Businesses today have shifted focus from offline marketing to social media platforms. Social media marketing has evolved over a period with significant changes in the way audiences interact with advertisements.
The use of modern-day advertisements seems to be fruitful through vertical videos and TikTok is one such platform that enables businesses to build their online brand organically.
What can businesses do to flourish on TikTok? To answer that question, let us explore some helpful TikTok tips for businesses.
1. Create videos with the right aspect ratio
Aspect ratio is the width and height of a screen. Since TikTok is a mobile application, all its content is shown in a vertical format. Make sure that the videos you create conform to this setup to make them easy to view. This will help enhance user experience.
Acceptable aspect ratio in TikTok
For standard ads, you can choose between 9:16, 1:1, or 16:9. As for news feed app series video ads, the options are 16:9 and 1:1. However, vertical 16:9 videos are highly recommended for TikTok.
2. Keep it short and straightforward
TikTok videos are often just 60 seconds or less. It’s best for businesses to create videos that are within this time frame to keep viewers interested. So, if your video is too long and dragging, viewers are more likely to scroll past it.
Tips to make your TikTok video count
Keep in mind that the human attention span is just about eight seconds so make that first few seconds count.
- As much as possible, you should be able to convey the importance of your business, produce, or service immediately. This way, even if viewers do decide not to watch your entire video, they have already heard and watched the most important part of it.
- Another way to make the first eight seconds count is by making the first few seconds so interesting and captivating that viewers will want to keep watching until the end. This is a big challenge but it’s possible.
3. Target the right audience
A business runs well if it successfully targets the right audience. When you switch to a TikTok pro account for your business, you will be able to dig deep into your account’s analytics. This information will provide you with essential information about your followers and content.
These demographics and data will help you sort your TikTok content so that you can target the right audience for your business. You can target the audience based on your product’s market by categorizing them by age, gender, and location.
This is extremely useful when you want to boost sales or generate TikTok leads in a specific area. Focusing on the right TikTok audience will ultimately help increase your engagement while boosting brand visibility.
How to identify your target audience
It’s important for businesses to know where to focus their strategies. You need to know who your target customer is to maximize your digital marketing efforts. Here are ways to help you identify who your target audience is:
- Gather data about your existing audience and customers. Data points include age, location, interests, spending patterns, language, and more.
- Check conversations between your followers. Track common hashtags to learn about relevant users.
- Check out your competitors’ audiences. More often than not, competing brands have similar audience types.
- Conduct a survey or poll. Ask your viewers to leave comments, provide feedback, or share suggestions regarding your brand or product.
4. Educate your viewers the fun way
TikTok audiences have their own reasons why they chose the platform. You need to make sure that you are one of the reasons. This might look difficult to achieve but it isn’t. One of the best strategies for TikTok is to educate your audiences in a way that’s fun for them.
Types of meaningful content that you can share on TikTok
Education does not only mean books, texts, and homework. It can be anything beyond these constructs. You can use TikTok to provide value to the audience by creating content that gives the audiences something to retain, such as:
- Tutorials
- Life hacks
- Tips
- How-to’s
- Solutions to problems
- Quick trivias
This will enable them to relate to your content, giving them a reason to keep coming back to your profile, watch more of your videos, and find out what else you have to offer. It will also build much-needed credibility for your brand.
TikTok challenges relevant to your business
TikTok is known for trends and challenges that go viral. They even have dedicated hashtags. A lot of TikTok videos have taken over the internet, engaging viewers and creators alike. A business can join the bandwagon, innovating the challenge while getting more visibility.
Viewers have an eye for creativity so make sure you give your creative best for your business to flourish on TikTok. When you take up a challenge on TikTok, you will increase the chances of getting noticed by the viewer as TikTok challenge videos have a high engagement and an organic reach.
Organic challenges vs branded challenges
There are two ways you can get involved in TikTok challenges as a business owner: Join trending hashtag challenges or create your own.
Organic challenges are those generated by TikTok for everyone to join. One of the most popular is the #pushupchallenge. If you think your brand can relate to the challenge or hashtag, then create a TikTok for it. Viewers love brands that participate in viral challenges.
Branded challenges are those created by brands. One popular example is the #pepsicanbalance challenge where TikTok users are encouraged to balance a can of pepsi on one side. Adding your brand to the hashtag makes it easier to find on TikTok while helping boost brand awareness and familiarity.
5. Create posts that spark reactions
As a business, you need to create posts that spark reactions and demand engagement from the viewers. TikTok provides you with multiple AR filters that make your video interesting. To make your business stand out, you can create your video using an online video editor.
