TikTok Marketing Strategy: Grow Your Small Business on TikTok | Louise Laurie | Skillshare
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TikTok Marketing Strategy: Grow Your Small Business on TikTok

teacher avatar Louise Laurie, Marketing Strategy & Courses

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome!

      2:46

    • 2.

      Class Project

      1:31

    • 3.

      Benefits of TikTok for Businesses

      4:41

    • 4.

      Is TikTok a Fit for Your Business?

      7:42

    • 5.

      Algorithm and User Behaviour

      6:06

    • 6.

      Content Strategy Tips

      9:13

    • 7.

      Boosting Video Engagement

      8:14

    • 8.

      Features for Business Growth - part 1

      9:05

    • 9.

      Features for Business Growth - part 2

      7:58

    • 10.

      Influencer Marketing on TikTok

      5:14

    • 11.

      Tracking Your Success

      6:25

    • 12.

      TikTok Case Study

      5:20

    • 13.

      Final Thoughts

      2:01

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About This Class

Are you a small business owner looking to tap into the viral power of TikTok? Do you want to learn the secrets to successfully marketing your brand or services on this popular platform? 

By the end of this class, you will be able to craft and execute a personalised TikTok marketing strategy for your small business, using the workbook provided in the projects and resources section.

What Will You Learn?

  • Understand the benefits of TikTok for small businesses 
  • Learn how to create clear marketing objectives for TikTok
  • Gain insight into implementing audience and competitor analysis on TikTok
  • Understand how the TikTok algorithm works, and how people use the app, to maximise your content's reach
  • Learn how to create a tailored TikTok content strategy, suited to TikTok's popular content types
  • Discover how to optimise your TikTok videos to boost video engagement
  • Understand how to utilise TikTok shop, affiliate marketing, and paid ads
  • Discover the benefits of Influencer Marketing on TikTok 
  • Learn how to track and measure the success of your TikTok marketing strategy

Why Should You Take This Class?

TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media platforms and has a user base of over 1 billion active users worldwide. 

With its immense popularity, TikTok offers a unique opportunity for small businesses to tap into its viral reach. This course is designed to not only help you decode the dynamics of TikTok but to effectively leverage its potential to benefit your business.

Who Is This Class For?

This course is designed for beginners and intermediates interested in increasing reach and engagement on TikTok. Whether you are a small business owner, content creator or student!

The course assumes some level of knowledge about social media and TikTok, and so doesn't go into the specific details of setting up a TikTok account or how to create videos.

Instead, we focus on the strategic elements of how you can utilise TikTok to grow your small business.

Whether you're a beginner or have some knowledge of social media, by the end of this course, you will be able to craft a personalised TikTok marketing strategy to enhance your reach and engagement. 

Materials/Resources:

To take part in this course you will ideally need a TikTok account and/or some basic knowledge of how to use TikTok, as well as an Internet connection, and your phone. I have also supplied a TikTok marketing strategy template in the projects and resources section for you to complete along the way!

About Me:

Hi everyone, my name is Louise and I’ve been working in digital marketing now for over 12 years as a marketing manager in various industries. I also help small companies with their marketing strategies through my freelance projects and marketing courses.

I have a first class master's degree in digital marketing communications, and I have a lot of experience with social media (including Tik Tok) both during my career and through working as a part-time content creator and educator.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram or via my website, and check out my Skillshare class on digital marketing strategy to learn more about how to create an overall digital marketing strategy for your business. You can also take my social media strategy course for a more general overview of social media strategy.

If this course sounds interesting to you, then let's get started! Don't forget to share your project with the class!

