By the end of 2022, TikTok is estimated to have more than 1.8 billion monthly active users. So irrespective of who you’re selling to — Millennials or Gen Z — TikTok is the right place to search for leads.
It also tops the chart of the most downloaded apps in 2021, followed by Instagram and Facebook. So not having a good lead generation strategy for TikTok means you’re missing out on a truckload of potential customers.
If you were of the opinion that TikTok can only be used to share content and educate potential customers, then you might want to change it after reading the success story of Nina Ricci. It’s a perfume brand that saw a 1.5% click-through rate, out of which 42% of customers converted. They offered free samples for sign-ups which dropped their cost per lead (CPL) by 83 percent.
Here’s how you can generate more leads on TikTok for your business. Let’s jump right into it!
8 Tips to Generate More Leads From TikTok
Optimize Your Profile Info
First impressions last. And you never get a chance to create it again. This makes it very crucial for you to have an optimized TikTok profile that gives your audience sufficient information about your business.
Here are some points you need to follow to utilize every “edit profile” feature to the fullest.
A Unique Logo: People on TikTok scroll through the feed continuously without paying much attention to the author of the content. One of the simplest things you can do to capture their attention is using a unique logo. It sets you apart from other creators and increases the probability of people opening your profile.
Brand Name as Username: Your username is a huge part of your TikTok identity. And it’s a rule of thumb for businesses to use brand names as usernames. It makes it easy for the audience to remember your brand and find you when needed.
An Interesting Bio: 80 characters. That’s what you get to tell the TikTok audience what you do. Go with your shortest pitch to convince customers that you’re relevant to them.
Clickable Link in Bio: If your bio has managed to convince the customers, you need to give them some way to know more about your business. That’s where the clickable bio link comes in.
Get Verified: When you get your TikTok account verified, the audience will find it easy to trust you. And hence, they’ll be more likely to become a lead.
Use All the Available CTA Options
There’s only one main CTA option. It’s the link in your bio. When a user finds your brand’s content interesting, they visit your profile. And with the bio link, you can direct them to the next stage of their buyer journey.
You can use the bio link to direct them to your website or some specific campaign landing page.
Though the bio link is the only clickable CTA, there’s more you can do. You can always leave a CTA at the end of your TikTok videos. This technique improves the CTR drastically because a video gives the audience the context of a giveaway, freebie, or any other offer.
You must show the same offer on the landing page that you promised in your videos so your customers don’t feel cheated.
You should also connect your Instagram and Youtube accounts to drive your audience to these channels where they can get to know more about your business.
Optimize Landing Pages for Lead Capture
Your audience is redirected to your landing page when they click the link in your bio. It’s crucial to optimize it so that the tons of traffic your profile drives to this page do not go to waste.
Your value proposition on the landing page should be very clear. The visitor should know your offer right when they land on the page. Remove any unnecessary clutter that distracts the audience from your offer.
Moreover, your CTA should stand out from the page’s overall design. Place it right below your offer and use a contrasting color for the button. The easier it is to find the CTA button, the more clicks it’ll get.
Use Targeted Hashtags
Like any other social media platform, hashtags help your content get more visible across audiences. They make it easy for potential leads to discover your content on the platform.
By using hashtags, you can:
Take your content to an interested audience.
Grow your followers organically.
Increase your engagement rate by being more visible
Identify your competitors
Get content inspiration
Here are some steps you can consider to get more leads using hashtags:
Research Relevant Hashtags
Let’s make one thing clear. You’re not on TikTok to entertain the users. You’re there to spread awareness about your brand and convert the audience into leads. So, you must search for hashtags that help you reach your target audience.
You can start by looking at what hashtags your competitors use. Also, try using hashtag generator tools to get similar hashtags.
Keep an Eye on Trending Hashtags
Your target audience is not on TikTok to explore brands only. Therefore, you must identify the trending hashtags on time to reach more users. Because if you don’t pick up the trends at the right time, you’ll be left behind.
Combine Trending, Popular, and Niche Hashtags
Popular and trending hashtags allow you to reach a broader population of audiences. But because of the content diversity in this hashtag, the conversion rate is quite low.
With niche hashtags, you can target a narrow audience — users who are most likely to convert.
When you combine these hashtags, you boost the visibility and conversion rates of your content.
Leave Room for Hashtags With Short Captions
Because TikTok is a video-only platform, you can only add 300 characters captions per post. And this also includes the characters you use for hashtags. Keep your captions short, just enough for the users to make sense of it and interact.
The shorter your captions are, the more room you get for hashtags!
Use Hashtags to Help TikTok Understand Your Brand
When you use a particular set of hashtags over and over again, TikTok identifies your brand with those hashtags. And its algorithm will associate you with all the topics revolving around those hashtags, ensuring that your content reaches the right audience.
Develop a Solid Content Strategy
You must have a robust content strategy to increase user engagement with your account. And when you post great content, leads follow you.
Here are some tips for creating a content strategy that generates leads:
Consider the Lead’s Stage in Your Sales Funnel
The audience on TikTok keeps coming back to your account for entertainment, knowledge, or whatever you’re offering. They are your potential leads. And when you’re creating content for them, you must consider at what stage they are in your sales funnel.
They might be people who heard about your brand for the first time on TikTok. They can be someone who knows your business and wants to explore your offers. You need to give them the content that encourages them to take the next step.
Establish a Posting Schedule
To get the most out of TikTok’s lead generation strategy, make it a point to post content consistently with a fixed schedule. Try to post content at least once or twice a day. Because the more you post content, the more audience you reach, resulting in higher engagement and conversion.
Go TikTok Live
Brands on TikTok can go live to boost their engagement rate. But going live just for fun doesn’t do much for TikTok lead generation. Always go live with a clear plan of action. It might be some big announcement. You can run contests there or run a live series to educate your audience. Ensure that you don’t end a live chat without CTA.
Use Gated Content
One of the best ways of converting TikTok users to your business leads is by posting gated content. Gated content can be anything like an eBook, freebie, blog post, etc. The goal is to bring your audience to a specific page where they could convert.
Partner With Influencers on TikTok
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are filled with influencers. Some were already celebrities before creating a TikTok account, and some leveraged TikTok’s reach to become famous. But both are equally capable of bringing the audience to your brand. If you pick the ones that resonate with your brand, you’ll surely see a boost in your lead generation strategy.
