There is no doubt that TikTok has become one of the most-used social networks worldwide, with over 1.2 billion active users. Even though TikTok commenced as a short-form entertainment space, its versatility, engagement, and innovation make it a valuable platform for brands to reach their online communities. TikTok marketing is no “one-and-done” strategy.
To reach your goals on this network, you must create a strategic marketing plan outlining your goals, objectives, and strategies to implement in your content plan. By the end of this post, you will have a clear path to building a TikTok marketing plan.
What Is TikTok for Business?
TikTok for Business is an account type that allows brands, creators, and advertisers to measure their content’s performance, schedule content in advance, and run advertisements on the platform. When selecting this account type, you can access TikTok Business Suite, the network’s centralized marketing and advertising space.
This network continues to provide creators and brands with powerful tools to analyze their accounts and understand how to refine their strategies better. To understand Business Suite and how you can use it for your brand’s TikTok account, follow this guide:
Why Run a TikTok Marketing Strategy?
TikTok is one of the most popular social platforms.
If numbers could speak… well, they did.
Total TikTok downloads have crossed the 1 billion mark. In particular, it has reached 1.5 billion downloads on App Store and Google Play together. You can even use TikTok online without downloading the app, with similar features found on the app version.
A social platform that continues to grow
Since TikTok was launched in 2016 as Douyin, it has experienced an unstoppable growth. In 2020, it had 800 million monthly active users according to DataReportal. Numbers that place TikTok on top of other social channels like LinkedIn or Twitter.
Users are highly active
Even when many users have an app, if they don’t interact with it, it is doomed to failure. Something that doesn’t happen with TikTok, where 68% of users watch videos from other accounts and more than half (55%) create and edit their own videos.
The content is downright addictive
TikTok users spend at least the same amount of time on Instagram (53 minutes a day) and a little less than Facebook (58 minutes). This data confirms that it is already at the same level as the most popular social platforms.
If this does not convince you to begin your own business strategy on TikTok, you must read the extensive TikTok Study we conducted:
Getting Started on TikTok
First things first, you have to download the App. It is available for mobile phones and tablets, both App Store and Google Play.
If you want to check out the app a bit more before creating a TikTok account, explore the new app and learn more about it.
| ⚠️ Once you create an account, you can see two types of content when you enter the app. For You: Videos recommended based on your preferences and interactions while you are on the app (likes, comments, following, etc.). |
If after reviewing the app, you feel ready, don’t be shy and click ‘Sign Up’.
Create Your TikTok Business Account
If you haven’t done so yet, it’s time to create your TikTok Business account.
▶️ Choose how you want to register with TikTok, using your email, phone number, or logging in directly from Facebook or Google.
▶️ Set up a password and BOOM! Welcome to TikTok.
Remember that creating a Business Account will let you access the marketing and advertising tools not offered using a Personal account. When implementing a TikTok marketing strategy, having these tools handy will give you the knowledge to make more informed business decisions.
How to delete a TikTok account
Deleting your TikTok account is easy. However, before taking this step, remember that doing this is irreversible and you will lose access to the videos you have uploaded, the information you have shared, and the community you have built. Then again, sometimes it’s necessary if you need a clean plate to rejuvenate your brand’s TikTok account.
How to recover your TikTok account
If you have login problems, you may have lost your TikTok account. You have deleted it, lost your password, or have been suspended.
You can recover it by establishing a new password with your email or mobile phone or ask the app support team to review your case if they have suspended it.
TikTok Verification
With 800 million users there is a risk of your account being plagiarized. Plus, receiving the “blue check” can help you boost your account’s credibility and visibility. This will also avoid plagiarism of your content. To verify your account, you must submit a verification request.
How to verify your TikTok account
1. In the TikTok app, tap Profile at the bottom.
2. Tap the Menu ☰ button at the top.
3. Tap Settings and Privacy.
4. Tap Account, then tap Verification. If you’re registered as a Business Account, then you can only apply for Business Verification. If you’re registered as a Personal Account, then you can apply for Personal and Institutional Verifications.
5. Follow the steps in the app to submit a verification request.
For more in-depth information on TikTok verification, click the button below:
If your account is not verified first go, here are some tips to move the needle and get that badge on your profile.
Tips to receive TikTok verification
↪️ Create high-quality content
Being creative is a must when it comes to TikTok marketing. However, how do we define “quality content”? This differs for each brand, yet it’s what will resonate with your audience best. Understanding your audience will be essential for your TikTok marketing strategy.
Sharing valuable and shareable content for your TikTok audience is crucial. This is what will amplify your account and leave followers wanting more.
