TikTok Marketing Guide

No doubt, TikTok has become the leading social media app for short-form video content. A social channel to complement your social media marketing strategy. TikTok, which started as an innocent social network to create music videos, has positioned itself as the new phenomenon for mobile phones. And now, with time, it has acquired more significance in terms of marketing. So, do you need to design a TikTok marketing strategy?

▶️ The answer is Yes!

What Is TikTok for Business?

TikTok for Business is a one-stop shop for advertisers on TikTok. Instead of researching and cultivating your own marketing strategy as a business on TikTok, this platform guides you through each step of creating ads, targeting your correct audience, and analyzing the metrics needed to understand how your ads performed.

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 also can use TikTok online without downloading the app, with similar features that you will find in 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:

With TikTok, you will be able to… 

➡️ Share your products or services in a casual and relaxed way.

➡️ Reach a large audience who can become a future customer.

 Where should we start? As always, from the beginning.

Getting Started With 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. 

If after reviewing the app, you feel ready, don’t be shy and click ‘Sign Up’.

Create Your TikTok Business Account

To get started with TikTok marketing, you need an account that you can create with some simple steps. 

▶️ Choose how you want to register with TikTok, the fastest way is through your email address.

▶️ Set up a password.

You already have an account!

Once you have it, it is important that you differentiate it from other personal accounts.

Remember, this is oriented to your business TikTok marketing strategy.

To do so, you must switch to a business account that allows you to:

➡️ Access different tools to improve your content and performance.

➡️ Consult all the stats related to your content in detail, such as reach or number of followers.

The benefit of a business account is that it lets you track if your TikTok marketing strategy is on the right path.

How to delete a TikTok account

Deleting your TikTok account is easy. However, before taking this step, consider all the consequences: You will lose the videos you have uploaded, you won’t have access to the information you have shared, etc.

Why You Should Verify your TikTok Account

With 800 million users there is a risk of your account being plagiarized.

Obtaining a blue check will help you to: 

✅ Prove that your profile is real and avoid that your content and comments are plagiarized. 

✅ Be easily found on the search tool.

✅ Demonstrate that the business is yours to avoid identity theft and therefore, a potential fraud and scam.

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:

Premises that will help you to get your TikTok account verified:

↪️ Create high-quality content

Being creative is a must in TikTok marketing.

You can use sounds or songs that already exist in order to create something witty or you can upload your sound through the app and make your video go viral.

↪️  Join trends

A way to reach a larger audience is to join one of the most popular features on this platform: Challenges.

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:

↪️ Make TikTok videos via streaming

Yes, you are right. With TikTok, you can also make live videos: get to know your audience, offer different content, and make money from your streams. 

A way of attracting new followers on TikTok, and not worrying about having to record a video, edit it, etc.

↪️ Follow new users 

Your account won’t grow if you isolate yourself.

It is important that you don’t follow other accounts without rhyme or reason, the ideal is to build a community related to your sector or industry. Check here how it works TikTok algorithm.

If for example, you own a fashion store, click ‘follow’ on users whose activity is related to your sector or influencers who stand out for wearing different brands. 

How to recover your TikTok account

If you have login problems, maybe it is because you have lost your TikTok account: you have deleted it, you have lost your password, or 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.

Customize 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 a personal and recognizable touch to your TikTok profile.

👉🏻 Change your profile picture

It can be the logo of your store or a representative image of your brand. You can even choose a video.

The point is that it must be easily recognizable so any user who ends up on your profile, knows that it’s you. 

👉🏻 Add a Bio

Apart from your username and display name ( that you will have to edit after creating your account as it’s automatically created by TikTok). You must describe your bio in a few words. You can explain who you are, and what you do or add a fun and clever sentence.

👉🏻 Add your links

At the moment, you can’t add links that take users to your store or product. However, you can drive users to your Instagram or YouTube profile.

If social networks are linked you can keep your community connected to your social networks permanently. 

Customizing your profile will make you more attractive to users and ultimately, gain followers and you can get TikTok to pay you money.

👉🏻 Create a playlist

The TikTok playlist helps users and followers to 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.

👉🏻 How to pin videos on TikTok

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: go to the video you want to pin, click on the three horizontal dots button, and pin the video.

How to pin a video to your TikTok profile

Have you already personalized your profile? Then it’s time to upload your first video.

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 might 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 you want to upload a video taken outside the app or shoot one with TikTok and add endless effects such as stickers or cover videos.

↪️ Choose the TikTok video length from 15 seconds up to 10 minutes.

