TikTok Content Strategy Guide 2024
TikTok is a powerhouse for video marketing. This platform has opened opportunities for creators, brands, and marketers to connect with their ideal audiences creatively and interactively. Creating content that resonates with your audience and drives action takes a strong TikTok content strategy to support.
This article will guide you through optimizing your content strategy to share more than just videos on this app.
What Content is Successful on TikTok?
What content works on TikTok? While this is a video-dominated platform, image carousel posts have arrived, creating a more diverse content mix. This unlocks multiple avenues for brand storytelling and audience engagement. Considering over 70% of US TikTok users are between the ages of 18 and 34, brands must understand the behaviors and interests of this demographic.
SEO-friendly content
TikTok is becoming a leading search engine and nearly half of Gen Z prefer TikTok and Instagram over Google. Brands can utilize SEO strategies to reach their audiences through searches and keywords. Conducting keyword research for TikTok will reveal key trending phrases and searches to weave within your content, helping increase visibility.
TikTok’s unique value lies in its algorithm, granting a fair playing field for all accounts – regardless of followers. Brands should focus on creating quality content that connects with their target audience over quantity.
Social Selling
This network also has the highest in-app purchase revenue in the world, making it highly lucrative and compatible with social selling. Shopping and product tagging features offer seamless user and buying experiences. The highly engaged atmosphere creates a powerful advertising platform, especially when utilizing influencer and affiliate marketing. Metricool’s 2024 TikTok Ads study explores what strategies lead to successful campaigns. Download the full study here:
“Unhinged” Marketing
TikTok users flock to the network for a sense of relatability in a noisy social media environment. Many brands like Duolingo, Nutter Butter, and Scrub Daddy have embraced an “unhinged” marketing approach on TikTok to connect with younger audiences, humanize their brand, and have humor be a main content pillar in their strategy. This approach is weird and bold, but it’s working, explaining the nature of this app.
Determining if Your Target Audience is on TikTok
Now that you understand what type of content works well on the network, how can you determine if your audience is active on TikTok? Creating your ideal buyer personas brings your clients to life including their behaviors, pain points, aspirations, and buyer type.
Metricool’s TikTok analytics reveal key insights into your audience and content results, to understand which content works best. You can access this information for free by creating your Metricool account, which you can do here. This includes a list of your top-performing posts in the period, impression sources, and average video views to understand how well you’re retaining and reaching your audience.
Tok’s native app insights feature has metrics for up to a year, providing insights about your content, viewers, followers, and LIVEs.
Benefits of Creating a TikTok Content Strategy
Before opening a new marketing channel, you want to know your efforts will pay off, right? Creating a TikTok content strategy guides what content you post and the goals you want to achieve.
Overall, this is a powerful piece of your marketing mix with multiple benefits such as:
- Organized content planning: A social media calendar is a roadmap to what content you’re posting, strategically organizing your content.
- Benchmarked goals: As you create content, benchmark the results against your goals and objectives. This will ensure you’re continuing to improve your strategies.
- Activated TikTok posting frequency: Creating a consistent content calendar will stimulate your audience to engage with your profile.
How to Create an Effective TikTok Content Plan
Step by step, let’s walk through the foundations you need for your TikTok content strategy. Six steps should be defined before executing your plan, which you can follow here:
1. Define your TikTok marketing goals
One of the most important benefits of creating a TikTok content plan is being able to benchmark your marketing goals and objectives. This allows you to measure tangible KPIs and continue to develop your strategy. Of course, it’s also recommended to great SMART objectives that define the plan on achieving the goal(s).
Common goals for a TikTok content strategy can include:
- Brand awareness: The aim is to create content that reaches and connects with new users to increase reach, impressions, and brand recognition. A realistic objective may be, “Increased TikTok reach by 10% by the end of the quarter through publishing 5 videos a week instead of 3.
- Sales: If you want to drive sales through TikTok, consider creating a profile shop to offer seamless in-app purchasing. This objective can be a specific figure, number of sales, decreased cart abandonment, or increased order value.
