What's Happening; Recalling TikTok Trends, Strategies & Brands that Grew in Q3
This Week; I share a report on where TikTok brands, influencers are heading. Alongside that, what strategies are working the best to scale on the app.
I’m rolling out new series about different social media platforms, what’s in it? I would share a list of strategies, influencers and reports to help you scale on multiple social media apps. Starting today with TikTok.
BTW, Before I launch the online discord community next month. I would like to connect with you on LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok. Choose your favourite social media app to connect with me. - Jaskaran Saini, Your Fav Strategist.
Back to TikTok Marketing and strategies;
TikTok Performative Strategies that work
Wait until you realise media content isn’t value, it’s strategically designed loop.
1/ The Blue Keyword Strategy
TikTok’s relevancy system connects post comment conversation with overall niche trends. That’s how you see that blue searchable keyword in comments or above the comment section. What’s the strategy?
Search for the topic you want to create content about, I searched ‘marketing’.
Click on the three dots and select these filtered settings(shown below) to refine your TikTok results.
After that, Scroll through the results and find the video with that highlighted 'blue comment.
Use that comment as the main keyword because the blue tag shows it’s still being searched by a lot of people.
Try to include that keyword in the starting part of your video or caption.
Extra; In the search bar you can see an additional keyword. That shows relevancy of the video to a specific industry or niche. Not the same as the blue keyword representing ‘trends’, the upper keyword represents ‘niche' or topic’.
2/ Stolen Exposure Strategy always works.
Seema R is a creator talking about history and Art, boring stuff. Nope, watch this video from her. The way she uses a popular figure ‘Anderson Cooper’ and connects him with ‘New York City floods’ to double the amount of exposure she gets, if she posted a separate video about Anderson Cooper, very likely the engagement would decline a bit compared to how she used a current event to reach a wider audience.
Your Idea + Highly exposed topic → More Reach (not confirmed) Why?
Beehiiv, the demonic sister of substack on TikTok recently used this strategy for a video, right here. But they failed because the strategy does need brands/creators to address the common points and relevancy of subject.
Your Idea + Highly Exposed Topic + You addressing that topic at some point in the video → More Reach and relevancy.
Examples; Mischief US, PGATour, NoGood and Every brand jumping on Taylor Swift trend + Influencer Campaign example; Alex and Jones.
Caution; There are recent arguments that brands are making everything about themselves, trying to be funny and all. When they are not funny at all. These arguments are kind of true, that’s why make sure to not make it all about you.
3/ Using the right sounds/audio matters
Every time I click on an audio especially when it’s trending. On Average, I saw 8-10 videos using that sound. Recently I clicked on the track ‘Agora Hills by Doja Cat’ and ended up watching more than 15 videos using that sound.
TikTok Music → First Music Audience → Second Content Audience
Sound influences how we perceive content, I post imagery content on TikTok and many other creators are very careful about the sounds they use to give the content an aesthetic and niched appeal. Images paired with Jazz and Lofi beats to give a reading experience. Check the links above and see the image content to video content ratio, Always do the same for most audios.
One of my favourite brand using the TikTok audio strategy at its best has to be Porsche. They have been very clever with use of different sounds to represent the cars in different scenarios.
4/ Impulse Purchase Strategy
Recalling the data shared last week, Gen-Z and Millennials are making impulse purchases off TikTok and instagram. A great example would be Pickle Sweatshirt Trend where one purchase video got hundreds of users and influencers posting about their purchase. What drives an impulse purchase on TikTok?
1/ Location; Most of the videos were filmed in the kitchen, building viewership relevancy about wearing pickle shirt in kitchen is cool.
2/ Demographic; The similarity in an ideal demographic posting about the sweatshirt leads to retargeting.
3/ The Timing; Accessibility becomes an important to keep the loop alive and for this product TikTok shop made it possible.
It’s important to realise that people are going through videos like they do window shopping. To stop them you don’t show shiny objects instead you focus on similar objects/people that remind them of what they like the most. Ex; Keith Lee, Mark Boutilier, AARP using Gen-X celebs, etc.
User Strategies every brand needs because without them
They can’t survive the landspace of tiktok. If you don’t know these factors/behaviours and build the strategy out. You will be always left wondering why they get views doing the same thing and we fail.