However, it’s not an easy task to get the viewer to react to your videos. You must continuously find creative ways to make TikTok videos that will make your audience want to react or comment. You can often create content that asks the audience to comment for an opinion or an answer.
You must always reply to those reactions so that the viewer feels acknowledged and will want to comment again for sure.
Factors to consider when creating captivating videos
Videos that trigger emotions are most likely to captivate viewers and stay in their memories longer. Here are some cues that can help your TikTok video trigger a reaction among your viewers:
- Colors
- Facial expressions of actors or characters
- Camera movement
- Background music
- Sound effects
- Plot
6. Add captions to your videos
Captions make your video easier to watch. A lot of people use their mobile phones on the go so, oftentimes, they watch videos with the sound off. The captions can help them see and understand what the video is about without having to turn up the sound.
Captions are also especially useful for people who have difficulties in hearing. You get to reach a wider audience this way.
Tips for effective captioning
Adding captions is more than just adding text to your video. Here are important things to remember to make your captions effective and beneficial to your audience:
- Use a contrasting color to make the text stand out
- Make sure it stays on your screen long enough to be read
- Make sure that it’s in sync with the actual voice or voiceover
- The font size should be large enough to see but small enough to not distract the viewers from the actual video
7. Make your videos easy to identify
Create a common theme across your videos. Not only will this make your brand familiar, it will also help set you apart from other TikTok videos. As much as possible, you would not want your video to remind viewers of another brand or video.
How to make your video distinctive
You can create a common recording style, use a unique color palette, or feature fixed characters that people can relate with. You can also add your brand logo in one corner of the video while it plays or make it pop out at the end, letting the viewers know who’s responsible for such an amazing video.
The purpose here is you want your audience to come to a point where they already know what company or brand is behind a TikTok video just by the theme, color, or characters it shows. People are more likely to support and purchase from businesses that they are familiar with.
8. Use hashtags wisely
Hashtags have a huge purpose of increasing organic reach by tenfold. But you must remember that with great power comes great responsibility. You must not spam hashtags. Use only relevant ones in your TikTok video’s captions.
Focus on hashtags that your business can benefit from and those that will catch the attention of your target audience. You may use as many as you want but 5 to7 is the recommended number of hashtags you should use on your TikTok videos. Make sure to target those with high usage volume.
Using relevant hashtags will help the audience find your business easily. They will help push your content to the viewers that engage with similar TikTok videos while keeping your account relevant to the platform.
Benefits of using hashtags
A hashtag is an essential element on social media platforms, including TikTok. But why should you use them? Here are a few good reasons why:
- They can help your video reach people beyond your followers.
- It increases the chances for people to discover your brand
- Helps you identify your competitors
- Helps you identify your target audience
9. Opt for content batching
It’s understandable for business owners to be quite busy managing their businesses. If you are running it on your own or if you are a digital marketer with so much on your plate, posting regular videos on TikTok could be quite tedious. So, why not batch create your videos?
What is content batching?
Content batching is a productivity strategy that can help you plan, create, and post more videos regularly. Instead of spending an hour or more brainstorming concepts, creating and editing videos, and thinking of captions, use those hours to come up with 5 to 10 TikTok ideas.
Then spend another few hours to film or record those videos, editing them as needed. And then spend another few hours to come up with captions or descriptions. Before you know it, you have about 5 to ten TikTok videos that are ready for posting.
You can then sort those videos to which ones get posted first and when.
The great thing about batching video content is that it takes the pressure off of having to come up with TikTok videos every few days or so. Because you already have a batch waiting to be posted, you can focus your spare time and undivided attention on other things that matter most to your business.
Bonus tip: Create highlights
When your business has created a certain number of TikTok videos, compile a video montage highlighting all your work. Creating video highlights will help the viewer understand the depth of your business in a single video. It also helps you share your brand’s story, TikTok style.
Takeaways
TikTok may seem like an unlikely platform to introduce your business and find potential customers but it’s the best place to be if you want to boost your sales and generate leads effectively. TikTok has a billion users and, if you want to reach out to your target audience, you have to be where they are.
Just by building and maintaining your presence on this popular social media platform, you would be able to market your business easily without having to invest too much. Now that’s one smart business strategy.
Author bio
Gladys Labsan is a writer and self-taught visual artist who loves to make mini Clipchamp videos, share her thoughts, sing her heart out (alone), and eat cake. All while handling four silly little girls who make her heart full.
