TikTok, one of the world’s fastest-growing social media platforms, reported having over 1 billion active users in January of 2022. Its explosive popularity, astounding market share, and unprecedented potential make it one of the forefront of marketing conversations throughout the business world today.
But for many businesses and business leaders, TikTok is a daunting, confusing landscape. Unlocking its marketing value has proven a mystery – many don’t even know where to start.
In this article, we want to share some of the strongest and most current TikTok marketing trends being employed right now. These can help businesses better understand the landscape and make a successful first foray into TikTok marketing.
Using TikTok for Business?
But isn’t TikTok just a platform where Gen Z’ers share music videos? Not quite. TikTok is proving itself to be a versatile marketing landscape that is converting favorably for a wide variety of campaigns and industries.
Forms of social media marketing aren’t anything new – they have ranked amongst the spread of marketing strategies for a solid decade or more. However, some of TikTok’s unique qualities make it worth considering for a number of different business types.
One of TikTok’s intriguing characteristics that extend beyond its sheer volume (e.g. total number of active users mentioned above) is the spread of demographics using the platform. While it’s true that a majority of its users are teens and young adults, the numbers of users in older age brackets have increased dynamically in its last couple of reporting quarters. This has broadened the pool considerably and made the platform much more viable for a variety of marketing campaign types.
Another unique aspect of TikTok is its capacity for instigating further content creation. Unlike more static forms of marketing, and even social media campaigns on other platforms sometimes, brands that market on TikTok can often initiate user-generated responses and content naturally and easily. This adds a potent virality and favorable shelf life to any marketing dollars spent on TikTok campaigns.
These aspects and more are contributing to the ways in which its ecosystem is currently shaping and propelling TikTok marketing strategies for companies around the world:
Trend One: Industry-Specific Marketing
A number of marketing firms and services that specialize in particular industries are incorporating TikTok campaigns into their offerings. Many industries have specific needs or styles of marketing that work best with their intended audiences. These principles need to guide their social media campaigns. Because TikTok operates with highly advanced algorithms that serve its content in highly targeted ways, it lends itself well to the specialization and focuses needed by many industries.
Thanks to these attributes, TikTok can be an attractive option for marketing campaigns that are highly targeted to a particular industry area or niche. This is currently being utilized with great success by companies and marketing firms for a wide number of target markets.
Trend Two: Running Influencer Campaigns
Social media marketing can generally be done in one of two ways: first, your company or brand creates and curates its own content in-house and shares it on social platforms. Second, your company or brand partners with “social influencers,” or individuals that have curated significant social media audiences, and engages that influencer to create content about your brand, service, or product.
Influencers can come in many forms. They might be celebrities of various types, like well-known athletes, authors, thought leaders, politicians, prominent business or industry figures, or entertainment stars. They may also be individuals who have curated an audience in a specific niche, industry, interest area, or demographic. These social influencers have amassed followings that they then serve branded or marketing content in order to drive sales or business outcomes for their clients (you).
Influencer campaigns can require a bit of legwork to set up properly. However, they can be well worth the expense. Influencer campaigns can be scaled to fit within virtually any budget size, can work for a variety of industry types, and can drive a favorable mix of benefits that include not only quantifiable outcomes (e.g. interest forms submitted, new customers acquired, sales revenue, and more) but other benefits in the forms of organic interest, visibility, and virality.
Trend Three: Creating User-Driven Content Ecosystems
TikTok stands out from the crowd because it makes it easy for audiences to not only interact with existing content but create new content to further a collective conversation. This aspect of TikTok makes it an environment conducive to creating brand communities rather than just one-way messaging.
Just about any industry’s customers and stakeholders could hypothetically benefit from collaborative, dynamic content environments where they can create conversation and interactions amongst themselves. TikTok can be an excellent platform to foster this type of community engagement amongst your customers.
Coaching interesting, valuable conversations within the purview of your brand will create a strong brand identity and loyalty that is hard to create in any other way. TikTok is one of the best environments available for fostering this type of community around and within a brand.
Closing
Remember, the three strategies above aren’t the only ways to leverage the power and reach of the TikTok platform. There are other breakthrough methods continually being developed by brands all over the world that are taking advantage of TikTok’s breadth and engagement functionalities. And, if these strategies seem a bit lofty, start simple.
Like virtually any other social media property, you can also simply run paid advertising campaigns on TikTok’s platform and make use of its more traditional advertising offerings. Whatever your niche and experience with social media marketing, TikTok is a platform that could deliver strong marketing benefits.
No matter what your industry or product might be, there’s a good chance that leveraging a TikTok marketing campaign could create strong benefits and ROI for your company. Start with these trend ideas and do a little exploring for yourself. TikTok could become a powerhouse marketing opportunity that generates significant value and brand awareness for your business.
