According to statistics from Statista, TikTok has now become the fifth most popular social app in the world. As of April 2024, its global downloads have surpassed 4.92 billion, and its monthly active users have reached 1.582 billion. TikTok achieved this milestone in just seven years, and compared to established social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp, its growth rate is truly astonishing.

Data source: Statista

TikTok's rapid rise has not only attracted more user attention, but also made it an ideal choice for businesses to expand into overseas markets. For companies looking to market internationally, TikTok offers precise user targeting capabilities and innovative advertising formats, effectively helping businesses attract and reach their target audience.

So, how can you use TikTok for marketing and promotion?Below, TuKe will share a 【Success Guide】, which includes 10 key points. Enterprises looking to go global need to master these10 steps to maximize your influence on TikTok and build connections with your audience:

1. Understand Your Audience

To understand your target audience on TikTok, you need to further explore the types of content they enjoy and the trends they follow. These are key factors in creating content that resonates.

For example, understand the current popular challenges and trends. TikTok users love to participate in various challenges and trends, including dance challenges, sound effect challenges, visual effect challenges, etc. These challenges often spread quickly and attract a large number of users to participate and create their own versions.

2. Create a Business Account

If you haven't already, create a TikTok business account. This allows you to access analytics tools, advertising options, and other features designed specifically for businesses.

Set up a TikTok business account

3. Define Your Brand Personality

Defining your brand personality on TikTok is very important, as it directly affects how you create content and interact with users on the platform.

Based on your brand's core values and target audience, you can choose different styles to define your brand personality on TikTok. This helps ensure your content is consistent and attractive on the platform, and builds a deeper emotional connection with your audience.

4. Participate in Trending Topics

Paying attention to current popular challenges, hashtags, and memes on TikTok is key to keeping your content creation active and attractive. By entering “new trends/challenges for 2024” in the search bar, businesses can quickly learn about current popular content trends. These trends not only help brands interact with audiences, but also increase content exposure and dissemination, as well as enhance brand influence and visibility on the platform.

For example, if you find a certain hashtag is very popular, you can use that hashtag to connect your brand content to widely discussed topics, increasing the topicality and user engagement of your content.

Search results for “new trends for 2024”

5. Leverage User-Generated Content

Leveraging user-generated content (UGC) is an effective strategy to enhance brand influence and engagement. Encouraging your audience to create and share content related to your brand not only adds authenticity and credibility, but also promotes user participation and community interaction, building deeper connections.

For example, you can create exclusive brand hashtags or challenges to motivate users to participate in creative and fun ways. For outstanding UGC works that are recognized, we offer corresponding rewards to encourage more users to join in content creation.

6. Create Highly Entertaining Content

Creating highly entertaining content is key to attracting viewers and increasing engagement. Whether it's jaw-dropping dance moves, funny comedy sketches, or practical life hacks, these are great creative content ideas that can attract users to stop, like, and share.

7. Utilize TikTok's Features

Make use of TikTok's unique features to enhance your content and interact with your audience in innovative ways, such as duets, challenges, effects, and more.

By leveraging these unique features, you can create distinctive and eye-catching content on TikTok, build deeper interactions with the vast TikTok user base, and effectively increase your brand's visibility and influence. Meanwhile, continuously paying attention to and participating in popular trends and challenges on the platform can keep your content fresh and help you attract more fans and supporters.

TikTok sticker effect display

8. Collaborate with Influencers

By collaborating with influential TikTok creators, businesses can not only effectively promote their brand and products, but also leverage their platform resources and fan base to achieve more efficient social media marketing strategies, helping the brand gain more attention and market share in a competitive market.

When choosing, you need to consider the following:

· Whether the creator’s fan base matches the company's target audience;

· The compatibility between the creator’s style and the company’s products;

· The creator’s fan engagement rate, video views, and number of likes;

· The creator’s credibility and reputation;

· Specific terms and expected goals of the collaboration, including budget, collaboration format (such as video posting, promotional activities), content requirements, etc.

9. Run TikTok Ads

TikTok has a huge young user base, especially Gen Z and Millennials, who have strong purchasing power and influence. By running ads on TikTok, brands can directly reach these active young consumers and build brand awareness and loyalty.

The types of TikTok ads that companies can run include:

· TopView Ads

· In-Feed Ads

· Carousel Ads

· Collection Ads

· TikTok Spark Ads

· Branded Effect Ads

· Video Shopping Ads

· TikTok Image Ads

· Branded Hashtag Challenges

· TikTok Creative Challenge

As for how to run TikTok ads, companies can do it themselves, but if you don’t know how, you can also directly find a professional overseas marketing team to help, which is more time-saving and efficient, and the marketing results are more promising.

Midea: Screenshot of TikTok branded hashtag challenge

10. Track and Analyze Performance

After creating a business account and publishing content, it takes about 7 days to get preliminary data. You must regularly monitor the data to track the performance of your content, ad campaigns, and overall account. This helps you understand which content is most popular and which ads are most effective, so you can further optimize based on this information.

For example, you can use A/B testing to compare the effectiveness of different ad creatives and strategies, so you can identify the most effective ad format and improve your advertising results.

By mastering these 10 steps, companies going global can fully leverage TikTok for effective overseas marketing. Whether you want to attract viewers through creative content or reach your target audience with precise advertising, these strategies deliver significant results and help achieve global market expansion and brand growth.