You can either go for micro or macro influencers. But to get the most out of influencer strategy, you should go for both.
On the one hand, macro-influencers will reach a broader audience and help spread brand awareness. On the other hand, micro-influencers will reach a more targeted audience who are more likely to convert.
You can give custom discount codes to these influencers to entice their audience to go for your offer. Moreover, customer discount codes will help you determine the best-performing influencer.
Using TikTok ads is one of the quickest ways to generate reads. It allows brands, irrespective of how big or small they are, to reach their target audience with ease.
Using TikTok ads, you can get to know your ideal customers better, collect information about them, and send them to a landing page for conversion.
Bibit, an automatic mutual fund investment app, saw a growth of 414% in its TikTok ad campaign for user registration. It shows how effective a TikTok ad can be when you use it correctly.
Here’s how a TikTok ad manager works:
First, you create a video that conveys your offer and ends with CTA.
The CTA directs the audience to a short form, where TikTok automatically fills in the basic user information.
Once users submit the form, they are redirected to your landing page.
You can access the collected data in the TikTok Ad Manager. Or connect your business CRM to manage it seamlessly.
If you have double thoughts regarding whether TikTok is worth the effort for your business, you should get started with social listening. It helps you determine if your target audience is present on the platform or not.
With social listening, you can get to know your target audience better and identify the trends they are swooning over. Now, you can’t manually monitor these accounts. It isn’t humanly possible. But with Radarr, an AI-powered social listening tool, you can tap into countless conversations happening around your business.
When you know what interests your audience, you’re better equipped to reach out to them for conversion. Moreover, identifying trends with social listening will help you reach out to more people, increasing the number of customers.
Use TikTok to Generate More Leads for Your Business
If you were still using TikTok as a channel where you push content without any significant business gain, then you were losing out on a lot. TikTok is more than just a medium to post content.
To use it to drive actual businesses, you can use the above-mentioned strategies.
Start with social listening to establish that enough users from your industry are present on the platform. It will help you grow organically faster.
Learn everything you need to know about online social media crisis management for brands and businesses.
Having an online presence for your business is no longer an option but a must-have. Given the vastness of the digital landscape, you have a chance to market your business widely and reach a wider audience.
However, going online not only helps you bring in customers and keep them informed about your business, but it’s also a way to communicate with them on a personal level.
Even though you already have a solid brand reputation, your customers may still respond negatively to one of your actions. This will therefore hurt your brand and result in a crisis.
A business crisis is a precarious scenario that affects the success of your campaign and your brand reputation. Therefore, you must have a strong crisis management plan to recover from the situation.
This blog discusses crisis management in further detail, including examples and strategies to deal with it.
What is a business crisis?
Business crisis is a situation in which an action that you have taken has led to a negative impact on your business. It affects the way you do business and your brand’s reputation.
It’s crucial to understand that a business crisis is distinct from a bad customer review or a customer complaint. Customers may criticize your company publicly, leave negative comments online, or even call for a boycott.
Simply put, a business crisis is anything that has caused widespread dissatisfaction, hatred, rage, or mistrust among people.
If the problem is not resolved immediately, it could have long-term effects on your brand.
For example, the audience called Tanishq, an Indian Jewelry brand and a division of Titan Company, on social media for a controversial ad. This was an ad for Tanishq’s new collection called Ekatvam. The ad showed a Muslim family organizing a traditional Hindu baby shower ceremony for their Hindu daughter-in-law.
This advertisement did offend many religious groups, sparking a significant outcry on social media. Later, the company released a statement explaining that they did not intend to offend anyone’s religious feelings and that they had decided to remove the advertisement.
Any brand would hate to be in this scenario, so crisis management is necessary.
What is crisis management?
A crisis management plan is a roadmap to deal with the situation that has hurt your customers’ sentiments and negatively impacted your business.
It includes instructions on determining the kind and scope of a crisis. It also includes up-to-date contact information for crucial workers and a clear statement of the roles and responsibilities that each department must perform.
What is social media crisis management?
Today 80% of customers use social media to engage with a brand. It means that any action that goes wrong will spark conversations from customers online. They’ll first reach out on social media.
Customers now find it quite simple to tag or call out your organization on social media as it is a preferred means of communication. They also believe it is appropriate to publicly express their rage, hatred, or dissatisfaction toward your brand because your followers can see it.
If the issue is left unaddressed, this can escalate the simple issue into an alarming crisis. This is where social media crisis management comes into play. Having a foolproof crisis management plan will help you deal with the problem immediately and prevent it from getting out of control.
Why is social media crisis management important?
The good news is that social media is a powerful tool for dealing with a business crisis. Here’s how you can use social media for crisis management:
You can simultaneously reach more people thanks to social media. All you have to do is post a message on one or two platforms. Therefore, when a crisis arises, broadcast a message and send it to customers.
Customers occasionally post negative comments or bring up a problem on social media. You can ask your customer support team to respond quickly through a private or public message. Try addressing the problem in a public message if a consumer has made anything public because it builds a good impression for your brand and makes customers feel valued.
Now that we know how social media can play a significant role in crisis management, we’ll walk through a step-by-step process on how to create a social media crisis management plan and communicate across critical departments.
How to create a social media crisis management plan
Even when acting in your customers’ best interests, you may still offend them resulting in a crisis. As a result, you need to develop a backup plan to handle the crisis.
Here is a quick guide on drafting a social media crisis management plan if you don’t know where to begin.
1. Identify the key problem
The first step in developing a social media crisis plan is pinpointing the problem and its source. The problem doesn’t need to have originated online. Perhaps a single public remark or newsworthy event led to the problem that later ignited online discussion.
Finding the cause of the problem is important for the right response and the distribution of that response through the appropriate channels.
If you find that the crisis started offline, check your social media to see if there is any discussion. You must expect that there will be one even if it hasn’t happened yet.
With Radarr, it’s easy to track online conversations about your brand and understand your audience’s sentiments.
However, if you discover a heated discussion online, do the following:
If any trend has resulted from this,
What harm has already been done
What social networking site is receiving the most comments?
You must properly assess the problem to develop an effective plan.
2. Understand if the issue is a crisis or problem
The next step in crisis management is determining how serious the problem is. Is it a problem or a crisis?
Although it may seem that both terms are quite similar, that is untrue. The two situations require different approaches. Thus it’s crucial to understand the differences between a crisis and a problem.
