TikTok for Business: Beyond Ads and Analytics

Have you ever wondered about using TikTok for business to increase your brand’s reach? If so, this article will be helpful. In here, we will see in detail how companies use TikTok for business to promote their brand and understand their audience to build a cohesive marketing strategy.

And the reason they’re doing this is simple when you want to grow your audience, create awareness around your brand, increase engagement with your customers, and reach millions of people, TikTok is an extremely valuable tool.

So, with the right strategy, and when you know how to use TikTok for business, you can drive thousands of people to your site and generate more revenue. However, to do this and tap into your audience, you should look beyond just ads and analytics and understand your audience and customer demand to ensure your channel gets the attention it deserves.

Today, we will walk you through precisely what social video analytics is, how it works, and tools that you can use to get the most out of your analytics to keep you up to speed and ahead of your competitors.

How to Use TikTok for Business

Considering that TikTok has become increasingly popular since its launch, it’s easy to see why it’s so attractive as a marketing tool that can give your brand exposure to a massive audience. Here, let’s look at the statistics:

• TikTok is available in over 150 countries worldwide.

• The platform has over 1 billion active users.

• The app has been downloaded about 205 million times globally in the second quarter of 2021.

Those numbers are simply staggering. What’s more, is that the platform’s popularity is not showing signs of slowing down anytime soon. The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that, for brands not using TikTok for their marketing, it’s time they do. It gives them a variety of marketing options to build their brand, attract more customers, and generate more revenue.

Now, before you delve into TikTok yourself, you’re probably wondering which companies use TikTok for business. Here, you can think of basically any well-known brand, and you’ll likely find them on TikTok. For example, there’s everything from Levi’s and Nike to HP, WWE, NBA, Calvin Klein, Guess, and even Crocs.

That’s part of the beauty of the platform. Basically, any brand can use TikTok successfully and you don’t have to be a video expert or content marketing genius to find your audience. So, now that you know you’ll be in good company, you’ll want to know how to use TikTok for business? Well, let’s look at some strategies you can use.

1. Generate and Share Your Own Unique Content on TikTok

When using TikTok for business, one of the first strategies you can use is by creating your own video content on the platform. As mentioned earlier, you don’t need to be a video expert to effectively use TikTok for marketing your business. You don’t even need expensive camera equipment or a large budget.

And no, you also don’t have to try to reinvent the wheel to be successful. You can use already existing and popular content and put your own unique spin on it. Before you start creating content it would, therefore, be worth your while to explore and determine what content is popular and tailor your strategy around that.

The most important thing to note when you are deciding how to use TikTok for business however, is that you’re authentic. In other words, you should be authentic to your brand and reveal its identity and values. In this way, you’ll give your audience something they can connect with and relate to. In turn, this allows you to build trust with them and create lasting relationships.

Typically, to create your own engaging content, you’ll:

• Create a video

Here, you’ll use your phone’s camera and have the option to create videos with differing lengths from 15 seconds to 3 minutes. Once you’ve decided on the right settings, you’ll just tap the red record button to start recording.

• Add some flair

TikTok has a variety of options for you to add music and effects to your videos. You could, for instance, add the newest songs to your videos. Likewise, there are hundreds of available effects you can add to make your video more engaging.

• Share it

Once you’ve recorded your video and added music or effects, you can share it on the platform with a description, hashtags, and links.

2. Use Your Audience’s Content

Let’s face it, TikTok is all about fun and being casual. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put a fair amount of consideration and creativity into your content. So, when using TikTok for business, you’ll need to carefully plan your content to get the biggest return on your investment from it. And this sometimes involves thinking out of the box.

For example, user-generated content is an excellent idea to spread your message and create awareness around your brand. In effect, you’ll then rely on the creativity of your audience to provide you with free advertising. A perfect example of this is Nike, where more than 900 million users have viewed the #nike hashtag, and millions have posted about it.

3. TikTok Advertising

Like most other social media platforms, using TikTok for business also allows you to pay for advertising which is then shown to users. Here, you have a few options which include:

TopView. With TopView, your ad will appear in users’ feeds before they see any other content. Its video-first format allows you to grab users’ attention quickly and easily. In addition, these ads are linkable to your landing page to drive visitors to your site.

