How Brands Can Achieve Higher Engagement On TikTok

Looking for some easy ways to improve your engagement rate and brand awareness on TikTok? We’ve got you covered with some valuable strategies successful brands on TikTok are already taking advantage of.

1. Value Audience Participation

Today’s customer journey needs to be highly actionable. You need to be on your toes at all times to adapt to it. No matter your goals and objectives, one thing’s for sure: your marketing needs to revolve around the user. 

How do you achieve that?

• Create content that’s easy to adapt. For example, a fun, fashion showcase-type video, accompanied with a hashtag challenge can be copied by almost anyone.
• Regularly reply to user comments.
• Highlight a user comment with a reply with a video feature.
• Reshare user-generated content (UGC)

Pixlee’s CRM platform lets brands collect TikTok UGC from their fans or creators of choice, and then gives the brand’s team and easy way to schedule this content to be reshared or published on other marketing channels (like on-site or other social profiles). Sharing content related to your brand from your community not only makes your content more relatable and interesting to users, but it also gives your brand’s profile an element of social proof that gives viewers more incentive to buy from you.

Cosmetics brand Temptu consistently shares how fans use its products to create their beauty looks.

2. Work With Influencers

Most brands today understand the importance of Influencer Marketing. For example, U.S. TikTok influencers alone had an average engagement rate of 17.99%. The good news is that TikTok makes finding connecting with creators super easy. All you need to do is look through their Creator Marketplace to find a suitable partner.

Morphe showcases an “influencer takeover” of their in-person store by Ashley Strong, a creator they’ve partnered with to create an eyeshadow palette. 

Tips to consider:

• Look for micro-influencers if you’re just starting out, want to work with many influencers at a time, or have a smaller budget. They often have higher engagement rates than larger celebs!
• Don’t be afraid to follow your influencer’s lead on content — they know their audience best so it’s valuable to give them creative freedom.
• Think long-term: set up a partnership for more than just one campaign (i.e., a series of product launches or free samples for them to feature every month, etc.)

3. Use Paid Ads

The TikTok crowd is more welcoming toward paid ads than you think. A study found that 72% of users enjoy ads on TikTok. And they start from $10 per CPM. Try one or more formats to see which ones bring the best results. Here are your options: 

• In-feed ads. These ads appear on the users’ For You page with the “sponsored” label attached.
• Brand takeovers. Brand takeovers are usually the very first video when you open the app and also get to appear in multiple spots of TikTok.
• Topview ads. These ads appear on the top of the For You page. TikTok’s ad page states that you get “leading access to user attention” with the TopView ads.
• Branded effects ads. These ads allow you to create shareable stickers, filters, or effects about your brand. 

4. Reshare Instagram Reels Content

For brands active on Instagram, resharing successful content you’ve created for reels or IGTV posts is a good strategy. Plus, reels also serve as another place to collect customer UGC from that can later be repurposed to TikTok. 

While brands are already repurposing much of their Instagram content on other impactful owned digital channels, Reels content could be incredibly powerful for things like TikTok or Twitter ads. This applies to both brand-generated content and UGC — as they work best together.

Start Your TikTok Journey Today!

TikTok has a lot of unrealized potential for brands. It’s not overly saturated by other brands yet, it may hold a lot of your target audiences (if they include millennials and Gen-Z), and it’s a very viral-friendly platform. If this sounds like something that could fit in your marketing strategies, then go for it. Plus, the content you create and the UGC you source from your community has the potential to thrive on your other social and general marketing channels, too.

Mark Quadros is a SaaS content marketer that helps brands create and distribute rad content.  On a similar note, Mark loves content and contributes to several authoritative blogs like HubSpot, CoSchedule, Foundr, etc. Connect with him via LinkedIn or Twitter.