1/ Obsession with “Validation” needs to answered.
Your content needs to address the viewer’s idea of validation to make them like or follow you. Because if your existing audience doesn’t speak up to share their POV and help new followers validate their decision. You only get views nothing else.
How Is it done?
Self-validation; I am Wendy, wealth management expert at Dave Ramsey’s show and this is why I think that “opening a Revoult bank” is a great financial decision. (You showed why your opinion matter)
Organic Validation; X, Y, Z users in the comments speakinh for you. (And I can tell most brands have silent comment sections)
That’s why always try to include “self-validation” to get users to interact.
2/ UGC Content arises from “Performative Nihilism”
What I have learned from the “what about me” effect on TikTok & every dumb person speaking about the “Israel-Palestine” conflict is “internet preaches performative nihilism”.
And brands need to answer that need of internet users either by making their ideal customers preach PN for their business or help their Customers out of the idea of performative social media usage & nihilism.
Now, You may ask? Like what the f*ck is this? I answer;
NP: It’s simply the urge of social media users to rely on algorithms to find like-minded people based on their beliefs & Ideologies. Because it is a shortcut to friendships & influence that are personalized for them. And their beliefs are not challenged.
(Hey, I don’t want to go deep into Gen-Z and Millennial consumers in this post, It’s in working) Back to Tiktok Strategy Part:
A majority of media consumption on Social Media was related to idea of being in the loop but the idea of “For You Page” made everyone realise it is about them. And now, everone is part of that loop.
For Brands, Performative Nihlism means their ideal users having enough space & context to express the thoughts about the product and feel performative to talk or express. How you do that?
1/ You have to make your users feel like part of the conversation, most brands make them feel like children being ordered.
2/ Ask yourself; are you leaving a space for them to speak?
3/ Mainly, Do you know them enough? Because if you knew that. You would know what drives them.
3/ Laugh Tracks Died for Survival of Comedy, Awareness died for survival of Communities.
This User behaviour and trend of online/offline communities arrived after highly active online tiktok users had enough of being aware + creating awareness.
Example; Friends, A show filled with jokes & laugh tracks used fillers to fill the empty space. An average TikTok user, used content to fill the emptiness in his life or free time.
Again, What the hell am I talking about?
A majority of early successful brands on TikTok, knew the long term answer wasn’t to focus on creating more awareness or conversion. That’s why they started their communities and moved to interactivity practices.
You can give, give, give and then take,take,take. But users will never feel the loyalty a brand seeks. To explain, If you look at laugh tracks vs jokes in some shows like Big Bang Theory or Friends. You can see that’s what they did for a longer show runtime, they had a great exchange flow. But what made them survive (aka successful) for so long is “character story”.
The Character Story on TikTok is “online communities”. It’s impossible that you can survive as a feelings/value content trader on TikTok. Everyone is doing that. The way out is to bring the audience to a feeling and space that is unique.
Examples; Lululemon is more successful due to their offline events. Fortnite isn’t successful due to streamers, it’s because of their In-platform Community. Duolingo isn’t winning long term because of tiktok, it wins because a million of their viewers go back to leaderboard chart in their app.
This behaviour & strategy is important to you when you have enough awareness and need to perserve it. Or you have a mature audience that seeks meaning.
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Critiquing TikTok Brands
These are my observations, most teams are doing their best and possibly hold off on strategies due to internal pressure.
1/ Athletic Greens; Overall I saw the act of repurposing content was at a huge play but they could have utilised Andrew Huberman’s content a little better by giving it more attention-capturing starting. Possibly a team member coming in first to capture the attention- But overall great act of distribution and content repurposing.
2/ Chipotle; I love their content series content like the best dips, what most people order. Content types are repeated every quarter and the brand’s strategy remains; if you like this, if you don’t know this, you will love X or Y, etc. What I wish they did; Constantly users are asking for ‘al pastor’ and other old products. They could include that in series, if you enjoyed our old X product, this is very similar just use this hack.
3/ Aldi Uk; They have a new mix of Dog content mixed with their regular content of cooking and Shopping deals. I hope they continue with that, dog wholesome content combined with supermarket deals. That’s like dream of money-saving buyers.