Meet Your Teacher

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Louise Laurie

Marketing Strategy & Courses

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Welcome!: Are you a small business owner looking to tap into the viral power of Tiktok? Do you want to learn the secrets to successfully marketing your brand or services on this popular platform? Maybe you're curious about Tiktok, but you're unsure if it's right for your business or how you could use it strategically. If so, you're in the right place. Hi, an, my name is Louise and I've been working in digital marketing now for over 12 years, and as a marketing manager in various industries. I also help small businesses with their marketing strategies through my freelance projects and courses. I have a Master's degree in digital marketing communications, and I have a lot of experience with social media, including Tiktok. Both during my career and through working as a part time content creator and educator. With over 2 billion downloads globally, Tiktok offers a unique blend of entertainment and user engagement. The sheer reach of the platform and opportunities for small businesses are endless, especially as you don't need thousands of followers to go viral on the app. All you need is content, which needs to be authentic, engaging, and relatable. However, with so much happening on this fast paced platform, it can be overwhelming and difficult for small businesses to keep up. In this course, I want to reduce this, overwhelm and share with you some strategy tips and tricks that I've learned in recent years that you can utilize to help grow your small business using Tiktok. We'll start with looking at whether Tiktok is a good fit for your business audience and goals. Before exploring how the algorithm works and how people actually use the app, we'll then look at creating your own Tiktok content strategy and exploring what content type performs well on the app. You'll also learn what resources and tools are available to you to help grow your business on Tiktok. And come away with some actionable tips to help boost the performance of your videos and measure performance. We'll explore some real life Tiktok case studies and examples along the way. By the end of this class, you'll be able to craft and execute your own Tiktok marketing strategy for your own business using the project workbook that I've supplied in the projects and resources section. This course is designed for beginners and intermediates who are interested in increasing reach and engagement on Tiktok. To take part in this course, you will ideally need a Tiktok account, as well as some knowledge on how to use it and also an Internet connection. I'm excited to get started. So if this course sounds interesting to you, then I'll see you in class. 2. Class Project: Welcome to your class project. For this class project, you'll be working on creating your very own Tiktok marketing strategy for your business. I've created a Tiktok strategy workbook to help you complete this project, which you can find in the projects and resources section. The workbook is designed to complement the course, so contains lots of useful information to help you as you go through the lessons. As well as including some practical activities for you to complete at the end of some of the lessons. And some additional resources where you can go for further information and reading. I chose this project because it's practical and even if you can't fill in everything during the course, then hopefully the template is something that you can take away and use in real life with your business. At the end of the course, I would love for you to share just one section of your Tiktok marketing strategy that you feel comfortable sharing with the class in the project gallery section. This could be your Tiktok goals, your competitor analysis, or a section of your content plan. For example, I'm excited to see your strategies and provide feedback. Remember to ask any questions as well, and I'll be happy to help. Before we get started, your first step is to head over to the projects and resources section and download the workbook. So now if you're ready, let's get into the first lesson where we'll be talking about the benefits of Tiktok for small businesses. I'll see you. 3. Benefits of TikTok for Businesses: Why should you consider using Tiktok as a platform for your small business? In this class, I will run through some of the benefits of Tiktok for small businesses. The first benefit is that Tiktok has a broad audience reach. It's one of the fastest growing social media platforms and has a user base of over 1 billion active users worldwide. This provides businesses with a large and diverse audience and it's only going to get bigger by 2027. It's projected that this number exceed 2.2 billion active users worldwide. And due to this broad audience reach, Tiktok is perfect for raising brand awareness of small businesses. It also has a very high engagement rate, offering businesses a chance to boost their visibility and reach potential customers a lot quicker. 82% of Tiktok users say they have discovered a small or medium business on Tiktok before seeing them elsewhere. And in 2023, the average user spends 55.8 minutes per day creating and browsing Tiktok videos. This is a figure that is projected to increase to 58.4 minutes by 2024. So this just highlights how high the engagement is on Tiktop and the potential benefits for businesses. The app has high engagement with young audiences. So if you have a product or service targeting younger consumers, then Tiktok can be an incredibly powerful tool for you to market your business. However, whilst Tiktok does have high adoption among Gen Z and younger consumers, other demographics are now using the app more and more as people adopt the app. As time goes on, it's not going to be just younger consumers on the app. And already there are more demographics using it. Now, for example, there are 170 million users, or 15.6% of Tiktok users over 18, that are aged 35 to 44. And this is actually up by 20% Another of Tiktok is the viral potential of the app. Unique creative content on Tiktok can quickly go viral, significantly boosting business online presence for little to no cost. The good news is, for all new Tiktok users or those that haven't built up a follower base already, is that neither follow account or whether the account has had previous High performing videos are factors in the recommendation system. If you create great content that speaks directly to your target audience, you have as much chance of going viral than accounts that have had previous viral content. And we'll cover more about the algorithm and how it works in the upcoming lessons. Great benefit of Tiktok is that it allows businesses to showcase their personality. So the personality of the brand, the personality of the business owner, the people behind the business. It provides that platform for businesses to showcase their brand values and their personality in a creative and fun way, which can really help to foster brand loyalty and develop that customer relationship. Another benefit of Tiktok is that it can drive sales of your products and services. Features like Tiktok shop and having the ability to link to your website in your Tiktok bio allows businesses to drive sales directly from Tiktok videos and Tiktok users are shopping. 52% of Tiktok users that have come across small or medium business content on Tiktok have gone on to make a purchase. We'll talk more about Tiktok shop and some of the features that Tiktok has for businesses in the upcoming lessons. And another benefit of Tiktok is their affordable advertising options. Tiktok self service ad platform is more affordable than other social media platforms, making it a good option for small businesses with lower budgets. Tiktok also gives you access to millions of content creators and influencers that you can partner with to help promote your products and services and increase your reach on the platform. Additionally, the organic reach on Tiktok is so good that businesses may not even need to spend on advertising. And in fact, my suggestion as a small business on Tiktok would be to grow your organic content first before you start thinking about advertising. But we will run through some of the advertising options available to businesses in the upcoming lessons. So now we've been through some of the benefits of Tiktok. Is Tiktok right for your business? Let's find out in the next lesson. 4. Is TikTok a Fit for Your Business?: Before you start creating content on Tiktok, you need to ask yourself. Is Tiktok right for your business, your customers, and your industry? Who would you be looking to reach on Tiktok? Don't just jump onto Tiktok because it's popular. If it doesn't, one, help you to meet your business goals and two, your customers aren't using it. Business lesson, we'll explore how to know if Tiktok is right for your business. Before you do anything, you need to define your target audience. Few, are you looking to reach with Tiktok? Are you looking to reach existing customers? Or are you looking to reach a new audience? You know who you would like to reach on Tiktok. Then do your research. Is your audience on Tiktok? What's the reach? Take a look at the free tool, Tiktok insights for some useful stats on audience behavior. There's also audience insights which is available within ad manager in Tiktok. And this can give you some really good information on your target audience. So you can see how your audience uses Tiktok, what kind of content they engage with, what hash tags they use, and how you can use Tiktok to provide value to your audience. There are other ways that you can use to find out whether your audience is on Tiktok. You can checking demographic data available from various social media research tools or surveys that will give you data about usage of platforms like Tiktok among different age groups and genders. For example, sites like Statista, you can use Tiktok Analytics. If you already have a Tiktok account, then use it's built in analytics feature which can offer crucial insights into your followers activity, including their geography and when they're most active. You could conduct a survey among your customers or potential target audience to ask about their social media use. You could do some influencer research. If influencers in your industry active and gaining substantial engagement on Tiktok, then chances are your target audience is using Tiktok. And then there's social listening tools as