Let’s understand it with an example:
A customer contacts you on social media when they have a problem with your product or service. Do you refer to this as a problem or a crisis? Undoubtedly a problem, right?
Because it’s a minor problem that can be settled by providing prompt customer service, a refund, or a discount.
However, a crisis develops when many customers collectively criticize your company and demand a response. Because the support staff cannot solve all of your problems here,
A better strategy is required.
We recommend starting with a typical customer service strategy if you’re unsure if the issue is a problem or a crisis. But also be ready if the situation escalates and develops into a crisis.
Pro tip: You can analyze the severity of a situation using sentiment analysis.
3. It’s time to execute the plan
When you have chosen the best course of action, it is time to implement your strategy. An internal flow chart that outlines what each team member must do to address the problem can be created for this purpose.
Customer service representatives and managers at executive levels are frequently required to provide more than the usual response. If the issue worsens, top executives may occasionally need to step in.
Make sure you don’t post anything new on social media or send marketing emails to your customers until the issue settles. This shows your customers that you’re dedicated to resolving the issue.
With the help of the steps listed above, we think it is now evident how to develop a social media crisis management strategy for your company. However, it’s important to comprehend it better from a real-life example before you begin resolving company crises.
We have therefore highlighted a few real businesses together with the social media crisis management strategy they used to get through the problem.
Social media crisis management examples to learn from
Brands, both big and small, are susceptible to a business crisis. It is unexpected and occurs anytime, significantly impacting your company’s reputation.
Here are some real-life business crises along with the strategy they followed to overcome the crisis:
1. H&M – Racial Advertising
A picture of a black child wearing a green hoodie with the words “coolest monkey in the jungle” printed on it that was posted on the website of H&M, a global clothing business with headquarters in Sweden, drew criticism. People were outraged by this and claimed that H&M’s ad campaign was terrible on social media.
Several users shared this picture, criticizing H&M for racially inappropriate advertising and stating they would stop buying from the brand.
Even one of its most prominent partners, artist The Weeknd, announced ending his partnership with H&M on Twitter. The 27-year-old stated that the image had “seriously hurt him.” He worked with the firm to design a collection and model it.
How did the brand respond to it?
The brand issued the following statement in an attempt to express its regret to the public after receiving harsh criticism on social media:
2. Burger King – Insensitive and sexist marketing
On International Women’s Day, the fast food restaurant Burger King sparked controversy by tweeting that “women belong in the kitchen.”
The company was accused of using a sexist clickbait cliche.
The aim was to poke fun at this sexist phrase and highlight the female cooks in these restaurants, but the tone was lost on Twitter, and the backlash was swift.
How did the brand respond to it?
The fast-food giant’s social media team spent the rest of the day issuing explanations and apologies, finally removing the tweet.
3. Nike – Product Failure
Zion Williamson, a renowned basketball player for Duke University, was hurt when his Nike shoe ripped during a game.
Williamson slipped and hurt his knee, forcing him to leave the game. As the globe pondered how a sneaker could split so dramatically in the middle of a game, Nike stock closed down 1.05 percent the next day.
As soon as this happened, Nike’s name was all over social media, with many criticizing the firm for creating such a poor item that would practically fall off the foot of the most well-known athlete on the field.
Rival shoe brand Puma even got in on the act, posting a now-deleted tweet saying Williamson’s injury “wouldn’t have happened in the Pumas.”
How did the brand respond to it?
Shortly after the incident, Nike released a statement to the media saying, “The quality and performance of our products are of the highest priority. We are worried and wish Zion a swift recovery. Even though this is a singular incident, we are trying to figure it out.
Note: The one lesson we can take away from these social media crises is that it is best to acknowledge your brand’s mistakes and address them as soon as possible.
Tips to manage social media crisis
Here’s how to respond if you suddenly find yourself the target of widespread outrage or criticism. The following is what needs to be included in your social media crisis management plan:
1. Track your online reputation
It’s important to track your online reputation to stay prepared for a business crisis. You can do it with the help of reputation management tools available online. These tools help you analyze every mention of your brand online (tagged or untagged), sentiment, and how the brand’s perception has changed over time.
Additionally, you can access every mention about your brand or products online with the help of the “mention feed.”
After tracking your online reputation, you must develop a social media crisis management plan. You must create a crisis plan considering every possibility, such as what to do if you receive a bad review, notice an influx of negative comments, or mention by a famous or influential person.
Write down every possible situation and go through them with your social media and customer support team. Ensure that they know the appropriate responses, how to prioritize particular conversations, and when to report on them.
2. Respond promptly
If you think that ignoring a problem will make it go away, trust us when we say it won’t. It will exacerbate the situation because customers, at the very least, want you to acknowledge the issue and act swiftly.
If you think a certain action has led to public outrage, you might delete it or issue a sincere apology or retraction. Lingering on the issue will only allow it to spiral out of hand. Simply acknowledge a problem and let people know that more information is coming soon.
For instance, Versace, a luxury brand, had to apologize for inappropriate printing content on some of its T-shirts. After receiving harsh criticism on social media, Versace admitted that it had made a mistake and stopped selling the tops.
In the worst situation, irresponsible social media posts made by your employees may potentially result in a crisis. But by adopting a social media policy, you can prevent this.
Every company ought to have a social media policy that is clear. The policy should include appropriate use, criteria for branded accounts, and how employees can discuss the company on their personal channels.
However, depending on the sector and size of the business, each organization’s social media policy will look different. But, you must specify the following terms in your policy:
Copyright regulations. The chances are that your employees don’t understand the copyright issues. Thus you can lay down guidelines on how to use and credit third-party content.
Restriction on privacy. This should clearly state how to interact with customers online and when a conversation needs to move to a private channel.
Norms for confidentiality. Mention in detail what information about the company, both internal and external, employees are permitted to disclose.
Brand voice guideline. The tone, the team, must use while communicating with customers online through social media should be mentioned. It should mention the situations in which they should be formal and humorous.
4. Have a crisis communication plan
Even if you have never experienced a social media crisis, it is always advisable to be ready. So, your top priority should be developing a social media crisis communication plan.
Having a crisis communication plan in a social emergency will give you clarity of thought and practical knowledge. As was previously stated, the best action in a social media crisis is to act immediately, so having a strategy in place means you won’t have to battle decision-making or wait for guidance from top managers.