4/ Kleinanzeigen; AI Storytelling seems to be working great for german brands, especially this one. They have been pushing harder than others with AI-voiceover stories. And it works.
5/ Ganni; I loved their strategy of Selfie Outfit content videos from above with no-face in them. It helps the audience imagine themselves in the video wearing those outfits.
6/ Attention Seeker; Not a Brand, It’s the most followed Marketing agency on TikTok. The team has figured out a way to use their community’s feedback as a loop to build out as much content possible. Recently they gained 100k new followers off a challenge to get tattoo.
7/ Drumstick; This Brand is using White background, Simple graphic design content to be witty and funny. It works for them as they have been doing it for so long. Especially with TikTok pushing carousel content very consistently, they have also utilised the trending audio strategy to the fullest.
8/ Reddit; It’s like a version of Barstool sports but reddit likely doesn’t beg for copyright access of viral content. And that’s how they are scaling with Reddit’s UGC content on TikTok. But my suggestions are reddit can do much better with their Logo & characters if they go-like Duolingo.
9/ Ogilvy & ASUS; What caught my attention was both brands practiced the same strategy of “Silly Tasks Done”. This content format is being used by others too. Watch Ogilvy & ASUS here.
10/ C4Energy; The Brand remains very consistent with their “meme to product” transition strategy and based on timing and relevancy organic reach of content increases.
11/ Tinder; The influencer Taxi Series from Tinder is one of the best pieces of social content on Tiktok. And the marketing team is clearly using best of their influencer knowledge, to make sure they get best arguments out of influencers.
12/ Essence Cosmetics; I honestly didn’t dig enough into their strategy because they are using product-focused content. And are clearly winning with it, recently they pushed more towards 1-minute+ long content when partnering with influencers. Leaning into what TikTok wants more from brands and creators.
13/ PwC Switzerland; I have to say while many Ad Agencies & Corporate companies struggle with the generic office parody content. PwC is growing their community steadily by being more about the humans at PwC.
14/ Shell; As you may know Oil companies are trying to become human and empathetic towards consumers. And Shell’s strategy is to focus on people rather than product or their brand. And it is working, not much backlash on their STEM channel.
Honorable Mentions aka Brands to Check; Duolingo’s patnership with Saw X, Elf Cosmetics, Penguinbookaus, Deutsche Bahn (Tree Series), Redbull, Milwaukee public Library (must check), United Airlines, TLDV.io and your favourite brand.
I would appreciate you replying and share your fav tiktok brand for me to look at it.
Trends; Ads, Formats & Influencers
1/ EU brands continue to push their viral organic funny content as TikTok Promoted Ads to reach more people. The key strategy for many remains awareness about their existence on tiktok app.
2/ Content targetting “Self-awareness” and highlighting behaviour of different demographics continues to rise. More and more brands/influencers are becoming more open about how they potray their buyers.
3/ Many Brands have huge influencer faces representing them, like AG1 had Andrew Huberman & WHOOP had Steven Bartlett. But the organic reach didn’t grew with their presence on brand channel. On other hand, when an influencer or user uses their name. Algorithm pushes it further, I experienced that for my own content. Not to name the brand or influencer, on my tiktok. I posted about a big influencer leading to my account getting an engagement hike. But the brand failed when they repurposed influencer content.
4/ Ad Pattern/Retargeting; I am observing a lack of advertisers doing retargeting and not many are building an Ad pattern to influence the audience. As I am writing this, I was pitched the same video from a recruitment company possibly 40th time and the Ad Creative wasn’t changed at all.
5/ “Borrowed Trust” - When brands are doing content about their product, one of the most important question to ask during production; what’s our source of borrowed trust for the video? Because when you are making it about you, it’s a pattern disrupt. A borrowed trust Act is use of testimonial, problem, trusted figure, etc in the video.
6/ Important; The Brands & Influencers that look at SMBs & Influencers are being more healthy about the art of content creation. Because you have to realise that duolingo, wendy’s, and others are brands that succeed with their funny behavior. Look at failed brand ideas you will find a pattern there, because I did.
