A Beginner's Guide To TikTok Marketing For Ecommerce Brands

Importance of TikTok marketing in the Ecommerce and DTC space

As per a Bloomberg report, in 2022, TikTok is on its way to tripling its revenues to $12 billion, with an average user spending 28.7 hours on an average on TikTok per month.

However, with one billion monthly active users and more than 40 thousand posts shared per minute, it can be very challenging to market your Ecommerce and DTC products to the right audience.

Besides creating content and running ads, one of the most critical aspects of TikTok Ecommerce marketing involves understanding the effective ways to optimize your content for maximum reach and engagement.

Let's take a deep dive to understand how to create a TikTok marketing strategy for Ecommerce that will enable you to boost your brand awareness and gain your customers' attention.

How to set up your TikTok business account

In 2020, TikTok launched TikTok for Business, allowing business owners to link their TikTok Business accounts to their online stores. Post that, TikTok has become a hub for brands to reach new audiences and drive more sales–thanks to their numerous Ecommerce-friendly features such as analytics tools, product links, and advertising options.

Before learning how to create a TikTok marketing strategy, here's how you can set up your TikTok business account:

1) Set up your Tiktok profile

To access a business account, you must first switch from your personal account to a business one.

This can be done by heading to Manage Account in Settings and selecting Switch to Business Account.

You can further customize your business account by selecting the category that accurately describes your brand, adding your website, and adding your email address.

2) Setting up profile name and photo

Ensure your profile photo reflects your brand. Using the same logo or color scheme as you have on other digital platforms will help you make it clear that this account is part of the same family as your website, Instagram, and Facebook.

Here is an example of Kaja, a beauty brand. You can see how they have kept both their TikTok and Instagram profiles very identical. Consistent branding across all platforms makes it easier for audiences to recognize and find the brand.

3) Setting up profile bio

Your bio is the first thing your audience will read when they visit your profile. Therefore, you need to optimize it so that it tells them who you are and what you do. And remember that you have only 80 characters to do all this.

TikTok lets you use one URL in the bio, which should ideally be a link to your website, or use a link tree if you have multiple links.

You can also link your TikTok profile to your Instagram or YouTube account with a separate CTA next to the follow button. Adding links to your other social media platforms allows you to drive traffic to these platforms.

Formulate a robust content strategy for TikTok Marketing

When you don't have a clear content strategy that defines your marketing goals, you can easily fall into the spiral of making videos for random trends on TikTok.

Developing a TikTok strategy for brands will help you create and share content that resonates with your target audience and achieves your marketing goals.

Here's how you can build a solid content strategy for TikTok marketing that will enable you to increase brand awareness, build engaged communities, and sell your product or services.

1) Define your target audience

Understanding your target audience is the first step toward creating the best TikTok strategy. By doing so, you can better understand their content consumption and the types of content you need to develop to be most effective.

Start by creating your user profiles based on the following information:

• Location: Helps if you're a local business or only want to target a specific area.

• Age: Helps to target the right age group.

• Gender: You'll need it if you sell gender-specific products.

• Interests: Useful for developing content ideas and identifying target audiences (workout, travel, and so on).

• Career/Industry: Helps you understand their day-to-day needs.

• Income range: Gives you an idea of how much they can spend.

• Parental status: Helps if you are marketing baby products or kids products.

• Buying concerns: Identifies all the barriers that might prevent them from making a purchase.

With this information, you should be able to develop a fairly accurate user profile for your Ecommerce business. Once you have the user profile, you can start brainstorming content ideas and create content pillars that will enable you to target the right audience.

2) Competitor Research

When it comes to TikTok marketing strategy, you need to know what your competitors are doing on the platform.

By analyzing what your competitors are creating and what results they are getting, you can understand how to improve your content. You can analyze the posts with the most impressions and engagements and discover what factors contributed to their success.

In addition, TikTok's video showcase tool allows you to browse the most liked and engaged brand videos.

When conducting a competitor analysis, ask the following questions:

• What type of content do they post?

• Do they use any strategies to gain followers and engagement?

• What kind of hashtags did they use?

• What time do they post regularly?

• Was anyone tagged in the post?

• Are they promoting user-generated content?

• How do they interact with their audience in comments or live streams?

• Which videos have failed and why?

• Which influencers are they collaborating with?