Everyone, from senior executives to entry-level staff, should be made aware of the actions needed during a social media crisis in the plan.
You must include the following points in your social media crisis communication plan:
Rules for assessing the type and severity of a crisis.
Roles and responsibilities for each department.
A communication plan for internal updates.
Up-to-date contact information for critical employees.
Procedures for approving social media messages.
Any external messages, images, or data that has been previously allowed.
A link to social media policy.
5. Practice social listening
You know social media crises come without knocking on your door. You never know when a small problem could get out of hand and become a crisis. Social listening is crucial in this situation. Social listening enables you to identify a growing problem on social media before it develops into a crisis.
You can tell if your brand is receiving unwelcome attention by keeping track of brand mentions on social media. But you should keep an eye on social sentiment to get a clearer picture and determine whether this will result in a social media crisis.
Social sentiment is a metric that helps you understand what people feel about your brand. If you see a sudden change in the sentiment, maybe it’s time to dig into your listening streams to see what people are saying about you.
Also, it can be tough if your marketing team has never dealt with social media crises before. But sometimes, even when you lack a full-fledged plan, your audience might have something to say that can help you handle the situation in a better way.
With social listening, you can keep track of the feedback your company receives and choose how to incorporate their suggestions into practical action.
Nearly 5 billion people in the world use social media. As a result, it is practically hard to monitor what consumers or other people say about your brand online. Social media listening tools like Radarr can be useful here. It is a powerful social media intelligence tool that helps you easily listen, monitor, and track online conversations. Click here to learn more!
6. Engage with commentators
A social media crisis is the last thing you need. It not only slows down the expansion of your company but it also takes a lot of time and effort. But it’s crucial to interact with your commenters.
Engaging with commenters shows your interest in the public’s opinion and your attention to their issues. But keep it brief, and avoid arguing at all costs.
Ensure you are not defending yourself or getting into a heated debate while interacting with your commentators. Instead, acknowledge the concerns and frustrations of the public.
If someone demands more of your attention, try to move the conversation into a private message, email, or phone call. But take the moral high ground, regardless of the communication channel.
It’s important to analyze the sentiments of your audience before engaging with them to come up with the best response. Use Radarr to measure human emotions behind online conversations.
7. Keep the internal communication moving
Not only do false information and rumors about your business circulate outside , but they can occasionally even reach your internal team. And if the top level does not address them, they can easily escalate and have negative impacts.
Consequently, internal communication must be covered in your social media crisis management plan.
It aids in alleviating the tension and angst that come with a social media crisis. Thanks to internal communication, everyone on the team will be better able to comprehend what is expected of them throughout the crisis.
8. Secure your social media accounts
Although it may seem obvious, social media crises can occasionally occur when hackers access your accounts.
In reality, 14% of social media users have reportedly faced unwanted activity on their accounts, according to the Norton Cyber Safety Report 2021.
It has been noticed that employees are more likely than hackers to commit a cybercrime. How? Using weak passwords, accessing unauthorized files from the company system, entering social media logins on multiple devices, etc.
Make sure you only provide a select few people access to the passwords to your social media accounts. Because if more people know your credentials, the likelihood of a security compromise increases.
Employees who leave the company or take on positions where they are not responsible for posting on social media should also have their access revoked.
Pro tip: Use different passwords for various social media platforms.By doing this, you can stop hackers from getting access to all of your social media accounts and minimize your loss.
9. Put your schedule posts on hold
When experiencing a social media crisis, hitting the post button is not a good idea, even if you have scheduled posts for important days. Until the social media situation is resolved, you must also halt any promotional campaigns. Because the last thing you want is for your customers to think you are tone deaf to the problem.
An ill-timed scheduled post will, at best, make you appear ignorant. At worst, it might totally undermine your crisis management strategy.
10. Learn from your social media crisis
Although handling a social media crisis can be extremely stressful, there are also some important lessons to learn for your company. Make sure you review the entire event and determine what may have been done better after the issue has been resolved.
Consider this experience a chance to grow and become better. Look at the reasons behind the crisis and whether you could have prevented it in the first place.
Share the key information with other departments, so they are best prepared the next time they encounter a similar situation. Get feedback from your marketing, social media, or customer care teams to improve your social media crisis management plan.
Each lesson should serve as a road map for your business.
Social media monitoring and analytics tools like Radarr can help your business gather insights and actionables on one dashboard. Book a demo today!
Create an effective social media crisis management plan for your organization now
You don’t have to wait for something uncertain to happen to create a social media crisis management plan. It should be your top priority because you never know what that one action can land you in a situation of crisis. So better be prepared.
When it comes to social media crises, you should respond as quickly as you can. Own responsibility for your action, apologize, and have a foolproof plan to deal with it. But most organizations only know that they are under social media crisis when the situation escalates to the point that it is tough to manage.
It’s where you need to focus on social listening, monitoring, and tracking online conversations about your brand. You can use a powerful social media intelligence tool called Radarr.
Radarr offers you the following features so that you can prevent social media crisis:
Do you know which app is the most consumed in the US and several other countries? If you guessed YouTube, you’re wrong! It’s TikTok with over a billion active users, followed by YouTube and Facebook.
As per data.ai’s recent quarterly analysis, TikTok users spend more than 48 hours a month on the app, which is still soaring.
And for marketers looking to target the younger demographic – Gen Z and Millennials, there’s no better time to maximize the power of TikTok ads than now.
For many, advertising on TikTok can be overwhelming due to the amount of content being uploaded and refreshed every waking second. So to help you run winning paid ad campaigns, here’s an ultimate guide on TikTok ads to let you get the most out of your ROI and ROAs.
What are TikTok ads?
The social channel provides a user-friendly advertising platform to create and run various forms of advertisements. Due to TikTok’s rising popularity, many marketers leverage the channel’s content to promote their marketing strategies with ads.
What makes TikTok ads stand out? Unlike other social media platforms, TikTok videos are shorter in size making your ads more prominent.
What are the types of TikTok ads?
TikTok currently supports nine types of ads on its platform. You can choose the most effective ad type that’s an ideal fit for your marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at them:
In-feed ads
This is TikTok’s standard ad format. You can create these self-service ads yourself using TikTok’s Ad Manager Interface.
The most popular ad format, video ads, appear within the user’s feed, specifically under the “For You” section.
