Marketing On TikTok: How To Feature On The For You Page

Some of us remember countless viral dances and daily updates from pet stars – that’s what TikTok used to be. In 2023, with 1 billion monthly users and 74% of users likely to seek more info on advertised products, TikTok has proven to drive real business impact by ads. Let’s waste no time! Here’s our recap of TikTok’s marketing potential – with some facts and how-tos to help you, marketers and CEOs, advertise better.

With the traditional marketing sales funnel, users go through the four stages of Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. While this still works for some social media platforms, TikTok changed the way people purchase. With volumes of information and brands getting increasingly creative with their ads, people have no choice but to see selling content on their FYP. Add influencers to the mix – and the common folk who occasionally cross your timeline just to share a review of a yoga mat or a knife set they recently bought.

According to TikTok Insights (you’ll find updated advertising stats there), a few main reasons make TikTok a worthy advertising platform:

• Entertainment. Every second user considers TikTok content purely entertaining. You would’ve thought, “how is that a benefit?” Well, it’s common sense: killing time by watching these videos, users are more prone to buying impulsively. Plus, some purchases happen only because something looks fun – we’ve all been there at some point, haven’t we?

• Personalization. TikTok works to align its advertised products with the audience’s needs. 86% of users see “their” type of content on TikTok, which proves that the platform curates content for each user. What’s better than that for a startup fishing out its potential buyers?

Now, it’s time to dive into the first few steps. Here’s what you’re going to do:

First things first:

1. Set up a business account.
2. Create a personal account in the app, then switch to a Business Account in the Manage Account tab and select your brand category.
3. Add a business website and email, and you’re good to go!
4. Present your brand. Now that there’s a clean slate, you get a chance to get creative with promoting your business. Choose a fitting photo, write an 80-character bio showing what you do best, and top it off with a CTA and active link.

Before posting, single out your target audience and scan the competitors. You can target the same demographics from other social media accounts and layer more audience research. Keep track of what resonates with your target group for when it’s time to enter the competition for real.

It’s easy to say, “create engaging content.” But TikTok doesn’t stop there. It’s a platform moved by trends, so you better stay on top of them. Watch well-liked TikTok users in your domain, use hashtags, and don’t be late for the trends if that’s your path – they change in a flash. Mix short videos with long-form content, create instructional videos (or guides, whichever works for your product), incorporate reviews, and cross-promoting. You’ve got various ways to elevate content based on your niche – there’s nothing bad about replicating specific formats as you start.

The common basics are:

• Use trending sounds
• Utilize teasers in your first frames
• Catch trends before they spread

There’s a massive difference in content potential on different platforms, and often, success comes from the willingness to try things. From #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt to Gen Z humor – sometimes absurd, abstract, and random, you can find your own style to stand out from the competitors’ bunch.

Create 4-5 pieces of content per week and post regularly. On average, the best times are considered from 6 to 10 am and 7 to 11 pm ET. You can access when your followers are most active by upgrading to a Pro account. Remember to invest in early audiences with solid engagement rates. Early exposure is crucial because TikTok tests content on a limited set of users and then shares it with larger audiences if people enjoy it.

Remember that TikTok is a social platform. Interact with the users – like their comments, respond, stitch videos, run live streams, and ask for the audience’s opinions. Sometimes, their comments are what make videos go viral. Better yet, if you present your product in a barely commercial way. For example, take Honk – a messaging app that drew the audience in with Gen Z gags: absurdity, memes, astrology, and emojis. Or Breathwrk, a breathing app that incorporates breathing exercises in their TikTok experience.

And here are a few more tips once you’ve gotten used to the platform:

• Instead of aiming at one trend, try to hit an entire category. Users often refer to different “sides” of TikTok – such as BookTok, NostalgiaTok, FoodieTok, FashionTok, TravelTok, GymTok, etc. These “sides” often contain a range of trends, all relevant to one niche. You can focus on that and try to take off within a category. Leading a niche rather than going viral on the app can take you further in the long run.
• If recognition doesn’t scare you off, introduce your team through TikTok. Share clips of your team at work, brainstorming, on their coffee breaks, and having fun after work. Show your audience what it took to create your product from idea to implementation. The closer to real life, the better.
• Ultimately, your brand’s authentic, unpolished side makes users trust you more.

• As we said before, TikTok’s comment section is often a source of insane user activity. It’s full of jokes, synergy, and brutal honesty. You can use that to your advantage. Look for insights and speak to your users. Invite your audience to create together, and you’ll know what’s on their minds, what they want to see and what confuses them, and how to tweak your company’s online presence.

Google’s success in encouraging brands to “rank higher” has backfired. Some businesses turn to dubious SEO techniques – giving us keyword-rich but pointless pages with little to no value for the end user. TikTok’s search engine has partially solved this issue. How?

For younger generations, TikTok is gradually replacing Google as the “go-to information platform.” Brief, easily consumed, and often entertaining videos provide information instantly and, most of the time, accurately. For example, to get the same info from a recipe page, users have to watch a 60-second (or shorter) video they can scroll through instead of looking at 3,000 words. Even a blog post can be compressed into a short video. Then, it doesn’t come as a surprise that 40% of Gen Z prefer TikTok over Google, as stated by a Google senior vice president in 2022.

Let’s look at how startups can optimize their videos for TikTok SEO to reach their marketing goals.

First, it takes understanding your audience and what they’re looking for. It’s the same way this works with Google: conduct market research and discover the audience’s likes and dislikes. Only this time, you’re gonna look at TikTok insights – or analyze the current trends to see what kind of content is in favor.

Similar to Google, TikTok operates with keywords. So, you’ll have to consider which terms your target audience will likely use to find your product. Once that list is complete, look for matching keywords other businesses in the niche use on TikTok. You can also refer to the Discover page to see how much weight a particular keyword or hashtag has.

Aside from creating engaging, easy-to-consume content that holds value and coupling it with trending sounds, which also work as hashtags, you should also optimize your posts with keywords. TikTok keywords belong to three areas: your video title, description, and hashtags. Per current TikTok rules, you can include up to 2,200 characters in video descriptions – plenty for product details and CTAs.

All TikTok business accounts have a shared goal: appearing on the longed-for FYP. But how do you get there? The answer is the TikTok algorithm. According to the platform, these are the factors impacting your chances of appearing on the FYP:

• User interactions. TikTok constantly analyzes what the users watch, like, save, and comment on. So, the more value your content has, the more likely it is to sneak into the FYP by being viewed and shared.
• Device & profile settings. User settings like location, language, and device type all impact the content shown first. While you can’t cater to the device type, consider language and location.
• Video information. Captions, trending topics, hashtags, and other bits of information that come with videos are all used by the engine to analyze which content to prioritize.

Plus, you’ve got a built-in tool: TikTok Analytics. With it, you can access data like follower growth, profile and video views, likes, comments, and shares – all within a fixed time frame. You can also find extensive data on each post, such as:

• Average watch time
• Total views, likes, and shares on each post
• Where users found the video
• Where your audience is located geographically
• The percentage of users who viewed the entire video

When gathered regularly, this data enables you to repurpose your posts and plan for the content that performs best.