Many brands associated TikTok with a much younger audience in the initial days and didn’t take it seriously enough to have a proper TikTok marketing plan. But now, there is a significant change in perception, and it is becoming a favoured marketing platform. The advantage of TikTok is that not many brands have a big presence on the widely popular platform. So, starting as early as possible presents a wonderful opportunity for brands to leverage their potential with comparatively lower competition.
According to latest marketing reports on the trends to look forward to in 2021 and beyond, TikTok will play a major role in the marketing strategies of all brands. Thus, it makes sense not just to understand the platform’s basic functionality, but it is equally important to know how it can be used for marketing. Familiarizing oneself with the trends and popular features of the app can help marketers design an effective marketing strategy for the platform.
Here are some marketing ideas that have gained traction on TikTok and can be used creatively to become a part of the overall marketing campaign. Thus, TikTok marketing can be seamlessly integrated into the overall marketing plan.
Tiktok
TikTok hashtags are similar to the ones used on other popular platforms like Instagram and YouTube. Thus, there is not much effort needed to understand what they are or how they function. The creative use of these hashtags can help place the brand communication in the relevant categories and front of the right audience.
According to latest marketing reports, early adopters have leveraged these hashtags on the platform via creative hashtag challenges. In these, the brands create a challenge for users to create videos on a theme and tag it with a unique hashtag, including the brand’s name. This helps build organic traffic and user-generated content, resulting in the brand’s improved search ranking. Thus, the hashtag challenge successfully promotes the brand and generates a high level of engagement with minimum efforts from the brand itself.
Influencer / Celebrity Marketing
The rise in popularity of TikTok as a platform for video content has also given rise to many users whose content has a high reach. These TikTok influencers have a huge target audience following their content and engaging with them. Leveraging the influencers to promote your brand is one of the fastest ways to harness the platform’s power.
Another trend, according to latest marketing reports, is the increase in the number of celebrities using TikTok and creating their content. These celebrities already have a large audience looking up their content, which also follows them on TikTok. Thus, placing your brand promotion so that the celebrities promote it on the app is another quick way of increasing your brand presence and awareness.
Duets
A unique feature is where the content creator can create a video and ask the audience to duet with them. This is a vastly popular feature that sees a lot of engagement since the audience directly interacts with the content creator. The duet feature can be creatively leveraged to drive brand promotions, and some of the brands have been experimenting with reaping rich results.
One of the ways to use this feature is to create a video snippet and then ask their audience to duet with them to either complete the video or create the same video with the user. The engagement of such contests is much higher than any other type since it allows the users to become a part of the brand video directly.
Memes
An extremely popular feature, not just amongst the millennials but users from all demographics, memes are a staple on any social media platform. These have a huge following, especially on TikTok. According to latest marketing report on the trends on TikTok, humorous content tops the type of content being shared and liked on TikTok, much more than any of the other types of content.
This is a golden opportunity for marketers. Using memes as part of their marketing strategy can be a sure-shot way of going viral on TikTok. Also, the popularity of these meme TikTok videos is so much that they are shared on the platform and other platforms like Facebook and YouTube. WhatsApp forwards also have a lot of TikTok memes. Thus, if you are a marketer working on the TikTok content strategy for your brand, make sure memes are a regular part. The benefits will start becoming visible very quickly.
Social Commerce
This is an area that is slowly getting traction as it allows the audience to shop directly instead of leaving the platform. According to latest marketing reports, social commerce will be a major trend in the future as users are already familiar with the social media platforms, brand placements, and advertisements catered to their specific needs. Now, the user journey can be completed by shopping on the platform itself.
The trend is so promising that the app announced a collaboration with the leading e-commerce platform Shopify. This is being planned to help the TikTok creators to leverage the features of Shopify on the TikTok app itself, giving their audience an option to purchase right there without having to go anywhere else. Also, for those already on Shopify, they can manage their TikTok marketing and analytics on the platform itself.
Conclusion
Knowing the marketing trends expected to pick up on the TikTok platform, marketers can make creative use of these to get the first-mover advantage on the app. With short, engaging content and a loyal audience, this is a great opportunity to improve the brand’s awareness.