You can embed your video ad to run them on your targeted user’s feed. The advantage of this format is that it has a native and organic feel. Video ads can range anywhere from 5 to 60 secs, although the optimal length is 15 secs.
You can run videos on full-screen along with your brand’s name, image, and text.
Here’s an example from an online jewelry store that used video ads to push their discount code:
Image ads
You can use image ads in videos on TikTok’s news feed apps such as BuzzVideo, TopBuzz, and Babe. It lets you add an image along with ad text and the brand or product name.
Spark ads
Spark ads were launched in 2021 to boost the product-related organic content of brands and users. TikTok’s research has shown Spark ads to have 142% higher engagement than the usual in-feed ads.
Image source – A before and after using the spark ad format
Pangle ads
TikTok integrates with Pangle’s platform to create videos and place them through the TikTok Audience Network. But this format is available for only a select few countries.
Carousel ads
These ads can include up to ten images at a stretch with different captions under each image and appear under the News Feed section. You can choose this format if you have multiple products to showcase in a single ad.
Your ads can be created as branded stickers, filters, effects, and other types of AR content. Doing so attracts TikTokers to use such content in their videos.
Hashtag Challenge
These challenges show up in the “Discover” section on the user’s account and encourage user-generated content using your hashtags.
TopView ads
They are full-screen video ads, usually 5 to 60 secs in length. TopView ads appear when a user opens their TikTok app.
Now that you know of the types of ads you can leverage to reach a wider audience, you must know how a TikTok ad campaign is set up.
How to set up a TikTok ad campaign?
1. Understand your audience and their interests with TikTok listening
Similar to brands advertising unique products, each user has special interests. So to ensure you target the right set of audiences and reach the intended community, as a first step, you must understand your target users and their likes and dislikes.
For instance, if you are advertising a US-based beauty product, your target audience is mainly US female users aged between 18 to 30.
But how can you carve your ad campaign with TikTok listening? Social listening lets you track trends, conversations, mentions, hashtags, interactions, interests, and more. A social listening tool such as Radarr fetches valuable insights based on which you can create and optimize a winning TikTok ad campaign strategy.
Next, set a specific amount you wish to spend on the campaign and run ads. Once your active campaign surpasses this amount, your ads stop running.
You can also set “No Limit” on your campaign budgets to keep your ads running. You can always re-edit your campaign budget or create another campaign with a different budget. If you wish to auto-optimize your budget allocation, you can enable Campaign Budget Optimization.
4. Name your ad groups and choose placements
TikTok lets you decide the ad placements that best suit your campaign. You can create multiple ad groups (up to 999) for each campaign.
Here are the types of ad placements:
TikTok placement: In-feed ads appearing on the “For You” page.
News Feed Apps: For news feed app ads and Detail page ads.
Pangle: The TikTok audience network.
Automatic placement: TikTok learns from the audience scope and auto-places your ads for increased optimization.
5. Select Automated Creative Optimization if needed
TikTok provides a seamless method to auto-create ad combinations (texts, videos, and images) to gain the most reach. By selecting this option, the ad system pushes your best-performing ads on top.
TikTok highly recommends you select this option to boost your campaign performance.
6. Target your audience
Using the first step defined in this section, you must’ve understood your target audience and their interests by now. And now, you must specify their exact interests.
The Ad Manager lets you add additional interests and behaviors apart from the default ones:
7. Set your ad group budget and schedule them
You set your campaign budget in Step #3, but now you must also set your ad group budgets and schedule them to run at specific times.
Select a daily or a lifetime budget for your ad group, and choose a start and end time. If you want to specify an exact time for the ad group to run, under Dayparting, set the ad timings.
8. Choose your optimization goal and set up a bidding strategy
What’s your optimization goal? Is it to generate clicks, reach, or convert users? Based on this, choose from the three bidding strategies:
Bid Cap: The supported billing events are Cost per Click (CPC), Cost per Mille (CPM), and Cost per View (CPV). Bid cap is available for conversion objectives where your optimization goal is set to Click.
Cost Cap: It gives an average cost per result. So the cost per result can reach higher or lower than your bid amount. Cost Cap is available for optimization goals set to Conversions.
Lowest Cost: It generates multiple results at the lowest possible costs. You do not have to set a bid.
Once done, choose a delivery type – Standard or Accelerated. Choosing Standard divides your budget evenly across the scheduled campaign dates. And choosing Accelerated spends your budget rapidly.
9. Start creating your TikTok ads
First, name your ad within 512 characters. Next, select the ad format. Note that TikTok only supports video ads, and their News Feed Apps support the rest.
Start adding your images and videos, or create a new video using templates or external video creation tools. You can also refer to the Video Creation Kit for more templates.
Once you have your video and/or image ready to go, choose an attractive thumbnail to enhance your ad. Now, enter text details such as brand/product name, CTA, URL to drive user traffic, etc. Finally, preview your creation before you hit publish and add performance tracking links from your third-party tools. Click Submit once done.
10. Use TikTok social analytics and sentiment analysis as campaign boosters
Social analytics on TikTok, such as your targeted audience insights, competitor monitoring, analyzing industry and brand trends, are building blocks of a campaign’s overall success. They are often undermined for their potential to reach a larger community of users and most importantly – drive conversions.
Also, performing sentiment analysis lets you drill down on the real-time issues faced by your audience and build your campaigns around them.
A social listening tool is the most effective way to optimize your campaign’s performance and get not just real-time metrics but also a user’s perception of your ads for a higher ROI.
TikTok ad specs you must know
Since TikTok’s standard format support video ads the most, here’s a look into its specifications:
TikTok video ad specs:
Aspect ratio: 9:16, 1:1, or 16:9.
Minimum resolution: 540 x 960 px or 640 x 640 px. However, a resolution of 720 pixels performs the best.
Supported file types: mp4, jpeg, Mpeg, .mov, .3gp, and .avi.
Duration: 5 to 60 secs. However, 15 secs is an optimal length for best performance.
Maximum upload file size: 500 MB.
Ad description and brand name: 1 to 100 characters and 1 to 20 characters for the brand name.
Pro Tip: Start using image analytics to crack the most suitable visuals for a high-performing campaign.
How much do TikTok ads cost?
To advertise on TikTok, an ad starts at $10 per CPM. You can set either daily or lifetime budgets based on your threshold. Here are the minimum budgets you would need to publish ads:
Campaign level: Daily budget starts from $50.
