and creative solutions. Give your brand a boost by making it more appealing to young people.
TikTok marketing requires you to be creative and original. Integrate your brand within the videos wherever possible for a higher TikTok engagement rate. Analyze the performance of your TikTok account using a TikTok analytics tool such as Keyhole.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is TikTok engagement rate?
TikTok engagement rate refers to the percentage of TikTok users who engage with your content, such as likes, comments, shares, and follows. It is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of your TikTok marketing strategy.
2. How do I calculate the TikTok engagement rate?
To calculate your TikTok engagement rate, you need to divide the total number of engagements (likes, comments, shares, and follows) by the total number of views and multiply by 100. For example, if your video has 1,000 views and 100 likes, 20 comments, and 5 shares, your engagement rate would be ((100 + 20 + 5) / 1,000) x 100 = 12.5%.
3. What are some tips for improving TikTok engagement rate?
Some tips for improving TikTok engagement rate include:
1. Create engaging and visually appealing content that resonates with your target audience
2. Use trending hashtags and challenges to increase your reach and visibility
3. Post regularly and at optimal times when your audience is most active
4. Respond to comments and engage with your followers to build a loyal community
5. Collaborate with other TikTok users and brands to expand your reach and tap into new audiences.
