Over the past few years, TikTok has grown to become the first non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion global downloads. Not only does this platform boast the lion’s share of social media users, but the highly individualized algorithm has led to users spending an average of almost an hour and a half every day on TikTok.
It’s also undeniable that TikTok is still experiencing a phenomenal period of growth right now in 2022, and it’s quite unlikely that TikTok will disappear from the market soon. TikTok is estimated to have 955 million monthly users worldwide in 2025, according to Insider Intelligence’s forecast. It is now the third-largest of the Big Five worldwide social networks (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter).
TikTok’s rapidly growing user base has also fuelled a diversification of content on the platform, creating opportunities for brands to get creative with relevant content on the app.
Once dominated by viral dance trends, TikTok videos now span almost every vertical imaginable. Beauty tutorials, home hacks, styling tips, and fitness videos are now commonplace, alongside a new wave of educational content covering current events and social issues.
Many people once might thought TikTok was a good for nothing Chinese spying app for bored teenagers. But in all seriousness I think most business owners and online marketers have looked at TikTok with this degree of skepticism. But it’s already 2022, TikTok has proved that it can help with business the way no other social media platform can do, so if you are still not using TikTok to drive traffic to your business, you are losing huge opportunities!
You probably already know that TikTok offers a low-cost, high-visibility way to gain free traffic, conduct influencer campaigns, break into the current conversation, run targeted ads, and launch new products using TikTok For Business. But how TikTok does that? And why TikTok worths your attention more than any other social media platform especially if your business is rather new, or you missed the best timing when Instagram and Facebook was growing rapidly many years ago. These are possible all because of the unique TikTok Algorithm.
Before we discuss about the indicators that TikTok considers important, I would like to mention the few factors that don’t influence how the TikTok algorithm ranks your content. These include:
- Follower count
- Whether you’ve had previous high-performing videos
This means that even if you only have a handful of followers, or have never posted to TikTok before, there’s still an opportunity for your video to go viral. This is completely different from SEO on Google for example, Google takes domain rating a very important factor for ranking the websites. As a result, it’s very hard for new websites to outrank established website, and it takes a very long time and lots of great contents to increase domain rating. But TikTok completely changed the game, every newly uploaded video is rated by TikTok only based on its content, which creates huge opportunity for every business.
So in this Article, I will share with you in details about how to drive FREE traffic from TikTok to your website step by step.
Although TikTok is famously known as a platform rather easily to go viral for some videos. That’s one big reason why the platform is growing so quickly. But if you are not just on TikTok for views and likes, but more for leads and sales. You need a content strategy that helps you to grow your account consistantly and convert more leads and sales for you.
TikTok content Strategy is an actionable strategy helping you to create videos(contents) that match your business goals and bring value to your target audience on TikTok, so that more of your video viewers on TikTok will become your customer and the content will even serve to build your brand loyalty over the time.
Business Goals, TikTok Goals and Metrics
So the first step of building TikTok content strategy is to have clear goals including business goals and TikTok goals, so that you can make sure every piece of content you generate is for serving your business goals.
Defiding business goals associated with social goals may sound a bit overwhelming but actually what you need to focus on is simply what you want to get out of TikTok to begin with.
To make this process easier, we can create a TikTok content funnel which just like a sales funnel. As you can see from the following diagram, the TikTok content funnel moves from contents with broad targeting content at the top to highly targeted, converting content, and last loyalty focused content at the bottom.
Create Contents Based On Your Goals
Awareness
Let’s say you’re trying to attract new customers then your first goal is to get attention or awareness, the metrics you’ll want to watch are things like reach, followers and growth.
These videos will make up about 70% of your posts. They’re aimed at a broad audience, with the potential to go viral and increase your reach on TikTok. You’ll see high viewing figures but low conversion rates. That’s fine. At this stage, you’re just trying to build brand awareness.
Consideration
Next moving further down the funnel your potential customers could be considering their options. And this is where measuring things like engagement and engagement rate is important. Now at this stage tracking will get a little bit more sophisticated. You can continue measuring the consideration phase of your customer journey all the way to conversion by using utms and google analytics to measure things like click-through rate traffic to your site sign-ups and eventually sales.
This is a much smaller part of your content strategy, but in many ways, it’s the most important element. About 15-20% of your videos should be dedicated to developing a relationship with viewers who are already aware of your brand. Share expertise, information, and entertainment that teach people to like and trust you.
For this type of videos, you could put a link with a longer vision YouTube video, or link to your blog post to give your audience more information that they are looking for.
Conversion
TikTok is not only a great place to find your potential customers but also an awesome platform to sell your products, no matter your product is physical or digital, TikTok is the best place to help your ecommerce store to generate more sales with free traffic, if you know how to create the right content. (You can also leverage TikTok ads or TikTok influencer marketing if you have budget, which we will discuss in another poste.)
