TikTok Video Series: Part One

Hey, everyone going to do a little three-part video series on TikTok, this being part one, the goal is to start a conversation around how brands can break into TikTok with a sound content strategy that doesn't completely bust their budget, which is a problem we are hearing and seeing. Time and time again. All right.

Let's get started here with part one and let's review the overall culture of the platform. Because it's really where you need to start when you're developing a content strategy for tick tock. TikTok is lighthearted, it's loose. It's silly. The channel is filled with short and snappy videos recorded with a smartphone and without production crews. The real key to good content on TikTok is that it provides value in the form of education or entertainment, or better yet, both. It's content that speaks directly to the interests and cultural moments that your consumers are already consuming. So that's exactly where you should start your content strategy, make it all about your consumer. And there are three places that you can look for data and information to help inform a strategy that is specific to your audience.

And one that your audience is actually going to give two poops about. Number one, the platform itself. Start by identifying key influencers, brands and hashtags in your industry. These are where the emerging trends are. Engage with industry content as well. This will boost trend discovery and help shape TikTok’s discover page, so you can find popular hashtags and challenges that you can latch onto ongoing. Number two, your own first party data. Analyzing demographics, purchase history, site analytics, all of this could give you a lot of good information to build your content around. If you know a certain product is trending up, then you can try and integrate that in a fun and poppy duet or challenge or some other trickery that people are going nuts over at that time. And number three, and this is the one that marketers usually miss out on– look to industry and market reports within your niche.

What are the things that are trending with consumers in your industry space? Remember. You're not trying to speak to everyone. That's a losing proposition. But you can speak directly to the folks who are most likely to care about what you offer anyways. One neat trick we use is leveraging brand monitoring and competitive analysis tools by monitoring sentiment and key terms being used online, you can get a pretty solid idea of what's currently important to your tribe. And weave some of that into some pretty rad digital video content. Alright, next up, we'll dive into specific types of TikTok content you can create to flush out your killer TikTok content strategy. Thanks for listening and be well.