In-feed ads. These ads appear in the “For You” feed between other users’ content and gives you up to 60 seconds of video with sound. Also, like other content, users can like, share, comment, follow, and more.

Branded hashtag challenges. Here, you’ll pay to sponsor a hashtag challenge. You’ll then be able to invite users to create content around your hashtag which allows you to promote your brand, increase engagement, and create more brand awareness. As you get more practice as to how to use TikTok for business, you will reap more benefits from this approach.

Branded effects. With this option, you’ll design shareable TikTok stickers, filters, and special effects specific to your brand. Users can then use these filters for their videos, which, in turn, creates more awareness around your brand.

4. Use Influencers

Like many other social media platforms, influencers have a lot of impact on the community. You can, therefore, effectively use influencer marketing to increase your reach and create awareness about your brand.

Remember, though, that influencers can have differing amounts of followers and, as such, differing amounts of influence. So, keep in mind that, generally, the more followers an influencer has, the more you’ll pay to work with them.

Discover More: TikTok Analytics

5. Competitive Analysis

Remember, the main goal of using TikTok for business is to promote your products or services, create awareness around your brand, and generate revenue. So, you’ll want to know how your videos are performing. If they’re not performing well, you’ll also want to know where you can improve and increase engagement with your audience.

This is where competitive analysis comes in. It allows you to see all the aspects of your marketing campaigns and how many likes, comments, shares, and engagement you get. In addition, you can learn about your follower demographics and get in-depth analyses of your competitors.

As a result, you’re able to optimize and improve your content to reach the widest audience possible.

6. Understanding Your Audience

No matter which of the strategies above you use, understanding your audience is probably the most important aspect. In simple terms, if you understand your audience, you’ll know what they like and what they don’t, and you can tailor your content according to this knowledge.

Here, social media sentiment analysis plays a crucial role and give you valuable insights into your brand’s performance on TikTok. With this valuable information, you’ll ensure that your videos spread the right message.

Consequently, because TikTok videos drive buying behavior and increase the motivation to buy, the right message will increase your sales and allow you to generate more revenue.

Learn more about TikTok Social Listening.

How To Use TikTok To Understand Your Audience?

Now that you know how to use TikTok for business, let’s look at how you can understand your audience which, as mentioned above, is probably one of the most important aspects of achieving success on the platform.

Here, Repustate’s machine learning analysis tool uses natural language processing and follows the six-step process to perform semantic video content analysis and extract valuable insights from TikTok videos:

Step 1. Audio Transcription

Audio and video files are converted into text using our TikTok Text Mining API and Process for Video functionality backed by neural networks. This means the tool is not limited to video content analysis but can also be used for podcasts and other voice recordings.

Step 2. Caption Overlay

Repustate breaks down videos into frame-by-frame image formatting. Any text that appears in the extracted frames is recognized and analyzed.

Step 3. Image Recognition

Through the use of video analysis AI, any images in the background like brand names and logos are detected and classified as entities.

Step 4. Text From Post & Comments

During the next step, our text analytics API extracts any text from comments and posts. Through this process of text, image, and user profile text mining, all text accompanying the video is extracted.

Step 5. Sentiment & Semantic Analysis

Once the relevant text is extracted, it is used to analyse sentiment and find semantic meaning to extract key topics and themes, and find sentiment score.

Step 6. Visualization

Once complete, all the sentiment scores are provided on a sentiment analysis dashboard so that you can easily understand what data has been analyzed and what the results are.

Learn more about how to use TikTok Analytics within your profile.

The Bottom Line

Considering TikTok’s popularity and its sheer number of users, it’s obvious why, as a brand, you should use it as a marketing tool. Not only does it allow you to increase your reach and grow your audience, but it’s also an effective means to create awareness about your brand and drive customers to your website.

However, before using TikTok for business it’s important to remember that you should look beyond just ads and analytics and that you should focus on what your audience and customers want. When you have TikTok audience insights, you’ll be well on your way to achieving success on the platform.