- Engagement: Online communities are fostered with high engagement, so focus on measuring interactions for an engagement approach. This can include increased video views, interactions, watch time, and engagement rate.
- Customer satisfaction: This goal is more for oriented towards eCommerce businesses, but can align with any brand’s objectives. A happy customer is likely to continue supporting your business and share it with others.
2. Determine your content pillars
Now is the time to build your content foundation, meaning defining the themes and tones you plan to execute in your content. This depends on your offerings and what other resources or education you plan to provide your customers. We recommend choosing between 3-5 to diversify the content mix and ensure you’re balancing branded vs. non-branded posts.
For example, if you’re a vintage clothing store, your content pillars may include sharing new finds with your audience, supplying vintage style tips, and weaving fashion and pop culture moments to relate to your online audience.
The tone of voice is also important to increase brand recognition and consistency. Think of your brand in character traits, which will help drive your messaging.
3. Analyze your competitors
Next, it’s important to understand how you compare within your industry. For this, analyze content views, engagements, strategies, and top-performing posts. You can also monitor which videos first amongst related keywords to see how your competitors rank on the platform. These keywords are vital to understanding what your audience is searching for.
4. Define your TikTok target audience
If you’ve determined your audience is active on TikTok, this is where your buyer persona comes in handy. When creating content, consider how you can share solutions, resources, and inspirations for your customer’s main pain points.
If you have multiple personas, define each using demographics metrics such as age, gender, location, and behavior metrics such as most active times, engagement sentiment, and how they can utilize your products or services. Metricool’s Best Times feature provides percentages for when your audience is most active. This way, you can publish content for these hot times to increase engagement.
5. Organize your content calendar
Planning your content will give your social media peace of mind when creating content. Instead of scrambling last minute for a content idea, scheduling content eliminates this unnecessary stress.
Enhance your content planning processes with Metricool’s drag-and-drop planner that auto-publishes content to multiple platforms for you. Whether you want to plan across each platform individually or bulk schedule content, the tool helps save time and unifies tools in one. Plus, Metricool’s Google Drive and Canva integrations allow you to accomplish your social media tasks without leaving the platform.
6. Create quality content
“Quality” content doesn’t necessarily mean the most aesthetically pleasing. While you should publish images and videos with high resolution, quality content connects with your audience. This is accomplished by frequently posting content that meshes your content pillars, tones, and CTA’s that drive users through the whole consideration funnel.
This content example includes a clear message – seeing the inside to an influential online celebrities’ personal music presences. Spotify’s caption asks users to comment if they’ve made a playlist for a romantic interest, provoking conversations and vulnerability.
7. Stay active and engaged with your audience
Users utilize comments and direct messaging to ask questions, provide feedback, and seek resources. It’s crucial to stay in touch with engaged users to foster your relationships. Responding to messages across multiple channels can become overwhelming. However, Metricool’s inbox management feature centralizes all social media messages in one place.
If you find yourself responding with the same message to customers, the Saved Text feature lets you save frequently used responses.
8. Analyze your content results
If you haven’t noticed, metrics are kind of our jam. Analyzing your TikTok results is crucial to measuring your goals and improving your strategies. I briefly mentioned Meticool’s TikTok analytics, but that didn’t touch the surface of this tool.
View a Brand Summary to compare all active social media changes or dive into specific content results. Select the period to analyze, up to three months on the free plan or up to a year with a Premium plan.
The list of posts shows the top-performing content in the period, measured by views, likes, comments, shares, reach, video duration, and engagement. This will reveal patterns and strategies to reuse in content.
Free Social Media Plan [3 FREE Planning Templates]
Assembling your TikTok content strategy is possible with the mentioned foundations. Each network’s social plan may differ considering the audiences, content formats, and usage. To ease your content strategizing, follow this video to access three powerful social media plan templates. Rather than starting from scratch, jumpstart your strategy here:
