How to Launch a TikTok Strategy
14 Minute Read
You already know that your company’s TikTok Strategy could make the difference between going viral beyond your wildest dreams and sinking into the depths of social media obscurity. While other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn offer acceptable ways for businesses to hawk their wares, TikTik offers companies the unique opportunity to tap into today’s culture and transform the way people experience and interact with their brands.
With more than one billion active monthly users, TikTok is the best platform for businesses to reach a tremendous amount of people organically and generate actual excitement. TikTok allows companies to showcase their personality and earn brand loyalists in a fun, slightly unhinged, and real way.
But you know all of this—that’s why you’re here. You see the benefits, but you need to know how to actually develop and launch a TikTok strategy.
We’ve got you covered. The social media team at Twelve Three Media has a ton of experience creating engaging TikTok campaigns that highlight authentic personalities and build positive brand awareness. We’ve even gone viral ourselves a couple of times.
Although TikTok does offer paid advertising options for businesses, this article focuses on organic strategies that won’t cost you more than a Grimace shake and a comfortable pair of dance shoes. So buckle in and get ready to learn how to create a TikTok strategy from the pros.
First Things First: Set Up a TikTok Account
So you’ve decided to throw your hat into the ring with dancing tweens and deranged mukbangers; good for you! The first thing you’ll need is an account. TikTok offers two types of accounts: business accounts and personal/creator accounts. You’ll need to decide which is best for you, based on your needs.
A business account offers advanced features like downloadable analytics, the ability to integrate with third-party platforms (like Hootsuite) for scheduling and engagement management, and access to TikTok’s Shop for direct sales. It also allows businesses to get verified and promote content through ads. However, business accounts are limited to commercial sounds, which can prevent you from hopping on trends. A business account will also lock you out of TikTok’s creator monetization programs like Creator Next or the Creator Fund.
A creator account, on the other hand, provides access to both trending and commercial sounds. This will give you greater flexibility to jump on any trends that may arise. Keep in mind that creator accounts have limited analytics (in-app only, with a 60-day view) and cannot be managed via third-party platforms, which can make it harder to schedule and analyze content in detail.
Next: Scroll, Baby, Scroll!
You know the old saying: If you’re walking into a shit storm, you want to know which way the wind’s blowing. That’s especially true with TikTok. You don’t want to roll into Gen Z’s house with your tired old LinkedIn rizz. You need to dive into the platform and get a personal feel for the “anything goes” lingo, rhythms, and vibes of this entirely unique trend factory.
There’s a reason that, despite their best efforts, Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts haven’t made the same impact on the modern zeitgeist—and it’s not necessarily the functionality of the app. It’s the culture of users. Trends drift and morph and turn in on themselves. Inside jokes are stacked upon one another in a towering inferno of self-referencing winks and nods.
TikTok can be huge, loud, and overwhelming at first. But soon enough, you may find yourself scrolling in the dead of night with bloodshot eyes and crumbs down the front of your shirt, howling like a maniac one minute and crying like a baby the next.
Don’t worry. We’ll help you get there.
Now, Develop & Launch Your TikTok Strategy!
Here’s what you came for: Our easy-to-follow 8-step guide for mastering your TikTok strategy!
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Like any marketing endeavor, you need to start with the end in mind. What do you hope to accomplish through TikTok? Defining your goals sets the direction for your entire TikTok strategy and helps you measure success along the way. Whether you aim to boost brand awareness, drive website traffic, increase sales, or grow your follower base, having specific objectives will guide your content decisions and ensure your efforts are aligned with your broader business goals.
Step 2: Identify Your Audience
If you want success on TikTok, you need to identify the audience with whom you want to connect. If you don’t, you won’t be able to reach your goals, despite any reach and engagement you might achieve. That might be fun for your social media department, but it won’t do anything to move the needle on your bottom line.
Generally speaking, TikTok skews toward a much younger audience. Nearly 7 in 10 18- to 19-year-olds use TikTok and nearly half of all 20- to 39-year-olds have a presence on the app.