Ad group level: Daily budget starts from $20, and a lifetime at the same price multiplied by the number of running days.
However, the final ad cost depends on how well your campaign is optimized.
Best TikTok ad examples you can learn from
1. Mercedes-Benz
Here’s how Mercedes leveraged TikTok’s hashtag challenge with an in-feed ad and included its own branded effects to attract a younger crowd:
2. James Allen’s Spark ads
James Allen pushed their discount codes with their impressive Spark ads:
3. Zoomerang’s video ads
Popular video editing app Zoomerang leveraged its user-generated content to promote its app installs with a powerful CTA. Here’s their in-feed video ad:
4. BMW
The automobile giant used a mixture of in-feed and TopView ads for its ad campaign, which fetched around 45 million views.
Best practices for top-performing TikTok ads
1. Trim down video length
TikTok suggests the ideal video length to be between 9 to 15 secs. Longer video ads get trimmed while playing and create zero impact.
2. Mix up your video styles
Add variety to your ads by using transitions, branded effects, and other attention-grabbing elements to keep your audience hooked on your videos.
3. Add background music
To avoid your ads from sounding dull and monotonous, add trending tracks as background music.
4. Leverage user-generated content
Try using user-generated content to advertise your brand or products to make your ads more authentic and captivating. This way, your ads can have an organic feel and attract more engagement.
Summing up
The secret to a video going “viral” on TikTok is understanding the latest trends and what peaks the followers’ interests. And the same applies to TikTok ads as well.
But TikTok ads are a little harder to crack. You need to get everything from the visual aspects to the audience’s behavior right on point. And social listening gets to the bottom of this!
With Radarr, you get accurate insights to optimize and get the MOST out of your TikTok ad campaigns.
With over 830 million active users, it is safe to say that LinkedIn is no longer just a place where people are creating professional accounts. It is also a place where they are actively sharing their experiences, networking with others and engaging with content that adds value to their growth.
But more than the growth of the platform over the years, the numbers actually show the potential it holds for businesses when it comes to promoting themselves to an active audience.
Although, just like any other social media platform, LinkedIn too comes with its own set of nuances that can help a business reach their target audience through content – namely so, LinkedIn hashtags.
Still new to the concept, many LinkedIn members can still be seen either publishing content without hashtags or not being able to identify the right ones. In this guide, we aim to solve that!
What are LinkedIn hashtags?
Similar to the usual hashtags we see on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, LinkedIn hashtags are a combination of letters and numbers without spaces, following the # symbol. For example, this is a hashtag – #linkedinmarketing.
How do LinkedIn hashtags work?
LinkedIn hashtags essentially act as labels to the content you post on the social media platform. It helps the platform index your content for the searches its users make with the help of phrases and keywords they want to follow or learn more from. A hashtag is what brings in the views, clicks and connections through the content being published on the platform.
Apart from helping the platform index and label content, LinkedIn hashtags also help its members discover content. By clicking on a hashtag, LinkedIn brings up all the posts, profiles and pages that are creating content relevant to it. This helps members use LinkedIn like a search engine to find content of their interest.
But that brings us down to the most important question – how do you find the best LinkedIn hashtags?
How to find the best LinkedIn hashtags for your business?
Using LinkedIn hashtags needs to be as strategic as it can get. The only way to make the most of them to increase your reach and boost engagement is to follow a series of steps that bring you closer to knowing your target market and ideal audience on the platform.
1. Identify your target audience
The very first step to knowing which LinkedIn hashtags to use is to know who you’re addressing. This includes not just defining your target market, but also your ideal customer persona based on the demographics that are active members on the platform.
Ideally, we recommend creating individual profiles of the target audience to be able to streamline their demographics, psychographics and their use of LinkedIn. This may include details such as their job titles, work location, work type, industry, years of experience, gender, objectives and goals, challenges and similar information.
2. Use social listening to identify interests
Once you have your audience identified and defined, the next step is to look into what interests them. This may include both professional and personal interests of your ideal customer persona on the platform – and can depend on variables such as their current job role, targets, industry trends, and so on.
We recommend using LinkedIn social listening to be able to do this at scale. With the help of social listening tools like Radarr, you can scan through thousands of posts and profiles on LinkedIn to capture data and bring it onto one dashboard to highlight what your audience is engaging with in your industry or topics that are of key interest to them.
Another aspect you need to keep in mind as you leverage social listening, is to look for patterns in your target audience’s interests and what motivates them to engage with content. This also includes their sentiment towards certain LinkedIn hashtags, which may drive the reactions and how they engage with content.
This is where you can use sentiment analysis in addition to social listening to stay up-to-date on how your audience feels about specific topics and trends. Knowing the sentiment behind online conversations can help you use emotions in marketing and advertising campaigns, leading to desired actions from the target audience.
4. Analyze performance with hashtag analytics
With trends and sentiments associated with them captured, shortlist a few LinkedIn hashtags relevant to your industry and the kind of content you aim to publish on the social media platform. But don’t just dive in and start using all of them – first, analyze what value they have to offer.
Using social media hashtag analytics, you can look into the potential reach and engagement rate a LinkedIn hashtag has to offer. This can help you streamline the number of hashtags you add to your profile or content, keeping things professional and at the same time, focusing only on those that give you the best results.
5. Create a set of LinkedIn hashtags
As you start executing your LinkedIn marketing strategy, you will have to create content in and around your industry. If you are creating content that guides your target audience through a funnel, it is important to note that the LinkedIn hashtags you use need to vary with the topics you cover.
For example, if you’re creating top of the funnel content around marketing, the LinkedIn hashtags you use could include – #marketing #learnmarketing.
But as you deep dive into the subject to cover strategy specific topics in your posts, your LinkedIn hashtags could look like – #linkedinmarketingstrategy #marketingstrategy #marketingtips.
Ideally, we recommend having at least five sets of LinkedIn hashtags ready based on your social media marketing strategy every month. This helps save time and effort when it comes to finally pushing out the content.
6. Monitor and optimize LinkedIn hashtags
As you start using the LinkedIn hashtags, remember to also look into social analytics to see how they perform. This includes your post reach, the interaction and engagement you get on it, improvement in how you get discovered – be it your own profile or company page, and the number of clicks to your website that drives a desired action of the audience.
Tools like Radarr can help you monitor your social content and hashtag performance on one dashboard. This helps you optimize your LinkedIn hashtag strategy accordingly to boost your reach in a timely manner.
