POV: 7 Paths to Growth on TikTok

When it comes to growing your brand’s presence on TikTok, understanding your audience and your product “edge” is fundamental. A product’s edge is what makes it different and sets it apart from competitors. Are you selling organic ingredients, cruelty-free beauty products, or offering sustainable packaging? These are the angles you should focus on when developing TikTok content to ensure it’s true to your brand and provides value to the user. Once you are clear on your audience, understand what sets you apart, and properly know how to use TikTok, it’s time to grow. Here’s how TikTok growth can be achieved: 

1. Understand the Assignment

Step 1

Have a crystal clear understanding of what TikTok users want. It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at TikTok- it will fall flat if it doesn’t resonate with the people of the Tok. Conduct a deep dive into customer insights annually to make sure your message is on target across media.

Step 2

Create multi-purposed content that can live across TikTok. Make your TikTok content easily searchable with hashtags and video descriptions. Once a TikTok video is developed, identify ways to activate that asset across channels: it’s a short road from TikTok to Reels, just sayin’.

Step 3

Promote organically to draw TikTok users in, instead of creating a standard ad.

Top tip: It’s not always about the product or service (yep – we really did just say that, and we mean it, too). Create fun, engaging pieces of content that inspire TikTok growth and virality. 

2. Trend-mine, build content around moments, rinse & repeat

Let’s cut to the chase: TikTok for business is important. With the right strategy, most brands are able to drive brand affinity, engagement and revenue on TikTok. Not only are TikTok ads a power revenue stream, TikTok is also the leading catalyst when it comes to social and generational trends. Viral moments may come and go but there should be a content strategy mainstay. Build a process where you continuously monitor trends and jump on them quickly to become part of a larger narrative. What’s more, the traction and views will follow. It’s not just because we’re a leading TikTok agency (or maybe it is), but we’ve defined the right posting cadence and framework for viral trends and engagement, driving traffic to:

• Website
• Physical stores
• Social media pages
• Blogs 

Client success: How a consistent organic presence boosted an outdoor brand’s engagement

In just one month, we kicked a leading outdoor recreation brand’s TikTok into gear. The formula was simple: posting multiple times a week, committing to immediate, regular audience engagement, and paying close attention to what is being talked about across industries and competitors to elevate the brand’s name in conversations. The results speak for themselves: 

• Video views: +96%
• Profile views: +794%
• +120% shares
• +950% comments 
• +82% like 

3. Make the TikTok Shop your storefront

Sync product catalogs to create a shoppable experience that is seamlessly integrated into the scrolling journey. Here’s how.

• Promote products – Tag products in organic posts and measure impact in the Store Manager. Once in the Shop tab, simply tag products to create shoppable experiences for active users. 
• Direct conversions – Convert directly within the app without the need for a landing page – a complete checkout process. You can even connect the app to your Shopify store and automatically get product data.

4. Make people stop, shop and listen

Use TikTok’s advertising program to reach your future customers in 3 ways. 

1. Content – Create quality content that is audience-specific. 
2. Promoted Posts – Reach out directly through video ads. 
3. Influencers – Partner up with influencers on the social platform. 

5. Project main-character energy with paid ads

The challenge: brands need to build relationships by becoming part of the story rather than simply telling it. Marketers that master their storytelling will experience a two-way audience-to-brand experience that no other social media platform can offer. The end result drives massive engagement and conversion. 

Let’s take a look at a SparkAds case for a leading fashion brand. Power Digital turned to Influencer Spark Ads to resonate with the brand’s target audience. This authentic, quality content resulted in Power Digital delivering a 257% increase in ROAS. The strategy leaned on restructuring the fashion brand’s account to support a Spark Ads-focused creative strategy with a strong posting cadence of 6+ new pieces of content a week. The TikTok algorithm had more to work with and, in return, drove more revenue.

Client success: Match-market testing yields delicious results for SmartSweets

A match market test (MMT) measures how incremental a marketing channel is and assesses its impact on holistic business performance. By experimenting at the Geo level across multiple channels, measuring at this level makes the data impervious to issues and limitations. The outcome is always objective because an MMT doesn’t rely on third-party data. Compared to Meta/Instagram MMT results, Power Digital’s TikTok strategy for SmartSweets drove a 287% higher incremental ROAS with a significantly lower budget. MMT results positioned TikTok as incremental to SmartSweets’ holistic business performance and offered a tangible impact on brick & mortar sales.

