We’ve rounded up 30 tips from marketers and business owners who shared their expert tips and tricks to level up your initiatives on Tik Tok in 2020.

The TikTok trend is abundantly leaning towards the younger generations. It has been initiating a buzz in the last few years and continues to with its whopping 500 million expanding every day. TikTok’s average engagement rate is 29% with over 1.5 billion users.‍

It has accumulated an impressive following and is currently used in more than 154 countries since its release. With such a quick growth rate occurring, there are truly limitless opportunities for brands to enter into influencer marketing partnerships on TikTok.‍

How to promote your brand through TikTok marketing?‍

TikTok has experimented with the advertising pitch deck in late 2018 and concludes that they are getting closer to the point where more people will be able to advertise on the platform in different ways.‍

In-feed native ad‍

TikTok In-feed native ads are just like Instagram stories. It has options of adding website links and order now buttons on the ad itself, which helps users to land directly on the page.

These are skippable ads and have numerous options for designing the overall ad. The utilization of the ad can be traced by click-through rates, impressions, total views, video viewing time, and the engagements acquired.     ‍

Branded lenses‍

It is a TikTok filter related to your business where users can choose the lens when selecting a filter for their video and it stays live for 10 days. The lens is automatically incorporated in the top 10 trending list and it comes in 2D and 3D. TikTok is presently working on an AR version.‍

Hashtag challenge ‍

In these types of advertising the user gets to see a particular banner ad that will take the user to the page of instructions and rules of the promoting challenge. The banner is put up on the discover page and based on user content. This sponsored tool targets specific consumers, and there are more probable conversions. ‍

Brand takeover‍

It is one of the purest forms of TikTok advertising where images, Short video clips and GIF’s turn out to be antecedent of the brand’s landing page or the hashtag challenge if any set. These ads are category exclusives, and hence only a single brand can take up a specific category per day. ‍

User participation‍

The most approachable and engaging medium of advertising on TikTok marketing strategy is user participation. Primarily, user-generated content is used to promote the causes and brands with tools and features that make it simple and enable users to post ideas and content by themselves tagging the inclining topic and concerned brands.‍

Approach TikTok Influencers
As a brand, you can approach relevant TikTok influencers and propose a working relationship with them but it’s prior to being strategic about whom you partner with. Find influencers who work within your niche and whose characters align with your brand’s values.

TikTok influencers might help you in the following ways:
• Highlight your product and talk about it in a TikTok video
• Advertise about it in the video description
• Link to your brand in the interpretation

Nidhi Joshi - Business Consultant, iFour Technolab Pvt Ltd

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1. Understand your audience and make sure you are following and like their work. This way you will be on their search radar.

2. Study the platform and the know-how about the business aspects of using TikTok. This will enable you to be more clear about the usage of TikTok.

3. Create fun content, that makes the audience stick to watching your business video or advertising.

4. Use hashtags in your video or on your videos. Start with the hashtag challenge. This will enable to you be easily searched in the TikTok browser and hashtags are a fun way to market yourself.

5. Work with influencers and make them use your hashtags or your products if you are selling your products. Influencers have already done their hard work and have a decent following. Why not, use their platform to market your business.

Adeel Shabir, Content Marketing Executive @ DSRPT

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The most powerful way I've seen for marketing on TikTok is user generated content. If you can encourage your customers to interact with your product in some way and then post videos on TikTok, it can potentially turn viral. The best example is the Chinese restaurant Haidilao which created a DIY menu item, and encouraged customers to post their DIY dish on TikTok. Others say those videos and wanted to try their own, and ordered from Haidilao. Over 50 million video views in total.

Katie Holmes, OutwitTrade

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To market on tiktok is simple, it just requires understanding the algorithm and using whats trending as spring to help launch your engagement. Think of tiktoks algorithm as a set of levels, where each level you are shown to a certain number of people, and for every certain amount of people that see your content, you must get a certain amount of points. Points are earned by likes, comments, but more importantly shares and rewatching the video.