Now that you know how to find the best LinkedIn hashtags, let’s look into how to use them to drive business goals.
How to use LinkedIn hashtags for more brand engagement?
There is no set rule for how you put LinkedIn hashtags to work. As an individual or an organization, your approach to using hashtags may vary based on the audience you are addressing or the content you publish on the platform. But following are a few ways in which we do recommend using LinkedIn hashtags to tap into the reach they have to offer:
1. Add them to your LinkedIn company page
Add LinkedIn hashtags to your company page. This helps the social media platform’s algorithm categorize/ index you for the topics relevant to your industry and show the content you create to members who use those hashtags to make searches.
We recommend choosing and adding upto 3-5 LinkedIn hashtags that best represent what your business is about, the kind of content you create and what you have to offer to the target audience.
2. Add them to key LinkedIn user profiles
Identify your key stakeholders in driving the business goals and marketing metrics. It’s important to loop them in and make them a part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
You can do this simply by asking them to include the LinkedIn hashtags in their profile as well. For this, they will need to turn on the Creator Mode on LinkedIn and add up to 5 of the hashtags you have identified for your strategy. The idea is to also index their profiles for the hashtags as well, which eventually leads to your company page.
3. Include LinkedIn hashtags in your posts
As you start posting content on your LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn company page, make hashtags a part of your caption. Include them after your caption to index the post for the platform’s search engine.
We recommend keeping some space between the post caption and the LinkedIn hashtags to not compromise on the readability of it. Additionally, we do suggest adding only 3-5 LinkedIn hashtags to your post – the idea is to keep only the hashtags that are extremely relevant to the content. This will also help you experiment with different hashtag sets in your content, monitoring how it impacts its performance.
4. Follow relevant LinkedIn hashtags and engage with them
Remember, LinkedIn too is for networking purposes. If you want to boost your reach, you need to become more visible and the only way to do so is to engage with other accounts and pages that are posting content relevant to your business/ industry.
LinkedIn now gives you the option to follow relevant hashtags from the company page. This helps you keep track of all the posts being made around them and also engage with them in the form of reactions or comments.
SEMrush is one company that does this really well. Apart from following hashtags that are directly associated with them, they also engage with posts around SEO success stories, tips and other content posted by members. This helps them get noticed and at the same time, also drive more traffic to their LinkedIn company page.
5. Use both general and niche hashtags
When you’re making use of LinkedIn hashtags, make sure you follow the same approach that you do when setting a sales funnel. The idea is to keep the funnel broad enough to drive traffic, but at the same time, define the niche to reach the right set of people from a vast audience segment.
If you’re including 5 LinkedIn hashtags in your post, remember to include at least one general hashtag to keep your audience reach wider. But remember to still stick to relevance as the audience on LinkedIn is more goal-oriented and professional as compared to other platforms, and will not like spammy content.
6. Request employee amplification
As you execute your LinkedIn marketing strategy, make sure you rope in everyone to drive more engagement on the content published. This will help the LinkedIn algorithm to further index your post for the value it has to offer around the hashtags it is categorized for.
The logic is similar to how other platforms show your content more to its audience when there is a higher level of engagement on it. A good way to ensure this is to use the ‘notify employees’ feather available on company page posts.
7. Leverage LinkedIn groups
When you’re posting content, you can ask your employees to also share the company page post in relevant groups that they may have joined. The idea is to get the post discovered, driving higher visibility and engagement on it.
If you have also added the right LinkedIn hashtags to the post, this will also help the group members see the type of content you publish.
Finding the right LinkedIn hashtags made easy
We know LinkedIn can be tricky to crack.
As a company, you want to ensure you look professional. But at the same time, you want your content reaching the right set of people – amidst all the other content that members and other organizations are posting.
That’s why we at Radarr enable social listening and monitoring on LinkedIn, along with hashtag analytics. This helps you track LinkedIn content proactively, identify trends and patterns, and find the right hashtags to meet your business goals and objectives.
Detailed comparison between TikTok vs Instagram Reels for video marketing.
Bite-sized video content is more than just an element of quick entertainment – now, they are also a powerful tool to drive brand engagement and bring excellent returns. According to the Social Media Marketing Report by HubSpot, short-form video has the highest ROI among every other social media marketing strategy. The report also adds that 51% of marketers using short-form video plan to increase their investment in 2022.
Statistics also show that a regular person spends 100 minutes per day, on average, watching online videos. In this fast-paced world, video content like reels saves time and delivers entertainment and information. So, if done properly, reels are an infallible method of engaging consumers with your marketing campaign.
If you want your brand to go viral, quality content is the key. Driving video content-based campaigns has become even easier with the rise in Instagram and TikTok’s popularity.
Trying to decide between TikTok vs Instagram Reels? Here is an overview of how these two very popular platforms can benefit your brand’s visibility and bring excellent ROI.
TikTok vs Instagram Reels for video marketing
What are Instagram Reels?
Released in August 2020, reels are shot-form videos of a maximum of 90 seconds. They are entertaining, immersive, and a popular way of expressing creativity through fun, informative content.
Instagram reels are an excellent tool to tell your brand story, educate your audience, and get discovered by people who may resonate with your business. People engage with reels to participate in cultural trends, collaborate with the community and discover new ideas.
Instagram previously allowed a duration of 15 to 60 seconds long, which they increased to 90 seconds. Users can stitch together video clips, add filters, and set the reel to music from the app’s music library.
Here is an example:
Reels promote engagement as they can appear on Instagram’s Explore page. Reels are designed to widen your audience reach and establish your identity to the public.
What is TikTok?
Formerly musical.ly, a popular lip-syncing application, TikTok is a social networking platform focused on sharing vertical video content. The platform allowed users to join trends and share short videos like bite-sized informative content, ASMR vlogs, life hacks, impressions, and comic performances.
TikTok’s popularity exploded as a video-sharing application where a billion monthly users interacted, especially during the pandemic. It became one of the most widely used social media platforms for people to interact and entertain themselves.
With TikTok’s success in vertical short video content, other social networking platforms followed suit. Instagram launched its own version of vertical videos called Instagram Reels. YouTube also released YouTube Shorts soon after.