well. There's many social listening tools available out there where you can use them to find out how and where your target audience is interacting online. From my own research and experience, Tiktok is hugely popular with younger demographics and particularly females. If your producti service targets younger female consumers, or this is a demographic that you would like to reach, then Tiktok is definitely a place where you should be. That being said, older demographics are growing on the app. We have the largest jump happening in the 55 plus brackets. This suggests that businesses and brands with older target audiences should consider including Tiktok in their marketing strategy. This age group increased by 62% 2021-2023 And although only represents 5% of Tiktok users over 18, there's still over 60 million users that fall into this demographic. I would also recommend at this stage looking at your top competitors and seeing if they use the app and how they use the app. So some examples of some things that you could research include, what type of content are they posting? What type of content is performing well and not so well? What are their strengths and weaknesses on Tiktok? How are they using Tiktok? Do they have a lot of engagement with their content? How many followers do they have? Are they growing? What hash tags are they using? What influences or creators are they working with? Are they using any paid advertising? Do they have a Tiktok shop? And if so, what are they selling and how are they selling? The easiest way to research your competitors is to go directly into Tiktok and search for your competitor's name in the search bar. So then they will come up and you can have a look at all of their content and what they're posting. Alternatively, you could go into Google and search your competitors name plus Tiktok. Or if you have access to any social media listening tools, then you can use these to track mentions of your competitors, have a look at what content they're posting, and also track their keywords and hashtags as well. I would say the majority of this research you could do within Tiktok itself. But if you did want to look at using a social media listening tool, there are loads out there. So do your research and find one that best suits your budget and your business. One that I've used in the past is called Hoot Suite, which I quite like, but I'll put a list of recommended ones in the project workbook. So now you need to think about your overall business objectives. What are your goals for using Tiktok and how do these align with your business objectives? Would you like to use Tiktok to generate brand awareness with a new audience, or maybe you want to increase sales via Tiktok shop, drive traffic to your website, generate leads, or develop relationships with your target audience by building a community. Here I would recommend that you set one to three goals for your Tiktok strategy that align with your business objectives. To ensure that you'll be using Tiktok strategically and that it will be helping to grow your business and meet your overall goals. Always make sure that your objectives and goals are smart. Here I mean specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. If you'd like to learn more about marketing strategy and setting smart objectives in general, then check out my other skillshare course all about marketing strategy for small businesses. So let's look at an example. Let's say you are a small business selling women's jewelry, with your main customer demographic being women over 40. You would like to reach a younger demographic with your new product range, specifically Gen Z females. Your overall top level business goal is to increase brand awareness. And then you may have a more specific objective around increasing awareness with Enzi females specifically. With this in mind, let's look at an example of setting a smart objective for Tiktok that aligns with this top level business goal. An example objective here could be to increase followers on Tiktok by a certain percentage by collaborating with a certain number of influences within that target market and creating engaging content relevant to that target market within the next six months. This objective is specific, because it gives a specific amount that you want to increase followers by. Which means you can measure this by tracking the number of followers on Tiktok. And it's achievable because you would set the number that is achievable for you as a business. So in this example I've picked ten, but obviously you would pick the number that you think would be achievable for your own business. And then it's relevant because obviously this example is wanting to amplify reach to the gen, Z demographic. So this is relevant. We've also given it a time limit of six months, so it's time bound. But again, this would be specific to the business and would be chosen based on what the business would deem as achievable For the class project, I would like you to complete the audit section of the strategy workbook. This section will encourage you to think about your target customer, your competitors. And also encourage you to set some smart objectives for Tiktok that are aligned with your business goals. In the next lesson, we'll be learning more about Tiktoks algorithm and user behavior on the 5. Algorithm and User Behaviour: In order to grow on Tiktok, you need to understand the following three things. One, the algorithm and how Tiktok works to your target audience and how they use the app. And three, how you reach them. In this lesson, we'll be covering all three of these points. Bear in mind that the algorithm and best practices on Tiktok are constantly changing. It's really important to try and stay up to date. Tiktok themselves have some fantastic resources on their site and I would really recommend you having a look at the Tiktok resources specifically for businesses. I'd also recommend reading their blog and signing up e mail updates so that you can keep up to date with any updates or changes. So let's talk about the algorithm. Your main goal with Tiktok is to create engaging content that lands on your target audiences. For page or FYP, this is a user's personalized feed and where the majority of Tiktok users spend most of their time. This content is tailored for each user as the algorithm learns what each user wants to see and therefore what they're most likely to engage with. The four page allows you to reach new users that may not be following already. This gives you the potential of more views and reach within your target audience and even going viral. So how does Tiktok recommend videos to users? Well, according to Tiktok, the algorithm uses a mixture of the following user interactions. This includes the videos that the users like share accounts, they follow comments they post and content they create video information which might include details like captions, sounds, and hashtags. Device and account settings like language preferences, country settings, and device type. However, these factors will receive lower weight in the recommendation system relative to the other points according to Tiktok themselves, a strong indicator of interest, such as whether a user finishes watching a longer video from beginning to end, would receive greater weight than whether the videos viewer and creator are both in the same country. Videos are then ranked to determine the likelihood of a user's interest in a piece of content and then delivered to each unique for you feed. So what this means to you as a business to be seen by the maximum people in your audience. Your video needs to catch people's attention and it needs to be engaging. By that, it needs to encourage likes, shares, comments. And be engaging enough so that the users watch the video all the way through to determine engagement. Tiktok will initially show your video to a small group of users as a kind of test. If they deem that video engaging, then Tiktok will show to more users and more users. And this is where there is the potential for a video to go viral. The key takeaway here is that engagement is crucial for creating content on Tiktok. And it's really the main thing that you should be focused on. I will give you some best practice tips on creating engaging Tiktok videos in the upcoming lessons. So now we've learned a bit about the algorithm. It's important to understand how your target audience uses Tiktok. Here we are thinking about your target audiences motivations for using Tiktok. What kind of content do they want to see and how do you reach them? My tip here would be to research how your audience uses Tiktok. For example, what keywords do they use? What hash tags do they use? What sort of content do they post? Tiktok have a lot of tools that can help you hear, including audience insights and creative center. Audience insights allows you to analyze your audience and what hashtags and content they're engaging with. It can also help you to find your subculture by identifying the interest categories most relevant to your audience. Creative Center allows you to explore and research keywords, trends, and hashtags as well as their popularity. You can also explore top creators videos and ads in your industry. Considering the main reason that users use Tiktok is for entertainment, then your videos need to be fun and engaging. According to research, 78% of Tiktok users are there to find funny or entertaining content. While 35% use Tiktok to follow or research brands. Therefore, the moral of the story when creating content for Tiktok is to have fun and be yourself. So once you found out how your audience are using Tiktok, how do you reach them? How can you be sure that your content is reaching the right people? Firstly, we have hashtags. Make sure that you research and use the right hashtags for your audience and your industry. You can do this using the tools that we've just mentioned in Tiktok or by searching in Tiktok yourself. Related to this are communities, there are so many subcultures or communities on Tiktok, each with their own hashtags. So some examples are book tark farm, Tark hiking talk. Does your industry have one? Chances are it does and you can use it to find your audience. And thirdly, we have SEO keywords are very important. Use them in your captions descriptions, voice overs. To ensure your video can be found by your audience, try to incorporate what people are searching for as much as you can into your video. There will be more tips in this area in the upcoming lessons. More people are now using Tiktok as a search engine, especially Gen Z. According to research, nearly 40% of this demographic prefer searching for info on Tiktok and Instagram over Google. Therefore, good SEO can help you get found by your audience. You can research hashtags and keywords in Tiktok's creative center. Alternatively, if you search on Tiktok directly, it will bring up suggestions from keywords that other people have searched for, which can be a really good place to start. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at some top tips for creating your own Tiktok content strategy. 6. Content Strategy Tips: In this section, we'll cover some tips on getting started with your content strategy for Tiktok. Remember to always have your target audience in mind when developing your content. The first tip is to find your niche and stick to it. The best accounts are ones that are focused on one niche. Because users can then identify easily the type of content that you offer. Those interested in the topic are more likely to follow and engage with your videos. An example of this is the Tiktok account, partly sunny projects. Her business is selling plants, but her Tiktok account is not surprisingly focused on plants, with a mix of entertaining and educational content around plants. She even refers to her audience as plant peeps. Further reinforcing the niche and target audience. Once you have your niche, try not to jump on irrelevant trends or post content that isn't relevant to your niche or industry just because it's popular or trending. This can appear inconsistent and can negatively affect engagement and growth. Or you may attract new followers, but these may not be your target audience. So they may not be interested in your usual content and are less likely to engage and buy from you. Always remember quality over quantity. The next tip is to think about your content type and try to post a mix of different content. Generally, the most engaging content on Tiktok falls into one of these following categories. Emotional or inspiring content, controversial content, educational or useful content, or entertainment. If you can create a mixture of entertainment and educational videos, then even better, for example, if we go back to the Tiktok account, partly sunny projects. She shares lots of educational videos about plants. But she does so in a humorous way to make it a lot more entertaining to her audience. Hey peeps, I see this question being posed all the time about growing beautiful succulents from seed, and I'm gonna tell you why. It's an absolutely horrible idea. Wait a minute. This is not like you. You're typically very positive about this whole thing. Why so negative? Your content shouldn't always be directly focused on selling your products. You instead need to add value to your audience with your content whilst remaining on brand and remembering your initial goals. You can of course, feature some of your products in some of your videos, but the hard sell will not go down well on Tiktok. Instead, you could show your products being used, like this example from Doll's House cosmetics. Some mascara. And now this is where the magic happens. This is the Zarzal's cosmetics lockup, glittery shadow in the shade jinks. And it's the perfect shade for this look. I feel like this I make up look isn't supposed to be neat and perfect, so I'm applying it directly with the applicator and then just smudging it out with my fingers. But like on any social media platform, I would always recommend posting a mix of different content types. The next tip is to start by posting and testing your organic content first. That way you can find out what works with your audience before you start on any paid advertising or partnerships. These insights can then inform your paid strategy if you choose to go down this route. The next tip is to post consistently. This is crucial as it lets the algorithm know that you're active and also your audience to know when to expect a video, find a cadence that works for you and try to stick to it. This could be twice a day, once a day, or once a week. It really depends on how much time you have. I would say that it's better to post less, but the content that you post be high quality than post multiple times a day with poor quality videos. As remember, the key factor in the algorithm is engagement. Next we'll go through some general tips for generating ideas for Tiktok videos. One is to answer your audience's questions. Create videos around your most common questions or pain points for your target audience in your industry. For example, how to top tips, et cetera. You can look at your frequently asked questions, what people search for on your site, and the most common questions you get from customers. Video replies, answering customer questions or questions from the comments on your videos also tend to do well on Tiktok and require minimal effort. You can also use sites like answer the public to find out what questions people are asking generally in your niche, and then make video content around those questions. The next tip is to use keywords. You go to the search on Tiktok and type in a keyword. For example, if you type in makeup, you scroll down, you can see the section which says, others searched for. This is a really good place to look for keywords because you can see exactly what people are searching for. If you make video content around these keywords, then these are likely to do well, because these are what people are actually looking for on Tiktok. You could also use Tiktok Creative Center to search. Hash tags that are trending either generally or in your industry. And this can help to give you some inspiration and ideas for your own videos. Another thing you can do is to analyze your competition. Have a look at your competitors and what works well for them. What are their most popular videos? What hashtags are they using? What are people commenting on their videos? What type of questions are people asking on their videos? These can all generate ideas for your content. I would also do the same exercise with popular videos in your industry or niche, which you can find through Tiktoks Creative Center. Now I'll run through some specific content ideas that you can use on Tiktok. This one is behind the scenes. Behind the scenes videos are always really popular on Tiktok. Things you can do include a day in your life, how you package your products, just the general realities of small business life. Another video type that does well on Tiktok is the transformation videos. So say you owned a gardening business and you show before and after, Those type of videos generally perform really well for engagement. Another thing you can do is to repurpose content from your other platforms that performed well and make into a Tiktok video for you have a Youtube video that's performed particularly well. Can you make a Tiktok version of it? If you have a blog post that has done well, can you make a Tiktok version of that? Just looking across your other channels, what content performs well with your audience and seeing whether you can make that into a Tiktok. Also consider sharing any user generated content. You have any customer reviews or customer stories, or customer experiences that are positive related to your brand or services. Another video idea is to tell a story. Tell a story about your business, how you started your business, what it's like running a business day to day. A lot of creators on Tiktok tell stories while doing other things. Maybe while they're doing their makeup or while they're getting ready for work. These can be really engaging and powerful and help to develop that relationship with your audience. My advice would be to spend some time on Tiktok and your own for you page and make a note of what are the popular videos, what are the popular trends and hashtags and video themes favor Any videos that you like or that you would like to recreate yourself. You can favor any sounds that you like and then come back to them later in order to use them in your own videos. Finally, I would recommend keeping up to date with Tiktoks trends and their predictions for the future. This will help you to keep ahead of your competition and give you more chance of creating content that's going to be engaging on the. You can find this information on their blog and also on the new section of their website where they'll share things like trends and forecasts and any changes on the app. So just some example, I'll share some of the trends that they're predicting for 2024 which may help inform your content strategy. The first one is Curiosity peak, which they're saying is hyper relevant, delightful, and useful content that peaks every curiosity, even the ones you didn't know you have. So some examples they give here are, what's something that's peaked your own curiosity and that you could tie your brand into what's something specific you wish more consumers knew about your brand. How can you educate your consumers and tie it into your brand trend? Is storytelling unhinged. This is all about flipping traditional storytelling on its head and creating intriguing narratives. Tiktok say that intriguing narrative structures guide viewers past the first few seconds. And ads intended to make user curious, keep them watching 1.4 times longer. And finally, the last trend, bridging the trust gap. This is all about how you can tie in relevant Tiktok lingo and trends into your products and creative campaigns because this will help to build trust and credibility. It's also about thinking what type of credible knowledge you want your audience to come to you for. So now what I'd like you to do for the class project is to think about what we've talked about and use these examples to brainstorms content ideas for your own business. In the next lesson, we'll cover some practical tips for boosting engagement on Tiktok. 7. Boosting Video Engagement: In this lesson, we'll go through some practical tips that you can use to boost engagement on Tiktok. First tip is to use SEO on all your videos. By this I mean to include relevant keywords as much as you can in your video. Include keywords in the captions, things that you're saying, any text that you have on the screen and definitely in your video description. Also say to always make sure that your videos include captions. Because not only is this really good for SEO, it also improves the accessibility of your video. When people are watching Tiktok without the sound, they can still watch your video and engage with your video. As we've already talked about, people are now using Tiktok more and more like search engines, not just finding videos on their four page, they're also actually searching specifically for things using Tiktok search. This is only going to become more and more important. Looking at my own analytics on my own Tiktok account, I can see that one of my most popular videos is actually being shown to people through search. 