So sure, TikTok is dominated by a younger audience, but if you dig a bit deeper, you can find the demographic you want to target. One of the best ways to target your audience is to create a customer persona.
A customer persona is a detailed, semi-fictional profile that represents your ideal customer. It’s created by gathering and analyzing data about your target audience, such as demographics, behaviors, goals, and challenges. By developing a customer persona, you can better understand and anticipate the needs and preferences of your customers and then tailor your marketing efforts more effectively to reach and resonate with them.
Step 3: Analyze the Competition
Now that you’ve defined your audience, it’s a good idea to see how your competition is already trying to communicate with them. Competitor analysis can provide you with valuable insights into what works well in your industry. Is your competition offering giveaways? Are they working with influencers? Are they showing recent projects or work in the community? What are they doing that is working?
Competitive analysis can also offer you opportunities for differentiation. You want to see what’s working, but you never want to be caught copying. How can you offer viewers something unique and intriguing that they aren’t getting from anyone else? How can you highlight your people and products or services in a fresh and compelling way?
When done well, competitor analysis can help you:
- Understand your audience even more: You can learn more about what resonates with your shared target audience. This will help you refine your own messaging and approach.
- Avoid mistakes: Your competition makes mistakes so that you don’t have to. Identify any failures or missteps that your competition has made and avoid doing the same.
- Discover opportunities: How can you differentiate your business from the competition? Once you know what they are doing on TikTok, you also know what they are not doing. This can give you a great opportunity to fill the void.
- Benchmark performance: You can use your competitors’ metrics to set realistic goals and measure your success. This will help you fine-tune your strategy for better results.
Step 4: Develop a Content Strategy
Developing an epic content strategy requires three essential tasks: defining your brand, establishing content pillars, and brainstorming themes or ideas for content that will support our pillars and overarching message.
Define Your Brand
Developing a strong content strategy begins with defining your brand. You may be saying to yourself, “No problem, I have a logo and color scheme; let’s go!” No, my friend, branding is a lot more than that.
Here’s what you’ll need to do:
- Define your Mission, Vision, and WHY: Start by identifying your company’s mission and vision. Clarify why your business exists, and determine the emotional reason behind its creation—this will shape your core brand message.
- Conduct competitive analysis: If you followed the steps above, you’ve already got a good head start on this. But instead of looking at how your top competitors position themselves on social media, analyze how they position themselves in the market. Identify what makes your business unique and how you can differentiate your brand from theirs.
- Understand your customers: Gather feedback directly from your customers through surveys or interviews to understand their perception of your brand and experiences with your company.
- Create your Brand Positioning: Write down your company’s core beliefs, emotional and rational benefits, and how you connect with your customers.
- Develop your Brand Identity: This includes your logo, color scheme, typography, and your brand voice.
You don’t want to skimp on this process. Defining your brand positioning and key messaging is crucial for every aspect of your business, not just your TikTok strategy. It’s so important, in fact, that Twelve Three Media offers a world-class Brand Positioning Workshop, a half-day exercise where we meet with your key stakeholders and perform a deep dive into your company and its services or products. We also offer FREE Branding Fundamentals downloads for law firms, outdoor companies, aftermarket companies, and small businesses.
Determine Your Niche
Your niche is a specific area of interest that helps creators produce content that resonates with a particular audience. Choosing a niche can help you stand out and build a loyal following, which in turn will help drive engagement and boost overall awareness of your account.
For the team at Twelve Three Media, we’ve focused our content on office humor, specifically for advertisers on advertising agency humor. We felt this was the best avenue to represent ourselves and office culture, while tapping into our services in an authentic and fun way.
Finding your niche should be based on who you are as a brand, the products and services you offer, and the people you want to reach. If you’re selling custom ski boots, then you may find “skitok” to be where your content resonates best. If you’re selling legal services, then you may find a mixture of lawyer humor and advice to be your niche.
