TikTok Strategies Your Brand Needs to Master

Tools to support entertainment-first content creation

A renaissance of content and commerce has arrived, and brands must compete to capture audiences’ attention. During the renaissance or rebirth of art, subjects shifted from mostly biblical scenes to more contemporary events. Similarly, today we see a parallel shift: from stoic portraits to real images (now videos) of contemporary life.

Our co-founder and CEO, Thomas Rankin, describes this new era as “the product of the collision of technology and culture.” In order to grasp this opportunity, marketers must forget everything they knew about social media: because it isn’t social media anymore, it’s social entertainment.

For the first time in social history, it’s not about who you follow or are friends with, but what you watch and want to see. The potential audience is therefore limitless, and brands can reach virtually everyone. Moving to entertaining and authentic brand content allows marketers to focus on what they do best: being creative.

The draw of TikTok

People spend 73 hours per month across social media channels, and 63 hours of that is spent consuming social entertainment, such as TikTok, YouTube Short and Instagram stories—full screen, mobile-first video. There is no doubt that social entertainment will encompass everything in the future and will draw together the traditional social and media platforms in a competition for consumers’ attention. By doing so, brands will be able to convert audiences into customers and drive results.

The rise of TikTok is a great example of the rebirth of content. It provides brands with a unique opportunity to reach a much broader audience and showcase themselves more authentically and in a way that leverages real-time trends.

With 656 million downloads and over 1 billion monthly active users, it’s no surprise that TikTok has opened the door for brands to connect with new consumers, entertain communities and ultimately convert them into loyal customers. TikTok has proved to be more than a new social platform—it can help brands reach new heights and drive results fast.

Dash Hudson has recently joined TikTok as a founding partner of its content marketing specialty, enabling the development of three powerful proprietary tools that allow brands to master their TikTok strategies. As a result of leveraging TikTok’s API, the team has built features that deliver the solutions marketers require to drive performance.

Understanding entertainment value

The exclusive and patented Entertainment Score is to social entertainment what Rotten Tomatoes is to television and film. Created by Dash Hudson’s data science team, it measures how entertained a brand’s audience was by a TikTok video, giving marketers the chance to double down on what’s working for maximum ROI.

Brands can use the tool to measure success and optimize content by leveraging it to benchmark how individual videos perform against their own content and against those of other brands. As a result, these benchmarks can be used to inform other campaign initiatives and ultimately lead to improving audience engagement and retention.

Connecting with sound

We’ve all been there—humming along to trending TikTok songs that have been stuck in our heads for days. Having the right sound at the right time can mean the difference between a brand’s best video falling flat or soaring to the For You page of audiences. Dash Hudson’s Trending Sounds help brands get ahead of the competition by identifying the most relevant sounds.

Using this feature, brands are also given instant context on how a particular sound is being used by other creators, providing them with the intelligence needed to act quickly.

Discovering trends

It’s common to see TikTok video trends grow in popularity and then vanish as quickly as they appeared, giving brands little time to jump on board. Through Trending Video Notifications, Dash Hudson enables brands to identify which TikToks are gaining traction so they can take action on high-performing content across owned and paid channels.

We are seeing a shift in the social media landscape toward entertaining content and short-form videos winning the hearts and minds of consumers. In response, brands have been pushed to venture outside of their comfort zones and take advantage of the uncapped nature of platforms like TikTok to reach new audiences.

With our partnership with TikTok, Dash Hudson has worked to enhance the platform to support the world’s largest brands in their transition to entertainment-first content creation—capitalizing on the content renaissance. 

Kate Kenner Archibald is an international marketing executive with nearly 15 years of beauty marketing and technology experience. As CMO, she supports the broader marketing team to align product positioning and go-to-market strategy in the new era of social entertainment.