98% of people that are seeing this video are actually finding it through search rather than the four page. And I actually get comments and likes on this video pretty much every day, which shows that people are finding it. And it shows the importance of good SEO because even if you don't get your video shown on the four page and it doesn't go viral initially, over time, it can build up engagement through people searching for the relevant keywords. Next tip is to try and start your videos with a hook. This is to try and get people to stop scrolling and pay attention to your video. You don't have long to capture somebody's attention on Tiktok. And the first 3 seconds have to make people stop and want to watch your video. This could be as simple as saying something like stop scrolling. You need to hear this stop scrolling, because I've got those. But essentially, you need to convey what value your video will offer and why somebody should watch in the first few seconds. This can also be a visual hook to get somebody's attention. Maybe starting the video standing up and then sitting down. It's time to fill, putting on lip glass or even drinking from a more give tea. Another tip for good engagement on Tiktok is to be personal and authentic. Be yourself and show the human side of your brand. Vulnerability is rewarded on Tiktok. People like to see real people they can relate to and hear real stories and struggles. Your content should look and feel more like it's coming from a user and not a brand. An example of this is one that I came across from dolls, houses, cosmetics. In the video, the owner of the business is talking about the struggles of running a small business and not being able to take a wage which is relatable. And a real struggle for many others out there. And this shows a human side and her customers and her brand for showing this side. So this one may sound obvious, but show your face or find someone within the business that is comfortable with showing their face post like a human. And make videos look spontaneous and unscripted. If you're uncomfortable with this, then voiceover videos can also work really well on Tiktok. But generally people do like to see the people behind the brand. Another tip is to engage with trends. So trending audio, trending filters. Or they remember not to jump on a trend just because it's popular. If it doesn't fit in with your audience, your goals, and your niche. Another thing you can do is to use the duet or stitch function in Tiktok. So for example, if there are popular videos in your industry that you want to add comment onto or you want to share, then using the duet or stitch functions can help to increase your exposure with your target audience. Another tip is to use the Tiktok app to film and edit your videos. That may sound obvious, but the algorithm favors videos that are made within Tiktok itself rather than in third party apps like cap cuts. Always ensure your videos are good quality, well lit, and in the vertical format. But try not to. Videos look to Polish as this will look out of place on Tiktok which favors authentic, real content. Another tip is to engage with your audience. Don't just post a tiptok and forget. Make sure you spend some time replying to comments, answering questions, asking questions in the comments, especially in the period of time just after posting. This will help the algorithm to see that your content is engaging and help to push it out to more people. The more engagement that you can generate in the short time after posting, the better. It's also important to engage with and comment on relevant content in your niche, which will help to give your account more exposure with your audience. Also, recommend using relevant hashtags to help increase visibility of your content. Remember, you can find relevant hashtags for your industry in the Tiktok Creative Center. Another tip is to ask questions as much as possible. So in your video content, ask questions. In the comments, ask questions because questions foster engagement. I'd also recommend adding a call to action to your video. For example, you could just say follow for more. Tell the audience what you want them to do. And this is more likely to result in engagement with your video. Another thing you can do is to experiment with different video lengths on Tiktok so you can find out what works best for your audience and your industry. So you can now record longer content on Tiktok videos of up to 10 minutes. And Tiktok are really pushing this at the moment, Creators who make longer content could make an extra 1,500 pounds a month. And it's easy to create videos longer than a minute on Tiktok. You can use sounds, filters, green screen, and other easy to use tools to get creative and boost your content. You can even go landscape, so make sure your next video is longer than a minute. Give it a try. Tiktok is moving past the short form dance content and more into longer form educational content. If done well, longer educational videos or story time videos can be really great for engagement. Another tip for increasing engagement is to create a series. For example, you could create a ten part series on something that's related to your business or industry. This can really help with building community, providing value, and keeping people coming back for more, which can really help with overall engagement. Tiktok series are growing. The hashtag Tiktok series has had a 2,000% year on year growth. According to Tiktok, creators are making longer form content and creating unique series to keep their audiences coming back. For more creators have the freedom to create a series on any audience query. So this is definitely something to think about. Another tip is to create value with your videos. Value through your video content is much more important than how the video looks or if the video is part of a trend. Always try to add value and create purposeful content and make this more of a priority than how the video looks. Another way to boost engagement is to post your videos when your audience is more likely to be online, which you can find in your analytics. And we'll go into more detail about the analytics and where to find things later on in the course. Another tip is to cross promote your Tiktok content on other platforms. Share your Tiktoks to your other social media in order to drive traffic and boost engagement. For the class project, I'd like you to go on Tiktok and research some of the popular videos in your niche or industry. Find one that's popular in terms of engagement and note down why you think this is. What features does it have that we've talked about in this lesson? Share your findings with the class to generate discussion and inspire others. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at some of the features that Tiktok has for businesses that you can use to help grow your business on Tiktok. 8. Features for Business Growth - part 1: In this lesson, I wanted to cover some of the business features that Tiktok has and how you can use them to grow your business on Tiktok. First, you're going to want to make sure that you've got a business account. This will give you access to additional features to help grow your business. Such as having the ability to link to your website in your bio and also access analytics as well. In order to check that you've got a business account set up or to change to a business account, head to the app and to your profile. Click on the top right hand side of your profile. Click on Settings and Privacy, and then click on Account. And in there you should see Switch to Business Account if you don't have a business account set up. If you do it will say switch to personal account. Once you've got a business account set up to access the features on Tiktok, then you head back to your profile again, click on the top right hand corner and then you'll be able to see Business Suite. And if you click on that, you can access Analytics Creative Hub. You can set up automated messages and there's other things as well that you can do specific to business accounts. And the business suite is also available on the Tiktok website as well. As well as having a business account. You can also register your business on Tiktok by providing a bit more information. And this will give you the ability to have a link in your Tiktok bio, which I would recommend, in order to drive traffic to your website. Next we're going to talk about Tiktok Shop. If you have an e commerce store or you sell products already, then Tiktok Shop can really help to grow your sales. Especially as two out of three users are likely to buy something while on the platform. I do need to point out that Tiktok shop is not available in all countries. But if it's something that is available to you, then you can utilize Tiktok shop in the following ways. Live shopping, this is where you essentially go live and showcase your products. Live shopping is a major trend that can really help you to increase sales. According to a Tiktok study, half of its users have made a purchase directly due to watching a Tiktok live from a brand. For example, if you are a make up brand, then you could have regular live events where you are using the products and showing people how to use them. These can be really powerful and you can advertise the times you go live on your profile so people know when you'll be online. Another way that you can utilize Tiktok shop is through Shoppable videos. Shoppable videos are a similar thing to live shopping, but it's pre recorded, so you could show a product in use or do content around your popular products, tell a story whilst using your products, or respond to customer questions about specific products. I would mix these types of videos in content as you don't want every video to be pushing your products, but try to think of creative ways to showcase your products in a subtle, natural way. People don't like the hard sell, but they will buy from people they like. Another way that you can utilize Tiktok shop is the shop tab on your Tiktok profile. This is basically your store front and we'll show on your profile all the time. Make sure you optimize your store and keep