↪️ Join trends
A way to reach a larger audience is to join one of the most popular features on this platform through trending audio, jokes, and messages that grab viewers’ attention.
Dances, sports, riddles, there is one for everybody. If you include the hashtag associated with the challenge, your video will reach more users. Be sure to check out our TikTok Songs of the Week Blog which we update weekly:
↪️ Go Live on TikTok
Yes, you are right. With TikTok, you can also make live videos. This lets you get to know your audience, switch up the content you’re sharing, and earn cash from your streams. You don’t need to record, edit, and configure a video. Consider inviting an interesting guest, providing a niche tutorial, demonstrating your product, etc. Anyone can join these live videos, which can amplify your voice differently.
↪️ Promote your account on other channels
The art of repurposing and multi-channel marketing allows brands to reach audiences and direct them to another account of yours. Thus, there is no harm in repurposing content on other channels or linking your TikTok account to drive traffic.
If you want to learn how to master the art of repurposing, watch this live MasterClass we presented with marketing strategies and online educator, Lastasha James:
How to Optimize Your TikTok Account
What’s the point of sharing high-quality videos on your account if users can’t recognize you? It’s time to give your TikTok profile a personal and recognizable touch.
👉🏻 Representative profile picture
When users first enter your profile, including a profile picture representing your brand is important. Whether this is a logo, headshot, or even video, the point is that your brand resonates with users as they fall on your profile.
👉🏻 Catchy bio
The next element of your profile is creating a unique description of what your brand does and a summary of what they can expect to find in your content. You can even utilize keywords in this section to categorize your business and increase your likelihood of ranking in TikTok’s search engine.
👉🏻 Link-in-bio
Inside your TikTok profile, you can only include one link. This may seem like a limitation, yet when using a link-in-bio tool like Metricool’s SmartLinks, you can centralize all your important links on one page to generate one URL.
👉🏻 Create a playlist
TikTok playlists help users and followers easily find your videos. Also, it allows you to sort and classify them according to the content of the video. The community will thank you for having all the content classified and organized.
👉🏻 Pin videos to your profile
Pin up to three of your profile’s most important or featured videos. This way, they will always remain at the top of your profile, and users will see them as soon as they land on your account. All you need to do is:
- Go to the video you want to pin
- Click on the three horizontal dots button
- Select the “Pin” option.
You can follow the same steps to find the “Unpin” option.
How is your profile looking? Optimizing your TikTok account should be conducted frequently, also known as a social media audit.
How to Upload a TikTok Video
Now that your profile is ready, let’s go to the most important part: Uploading a video on TikTok. It may seem complicated, but we’ll show you how to do it step by step.
👉🏻 Click the plus (+) icon at the center of the screen
A new screen will display all the possibilities for your video. What can you find here?
↪️ You can choose whether to upload a video recorded outside the app or shoot one with TikTok and utilize the network’s native effects, in-text, captioning, and custom cover photo features.
↪️ Choose the TikTok video length from 15 seconds up to 10 minutes.
↪️ Select the option ‘Add a sound’. Another screen will open where you can see trending sounds and the ones you’ve saved as favorites.
| ⚠️ To add a sound to your ‘Favorites’, click on the circle icon at the bottom right corner of the video, next to the profile name. The song will appear in a new window, where you can tap to add it to Favorites, play the complete song, use the sound directly, or check which videos have included the song. |
↪️ Edit your video before you publish it with multiple options that appear on the right side of the screen.
Record your video in whole or parts. Utilize the countdown feature to shoot a video free-handed, up to 10 seconds.
Once you have the content, choose from multiple editing options to create your unique video. Change the speed of the video, add filters to change the look of the video, or insert video effects to make your content flow.
↪️ Adjust the sound chosen, crop the video, or turn up or down the music volume.
↪️ Add sounds, effects (faces, slow motion, countdown cinema style, etc.), texts or choose stickers-emojis from the TikTok library.
👉🏻 Add a description to your video
Before you publish your video, add a caption to tie it all together. Don’t forget to include hashtags related to your content or mentions to your friends or users. You can also make your video public or private, allow comments, enable a duet, and save or share it on WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook.
👉🏻 Upload stories to TikTok
Take advantage of TikTok’s content formats, including Stories. Just as this content type is useful on other platforms for quickly and easily connecting with your audience, the idea is the same on TikTok. You also have the option to include stickers, mentions, music, and photos.
How to Build Your TikTok Marketing Strategy
Now that you know how to use the platform and create content, it’s time to build your marketing strategy and implement your tactics. We recommend recording detailed notes and organizing your strategy on a written or visual document, to refer back to with your team.