Following the success, SmartSweets increased their TikTok ads investment by 50%.

6. Hit different with authentic influencer relationships

The importance of brand buy-in from influencers cannot be overstated. The holy grail of TikTok is to create meaningful relationships with creators who are open to making content and driving reach.

You can’t just throw a script at a TikTok creator and expect results. Involve them early in the planning and get their input.

Equally as important – get creative. Use TikTok as an always-on platform to get any sort of longevity when it comes to building engaging content libraries through creator relationships.

Client Success: Prebuilt gaming PC company NZXT sees nearly 250% growth

NZXT, a prebuilt gaming PC company, looked to drive TikTok growth through Power Digital. Power Digital activated influencer content as Spark Ads, driving a 246% increase in account growth, and ultimately, a 12-fold return on ad spend. Within the first month of influencer activations, NZXT saw immediate results and success, generating $65k in Earned Media Value. Needless to say, the strategy paid off.

7. The conversion conundrum

Attribution explains the credit or blame for conversions or actions taken (or not) by a user. When a user converts after seeing a brand on TikTok, marketers want to know: WHY? What percentage of conversions came from an ad or other factors – such as organic discovery or word-of-mouth referrals? The problem with most attribution models is that they’re incredibly opaque. They don’t provide visibility on what happens after users leave a social media platform.

If you’re running an ad campaign where conversions happen in the first few days (or less) of viewing the content, this may not matter much. But with campaigns where purchases happen months or weeks after people have interacted with the content – what do we know about them now?

Ask:

1. Do they even remember who we are?
2. Are they still using our product/service?
3. What else may have influenced their choice?

These questions become especially important as we consider longer-form content like music videos or skits that might only be watched once, but remembered for weeks.

Strong attribution signals

The TikTok Insights tool is powerful, offering a bird’s-eye view into what works best for brands.

Attribution window time is the amount of time it takes for views or clicks to be attributed as an impression, view or click. For example, suppose your attribution window is set at one day (24 hours). In that case, all of your impressions and views will be counted on the same day they were received by users.

Say 10 people watched your TikTok video after seeing it yesterday, but they didn’t watch it today. It doesn’t count toward the total number of views for your campaign. But, if you change the setting to 7 days (168 hours), all impressions/views from this time frame now count toward your total number of impressions/views. These will however drop off in another seven days as long as there’s no more activity from the original users who first saw them.

Say a user watches one minute into a five-minute video today but doesn’t watch any further until three weeks later, when they complete the video. Both scenarios will score points for the campaign because the attribution window was set accordingly.

Impactful creative & audience signals

The Insights tool also gives visibility within each creative on the exact point a user took action – think: clicks, conversions and the associated efficiency metrics. Though not possible in the ads manager alone, Insights saves significant testing time and dollars by highlighting the most efficient areas for testing broad audiences or interests. Use these insights to optimize future campaigns around specific winning creative elements.

• Getting demographic breakdowns (like age and gender) of each individual creative can unveil where the majority of revenue is coming from.
• Gain insights into interests, demographics, geographic and technological audiences from a birds-eye view, something that isn’t possible in ads manager alone.
• Power Digital delivered a 133% increase in conversions and a 163% increase in number of clicks in the first 3 weeks for one of our top clients after incorporating learnings from their video insights page.

Grow Your Brand’s TikTok Account With Power Digital

Power Digital can help you craft the perfect TikTok strategy to maximize your visibility as efficiently as possible. Our team of experts will help you identify which type of videos best suits your brand’s goals, create an engaging and comprehensive content strategy, and use data-driven insights to target and track the progress of your campaign. 

We know that developing a successful TikTok marketing campaign is about more than just creating video content; it’s also about understanding your target audience, identifying trends in the algorithm, and knowing how to leverage influencers. We have the knowledge and resources to help you get the most out of your TikTok campaigns and ensure your content reaches its desired audience.

We understand that managing a TikTok presence can be intimidating, but with the right team and strategy, you can capitalize on this powerful platform and tap into new audiences. Let our digital marketing agency help you create a TikTok strategy that drives growth for your brand. Reach out to us today to learn more about our TikTok agency and services offered.