Need a TikTok Marketing Strategy? Here's How to Get Started

More than 755 million monthly users—twice the size of the U.S. population. That’s the forecast from Insider Intelligence on how many people TikTok will reach in 2022. This would make it the third largest social media network, just behind Facebook (2.1 billion) and Instagram (1.3 billion), and slightly ahead of Snapchat and Twitter. There have been thousands of startups that have successfully unlocked TikTok as an acquisition channel , either organically with their brand profile content or via paid acquisition. DrainFunnel, a small company that helps eliminate drain clogs, has reached millions of views and a staggering 2.4 million likes on its branded TikTok videos. The founder takes viewers through product demonstrations, gives them a behind-the-scenes look at product photography and even answers viewer questions. Similarly, Hopper, a discount travel app, has found a way to promote its app while utilizing a native TikTok touch within its videos and boosting them with paid spending. As TikTok continues to gain steam, it would be a huge miss not to include the platform when building out a growth marketing strategy. Organic page benefits There’s no crystal ball to reveal whether your startup should explore organic or paid acquisition, but both are important. The two primary advantages for creating organic content are leveraging free traffic from videos and building a brand page in the process. Why does producing organic content also impact paid acquisition? When users see your paid acquisition ads and click your brand name, they’ll be directed to your TikTok profile page. Having content on your profile adds validity, social proof and inspires engagement from those who land there. There's a variety of content to consider adding onto your branded TikTok pages — below are just a few ideas to help you get started: Founder and staff Q&AsUse case examplesTrend and viral replies/reactionsProduct explainersAnswering viewer comments/questionsBehind-the-scenes opportunities Inspiration and ideas can also be drawn from competitors or other brand profiles. Save time by seeing what already works with other pages and taking pointers from the best. Channel-specific creative I typically recommend testing the same creative assets across all social channels as a best practice. Time and again, I’ve seen assets made for non-TikTok channels perform poorly on TikTok. This means that ideation, styling and asset production have increasingly needed to be specific to TikTok. It makes sense — TikTok content is structured differently from other social channels. Some of those attributes include: 9:16 ratio and shorter than 20 secondsBackground trackText overlays to emphasize pointsPlay to trendsVery lo-fi, not studio quality If there’s one major takeaway from the bullets above, it’s the fourth one—play to trends. On any given week, there are a handful of trends that take over TikTok, often popularized by larger influencers and made widespread by thousands of others performing their take on it. By emphasizing creative direction and focusing on popular trends, you’ll naturally hit the rest of the attributes, such as creating the video in 9:16 perspective and including a background track. One major advantage TikTok has against other paid social channels is that the cost per thousand impressions (CPMs) are significantly lower. With that huge upside comes a caveat: Creative will fatigue more rapidly, since the videos are getting served at a faster rate. If you plan to run a successful TikTok campaign, be ready to continuously add new content to the mix. Leverage influencers What’s TikTok without Charli D’Amelio, Noah Beck and the various other power figures raking in millions of views? While that’s hard to imagine when thinking about how to incorporate influencers into your TikTok strategy, remember you don’t need a marquee name to be successful. Instead, leverage TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, which has made it frictionless to discover influencers from all types of categories, styles, regions and follower counts. You can typically work with smaller influencers (less than 50,000 followers) at a rate of $100-300 per video—oftentimes, that’s all you'll need. To double down on influencer content, leverage TikTok’s Spark Ads, which allow advertisers to boost influencer posts and put media budget behind the organic content. This works particularly well on TikTok because ads then look native to the platform. Constantly evolving TikTok is a creative ground for experimentation when it comes to ever-changing campaign formats and features, all being rolled out on a frequent basis. This means you should test everything as it becomes available. Two of the latest campaign features made available in early 2022 are auto-targeting and App Profiles. With auto-targeting, TikTok removes the complexity and time of having to test a myriad of interest layers. Instead, the campaign set on auto-targeting finds the best combination of interest settings to target. This can be paired with App Profiles, which sends users to an App Store-like screen before actually sending them to the App Store. The idea behind this is to increase the signal on the platform, so TikTok can target higher propensity users who will be more likely to download the app after seeing the real App Store page. Some of the best practices from other major paid social channels still apply to TikTok. Tactics such as broad targeting and lowest cost bidding have been successful for many advertisers. If you see something working on Facebook or Snapchat, don’t shy away from trying it on TikTok. Bottom line: TikTok isn’t just becoming a huge force in paid acquisition — it's already there. As you start devising a growth marketing strategy for 2022 and beyond, including TikTok as a part of that long-term plan will have you ahead of the competition. The ‘TikTok Difference’ Delivers—Here’s How and Why