STEP 1: RESEARCH NICHE, IDEAL CUSTOMERS, & COMPETITORS
You need to understand your target audience and what they are looking for to position your brand and content on this app. This will help you build your ideal buyer personas to define your target audience.
You can conduct this research in a few different areas:
- Scroll the TikTok app, using search terms that relate to what your brand does.
- Use keyword tools such as Keywordtool.io, SemRush, or AnswerthePublic to see what your ideal clients are asking.
- Research user demographics and behaviors on the TikTok platform.
- See what your competitors are doing on TikTok and conduct a social media competitive analysis
A competitor analysis lets you into the secrets of how other brands are performing on socials. As you begin to grasp the nature of this network, you can see firsthand what other content and strategies businesses are using, and set performance goals for your own brand.
Metricool provides the tools to conduct a thorough competitive analysis, with metrics and analytics that will help you as you design your TikTok marketing strategy. To learn more about how you can conduct a social media competitor analysis, use this guide:
STEP 2: DEFINE YOUR GOALS
After researching how your business can create content tailored to your niche audience, it’s time to define your goals and objectives. Using your ideal buyer persona profiles, you can align these goals with what will resonate with your audience.
When doing this, as a brand you should ask:
- What would success look like for your business on TikTok?
- What is the primary goal: conversions, driving traffic, building an online community?
- How will you present your product or services on this network?
- What metrics will you analyze to measure the success of your strategy?
While this guide is intended to measure your goals and TikTok performance, remember that this strategy will evolve, meaning your goals and objectives will change over time. Think of this working document for developing your perfect TikTok marketing strategy.
STEP 3: CREATE A CONTENT PLAN
Here comes the fun part, creating your content strategy! As with this entire strategy, your ideal clients should always be at the forefront of your content. Depending on their search intents, behaviors, demographics, and interests, you should position your brand in a way that answers, relates, and entertains your audience. This goes back to keyword research, an indispensable strategy in content marketing.
Your content plan should include a few necessary foundational elements:
- Content Tones: What emotions will provoke in your audience and how will you convey this through your content? Think of pain points and desires your audience experiences daily so you can position your brand to improve their work, life, happiness, etc.
- Content Pillars: 3-5 topic ideas defining your brand’s content on TikTok. This should include a balance of selling your product or service and creating relatable, engaging content to connect with your audience.
- Posting Schedule: Determine how often you will post your content and what type of content you will post each week. We recommend switching off what content you post daily to create a more dynamic brand style.
- Format Types: Lastly, decide what content you will post. Will you post stories, carousels, advertisements, and products along with normal short-form videos?
💡CONTENT PLANNING TIP: Consistency is crucial on TikTok. We recommend posting at least 3x a week (standard posting frequency) to stay connected with your audience. A social media scheduling tool like Metricool will help you save time in managing your account in a single location.
STEP 4: OPTIMIZE CONTENT FOR SEO
We’ve mentioned keyword research multiple times, but what does this mean? TikTok has become a leading search engine, where users can ask questions about any topic. The algorithm ranks content based on how audiences have reacted to these different topic videos.
By conducting thorough keyword research for your brand, you can align what content your audience is searching for with the ideal audience you’re trying to attract. Then, you can sprinkle these keywords into your content and profile to let the search engine do its thing.
For more detailed information about optimizing your content TikTok, follow this SEO guide:
STEP 5: ANALYZE YOUR STRATEGY
As we always say, you can’t understand how your content is performing if you don’t analyze the data. This last step is important in measuring your strategies’ impact. This may sound like work, jotting down data and numbers. However, thankfully some tools provide you with powerful TikTok analytics.
TikTok Ads
If you decide to include paid advertising in your strategy,
Before we get started, you must know that you can’t create ads or promote videos from the app. You must do it from their own website, TikTok Ads, a bit like Facebook Business Manager.
Add your company’s information
First of all, you must include the billing country or region and if a business or individual will use it.
Whatever option you choose, on the next screen you must include the contact information such as your full name, phone number, and email address.
Between 48 hours and up to 5 days, TikTok will contact you to confirm that information..
Create your ad
1. Create your ad.
Once you have access to your TikTok Ads account. Click on ‘campaign’.
Then press create. Since it is your first campaign, the edit button is not yet enabled.
2. Choose your objective
So far, TikTok only allows you to choose amongst three types of objectives: Traffic, conversions, and App install.
They are quite straightforward, to drive users to your site, get more interactions, or encourage users to install your app.
3. Set your budget
There are two ways to set a budget: Total or daily.