everything up to date as much as possible. Everything within Tiktok shop stays within the app, so there's no redirection to third party websites or apps which results in higher conversions and sales. Tiktok also a variety of partners such as Woo Commerce to build integration. So merchants can connect their chosen commerce platforms to Tiktok sharp to manage everything in one place. The main benefit is that Tiktok can really help to generate brand awareness and a buzz for businesses with the hashtag. Tiktok made me buy it regularly driving products to customers. For page just an example of the viral nature of Tiktok and how this can really generate a buzz for brands and products. Recently, a video went viral featuring a Stanley Cup. Now in this video, the lady in question was showing that her car had been on fire and the cup was still untouched and still had ice in it. Everybody is so concerned about if the Stanley spills. But what about the Mills fiery yesterday? Still had in it. This reinforced how good quality this cup actually was. Now this video went absolutely viral. And I think in the end it had over 90 million views. Now that level of brand awareness for Stanley is just crazy. They actually responded to the video with a video back which I'll play now. Hey Danielle, My name is Terrence Riley, I'm the president of Stanley and we've all seen your video. Wow, what an ordeal and we're all really glad you're safe. Thanks for sharing the video because, wow, it really shows how Stanley, our Stanley's are built for life. Because what it went through with you, I couldn't think of a better example of our products quality. But anyway, we're glad you're safe. I've seen a lot of comments that we should send you some Stanley's. Well we're going to send you some Stanley's. But there's one more thing. We've never done this before and we'll probably never do it again. But we'd love to replace your vehicle. Yeah, all of us at Stanley. Really like to replace your vehicle. So check your DM's for details. Thanks, be safe. Cheers. There's also lots of positive comments from Tiktok users about Stanley's response and about how they're going to buy a Stanley. It was just absolutely amazing for raising brand awareness. And it just shows how powerful Tiktok can be. More information on selling on Tiktok and how to set up Tiktok shop. Tiktok have some amazing resources. They have a Tiktok shop academy with lots of lessons and free courses on setting everything up. So definitely go and check that out and now put a link in the project workbook. Next we're going to talk about Tiktok affiliate marketing. Tiktok affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to grow your reach on Tiktok. You can discover, communicate, and collaborate with thousands of creators through the affiliate program. This can be accessed via Tiktok shop by clicking on Affiliate marketing. Once you have a Tiktok shop, you can choose the products that you want creators to promote for you, either on posts or via live streams. And when they sell those products for you, you would pay them a commission. Tiktok offer target or open collaboration. Open collaboration means that you can let more creators your products to extend your audience reach and drive sales. Whereas target collaboration means that you would target specific content creators to work with. Tiktok also have a creator marketplace to allow you to find creators that best suit your brand. Here you can invite creators to collaborate on a campaign. You can also access demographic and engagement data for the creators, as well as reporting and analysis for your creator campaigns. The benefits of affiliate marketing on Tiktok are that you can extend your reach with your target audience as saving time and money because you don't need to create as much content yourself. The good thing about working with creators on Tiktok is that they understand how to make high performing, high engaging content that will resonate with your target audience. According to Tiktok, working with creators can double your engagement rate on average. If you want to find out more about affiliate marketing on Tiktok and the options available and how to set everything up, I've put a link to more information in the project workbook of Tiktok that you can use to drive business growth is live streaming. Tiktok live allows viewers and creators to interact in real time as well as live shopping. You can also do regular lives where you answer customer questions, show yourself packing customer orders, or just have a general chat with your customers. This can really help to develop customer relationships and loyalty as the customers really get to know the person or people behind the brand. I've noticed many small businesses on Tiktok going live while they pack customer orders, packing customers individual orders, and engaging with their customers. And I think this is really nice and a really good way of building that relationship going live can also help to boost engagement and followers and especially boost performance of any recent posts that you may have done on Tiktok. This is because Tiktok will show that you're live to your followers and on the four page, which increases engagement with your account overall. Going live allows you to develop closer relationships with customers, showcase products, answer questions, and foster engagement and loyalty. In the next lesson, we'll look at the paid ad options available to small businesses on Tiktok. 9. Features for Business Growth - part 2: In this lesson, we'll be going over Tiktok's paid advertising options and some further resources they have for businesses. Tiktok has many options for businesses looking to reach new audiences. And these can be really powerful, especially as 84% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a branded video. In this lesson, I'll give an overview of some of Tiktoks, paid advertising options that would be suitable for small businesses. So first we have in feed ads. These are ads that you can create yourself using the Tiktok ads Manager. Benefits are that these are affordable and accessible and make a really good starting point for small businesses. They look exactly like user generated content on Tiktok. And because of this, they tend to have good engagement. You can also link directly to your landing page, such as your website, via these ads. So these ads are good if you have objectives around driving traffic, or driving conversions or mobile app downloads, for example, because these ads allow you to drive traffic away from Tiktok. Next we have spark ads. Spark ads are a little bit different in that they boost organic content from any user's Tiktok account. Unlike the feed ads, spark ads use content from real Tiktok accounts. This means that any engagement gained from boosting the video, such as As, and shares and comments, are attributed to the original post. Spark ads allow users to duet and stitch the video, as well as clicking on the post. Sound As a result, spark ads offer 142% more engagement compared to non spark ads. Because the ad format is designed to mirror authentic Tiktoks on the four page, your target audience is more likely to feel comfortable interacting with them as they feel more like normal Tiktoks than ads. They can drive sky high engagements. As far ads don't link to an external site, they link to the accounts Tiktok page. Then they're really good for driving engagements and driving followers. Whereas the feed ads are better for driving traffic to an external site. Another option is top view ads. These are video ads that appear as a full screen takeover for up to 60 seconds when a user first opens the app. Another option is using Tiktok promote. Tiktoks can be promoted natively on the app by tapping the three dot symbol on your own Tiktok, then tapping the promote button with a flame shape. From there, you can choose a goal for your promotion, such as directing users to your website, define your target audience, and set a budget for your campaign. Promoting a Tiktok in this way could be a good idea for you to test the waters on the app. But its options are less sophisticated than the Tiktok ad manager, which offers more precise audience targeting and allows you to upload a brand new video to serve as an app. The Ads manager will also provide you with more detailed analytics and also allows you to AB test your content. Promoted Tiktoks are available to all users, not just those with a business account. With promote, you can only promote Tiktoks that you've already uploaded to your own feed rather than uploading a video that you've done specifically for an ad. Personally, I would recommend posting organically first and getting to know what works for experimenting with boosting your popular content. Some tips from Tiktok themselves when choosing which organic videos to promote select Tiktok videos that can reinforce your brand message. Choose videos that have garnered strong organic performance, whether that's a high number of views, likes comments, or shares. And use the trend discovery tool to learn about what's trending on the platform for your audience and industry. Or the tips for creating engaging ads on Tiktok. These are similar to when you're creating organic contents. Ensure your ads are entertaining. Create your ads for Tiktok so that they fit in with the platform. Sound is really important and needs to grab attention. Have a good hook to draw attention. Make sure that you create the ad for mobile first so that it's vertical. Incorporate trends and make sure that the ads are not too polished because unpolished ads see 33% stronger consideration. Finally, make sure that you use a strong care to action. Tiktok is not like other platforms to work well. Your ad needs to look more like content a user would find natively on the app than an ad overly polished. Brand ads will look inauthentic and will not perform as well. So now I just want to go over some of the helpful tools and resources that Tiktok have to help you grow your business. I would suggest having a further look into them after this course, and I'll provide all of the links in the course workbook. Just bear in mind that not all of these resources and tools will be available in every country. So first up, we have the Tiktok Academy. This is really useful. They have so many free courses and webinars aimed at small businesses to help you grow on Tiktok. So they have a Tiktok one oh one course. They have a course specifically for small businesses. There are so many courses and I would definitely recommend checking that