Once you’ve honed in on your specific niche, the fun begins, aka content creation!
Step 5: Create Your Content
This may seem like the most overwhelming part of starting a TikTok, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll find it to be the funnest part!
First you’ll want to do your research: What kind of videos are performing best? Are there ways I can film this style and make it relevant for my brand? You’ll want to look at what’s trending as well, not just trending audio, but concepts, and video styles. Throughout this research, you’re probably thinking of a million ways you can make something that’s relevant for your brand’s TikTok. This is where you’ll want to start documenting the ideas, including links to video inspiration and planning when, how, and what you’ll film. Aka, you’re starting a content calendar that you can use to organize your thoughts and post ideas. Try to plan enough content so you’ll have 2-3 posts per week. On TikTok, consistency is key in growing your video views and audience.
With a content calendar mapped out and plan of attack for what you want to film, you can start actually filming videos! For this, we suggest carving out a couple “film days” where you know you can capture a bunch of content all at once. This will help streamline your process and ensure a consistent posting cadence.
Video Creation
When you’re creating content for TikTok, authenticity is absolutely imperative. TikTok is more of an “anything goes” platform; the audience here craves authentic connection and content. You don’t need to look flawless, with studio lighting and a glam squad, you just need to be your true authentic self and have an iPhone. Easy, right?
When it comes to filming, here are a few tips to keep in mind:
- Shoot vertically: Use the full 9:16 aspect ratio when shooting.
- Keep it short: Generally speaking, shorter videos perform better, but this can also depend on your audio!
- Keep it engaging: Do this by filming in different locations, with different people, angles, and piecing the cuts together during editing.
- Go lo-fi: Lo-fi doesn’t mean low-quality. All you need to start creating is a mobile phone with a video camera.
- Get good lighting: You don’t need a full studio; natural lighting is great, but you could also incorporate a ring light to make videos look a bit nicer without looking overly produced.
- Keep still: Try having a steady hand when filming, you can also use tools such as a tripod to help stabilize.
Now that you’ve planned your content and filmed your videos, you’re ready for the editing phase. In many circumstances, TikTok’s native editing tools can give you everything you need for a basic video. You don’t need some fancy editing suite to make a splash and go viral. From transitions and slow motion to visual effects and voiceovers, TikTok has a wealth of editing options built in.
In addition to native editing in TikTok, there are some great third-party apps that can make the process easier and maybe even provide some inspiration. At Twelve Three Media, we love CapCut for the professional-level features that are easy to use right from your mobile device. They also have a whole “templates” section where you can find memes, plug-n-play video edits, and so much more. They also include insights into usage, so you can see what’s popular!
Copywriting
TikTok post copy is truly next level. The less-is-more approach is your best friend here. Witty, leave it to the imagination, gen Z lingo, short and (not so) sweet post copy is where it’s at. Of course, the copy needs to align with your brand identity, but it also needs to respect that this is the style of post copy you see most on TikTok.
You may also find using long-form copy is best for your video too. This also can help with social SEO.
Make sure you’re using 3-5 relevant hashtags in copy. You’ll want some consistency on this front too, if you’re niche is ‘agency humor’ for example, using #agencyhumor in content will help your content be shown to the right audience, which helps with overall growth in visibility. You can also play around with other popular and relevant hashtags to see which ones perform best.
Now that you have your video and post copy created, you’re ready to post on TikTok! So open the app up and post away. There are also third-party scheduling tools out there you can use such as Later, Sprout Social, and Sendible.
Jumping on Trends
We know we just talked bout creating consistency with a content calendar, but it wouldn’t be TikTok if you weren’t jumping on trends. It’s actually one of the best ways to find viral success on the platform. So, welcome to the Wild West of Operation TikTok.
Trends are happening all the time, figuring out which ones to jump on and being nimble and dynamic enough to hop on the right ones in a timely manner is crucial. So yes, use a content calendar for posting consistency, but you also gotta live that ad hoc life and jump on opportunities when they arise—and they’re always popping up.
