TikTok is incredibly popular, but that doesn't mean your brand should be on it. Here's how to know if TikTok is a good fit for your brand.

Many of our clients recognize the importance of jumping on social trends to reach a broader audience and grow their brand recognition, but choosing a social media platform to promote branded content is about so much more than following the new wave of social networking. Finding the best fit platform for your products and services starts with examining each available platform and understanding where your target consumers are spending their time online.

If you’ve already determined which social media platforms your brand’s target demographics prefer, that means you’re likely already be promoting branded content on Facebook or YouTube. After all, they boast an impressive combined active user base of 5.1 billion. But as those platforms near their 20th anniversary mark, it’s worth your time to consider expanding your social media horizons. Today we’re deep-diving into TikTok to help you determine if this newest user-generated content platform is a good fit for your brand.

What TikTok Is…And Is Not

Even as the youngest of the social media platforms, Tiktok is an exciting marketing tool from both an organic and a paid perspective. It’s potential to reach its 689 million monthly active users via free, one-click identifiers like original audio and hashtags is incredibly powerful. Couple this with the fact that TikTok currently offers one of the lowest CPC simply because its newer on the social scene means that brands can generate much higher impression and engagement rates at a much more budget-friendly price point.

There are still a few minor drawbacks to using TikTok as a marketing platform, like the fact that you can’t define target audiences in great detail when launching ad campaigns. TikTok also doesn’t work well for businesses that offer services, technology or software rather than tangible products, simply because it’s difficult for users to experience and connect with something intangible in the span of a three-second video snippet. But if your brand has a visually appealing product to sell or a concrete way to bring its services to life, TikTok may just be your next great marketing tool.

How To Create Great TikTok Content

The main draw of TikTok among users is the fact that it is inherently a highly creative platform that’s riding the trend of natural, unfiltered content. Where Instagram plays more to the curated market, TikTok users like the fact that content feels more organic and relatable. In fact, most of the platform’s content seems to be shot on smart phones, a feature that, from an ad perspective, makes content more accessible. Audiences feel like they can relate to videos that aren’t overly produced, and this allows the content to be more relevant and relatable to consumers. To create your own branded TikTok videos and connect with new audiences, follow these tips:

• Captivate users in the first three seconds. The longer people watch your videos, the higher your content’s completion rate will rank, and high completion rates tell TikTok’s algorithm to push your content out to more users.
• Capitalize on musical trends to generate organic traffic or even go viral. No matter how many (or how few) followers you have, your brand can be found by a much larger audience simply by participating in sound trends or dance compilations.
• Connect with people on a feel-good level by creating visually appealing content. LEAP recently created a campaign for a well-known client in the food industry that generated 650,000 impressions and over 8,700 clicks simply by engaging users on a visceral level.
• Leverage the fact that TikTok is primarily an entertainment and humor-based platform. Look for ways that your brand can both present its products while also injecting a bit of comedy to boost your content’s likes, comments and shares.
• Repurpose existing short-form video content from your Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. Marketing on TikTok isn’t about reinventing the wheel, it’s about melding your creative content with the preferences and expectations of TikTok users.

Following trends and then making them your own requires dedicated team members who invest time and energy into researching, publishing and testing content across social media platforms. At LEAP Amp, we understand that this may not be possible for every brand, so we provide our clients with Community and Media Managers to constantly monitor trends and viral events for you and then connect your brand to those trends.