out. Also a similar thing for Tiktok shop. Specifically, if you want to learn more about Tiktok shop and how you can grow that on Tiktok, they have a Tiktok Shop Academy. There are courses on how to set up your shop, how to register, how to manage products, how to do customer services and finance. I would definitely recommend having a look at that if you're interested in growing Tiktok shop. Another tool that we've already touched upon is Tiktok Insights. This is a really useful research tool, so you can select a location and select an audience and industry. And you can find lots of snackable insights on everything, from how your community behaves and connects with brands, to how ads on the platform are driving business impact. There are lots of stats and things which can help you with planning your content. And then there is audience insights, which you can access via the ad manager account. This will give you access to lots of data on your audience, including demographics, location, interest device, and activity to help you to plan your content and find out what's working and what's not working. And finally, there is the Tiktok Creative Center. If you haven't come across the creative center yet, I would recommend that you go and check it out. Because it's really, really useful. There are loads of useful things on here. So you can search for examples of top ads by industry, by country. You can find out what's hot on Tiktok trends. There are what people are searching for, what hashtags are popular. And there's also lots of tools on here as well. So there's a video editor, there's templates you can use, and even a script generator on top of this. They have creative strategies and expert courses to help you improve your content creation. You can also search for top products and look at some quite in depth analytics to do with those products. In terms of performance analytics, audience insights, demographics, and then you can also look at related videos and related hashtags. So this is really useful if you're interested in promoting a specific product on Tiktok. The takeaway here is that Tiktok have so many free resources available to help small businesses. So definitely go and check those out. If you want to learn more for the class project, I would like you to write down a Tiktok business feature. Mentioned over the last two lessons that you could use for your business. How would you use it and how would this help you to meet your objectives? In the next lesson, we'll be looking at an introduction to influence the marketing on Tiktok. 10. Influencer Marketing on TikTok: Another way that you can grow your business on Tiktok is through influence and marketing. How you approach this will depend very much on your budget. But it essentially involves working with creators on Tiktok who align with your brand and your target audience to promote and recommend your products to their audience. Influences can help you expand your reach on Tiktok and improve your credibility and authenticity with your target audience. This approach works so well because people tend to trust recommendations from other people over obvious adverts, especially from people they like follow and trust. 72% of Gens and millennials follow influences on social media. 69% of consumers trust influences recommendations, and Tiktok influences have a higher engagement rate than those on Instagram and Youtube combined. So how do you find influences to work with on Tiktok? Tiktok have many resources to help you find creators. For example, the Tiktok Creator Marketplace, which is a hub that gives brands access to a diverse selection of millions of content creators across all niches. You can also filter creators to find the ones that suit your brand and audience. And you can use this to find creators in your industry, manage your campaigns, and access any reporting. You can reach out to them via the platform directly. And send them an invite link, inviting them to promote your brand with their content. If you have a Tiktok Ads Manager accounts, then you can easily access the creator marketplace. Otherwise, signing up is straightforward and I put the link in the course workbook. Another way to find influences in your industry is to search for relevant hashtags and keywords and see who the popular creators are in your space. You could use the creative center, as we talked about in the previous lesson, or search Tiktok directly. You could search for hashtag ad and the relevant community hashtag for your industry. For example, hashtag book talk, Farm Talk. The list is endless. For example, if I search for hashtag makeup tips in Tiktok and I go to top, I can see the top videos for that hashtag. I can also go to users and see who the top users are for that hashtag. And videos here you can see straightaway that there are some videos that have had quite a lot of engagement. And then from here I could go and have a look into some of these creators and see if there are any that I would like to work with. Another thing that you could do is to search your competitors and see if they're working with any influences and which ones they're working with. You could also search on Google or work with an agency that will help to connect you with relevant influences for your brand and target audience. There are also tools out there to help you find influences such as fluence, although this is something that I've never used. But there are lots of tools out there that you can have a look at. My tip would be to make sure that if you're working with an influencer, are aligned with your target audience and your brand. And that you know what you'd like to get out of it. So what your objective is for working with that particular influencer. For example, are you looking for reach or are you looking for engagement? Some of the larger influencers think beauty, food, fashion can have followers in the millions. Their reach is huge. Then there are the Tiktok micro influencers. They have smaller audiences, but their followers are usually more specifically targeted and therefore more engaged. You don't need to work with a high profile influencer to be successful at influencer marketing. Especially if you're a small business, a smaller budget. Try instead to discover rising stars or influences in your niche with Tiktok, sophisticated algorithm and niche communities. If done well, influencer marketing can be great for brand awareness and generating a buzz with your target audience. A tip is to consider engagement and content quality over followers. Before working with an influencer, have a look at their recent videos. Are they good quality? Consider their engagement. So likes shares, views of their videos. This is more important than number of followers because often having a large following doesn't automatically equal engagement. There are tools to help you do this, for example, can tick.com influences with larger audiences will also charge more. Bear this in mind if influencer marketing is something that you'd like to try for your business on Tiktok. Before working with an influencer, remember to protect your business with influencer agreements and guidelines for content. And be sure to familiarize yourself with the relevant laws and regulations around influencer marketing for your specific country. For your class projects, I'd like you to identify one to five influences in your industry that would fit your brand and audience. In the next lesson, we'll be talking about how to track your success on Tiktok. 11. Tracking Your Success: In this lesson, we'll be talking about tracking your success on Tiktok. Don't be afraid to test, find new things and even fail in the process. It's all about experimentation and learning what works and what doesn't. In order to track your success on Tiktok, you need to think about what your original objectives were for using Tiktok. You then choose a select number of KPI's to focus on and measure to help you meet your objectives. For example, if you're using Tiktok to generate brand awareness, then KPI's that you'd want to monitor include reach video views engagement including likes and shares, follower growth and target audience to ensure your videos are reaching the right audience. All these stats can be found in Tiktok analytics, which you'll need a business account to access. Another example, if you are wanting to generate sales or leads on Tiktok, then you would be focus on tracking conversions. So how many sales generated, cost per sale leads, generated website traffic generated, et cetera. And always make sure that you use trackable links in this case so that you can attribute the traffic or conversions to your Tiktok activity. Another example is if you're using paid ads on Tiktok, then you'd be tracking things like clicks, cost per click, cost per conversions, conversions, et cetera. And again, you'd need to ensure that you're using track links. You'd be able to find all of your engagement stats for your paid campaigns in your Tiktok Ads Manager, influence the campaigns. Engagement metrics such as number of views reach engagement rate, video completion rate, and other metrics can be accessed via the creator marketplace. It's worth noting that to view the performance of a creator video on Tiktok creator marketplace reporting, the brand must ensure that the creator they partner with correctly links to a Tiktok creator marketplace campaign. So be sure this is correctly set up before it goes live so that you can track performance. I would suggest monitoring your KPI's weekly so that you can see what performs well and what doesn't to help inform your future content. Bear in mind that experimentation is key on Tiktok. So don't be afraid to try new things and push the boundaries. What I'll do now is run through the reporting options and what's available using my own Tiktok account. First, to access the reporting, you go onto your profile and then click on the top right hand side. And then go to Business Suite and then go to Analytics. In here, you can see an overview of all of your analytics. You can choose the date range. So if we choose the last 12 weeks, you can look at the reach, you can look at engagement, and you can look at conversion. For reach, you've got video views, reached audience, and profile views, most popular videos. And you've also got your followers, any new followers and lost followers. And then if you go on engagement, you can see likes, comments, and shares and conversions. If that's something that you're tracking. If you click on any particular video and then click on more data, you