The goal is to optimize your content to generate a lot of shares to other social platforms and friends, or get your viewers to watch your video more than once. You are first shown to a few hundred, then a few thousand, then 10-100k, and then 100-500k and after that you pretty much go what we call super viral and can rack upwards up millions of views, the highest ranked tiktok is over 2Billion views.The next hack is simple, use trends and add your own spin, and then use a trending song and trending hashtags as well, all while posting at the best times (6PM Est is my recommendation).

Joe Staiber, Staiber Consluting

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With any social media platform, you need to understand the purpose of it and the audience that frequents it. TikTok skews young, and its audience uses it primarily to entertain and be entertained. If you're just trying to sell to them blindly, you're not going to make any traction.

You need to create fun, creative content that doesn't try too hard to be "relatable." So many brands are attempting to interact as people these days, and the younger generation sees right through it. Create content that's enjoyable, shareable, and something you can build on in the future, and your audience will find you.

For example, we're working on a "DIY Gardening Fails" compilation that consists of quick shots showing the "wrong" way to do certain things. Overwhelmingly people respond better to a more negative spotlight (showing failure versus success), and we've seen similar companies do well with these types of videos, so we're hopeful we can get some good data from it.

Dan Bailey, President, WikiLawn Lawn Care

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I’ve been on the platform since it was Musically. I post funny, relatable content daily & have accumulated almost 21k followers just by being real.

Cara Maria, The Leighty Life

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At Content Merchants, we are working with brands such as Fila to create challenges. With no paid promotion, content on TikTok must be fresh, original - and above all, authentic. There can be no hidden catches. Brands offer products by way of prizes and we have been experimenting with this as a promotion format. Offering prizes is our top tip to grow your TikTok marketing audience. Above all make it fun and make sure it represents the character of your brand.

Dylan McLaren, CEO, Content Merchants

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So how can businesses get in on a platform that’s all about dance routines and Tiger King?

• Create more visibility by finding hashtags that have less than 50K posts.
  
• Use those hashtags along with popular sounds to create your own videos.
  
• Duet with other accounts that you enjoy.
  
• Comment, like and engage other accounts and videos you like.
  
• Have fun! TikTok is essentially a virtual party, so make sure you’re posting plenty of fun videos along with your business content.

Breanna Gunn, Breanna Gunn Enterprises, LLC

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Even though TikTok is less than 2 years old in the US, its impact is already significant, and your business likely should be paying attention to it. That doesn't mean that your business needs to have a presence, but it should be on your radar.

Here's the best advice for beginners finding their footing.

First, don't be tempted to go meme crazy. The Internet can be fickle, and it's tempting to go straight for the funny, shareable content. But that's not always the best message for a business. Consider creating how-to-guides that might allow people to dabble in your industry, and showcase your experience. These are a great, easy way to generate authority, and a larger following for your TikTok profile. If you're lucky enough to be one of the first people in your industry to be on TikTok, you can quickly establish yourself to be a leader in your niche.

Secondly, make sure you're actually trying to reach the audience on TikTok at the moment. If millennials is your target market, you're shooting too high. TikTok is great for reaching teens and young twenty-somethings, so only target the network if that's your audience.

Flynn Zaiger - CEO, Online Optimism

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My tips for finding an audience on TikTok – the dance has to be simply enough for anyone to learn, but hard enough to show that you’re better at the dance than anyone else can do. Natural, by way of practicing for hours perfecting it. Because, really, it’s just an extension of social media for the most part.

Eric Alper, ThatEricAlper

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TikTok has significant potential to become a major player and platform for companies and brands looking to target an audience with a specific younger demographic.

The influencer space has already proven itself to be an extremely cost effective and legitimate way to generate a healthy ROI for driving brand awareness, amplifying a message, and building a community.  Brands can’t afford to be indifferent regarding which platform they utilize to generate traction – the fit must be there to maximize the opportunities.

Having a platform with ongoing authentic content allows companies of all sizes to tap into influencers’ audiences, once matching up the relevance of the audience to the brand.  Allowing for content to be created that is consistent with the desired messaging and the influencer’s “brand”, will move the needle for both brands of all sizes and TikTok in a much greater way then we’ve seen up to now.

