Making a mark in e-commerce advertising is no easy feat. Sometimes, with the swarm of content abounding on social media platforms such as TikTok, our advertising videos and content can easily get lost in the sea of content. But just like going to war, or sailing aboard a boat, the best way to win or to get to your goal is to be ready with a foolproof strategy.
With billions of users under its mantle, TikTok has proven to be a formidable player in both the social media and e-commerce worlds. With the launch of TikTok shopping, the social media platform has rapidly transformed online shopping, merging the best of both worlds from entertainment and e-commerce. But with all its benefits, it’s pretty hard to penetrate the TikTok market and make your product stand out. Luckily, TikTok brings out the most comprehensive advertising tools that can help you launch your online business from simple and small to big and popular.
In this article, we discuss how to make that strategy. We tackle how to make sure your content is well thought out from creation to distribution. We will try to understand what makes good and impactful content. And we seek ways to ensure your precious video ad reaches your desired target audience and propels them to purchase the best products your online store can offer.
Invest in ad creatives
Content is a supreme necessity in social media marketing. And as such, aspiring online marketers and digital business owners must tackle this matter in the most serious manner possible. Content must always be of top quality – which, put simply, is engaging, mobilizing, and transforming. And when we say transforming, it means your viewer turns into a buyer, then a loyal customer, then a part of your army of satisfied customers slash social media marketers.
Ad creatives can be in different forms, and these forms you have to masterfully utilize like a true artist, mixing and matching and learning which of them is most effective at every period of your campaign. You can do them in the form of videos or images that your users can interact with and catch their attention as soon as they open the TikTok app.
Creating a steady volume of content can help you, but you also must be fully aware of which are effective and which do not help your goals. From these careful evaluations, you can discern what to continue, what to improve, and what to leave behind. Mastery of content, coupled with a concrete grounding provided by Tiktok’s analytics can help you determine which content you put out resonated the most, and have a bigger chance of converting viewers to buyers, and buyers to “partner-marketers.”
As soon as you begin putting out content, use a variety of forms and try out new ideas, and define a period wherein you shall check out the engagements for all your content to sift out the best from all the lot you created.
Define target demographics
To correctly define your target demographics, you must first differentiate them from your target audience. The target audience is the entirety of the group of people you are targeting for your marketing and your business. The target demographics are the set of different characteristics that your specific target audience possesses. These characteristics are customizable when you launch TikTok marketing campaigns and are worth serious consideration as soon as you set up your ads. Knowing the correct demographic you want to engage with ensures value for the money you invest in your ads and provides you with a more or less optimal effect for advertising.
When you determine the demographics of your target audience, you let your imagination run free and illustrate in your mind that you are selling your product face to face. As such, you would ask yourself, among the people in the world, what age group would probably be most interested in my product? Are they senior citizens, millennials, or Gen Z? Or am I targeting parents who want to provide the best stuff for the children they are raising? Afterward, you further refine. Which region of the world will be interested in my product? Note: Language also matters in targeting your audience. Make sure they understand your ad. Then you go on with more pertinent questions such as education level, religion, and income bracket.
Studying demographics will streamline your strategy and ensure your content reaches the places and the people you intend them to do. When it’s clear who you’re talking to, it will drastically affect how you approach your content creation. You also get to study the interests and trends among your target population, and your brand and store become an integral part of their community as a whole. Demographics is key to creating solid, tight, and effective brand messaging that really gets through.
Be specific with your objectives
You can’t get everything, everywhere, all at once. And as such, you have to be very specific in studying the current situation of your brand, in congruence with market trends and demands. Just like in sailing, you have to know how sturdy your boat is at the moment and how it will fare with the current weather conditions. These will help steer your company in the right direction while minimizing damages from risky actions or decisions. At different stages of your business, you want to correctly maximize each opportunity. And you can only do that when you are fully aware of your capacities. Capacities and opportunities are important factors in defining your objectives in each period.
When you are a startup, you might want to set your primary goal as introducing your product and penetrating the market. If you want to achieve this, you will adapt your strategy to creating interesting and viral content, linking with influencers to help you reach more people, and hooking up your most loyal customers with value-added promotional stunts. You want to build and take care of your audience at this point.