can drill down further. You can see how many views it's had, Likes comments, shares, favorites. You can see the retention rate. And you can view videos by region and by section if you've got enough data. If we go to the video tab and then you can filter by most recent or most number of video views. And then if you click on any video that you want to look more into, you can look at the reach, the view time, the completion rate, the profile views, and if you're tracking it, how many conversions you've had from that particular video, the traffic source from the video. So like I was talking about earlier, where are people coming from when they find your video? So for me, a lot of my video views come from search. Are they coming from the four page or from profiles or other places? You can also see your viewer insight. So the percentage of your audience that are female and male, and the ages of your audience, the countries and the cities as well. Then if you go to the audience tab, you can see your reached audience and also your engaged audience. This is where you can find the information about when your audience is more likely to be online. So if you click See More and you can see your engaged audiences activity. So what times of day your audience is more active? And also the demographics, including the age and gender and countries of your audience. So you can use this data to find out what are the best times for you to post your content. Depending on when your audience is more likely to be online and the times may vary based on the day as well. So weekends and weekdays, it's definitely worth drilling down into that. Finally, there's a live tab. I haven't personally gone live on my account yet, but if I had, this is where the analytics would be for my live videos. If you want more advanced analytics for your Tiktok activity, then there are third party tools that you can use. I haven't used any personally. As I find there's a lot of information already in Tiktok supplied for free. But tools like Hoot Suite and Sprout Social I've heard are very good for providing additional insights. But personally, I would probably start with the free analytics in Tiktok, as there's a lot of information in there to be Starting off with. The main takeaway here is to consider your original objectives and then what metrics you need to be tracking to know whether you've met your objectives or you're on track to meet your objectives or not. Probably suggest creating an external report in Excel so that you can see trends and everything more clearly. Especially as Tiktok only allows you to filter by the last 12 weeks. So if you want to go back further, it'll be easier to see all of that on a spreadsheet. If you start tracking that now and putting it into the spreadsheet, then you can go back and have a look at historical data, say in like a year's time for the class project. I'd like you to go back to your original objectives. And for each of those objectives, list one to five KPI's that you want to measure so that you know that you're on track to meet them. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at a Tiktok case study. 12. TikTok Case Study: In this lesson, I wanted to share a Tiktok success story case study. There are many small businesses out there that have grown immensely due to Tiktok. And I wanted to share an account that I came across by chance just from using Tiktok. And I just thought, wow, they've done such an amazing job at exploding their brand awareness and sales and utilizing all of the features that Tiktok has to offer. This is just one example, but there are many more out there. In different industries section I'll talk about brand and some of the tactics they've used on Tiktok that I've noticed to grow their business and hopefully this will inspire you. The brand I'm referring to is called Made by Mitchell. They're a make up brand that started in 2020 and are now making millions a Tiktok. They're the first Tiktok brand to make 2 million in one week. And I'll just share a snippet of the video now where the creator of made by Mitchell is talking about how the brand made 2 million in one week on Tiktok. And it just goes to show the real power of Tiktok when it's done, right? So after about six months of us not really knowing where the brand was going, I didn't really have any inspiration of where the brand wanted to be and who it wanted to be either. And it was around this time that we discovered Tiktok shop. And at first, I was really, really reluctant to start it because it was a fresh start. I was about to become a small fish in a big pond again. But anyhow, we took that chance and we started Tiktok shop. Our first live that we did with Tiktok shop, we made 20 orders. At the time, we were buzzing. We absolutely loved what Tiktok Shop was doing for us and what we were doing for them. It was a really informative way of educating our audience on our products. So we kept going. It really did feel like the brand had kind of had a rebirth and not in sales or anything like that. Because we really didn't start off making loads of money on Tiktok shop. It was just exciting. Again, I felt like we were reaching people that we weren't reaching anywhere else and who would have thought. But a year on from our very first live, we hit 500,000 orders, which is when we did our silly for half 1 million sale. But then again, fast forward another six months, another six months of hard work and so many amazing opportunities that we've taken. Every single one of them. We started our pop up and we've been all around the country. So H Beauty and Mitchell Matt. And that is what brings us to this moment right here. We hit 500,000 followers about two weeks ago and we decided to celebrate the best way we know how to do it with several lives a day. Exciting and engaging content. And also of course, our amazing flesh deals. We ran this campaign for a whole week to celebrate with you guys and really just take it there because it was such an exciting and monumental time in our journey here on Tiktok. Then I guess that is how we ended up making $2,000,000 in one week. That's just crazy for me, is never about being number one, but to be the first one to do something is always so special. And we were the first Tiktok shop brand to reach $2,000,000 in one week. Again, it really isn't about the money. For me, the most important thing is how many people were reaching. As he says in the video, one of the main reasons for their success on Tiktok has been Tiktok shop. So they have obviously they have their shop on Tiktok. They have a lot of sales and they also work with a lot of influencers. And that's how I actually found out about them because people that I was following on Tiktok were using their products and recommending their products and then I found out about them that way. So they've really built up that brand awareness through working with lots of different creators and working with influencers in the makeup industry to really get their name out there. Another thing that they do that I've noticed is that they have a lot of lives where they're packing products or they're doing demonstrations of their products, which really helps to build that close relationship and community with their customers. Also, a lot of their content is very authentic. So like the video I showed you before, a lot of the videos are from the owner talking about the business and being very honest and upfront and basically showcasing his personality. Also, the content that they put on their page is definitely more like a user would post. So for example, they do a lot of get ready with me using their own products. But it looks so authentic and like content that you would find on Tiktok that you forget that you're watching a brand. They do obviously post product videos, but it's not the only thing they post, they mix it in with other content like entertaining content. And a lot of the product videos that they do post are showing demonstrations of the product. And not just the hard sell, they also share a lot of behind the scenes and their content just comes across as fun and authentic. And I have no doubt that the people that follow made by Mitchell and by their products do so not just because of the quality products, but because of the personality of the owner and the people behind the business. Whatever industry you're in, it's definitely an account to go and have a look at and to gain some inspiration from, as they've done very well on Tiktok and obviously made a lot of money and had a lot of success from their content and their strategy on the app. 13. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking the time to watch this course. I really hope that you've learned something new, and it's helped you to think about how you can utilize Tiktok for your own business. To recap, we've learned about the benefits of Tiktok for your small business. We've looked at whether Tiktoks are right fit for you. We've looked at how to understand the algorithm and the behavior. We've looked at how to create your own Tiktok content strategy and what type of content works well on the app. We've learned some practical tips to boost video engagement. We've had a look at Tiktok features for business growth, including Tiktok shop affiliates and paid ads. We've also had a look at an introduction to influence the marketing on Tiktok and how you can track success, adapt your strategy. The key takeaways for success on Tiktok are to experiment and test as much as you can host as a user first and a brand second. Show your human side and vulnerability. And most importantly, add value through your content. When it comes to the algorithm, engagement is key. So you need to make sure that your content is as engaging as possible, so it is shown to more of your target audience. Growing your audience on Tiktok is hard work and it's not going to happen overnight. The key is consistency. It's important to post consistently and don't give up. Don't forget to complete your strategy workbook and share any sections or elements you feel comfortable with in the project gallery section. And I'll be sure to leave my feedback. If you're interested in learning more about social media strategy, then check out my social media strategy course for a more general overview. If you've enjoyed this course, please consider leaving me a review because it really helps me out. Also, follow me on skill share to keep up to date with my future marketing courses. Thanks again for watching and well done for making it to the end. And I'll see you in the next course.