TikTok vs Instagram Reels
Instagram and TikTok both gained significant traction due to their vertical videos. While the platforms are similar in certain aspects, there are still a lot of clear differences in terms of features, audience, availability, etc. Let’s take a look at some of these distinguishing elements-
Duration
TikTok started with 15, 30, and 60-second long videos. But now, it allows video content to be upto ten minutes. On the other hand, the duration of Instagram reels is limited to 90 seconds.
Cross-posting
TikTok videos can be downloaded on your phone via the save video option in the app and can be uploaded and shared on other platforms. However, the downloaded video will have a watermark of TikTok and the original creator’s username.
On the contrary, the app doesn’t provide any download feature for reels. Although you can save a reel in your profile, you can’t download the reel to your device. However, Instagram reels can be posted on stories, and the link can be shared.
Audio
TikTok offers a wide range of audio materials for its users. On the flip side, Instagram has a smaller selection of featured music and sounds. Instagram business accounts also can’t use copyrighted music. However, Instagram has recently brought updates on Reels, enabling text-to-speech and voice effect features.
Audience reach
While both platforms are quite popular with millennials and Gen Zs, TikTok’s easy content creation and sharing across platforms does give it certain leverage when it comes to audience engagement. In comparison with other social media platforms, budding influencers on TikTok earned around 18% more engagement, according to statistics. While Instagram reels saw an increase in engagement rates in the app by22%, the platform’s overall engagement rate lags behind, with emerging influencers only gaining 3.86%.
Availability
Instagram is accessible across 170 countries. On the other hand, TikTok has faced criticism and scrutiny due to privacy issues and is banned in some regions.
Analytics
TikTok analytics measures both the overall profile and individual video performance, including big-picture metrics like total playtime, average watch time, and geolocation.
Similarly, Instagram users had to rely on general analytics of the platform at first. But the social media network rolled out Reels-specific data for specific insights, covering metrics such as plays, interactions, reach, likes, comments, and saves.
Advertising opportunities
Both Instagram and TikTok are releasing new advertising features, but the approaches are quite different. While Instagram focuses on traditional, shoppable ads and campaigns via Reels, TikTok emphasizes on creator-based ads.
TikTok vs Instagram Reels – How to choose the right platform
Engaging the audience through video content is the future of brand marketing. Both Instagram and TikTok offer varied advantages. But identifying the perks and the alignment with your brand is key to successful social media marketing.
Here are some points you should keep in mind before settling on your marketing strategy.
1. Define your target audience
Knowing your target market is not only integral for advertising your brand but also for curating the right content. For an effective video marketing strategy, thorough audience research is your first step.
The two platforms may be identical, but it’s clear that they serve different audiences. Determining which platform works best also depends on where your target market is. Most millennials are well-acquainted with navigating Instagram, while Gen Z spends most of their time scrolling on TikTok.
Once you have defined your core audience, you can choose the right platform for your social video marketing strategy and bring you the maximum ROI through video marketing.
2. See what channels they are active on
Growing your brand visibility depends on how well you identify and optimize areas your target audience interacts with the most. After identifying your target audience, you need to find out which channels appeal to them the most. Those are the ones your marketing campaign should focus on. It will help you become visible on channels where your core market will see you and interact with you.
3. Content they consume
Thorough research on what type of content drives your viewers the most should be a priority of your marketing team. To understand that, monitoring what they talk about online, which influencers they follow, and their gender, age, and demographic is important. Doing this manually is next to impossible– and that’s why you need to invest in a proper social listening tool.
An efficient social listening software will track and collect data on trends, popular conversations, likes as well as dislikes of your target market, giving you a proper set of insight on which platform accommodates that the best. Such tools also provide sentiment analysis to gauge the intent of your audience behind their social media engagement and conversations so that you can target those while running your brand marketing campaign.
4. Do a competitor analysis
Want to know what platform will work the best for your brand? Track where your competitors are the most active. A thorough competitor analysis will help you pinpoint the topics that work for similar brands and how well they performed in terms of engagement and ROI. This will help you optimize the right opportunities and avoid wasting time on stuff that most likely won’t work.
5. Define your video marketing goal
Identifying your target audience and tracking your competitors are not enough for a stellar video marketing strategy on social media. Clearly defining your social media marketing goals is an integral part of choosing the right platform.
As discussed before, Instagram and TikTok have different approaches to sponsored videos and ad campaign and is popular among different sets of population. How you want to portray your brand marketing campaign and what you want to achieve through it will decide which platform fits you the best. The point is to choose a platform according to what they offer and what video dimensions can be displayed.
6. Create a strategy
Once you collect all the relevant data, it’s time to create a solid video marketing strategy for your social media campaign on Instagram or TikTok. For that, you can start by auditing all the collected data and see which platform has worked better for similar brands. If you see your approach is not accommodating your audience properly, don’t shy away from choosing a few different approaches and align your marketing strategy according to your chosen medium. You can also track and see what type of videos worked best for your brand, how long it took to produce, etc.
While collecting data and measuring the success rate of different ad campaigns are important steps, creating a strategy with a dash of uniqueness will help you stand out. If you.
7. Measure impact and test for different purposes
Releasing good content is not enough, and constant improvements are necessary. Thus, measuring impact every time you release a new reel or video, track their performance on each platform. Try to use them for different marketing purposes and see which ones drive the best engagement rates and ROI. In the debate of Instagram reels vs TikTok, this will give you a fair insight into which platform fits your brand image.
8. Create and repurpose
Creating a piece of informative and properly toned short video or reel takes a lot of thought, time, and energy. So make sure you choose a platform that gives you enough creative space to repurpose your content on different platforms as well.
Conclusion
Your part in the Reels vs TikTok debate depends on what you’re aiming for when it comes to your brand marketing. If you want a quick, effective, versatile platform that can result in your content reaching huge audiences, TikTok can be your best pal. If you already have a fair number of followers, the curated campaigns of Instagram reels might come in handy.
Merits don’t lack in both platforms. Our suggestion is – exploring both and tapping into the different features and quirks can be worthwhile for marketing strategy. Using both platforms will allow you to measure elements that have maximum impact on your campaign performance, and then you can double down on that as a channel.
Does identifying the right marketing channel seem tricky to you? Radarr can help you with that and so much more. With cutting-edge sentiment API. accurate reports and insights, precise monitoring of trends and topics, you can redefine your marketing strategy. With real-time visualization and content tracking, Radarr will take your marketing campaigns to the peak of success.