To prove this, you just need to search #product in TikTok and see how many people are demonstrating products and selling on TikTok directly. One good way to find out how to create the videos that convert ist to take some time to do research about the hashtags in your niche.
If your channel is more about educational contents, it’s better to create no more than 15% of the videos on the purpose of “conversion”. This is the smallest portion of your content. Your conversion content will feature short videos with very clear calls to action. You’ll see very low viewing figures on these videos but they should have comparatively high conversion rates.
Loyalty
At the bottom of the funnel, we are focusing on increasing brand loyalty. The business goal is to improve customer retention, and the social goal is to gather consumer sentiment.
One good idea to generate videos using customer feedback, simply put a screen shot of customer reviews or insert some user interview footage in your TikTok video.
Now it’s time to map out your current business goals, TikTok goals and metrics that you can use to measure your result before we move to the second step, which is to Define Your Audience.
Create Content For Your Audience
When you’re starting from scratch you could theoretically attract anyone with your TikTok videos. So it’s important to zoom in and prioritize the people who your product is built for, what kind of struggles and challenges do they face, what is the content that they’ll find extremely helpful make that person the center of your social strategy, building out audience personas with demographic ocation age job title etc is certainly helpful especially when you’re using ads. But the foundation of success is understanding at an emotional level what your customer struggles with and what you can post that will help them out.
Create Persona Based On Research
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas can help you recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals.
There are several different you can conduct qualitative and quantitative research for buyer personas. For example, Customer surveys, Phone and in-person interviews and Web surveys.
Take the following persona we developed for one of our clients in the sports niche as an example, as you can see, we tie the Wants and Needs, Pain Points on the persona with our content ideas on TikTok.
Storytelling
Video storytelling is a marketing tactic that uses the naturally engaging video format to tell a story about a brand, company or product. Video storytelling is much more than a sales pitch, as it focuses on a story rather than a product. It is immersive and powerful, and very effective in driving engagement.
But how to be successful at video storytelling?
I think a story should contain a starting point (a hook), a challenge, and a goal/outcome.
Simply start by asking yourself what is the problems you want to help your customers to solve in the video.
Problems Examples:
- Difficult to build daily routine for streching the body in a besy schedule.
- Always forget to do sports when we get too busy.
- Can’t find the right running shoes with.
- Difficult to change bad eating habbit.
It’s really important to think about the pain (the problems) of your potential customer because problems are your friend in the case of video storytelling. Create your story as these are the challenges that you have to overcome.
The challenge is everything that happens in between, what’s important in the middle of the video is to emphysize obstacles or problems that come your way while trying to move closer to the goal.
The challenges during the video ultimately leads to the climax, which is the point where you overcome the challenges and you’re finally ready to reach the goal of your video come to conclusion or any other outcome.
Let’s take a look at an example on TikTok.
The video is not only creativ and funny, but also telling a story totally matching our video storytelling formular. He started the video with a problem that he has, which is being scared of an open door. And he transformed the problem he has into a hook with the script, the visual and the sound effect. Later he continued by saying how he struggled with this problem and how difficult it is to him (Challenges and Climax), then he finanlly had a solution, which is a very simple product that he found.
This account has only 21 rather simple videos, but it already has almost 50k followers.
Create Content Relate To Target Audience
Now we already know that we can use storystelling technique to create short videos for the potential customer. The last missing piece is about creating content relate to targe audience.
It’s really crucial to think about how you can connect to your audience, what techniques would make the video especially memorable to viewers, and what could make it shareable, perhaps even with the potential to go viral! So in the end of the day, you want your audience to relate their life, their struggle to the story you tell in the video.
Get Content Ideas With Competitors Research
Step Three: take a look at your competition and see what they’re doing, and what they aren’t doing. Before you can create content destined to go viral — or start brushing up on your dance moves — it’s critical to research what your competitors are doing. Competitor research may seems mundane, but the best way to rise to the top is learning from your competitors, adopting their winning strategies, and beating them at their own game.
Here are a few questions you can ask while doing the researach, below you can also find a competitor research example I did with the help of Notion database.
- What audios are they using?
- What type of videos tend to get more views?
- What type of videos get more comments and likes?
- How they tell a story within 30 seconds?
- How they grab people’s attention in the first scene or in the thumbnail?
- What kind of keywords do they use in caption?
- Which hashtags do they use?
For example, I did a quick research in the niche of products and filled out all the information in the following table.
In conclusion, a solid TikTok content strategy is essential for any business or individual looking to establish a presence on the platform. By understanding your target audience, creating engaging and relevant content, and utilizing the right hashtags and filters, you can increase your reach and ultimately drive conversions. Additionally, staying up-to-date on the latest trends and features on TikTok can give you an edge over your competitors. Remember, consistency is key, so be sure to consistently post new and engaging content to keep your followers engaged.