A thorough understanding of these will assist you in defining your own platform-specific TikTok strategy for business.

3) Create a content calendar

Based on your user profile and competitor research, you should now know the type of content you should create.

However, before you dive into creating content, you need to keep your content calendar ready. By creating a content calendar, you'll be able to plan and organize your TikTok marketing strategy and ensure that your content aligns with your marketing goals.

Make a calendar detailing what you want to create when it will be created, and how often you will post. Once you have a plan in place, you can start creating content that will appeal to your target audience.

Proven content ideas for TikTok Ecommerce

1) Keep your content entertaining and inspirational.

According to TikTok, the number one reason users report going to TikTok is to uplift their spirits. TikTok users report feeling energized, motivated, confident, and entertained when spending time with the app.

Gymshark is one of the best TikTok marketing strategy examples to understand how to create content. It has built a content strategy that is both engaging and motivational at the same time, which got them nearly 3.8 million followers on its TikTok account.

2) Leverage TikTok Commercial Music Library

The TikTok Commercial Music Library offers over 150,000 tracks for free use. Furthermore, new songs are constantly added to provide brands with a wide range of options that will save them time and prevent them from committing copyright infringements.

3) Create your own music

The library offers a number of options, but if you are not satisfied with what you find, you can upload and use your own original sounds to create a TikTok campaign and invite other creators to incorporate them in their own videos!

As part of their product launch, Ole Henriksen partnered with Statusphere and created an original sound accompanied by the hashtag #YourMainSqueeze. Currently, their audio has been used in 220 videos, and the hashtag has 12.7 million views!

4) Create your own trends

You can start your trend by posting creative and attention-grabbing videos and tagging them with appropriate hashtags. With enough exposure and a bit of luck, your trend might catch on and become a huge success.

The #converseAllstar campaign is an excellent TikTok example of how you can create your own trend and skyrocket your marketing efforts. Through this campaign, Converse asked users to customize their shoes and post a video using the hashtag.

With an engagement rate of 9.22%, this campaign generated more than 24 million total video views and 29.7 million impressions.

Optimize Your Caption and Hashtags

Hashtags are the new keywords on TikTok, and it's imperative to optimize your captions with the right keywords if you want to reach a wider audience.

Here are some tips to optimize your captions for TikTok searches.

1) Include a mix of trending and niche hashtags

When it comes to hashtags, the secret is to mix popular hashtags with niche hashtags to maximize your reach. Doing this will allow you to reach a wider audience while still targeting your niche.

In this TikTok example, Liv Portio, a DTC store for handmade jewelry, uses #smallbusiness as the popular hashtag and #custom #jewelry as the niche hashtag.

2) Keep your niche hashtags consistent

Constantly using niche hashtags helps the algorithm categorize your content and deliver it to the right audience. This allows you to build authority over niche keywords, and the algorithm will associate your brand with these keywords, showcasing your content every time the niche keyword is searched.

Here's a TikTok example Actoyz, an Ecommerce fidget accessories brand uses niche hashtags such as #anxietytools #anxietyhelper to help the algorithm identify their posts and show them to the relevant audience.

3) Write compelling captions

Aside from creating engaging and high-quality content, you must provide relevant details so the user can quickly figure out what the video is about.

Additionally, experts recommend optimizing your video description with long-tail keywords as an effective strategy to boost your reach. Recently, TikTok expanded its description length from 300 to 2,200 characters, giving creators more room to experiment.

4) Don't fake hashtags

It has become a common practice for brands to use irrelevant hashtags to gain more views and followers. Faking hashtags, on the other hand, keeps your videos from being seen by potential new viewers and, even worse, drives you to external audiences, negatively affecting your long-term growth.

Leverage different types of TikTok Ecommerce Ads

TikTok ads can be customized and targeted to reach a specific audience, making them one of the most effective tools for promoting your Ecommerce brand and products.

There are various types of TikTok ads for Ecommerce brands available on the platform for you to choose from based on your marketing goals.

1) In-Feed Ads

An In-Feed ad is a TikTok ad that appears between users' content. These ads allow users to engage with them by liking, commenting, sharing, following, or even reusing the audio.

You can also add a CTA at the bottom of the ad, helping you drive more users to your landing page.

TikTok in-feed ads are a great way to get your brand message across to a wide audience, promote your products and services, and raise brand awareness.