When you establish yourself as a medium-sized and trusted brand, you want to ramp up a bit. You start taking risks. You want to cement your brand as one of the best. You might want to start holding events, online and on the ground. Of course, you make sure your influencer-partners are well taken care of, and work together with them to further promote your product. Your goal is to be the talk of the town and become a household brand.
The ultimate objective that you want to achieve with your strategy is for your products to sell and your brand to be known. But in different stages of your business, and whenever the situation calls for it, your particular objectives differ. Just try to ensure that whatever risks you take are well-calculated and will contribute to your ultimate goal in the long run.
Collaborate with content creators
Partners in life, partners in business, partners in marketing. Most of the things we do in life cannot be achieved alone, or just by a small group. For big things, such as propelling your online business to popularity, it is not enough to just rely on yourself. You have to build long-lasting and strong relationships which grow better and bolder over time. And in the case of TikTok marketing, it is a universally-acknowledged truth that social media is all about influencers and working with them to achieve your goals. You see, these influencers are very much respected in the specific communities they are part of. They are considered experts in their respective fields. In short, their words matter.
If you want your business to be reputable and established, partnering with the best content creators is a must. If you see a popular make-up tutorial vlogger on TikTok, who has millions of followers, you must seize the moment and shoot them a direct message, hook them up with your products and ask for reviews. In exchange, they give you an effective boost in reputation by mentioning your product and tagging your store. These benefits are infinitely greater than that little investment you hand them out, with just a few freebies.
Besides scouring TikTok for the best content creators, there are also a few tools online which will help you conduct market research and look up which creators have so far been most effective in linking sellers and customers.
Work with a budget, and be consistent
Looking for an advertising budget can be a bummer especially when you are starting. But do not fret, just allot a few dollars and carefully plan out your social media content. Posting regularly is generally a correct strategy, but quality beats quantity any time. In working with your budget, you have to maximize every cent that goes into advertising. You have to make sure they have a return in sales. To do that, a social media plan must be in place.
Creating a social media plan is carefully marrying what you have with where you want to go. It might not be as quick as we want to, but the point is to march on and get something as we go. Content quality is of prime importance. No paid ad campaign can boost uninteresting content. The rule of thumb is that your content must inform, influence, and interact. Imagine you’re talking to a real person when creating content.
And of course, let us not confuse regularity with just mere frequency. Swarming your audience with ineffective content might do your business more bad than good. Just set a regularity of posting that is comfortable with your budget and content creation capacities. Being a regular in your audience’s feed does not mean bombarding, but creating that excitement that makes them come back for more.
Monitor and analyze ad performance
You don’t want to mindlessly just release content, and in the end, become unsure if they are truly making a lasting impact. Thank the heavens, though, TikTok has provided us with a very helpful set of analytical tools. And all we have to do is to study how to read them and familiarize ourselves with how to infer them to apply improvements to the overall marketing strategy that we have.
Some metrics that the analytics tool can provide, and can help you bolster your strategy include the likes, comments, shares, where or from what age group the traffic to your content is coming from, the total play time of the specific video, the number of views, gender of your audience and many more.
These metrics, when studied, can help you assess whether you are hitting your desired target audience, if there is a need to shift your ad campaign particulars, or if your overall content strategy needs some tweaks, or even an overhaul.
Repurpose: be consistent across channels
Repurposing is not a crime, and when done the right way, it can establish your brand with a very attractive consistency, imagery, and messaging. In the process of repurposing our social media content, you have to be very familiar with the particular strengths and weaknesses, good points, and bad points of each platform. Of course, it would be a no-no to just upload a video from YouTube to Tiktok, or use the size you used for your main video content and just upload it to Instagram. Treat each social media platform as a wild animal that you have to observe, know more deeply, tame, and draw to your advantage.
Repurposing relieves you of the burden of thinking of and creating separate content from channels. When you do repurpose tastefully, your audience can appreciate the different approaches you employ on each platform and see your brand as a whole, solid and integrative.
Put it to a test
Strategizing, to be frank, is not something that can be fully formed in the mind. We can pay PR experts, or social media strategists to assist us. But ultimately, true strategy can only take shape once we interact with the audience, take in their feedback for the improvement of both sides, take risks and make changes along the way. So, we leave you with our small piece of advice: try, maybe fail, maybe succeed, but always move forward with the lessons.