Steve Zeitchik, CEO - Agency 8200

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My best advice for TikTok marketing is to use the channel as a native user would, not a marketer for best organic and paid results. Videos are watched, liked and commented on TikTok because they are entertaining, set to fun music or parodies, and you have better chances of viral organic or regular success when you play by the platform's organic rules.

Stacy Caprio, Founder, Accelerated Growth Marketing

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Take advantage of TikTok ads. As with any social media platform, paid advertisements can help you to reach far more users than you would organically. While it took awhile for TikTok to launch advertising features onto their platform, businesses currently have the ability to use four different types of paid ads, including:

Brand takeovers: a feature allowing another party to take over your TikTok account for the day. They can create images, GIFs, and videos with embedded links to landing pages, or launch hashtag challenges.

Hashtag challenges: instead of trying to make your hashtag challenge go viral on its own, you can pay to promote your hashtags in order to get more engagement.

Infeed native content: similar in nature to Snapchat and Instagram story ads, infeed native content supports multiple features like website clicks and app downloads.

Branded lenses: Similar to Snapchat's 2D and 3D lenses for faces and photographs.

On top of this, TikTok offers precise targeting, so you can make sure your ads are reaching the exact users that would be interested in what you have to offer.  If your business has a younger target audience, TikTok is the perfect place to pay a little extra to capture their attention.

Alice Bedward, Digital Marketing Specialist @ Flyparks

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For a business starting to explore Tiktok marketing, I will advise you to leverage the prevailing theme of the platform: fun and creativity. If you want to more professionalism and “lets-change-the-world”stuff, you would be better served looking at LinkedIn and Facebook.

Basically everyone on Tiktok wants to have fun and be HAPPILY CRAZY. They want tobe thrilled by silly creativity. This is what your content should be based around. Make sure to juice your content with as much excitement, the more ludicrous it is, the more viral it could go.

Also maximize user interaction. This could be via energetically promoting challenges and targeting key hashtags. Commonly dances and lip-syncing are some of the most effective challenges on Tiktok.  

Michael D. Brown, Director at Fresh Passion Institute

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1) Use hashtags challenges: Tiktok puts a trend and with the right content, this will helps you get a lot of traffic and garners a considerable number of organic engagements.

2) User participation: Get creative, create different how-to videos of your product/service so people can get to know you and create different calls to action like DIY.

3) Post a challenge: Post challenges that encourage users on the meme-friendly app to post their own videos in response.

Andrea Gandica, Official Models NY

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I have been able to grow my TikTok following from 0-30,000 followers in 7 weeks. I have done this through 3 strategic plans.

1. Staying in my niche. I consistently post real estate tips or small business growth tips.

2. Following the trends. When a trend is happening, I put my own spin on it. If there is a trending song, I will use it and put a real estate or business strategy around that post.

3. Posting Consistently. I post at least 1 time a day, sometimes up to 3 times. The algorithm in TikTok allows for you to post many times without annoying your followers. So keep posting consistently and allow TikTok to show your content to their growing audience.

Austin Glanzer, Glanzair Properties LLC

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My advice would be to start focusing on content as soon as possible. Primarily focus on content related to your industry and/or intended audience, and make it catchy and digestible. Lean into things like how-to and instructional content to appeal to your current fanbase, as well as group participation in things like dance trends and fun storyline videos to reach new fans.

Jake Woehlke, Nomad In the Middle

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Tiktok marketing is EXTREMELY underpriced for a few different reasons:

1) Unlike other social media platforms, you can have a super small account and still have a massive reach for your posts, organically. Thus, every single brand needs to be on Tiktok and making 5 videos a day, especially if you are targeting the 13-24 age group. No paid campaigns necessary.

2) If you want to go the paid route, Most TikTok micro-influencers are underpriced. Influencers are Addison Rae might be too expensive, but if you find influencers in the 50-150k follower range, you get access to a massive following which will be further amplified by the For You page for relatively cheap. For example, on Tiktok, a mdicroinfluencer with less than 200k followers might demand $0.01/view. In comparison, Youtube is $0.08/view.