↪️ Select at the top of the screen the option ‘Add a sound’. Another screen will open where you can see trending sounds or the ones that you add as favorites.

↪️ Edit your video before you publish it with multiple options that appear on the right side of the screen.

Flip the camera to put it frontally and record the video easily.

Change the speed of the video and be creative.

Add proposed filters to change the look of the video, portrait, landscape, food, or vibe.

Give your videos a fun touch and beautify your look without leaving your couch.

Start a countdown to shoot a video if you can’t hold the camera. It can be 10 seconds max.

Once the video has been recorded and edited, you can still add new changes:

↪️ 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.

Wait, you haven’t finished yet. Simply with a fun video, you won’t reach all the people you want.

👉🏻 Add a description to your video

Before you publish your video, add a description: for instance, add a clever title, explain what it is about, or add the name of the challenge or video. Don’t forget to include the hashtags related to your content or mentions to your friends or users.

You can also make your video public or private, allow comments or not, enable a duet so others can grab your video and publish their video next to yours, and save or share it on WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook.

👉🏻 Upload stories to TikTok

Take advantage of all the options TikTok provides you to share content and continue growing on the platform.

You can also add stickers, mentions, and music, as well as videos or photos.

Display your products or services on TikTok

If you have a physical store or online business and you want to bring up your products on TikTok you must bear in mind the type of audience that will be interested in what you are offering.

▶️ Remember that the age range of users is mostly between 16 and 24 years old.

▶️ The content must be fun, casual, and homey.

Here you can check some business or personal brands that use TikTok to reach their audience. 

Schedule your TikTok content

A great way to grow on TikTok and better manage your work time is to schedule your content on TikTok.

With Metricool, you can plan and schedule the videos you will upload to the platform. You just have to create your content, and our tool takes care of the rest: When it’s time to post, you will receive a notification to share the scheduled content and that’s it.

Schedule as many videos as you want and forget about them until it’s time to post. Plan your TikTok strategy successfully!

Repost on TikTok

Share videos uploaded to TikTok by other users and show up in people’s ‘For You’ feeds as long as they follow you and you follow them too. 

Similar to Instagram’s repost or Twitter’s retweets, but without appearing in your channel’s feed. A way to increase the interactions of the videos you like and share the content with your community.

Analyze your TikTok Marketing Strategy

Marketing in any social network without later analyzing the results of the whole strategy is a mistake.

➡ ️Find out what kind of content works best for you and optimize your strategy to succeed in TikTok.

Having a content plan will help you in your strategy to succeed on TikTok.

➡ ️Keeping track of your analytics is a very important step in your TikTok marketing strategy to get the most out of your account.

➡ Measure your engagement on TikTok from the Metricool dashboard or by calculating the metric with the engagement formula.

➡ With Metricool, you have all the information about your posted videos, from both your personal and business accounts.: views, comments, likes, shares. Valuable data to redirect your strategy.

➡ Download custom reports with all the metrics of your TikTok videos. All the information at the click of a button.

How TikTok Ads Work

Now we are getting into the good stuff, how to advertise with TikTok.

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.

Therefore, first, you must register on this “new website”. 

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 Lead Generation Management

Do you want to score leads through your TikTok content? 

This feature on the platform allows users to provide their details such as their name, email address, and phone number so that you can store this information. 

In this way, you can get closer to them and make them feel part of your community.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

Organic Marketing on TikTok

Aside from paid ads, TikTok organic marketing is free! This is a way users market on TikTok through reach, connect with possible customers using engagement, and test paid content through impressions. Showing up on the For You Page organically and receiving engagement this way is a great way for organic marketing.

Monetizing Your TikTok Account

If you are not yet convinced with the other advertising methods, you can try influencer marketing. 

As a brand, you can contact influencers to appear in videos with your products.

Except for famous personalities who are quite expensive, you can try to reach an agreement with an influencer so they appear in your videos in exchange for the product that you want them to promote. 

For example, the fashion chain Bershka uploaded this video where Twin Melody, two influencers, were doing a challenge while wearing clothes from this store.

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. To learn more about it, click the button below:

Have you taken notes with all the relevant information to start your TikTok marketing strategy?

Have you written down everything you need to get started with TikTok marketing? Maybe you’re thinking… And what’s the difference with Instagram reels?

Good question!
You have the answer on the button. But we advise you that to save effort you could download your TikTok’s without watermark and reuse it on your reel strategy.

If you want to learn more visit this TikTok Guide for Business.

Isabel Romero , 20 December 2023