Whatever budget you choose, monitor the performance of your campaign so if you see that it is not working as expected, stop it in time before it gets very expensive.
4. Create an ad group
It’s time to start creating your ad group within the campaign.
In this section, you can change the placement, it can be automatic or you can select the placement to show your ads on TikTok and also on the rest of the apps of the group:, Vigo Video, Buzz Video, amongst others.
Then, edit all the details requested as you do on Facebook Ads: Landing URL, display names, images, etc. You can also select keywords to describe your page or app to help you reach your target audience.
In the Targeting section, you can define your target audience, selecting gender, location, age, language, or other categories.
5. Optimize your campaigns
Before you launch your campaign, you must set your optimization goal for your campaign:
- Conversion, which will show your ad to the audience with higher chances of conversation;
- Click, the goal is to get as many clicks as possible.
- Impression, the goal is to show your ad as many users as possible.
Within this section, you can turn on the ‘Smart Optimization’, to constantly optimize and increase your conversions.
Remember to set when your ads will run continuously, the budget, and if you want your ad to show every day or on specific days.
6. Design your ad
On TikTok marketing, you can advertise through images or videos.
If you don’t think that your homemade videos are good enough and video-editing apps are not your strength, keep calm! TikTok has you covered and puts a ‘video creation kit’ at your disposal where you can create your videos from templates that you can personalize with images, videos, and music.
Once the design is ready, you can write a text with 80 characters maximum and include a call to action.
TikTok Ads Types
Once your account is registered on TikTok Ads, it’s very important to set a clear objective for your ad, and therefore, know the type of ads that you can create on this platform.
In-Feed Ads or Biddable Ads
These types of ads will remind you of those that you have already run on Facebook or Instagram. Ads that will appear in users’ feeds and can drive them to your website, buy a product, or download something.
One benefit is that you can create custom audiences and target your audience by gender, location, and age, the basics. However, at the moment it’s not possible to segment your audience by interests which limits access to your potential customers.
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These types of ads are the ones that require a lower investment and allow videos between 9 and 15 seconds. Here you can bid depending on the ad space. Three payment models depend on your objective. Pay per click, per thousand impressions, or per number of views that appear on the “For You” feed. |
Brand Takeovers
These types of ads appear instantly when users open the app.
They occupy the whole screen and they can be either a static image or a video and redirect users to an internal TikTok profile or external link, such as the page of any specific product.
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These ads are the most expensive and are only within reach of big brands that want to promote their products on TikTok. The main reason why it is so expensive is because TikTok only allows one advertiser per day. The platform Voluum has published on their blog that this ad can cost from $50,000 per day. |
Hashtag Challenges
If you have challenged your friends to do something, this can be your type of ad, although it won’t be cheap.
With these types of ads, the brand promotes a hashtag challenge where users can participate. It’s a great way to make your brand go viral and increase the number of views.
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With this type of ad, you will appear with a banner in the trending tab for 6 days. Within this page, users will find the instructions for your challenge. You should know that the price of this type of advertising is around $150,000 per week according to Voluum’s blog. |
Branded Lenses
Getting the most out of your creativity is part of your day, right?
Now it’s time to bring it up to your ads, where you can create your filters, augmented reality filters in this case, that users can apply in their videos.
If you know how to be different and original, you will get many views for your brand and help your filter go viral.
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These types of ads are also reserved for big brands that invest up to $80,000 a day to add a filter on TikTok so users can add them to their videos. We recommend that unless you are certain that you have created an extraordinary filter to reach millions, you don’t make such an investment. |
💡Our 2024 TikTok Ads Study found that campaigns aimed to boost Video Views were most heavily invested, with Traffic campaigns coming in second. We also found the average campaign duration length was 26 days, the average CPC was $0.22, and CPM was $1.56. Download the full study here:
Monetizing Your TikTok Account
Along with advertising, there are other ways to make money from your content. With the introduction of TikTok Shop, affiliate marketing, and other TikTok programs, creators and brands can now generate a serious income with this platform.
Another option to generate income with your TikTok content is the application’s creator fund. This is a “funding” that you as a content creator can apply for if you meet certain requirements requested by the platform. If you meet them, you can be part of this creator fund program. The TikTok Creator Fund is switching over to the TikTok Creativity Center.
Manage your TikTok Account with Metricool
Metricool is an all-in-one social media scheduling, analyzing, and management platform for brands, creators, and social media managers to grow their brand’s online presence. On this platform, you are never limited to one platform. Manage content across nine social media channels, collaborate with team members, and automate reports to send to your clients.