3) Create your own hashtags and use your relationships with influencers to ask a few of them to make videos using your hashtag. This would snowball your reach and also encourage engagement from TikTok users who are likely to also start making videos using your hashtags if they see their favorite influencers make those videos

Paraj Mathur, Couch Potato

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Use a song clip that's currently trending to ensure your post receives the maximum exposure. Hashtags are also a great use for marketing your post to ensure the maximum exposure is received for your target market. Work with influencers to spread the proposed content to a more broad audience.

Tricia Jay, Cynnamon Sugar, LLC

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1. Make ads appear as native as possible! No high production necessary here. Appearance should mimic that of an organic video including the option to like, share and comment.
2. Want engagement? Try a hashtag challenge! These capitalize on an audience’s natural tendency to create and share content. They encourage user-generated content by asking users to record themselves completing a specific action or following a set of instructions to participate in the “challenge.”
3. When doing a brand takeover, strong brand recognition is key. A strong call-to-action will catch the viewer’s eye and a graphic button can be created to engage the audience to click on the ad and link out externally.
4. Make it interactive. Gamify the ad to involve the viewer to keep tapping through and stay interested!

Hannah Nelson, Marketing Coordinator, Helen & Gertrude

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I am the head writer and marketing director at MusicGrotto.com and I have helped market a handful of my artists, increase a large amount of popularity on the new popular app, TikTok, as well as build my brand with the same methods.

• First things first create an account! Upon creating an account they ask you right away what type of content you want to see. This instantly makes the most popular videos within the themes you selected pop up on your news feed.
• Select all that may apply but keep in mind that dancing and comedy are the most popular. Also select themes that are relevant to your company and brand!
• Check the app daily for new challenges, hashtags, trends and dances. Once you find what is going viral, start practicing right away! Be unique and keep the hashtags and challenges on theme to your company and brand. A video has recently gone viral of a group of nurses dancing to the popular "Savage Challenge" while in uniform and jokingly performing a surgery.
• Also keep in mind that kids are the biggest users of the app and they always find the newest trends first. You may even want to ask one of your kids or nieces and nephews to keep you updated on new things you should try.
• Work with influencers and ask them to promote your company or brand. Also don't be afraid to pay for some advertisements. Tiktok is one of the biggest platforms in the world right now. As long as you follow all the steps listed above, paid advertisements can definitely pay off.
  

James Croad, Marketing Director and Head Writer, MusicGrotto.com

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TikTok is a platform designed for pure, unfiltered entertainment. It’s also a place for short, unconventional storytelling. Aimed at a younger audience, videos posted here are light-hearted and focused on fun.

TikTok is also maturing, it built its initial user base by allowing predominantly younger audiences to be content creators - sharing short-form video filled with amusing filters, music and graphics. Unsurprisingly, the platform has been adopted by more established content creators and brands, but those new to TikTok need to be wary of sticking out like a sore thumb by posting content that doesn’t fit the user base.

It’s undeniable that with the exploding popularity of TikTok, businesses that don’t try to cultivate a presence on the platform will miss out, on both the commercial and exposure opportunities. In comparison to Facebook/Instagram and Twitter, the platform is lacking in its ad serving, audience targeting and conversion tracking, but it has users and highly engaged, receptive users at that.

For any business, the potential to engage with a vast number of people on TikTok is growing every day. The challenge is creating branded content that focuses on authenticity not promotion. In this influencer-driven ecosystem, it is better to partner with an established name to promote products or services. To go alone, brands must be sure that the creative they post is going to resonate with the users.

The very best Tik Tok marketing campaigns are ones that inspire users to get involved. A great example of this is Chipotle, with its #guacdance and #boorito challenges. The brand’s #guacdance challenge resonated incredibly with consumers, resulting in 250,000 video submissions during the six-day challenge and Chipotle’s biggest guacamole day ever, with more than 800,000 sides of free guac served. The success of the campaign lied in its whimsical tone, which thrust it into the minds of consumers across the US who wanted to take part.

The platform has a huge opportunity to disrupt the way businesses approach social media marketing. For those brave enough to produce original, creative advertorial content or are smart enough to identify authentic influencers to carry a message, there are huge benefits for those brands getting in early. One thing is for certain, this platform isn’t going away anytime soon.