Here is an example of Ecommerce jewelry brand Livish using in-feed ads as a part of its TikTok Ecommerce strategy to showcase its products and encourage users to shop through the 'Shop Now' CTA.

2) Brand Takeovers

TikTok Brand Takeover ads are the ads that pop up as soon as users open the TikTok app and take up the entire screen for a short period.

These ads can be used when you have something to broadcast to your audience, like launching a product or promoting an offer.

Here is an excellent example of a Brand Takeover ad from Too Faced, where they launched a TikTok campaign to introduce one of their products. With 7.6 million impressions and 1.3 million clicks, the ad delivered a staggering click-through rate of 18.38%.

3) Sponsored Hashtag Challenges

A branded hashtag is another TikTok ad that encourages users to create content related to the product and post it with the defined hashtag.

As popularity and content grow around these hashtags, users become familiar with and trust your brand, making them more likely to buy your products.

Here is an example of a beauty brand called Bobbi Brown, who created the fastest-growing TikTok hashtag #IFeelWeightless with 11.3 billion impressions, encouraging customers to create content featuring the product using the hashtag.

4) Video Shopping Ads

Using shopping video ads as a part of your TikTok Ecommerce 2022 strategy, you can reach shoppers wherever they are in the purchase journey, sparking demand, and boosting sales.

TikTok will create an in-app landing page when users tap on these shopping video ads to speed up the purchase process. Shoppers can learn more about products on these pages and are directed to the retailer's website when they are ready to purchase.

In this TikTok marketing example from Scary Mommy, a DTC brand that sells mother's products, advertises on TikTok and directs them to the Walmart site via Video Shopping Ads to complete the purchase.

Scale your TikTok marketing with Infleuncers

If you want to take your Ecommerce marketing to the next level, you need the right tools to help you automate most of the TikTok marketing processes.

Here are some of the top TikTok marketing tools you can get started with:

1) Fanbytes

Your TikTok strategy for business will be incomplete without influencer collaboration. Influencers have a huge following, and their endorsement can go a long way in promoting your brand.

However, choosing the right influencer who aligns with brand values and resonates with your target audience can be difficult.

That's where Fanbytes come into the picture, an all-in-one platform for influencer marketing that makes finding influencers and launching a campaign simple.

Top Features

• Finding and connecting with Gen Z influencers.

• Social listening and trendspotting to increase TikTok growth.

• Develop a campaign strategy with Fanbyte experts and get content ideas.

2) CapCut (Previously Viamaker)

CapCut is an all-in-one video editing app that simplifies the TikTok video creation process with an easy-to-use interface, trending stickers, and custom fonts.

With CapCut, you can easily trim, reverse, and add speed changes to your videos. Using their advanced filters, you can add a creative and personal touch to your videos.

Top Features:

• Create Picture-in-Picture (PiP) effects easily.

• Access to their vast music library.

• Resize, move, crop, adjust, transform, blend and do just about anything with your video.

3) TrendTok

TrendTok uses AI to track, identify, and forecast TikTok trends based on location and category. Video creators can use it to know of upcoming trends beforehand and create entertaining content.

By analyzing the data,TrendTok also provides comprehensive reports on your videos' performance, recommending the most influential trends for reaching your audience.

Top features:

• AI-based trend prediction for your TikTok Ecommerce strategy.

• Trend suggestions tailored to your preferences.

• Save trending music and sounds for future use.

4) Exolyt

Exolyt provides content creators and Ecommerce brands insight into TikTok analytics, tracking statistics, and engagement metrics.

Top Features:

• Monitor follower counts, daily progress, engagement rates, comments, and views of videos.

• Keep track of video statistics.

• Track profile growth and stats.

5) Storyclash

Using Storyclash influencer marketing platform, you can analyze the influencers your competitors work with on TikTok and better understand your industry.

Top Features:

• Finding brand mentions on TikTok.

• Detailed reports of your influencer campaigns.

• Analyzing your brand's performance against your competitors.

Are you ready to join TikTok for Ecommerce?

Wrapping up, if you're wondering how to create a TikTok strategy for your Ecommerce business, here are the basic steps to start with.

• Set up your TikTok business account
• Create a content strategy and post regularly
• Optimize your captions and hashtags
• Leverage different TikTok Ecommerce ads
• Scale your tiktok marketing strategies using TikTok marketing tools