7/ Offline Events Content; Many brands post employee pictures and especially outfit content like Slack did in this video. The only problem here is, your employees are unknown to an external audience. It’s important to write your caption for events post like you are asking a stranger, How do I look? You don’t just ask, you give context to a stranger, which is important.
8/ Influencers are dying, we only have accidental creators. We all create conversations and tiktok right now impowers all creators with an opinion and knowledge about something. Social listening is becoming far more important due to this growing trend. Brands are taking it easy by partnering with trending influencers only.
9/ Hand Movement while talking is a huge initiative to make people more attentive to the content.
I know Jada Pinkett Smith, gave “Deinfluencing” a Boost.
Jada is currently on a campaign run for her book launch and I have to say, she’s not acting like she does in movies.
Media Channels are no-face businesses. They survive this stuff, influencers hold more human values and the audiences are losing the trust in them as Jada partners with these established influencers.
So far, I have encountered Jada’s strategy is to be exposure focused. And it’s not cool when audience realises that unaligned collaborations happen due to money, deinfluencing is on the edge waiting.
I am not blaming influencers. Based on Jada’s history, It’s likely that influencers didn’t had much creative freedom. Still, my observation remains the same influencers and brands harm or scare away the audience by stealing away the creative freedom from influencers.
PS; The Theory of Every type of publicity works proves me wrong for now. As Jada’s book is #1 best seller on Amazon this week. For more into Jada’s strategy, I recommend reading this post breaking down her story.
Rant & Unfiltered Views Begin;
I think TikTok Brands needs Patience, Creative & Better Repurposing
1/ Many creators believe that tiktok growth needs at least 12-20 posts in the beginning or after inactivity to kickstart your growth. And I believe that too, I call it “Authority time”. Tiktok in someway tests your content and account in the beginning or after inactivity.
2/ The Office Strategy
I think much of success for Corporate brands lies in studying “The Office; US”.
At the end, Cast is seen thanking how the story was potrayed because editors shortened the story to the elements most relatable for outside workd. Now, overall the show was scripted no one filmed them in real-time.
But, The office US is reality of today’s best strategies.
Record everything.
Allow the characters to view themselves.
Show the videos to a strange person or anyone but not the character in the video.
Get perspective of both sides together.
Learn the art of story editing from books like The Story Grid. And you have your own show like Office.
If you think I’m stretching it out. May be I am but many media and magazine businesses like sheer luxe & Barstool sports are doing this from last year. They can afford it because they are running a media business. But my suggestion, anyway possible try this idea.
3/ I think TikTok influencer marketing struggles from a similar problem as Youtube’s VPN sponsor issues.
Quality youtubers are still promoting Nord VPN. Tiktok creators pushing boundaries are getting buried by influencers with an aesthetic to their content. Most brands, new to influencer marketing stick to formats. And I hope it gets better.
4/ Keep the starting Hook of the Video & Image, short that’s the mantra, I have been sharing text content on tiktok and it likely takes most people more than a minute or so to read. Attention capturing is becoming harder but what you say next matters the most.
5/ Fetish Content works and it also helps you to get better insights and feedback out of the audience
6/ News; If you remember the post where I mentioned TikTok’s US marketing strategy. TikTok made that strategy accessible for everyone. This week, launch of ‘Out-of-phone’ ad format, brings OOH to TikTok. (source)
The Original Guide I wrote about TikTok;
I originally wrote the guide about TikTok earlier this year and it took me a while to write and research. Obviously it’s not ranking no.1 on Google, but it’s one of the best guides you will ever read. I tried to dive deep into how TikTok Algorithm works and how brands and new businesses grow on TikTok.
Random Question;
If you are planning, I would love to share a review on Sunday with you. LMK.
The End; Dessert is here?
Show this if someone asks about Gen-Z. (watch)
Ogilvy Germany’s new Ad for IKEA Halloween. (Here)
Snapchat partnered with Captiv8, allowing businesses to find snap creators easily. (LI)
VML, A new agency is here from WPP’s merger of Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R. (announce)
X to charge $1 per month to every user, shocked? (source)
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I plan to send the overall news update as usual on Sunday, in future you will get exclusive updates as the online discord launch is close now. Only few weeks are left.
Plus, You can join the paid newsletter to support my work and research.
- Jaskaran
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