Mike Kelley, President of Americas at Grabyo

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1. Make sure your profile is set to a Pro Account. This allows you to gain insight into your analytics.
Through your analytics you will be able to gather information on the best time to post your videos, your top trending videos, videos your followers watched and sounds your followers listened to. With this data, creators can gain inspiration on what type of videos to create for their followers.

2. Pick a niche and stick to it. Use the same 3-4 hashtags in your video captions so TikTok's algorithm can pick up on your niche and show it to your ideal audience. Using hashtags that are specific to your niche and have 50-100 M views. Hashtags related to your niche will work much better than putting #fyp, #foryoupage, etc...

3. Keep your videos between 10-15 seconds. Catch their attention within the first few seconds by adding text on the video to explain what the video will be about.

4. Educational and entertaining content works best. Get creative on how you can educate your audience in an entertaining and concise way. Highlighting tips that are specific to your niche. Recreate trending videos on TikTok but put your own spin to it. For example, use a popular dance trend and add educational tips or use a popular sound bite and connect it to your niche.

5. Optimize your bio. Add your Instagram and Youtube links. Use your bio to funnel your audience to other platforms. Add a link to your website and email funnels.

Shannon Taruc - CEO, Shannon Taruc Coaching

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My best overall advice for businesses on TikTok is to leverage the audience participation. Watch what some of the big brands are doing - most of their content is actually user generated content, vs. content that the brand created for their own account. The appeal of TikTok is the copy-cat culture, so for businesses to see success on this highly addictive platform, the best type of content is an idea that can be replicated by the audience. Start by simply watching and learning, and then participate to get comfortable with how the platform works.. One of the best things about TikTok for marketers is that you can go viral without having any followers, so focus on creating great content.

Allison Chaney - Chief Digital Training Officer - Boot Camp Digital

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When it comes to using TikTok for marketing I highly recommend every business do so. The platform is basically giving away traffic and you can go "viral" for just about anything. TikTok makes editing videos a breeze and at the end of it you end up with very professional marketing videos you can use on any of your social channels. I recommend marketers use the hashtag feature to have a greater chance of being found in the niche that relates to them. ‍

Jon Torres, Founder - Jontorres.com

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Given it's still the wild west and randomness of videos are rewarded, to make your money go even further, you can partner with other brands too for an influencer video. That's exactly what we did. With another friend who also has a gaming platform, we worked with numerous influencers who made videos going between our games acting frustrated because they were having so much fun they didn't know what to play. Not only were the engagements cheap, but because we split costs, our money went even further and reached well over 1 million views! Win Win.

Neal Taparia - Solitaired

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I never imagined growing my following this quickly on the app. My tips are as follows:

- post 2-3 times per day

- look at your follower stats. Cater to their interests. For example, 80% women follow me so I post videos about being a female businesswoman.

- use all the latest songs, even if you can’t dance.

- try to post a dancing video at least once per week. Easy dancing videos come along (I’m a bad dancer).

- answer every single commented.

- spend 30 mins per night studying the for-you page. Don’t use the #foryou hashtag, it can be flagged as spam. ‍

Alexandra Fasulo - Alex Fasulo

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1. Target Digital Natives

One of the main things that TikTok has done well is to target a specific audience. TikTok targets everyone who was born between 1995 and 2010, a generation called Z. Gen Zers consume more digital services and products more than any other generation; they spend an average of 10 hours a day of online time on their phone.

This generation is a digital native, and they are the main users of social networks. For Gen Zers the main factor to define a purchase is the creative. The Z Generation is great with communication, enjoying sharing their life through social media and creating a dialogue with others. They use social media for both fun and informative which define the uniqueness in products and services they demand.

2. Emulate TikTok’s International User Acquisition Strategy

Currently, TikTok users are mainly concentrated in China, India, and USA,  the three most populated countries in the world. The app has more than 500 million monthly active customers in China, followed by 200 million in India, and 26.5 million in the US. By targeting, TikTok can focus its marketing strategy in specific markets and yet become viral worldwide.

3. Be Competitive and Innovative‍

In general, we all want fresh, unique, and fun short content; TikTok triggers those needs. 

TikTok also brings the opportunity for you to feel like you're a celebrity. You can enjoy singing your favorite songs and be able to do that with simple features from your own place. This app really knows how to be innovative and competitive in the digital market.

4. Get Viral, Therefore Monetize

TikTok has become viral, and it has done it perfectly. But the time to monetize and capitalize the app has come. It’s here where the media has to prove its value.

In the meantime, marketers and users can enjoy this new fun platform and learn from all its successful strategies and emulate its user acquisition. The brands should look at TikTok as the new king of media communication, Way to go, TikTok.

Antoine Forest, Co-founder & CEO of STARGAZER

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TikTok lacks content, so it is an excellent opportunity for brands to gain followers at scale and to be recognized in this new network. But for brands to be successful it is necessary to follow some simple tips such as: always post original content, publish content frequently (every day), keep the profile complete and updated, interact with your audience, participate in challenges, use popular musics, make duets and use hashtags that target your audience.

Erico Franco, Inbound Marketing Manager - Agencia de Marketing Digital

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Duets are your best friend: Creating unique content is incredibly difficult nowadays, but piggy backing off other peoples content isn't. Duets not only can get you great exposure on their own, but they will also notify the original creator, which could open the door to future opportunities with them. It's a pretty easy way to steal somebody's idea, without really stealing their idea.

Theme your account: Building up your followers is more important than any amount of views in a single video. An incredibly simple way to gain followers, is to theme your profile, meaning follow a set theme for all your videos. If a viewer thinks one of your videos is good, but doesn't enjoy any of your other content because it's too different, they won't follow.

Thomas Kelly, founder of zeroeffortcash.com

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A large portion of Tik Tok's audience are Gen Z or Millennials, meaning that it is a great platform for brands that are targeting the influential group. However, this demographic that dominates Tik Tok is not overly open to advertising so it is important that your message is content driven to engage in an interactive manner, rather than trying to sell.

One of the most popular and effective ways to engage the audience on the platform is through "challenges" and using custom hashtags to promote them. There are a number of brands that have created challenges to engage with their audience. One of my favourite examples is the Fruit By The Foot Challenge "#FruitByTheFootChallenge". This is video content where you challenge your friends and family to see who can eat a Fruit By The Foot the fastest without using your hands.

It is one thing to create a challenge and it is another to get people to do it. One of the best ways to interact with the Tik Tok audience is to engage influencers on the platform. There are a number of both popular influencers as well as niche influencers for certain types of content (i.e. dancing, fitness, pranks, etc.). It is important to research influencers in which you want to target to help promote your brand, challenges, or content and see which types of videos they are most popularly known for. Aligning your creative challenge with influencers that will generate the largest niche to the right type of audience is important.

In order to get started with marketing on Tik Tok, first take a look at what your objective is that you are trying to achieve, brainstorm how can you create fun content that others will want to re-create or try to do that involves your brand, and find influencers to help push out your message.

Kyle Turk - President, Meerkat Marketing

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Being early to the TikTok game has a lot of benefits. It helps businesses stand out from the competition and expand their reach.

Here are a few tips to creating stand-out video content.

• TikTok videos may extend up to a minute in length, but ideally, it’s best to create videos that are 15 seconds long
• Get straight to the point - time is of the essence
  
• Be as humorous, candid, and informal as possible. - this types of videos work best for us
  
• Add music for even more engagement and brand visibility
  
• Use relevant hashtags for increased exposure - You can find trending hashtags through TikTok’s Discover page

Nikola Medvedec, Marketing Manager, Udonis

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If you want to grow on TikTok organically then start by creating your own channel and posting videos relevant to your business with relevant and trending hashtags so your target audience can discover you easily. Furthermore, you can reach out to micro-influencers who would not charge you but would just like to associate themselves with your product if it serves their niche.

You may take the easier option out and use paid TikTok advertising, however, the market is not as established if you compare it to YouTube so i would suggest you spend your money wisely.

Shayan Fatani, Digital Marketing Strategist - PureVPN

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My advice on marketing Tik Tok will be to create awareness videos for coronavirus that can go viral and help people get required understanding to deal with the crisis. It may involve videos that bring positivity and peace to the human mind.

Shiv Gupta, CEO, Incrementors Web Solutions