Not sure when to jump on a trend? Don’t worry, we’ve got it all broken down.
Once you decide to jump on a trend, quickly rally your team (even if that’s just a team of one), figure out your game plan, capture the video, and get that blasted on TikTok. Make sure you’re following the trend, while still adding your unique spin. Use the trend’s hashtags and audio, look out for any copy nuances that are specific to the trend, too.
Step 6: Moderate, Engage, and Interact
When you post on any social media platform, it’s a two-way street. This is true with TikTok as well. In addition to getting your message out there, you need to actively monitor your account to engage with your audience one-on-one. This means responding to comments, answering questions, and replying to direct messages.
But don’t limit yourself to the vacuum of your own channel. Get out there. Look for other relevant conversations that you can join. This amplifies your voice and extends your reach by becoming part of a trending dialogue.
As with all of your online interactions, however, make sure your brand voice is consistent and your messaging is on-target. Be selective with the conversations you join and make sure your input is appropriate and valuable to viewers, whether that value be informational, educational, or legitimately entertaining.
Step 7: Monitor Performance & Optimize
There are countless tools that can help you dissect and analyze every metric your TikTok account has to offer. And it might even be a good idea to look into those services someday when you have enough time and money to blow on useless garbage. But as for today; you can skip all that.
TikTok tells you everything you need to know in its cooked-in analytics. You can see everything you need to know in order to make informed decisions about your TikTok strategy, such as a video’s:
- Views: See how many people have seen your video.
- Average watch time: Did most of your viewers watch your entire video or bail early? This shows you the average amount of time that viewers spent watching your video. It an informative snapshot that is explored deeper in the retention rate metric.
- Retention rate: This is a metric that calculates the percentage of users who have continued to watch your video over a given amount of time. This can help you understand if you have strong hooks at the beginning of your video, and compelling content throughout to keep your audience watching.
- Traffic sources: AT Twelve Three Media, most of our video views come from the “For You” page (FYP), which proves that jumping on trends and popular content on the FYP is your best chance to get views, interactions, etc.
- Likes: TikTok tells you when most people liked your video. This information is useful for determining the best times to post.
- Comments: Beyond just viewing or liking, it’s important to see how many people are compelled to take the time to comment on the content you’re posting.
- Shares & saves: When your video gets saved or shared on TikTok, it boosts its chances of reaching a wider audience. The more Saves and Shares it receives, the higher the odds of it appearing on the ‘For You’ page, giving it even greater visibility.
- Search queries: Keeping an eye on the most highly searched hashtags, terms, and queries gives you insight into what is driving views and interactions. This information can be used to optimize future content.
- New followers: If your goal is to build your TikTok following, this metric is your final score.
The metrics listed above provide vital information that tells you more than just how your video performed: it gives you critical insights on how to optimize your videos in the future. Analyze this information to help your next video perform even better.
Take one of our high-performing posts as an example. It earned us 2.3 million views, 129,000 likes, more than 1,000 comments, 45,000 shares, and 13,000 saves. Perhaps most importantly, this one video earned us almost 800 new followers!
Step 8: Stay Updated!
TikTok isn’t a platform you ‘figure out’ and then call it a day. There’s no ‘mission accomplished’ moment here. It’s a constantly shifting landscape of trends, ideas, and conversations where you need to stay engaged. Just like you endlessly scrolled when you first joined, now you need to keep scrolling to stay on top of the app’s ever-changing tides.
Now What?
We’ve taken you as far as we can; the rest is up to you. It’s time to take this new wealth of knowledge and brave the hard streets with your phone and a sweet dance routine. Unless you don’t really have the time. We get that, too. In fact, it’s why we offer world-class social media services to a range of local, national, and international companies.
If you want to succeed on TikTok but don’t have the time or resources to put your best foot forward, Twelve Three Media has the team, talent, and expertise needed to help your business find its audience and thrive.