Marketing and Advertising on TikTok

TikTok continues to be a popular social network that showcases short videos. The platform engages a young, international audience that spends hours on the site and TikTok creators generate and perpetuate countless online trends and memes. The platform also has faced challenges in the United States, namely due to the fact that it is owned by a Chinese company and is rumored to provide user data to the Chinese government.

If you’re thinking of using TikTok to market your business, first examine if there might be any issues with publishing your company’s content on a website and app that is not owned by a U.S.-based company. Some things to consider include compliance, copyright, or security issues.

Next, make sure the audience you can reach on TikTok is one that will help grow your business. TikTok claims that the majority of their users are male (55.7%) with the single largest group being 25 to 34-year-olds males (19.1%). If that is not your audience, it doesn’t mean TikTok couldn’t be useful for your company. However, you’ll need to find your audience on the platform – either by demographics such as age range or geographical location or psychographics meaning interests and behaviors.

To be successful on TikTok, you need to understand what content is popular on the platform, find topics that will resonate with the right audience, and produce a high quantity of videos to build and sustain momentum. While doing all of this, you should also remain true to your brand image and keeping your business goals in mind.

With over 1 million videos viewed daily on TikTok, how will your videos be seen? Putting the heavy lift of producing videos aside, to get visibility for your videos, you’ll need to employ a variety of tactics including:

• Developing compelling content
• Integrating trending video styles and sounds
• Leveraging your TikTok videos on other platforms such as Instagram
• Promoting your TikTok account online and offline

To enhance your marketing tactics on TikTok, take advantage of the TikTok Business Center to access ecommerce features to sell online, reach creators who are influencers for promotions, and manage advertising campaigns. Make sure you have a TikTok Business Account to gain access to these professional features.

The TikTok Business Center provides a dashboard for you and your team members to collaborate on and manage all of your marketing efforts on the platform. If you work with an ad agency, you can provide them access through the Center to help manage your campaigns.

TikTok Ads Manager

Before you can create your ad, you will need to connect your Business Center or Ads Manager account to your TikTok Business Account if they are not already connected. If you set your company’s TikTok account up as a personal account, you’ll have the opportunity to upgrade it to a business account.

To start the advertising process, TikTok directs you to their Ads Manager that consists of three sections: Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Ads. You can start your ad campaigns by selecting your goal from the following:

• Awareness - to help increase brand visibility by reaching a broad audience.
• Consideration – to drive engagement and interest in your brand, product, or service.
• Conversion – to drive specific actions like lead generation or sales.

Next, you can choose your target audience based on Location, Demographics, Interests, and Behaviors. Then you can either opt for a Custom Audience where you manually choose who sees your ads, or Automatic where TikTok uses its vast amount of user data to identify a “receptive” audience.

Finally, you set a budget of at least $10 and schedule your ad campaigns.

TikTok Creator Marketplace

If you’re looking to engage popular TikTok creators to help promote your company, products, or services, the Creator Marketplace is the place. After going through a verification process for your business that includes uploading a business license or other form of corporate identity, you can search for compatible Creators. You can search by location and category as well as the number of views, followers, or reach of the creators.

As with any influencer-type marketing, you need to be clear on your marketing goals, your budget, and exactly what you’d like the influencer to do. You also need to be open to input and collaboration on the part of the influencer. Each TikTok Creator has their own style as well as the audience they reach. Use the Creator Marketplace to track the results of each campaign to ensure that the collaboration is fruitful for your business.

TikTok Shop

If you sell products, setting up a TikTok Shop could be a useful next step once you’ve established your TikTok presence and are investing time and money to build your audience. TikTok Shops feature in-feed videos, TikTok LIVEs, and a product showcase tab. Think of LIVEs as your own shopping network where you can present your products on a live stream or work with a TikTok Shop Partner to assist you. You can also work with a TikTok Creator to handle the live video portion of your TikTok Shop experience.

As you can see, TikTok provides a variety of advertising tools for businesses and can help facilitate connections to their influential Creators to market your business. If you’re ready to post videos on TikTok, make sure you’re ready to budget in some advertising dollars each month to ensure your videos are seen.