Should You Invest Your Time in TikTok?
TikTok is perhaps one of the top conversations in the social space. With millions of users and metrics going higher by the day, the service is currently the most popular social media buzz.
Like every trend, companies have been looking into the possibility of using TikTok to promote their business. So, it begs the question, “Is TikTok really worth it?” The short answer is a resounding “Yes,” and we’ll look into the details to see why below.
Understanding TikTok
TikTok is quite different from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media that most people are familiar with. It was built as a video-sharing platform.
With TikTok, users can create, edit, and share videos that last no longer than 15 seconds. You can add music, animations, special effects, and several filters to your videos to spruce them up.
Depending on the style of your video and what you included will determine how it reaches people. While you can share with your followers, there are also themes that your content can be placed under, certain hashtags can help determine how a video will rotate through with Tik Tok’s algorithm. The views are based on the viewer’s theme preferences and what Tik Tok has created for them.
TikTok is available on Android and iOS. The service has grown significantly over the past year, combining internet connectivity and artificial intelligence to change how users consume their information.
How TikTok Works
TikTok operates primarily using artificial intelligence. The service provides customized suggestions for videos and content based on your feed to send you videos directly. It also provides filters based on facial recognition data for you. The end goal is to provide users with precisely what they desire when they want it.
For now, TikTok is one of the best ways to reach people under 25. However, several members of the older generations are also using it to reach out to their base and build new audiences, and there have been significant success stories so far.
Understand What Performs Well on TikTok
Now that we understand what TikTok is, it’s beneficial to understand what drives this social media platform’s operation. If you run a business, you’re probably wondering how TikTok knowledge can translate to marketing gains. Well, the answer will depend on your target market and brand.
You will need to study TikTok before launching your business there. Just as it is with other social media platforms, you need to understand how best to develop posts that will rank and perform well on the service. It might take a while, but it’ll be well worth the effort.
To begin, you need to understand the type of content that performs well on TikTok. You will also need to learn how best to interact with the service’s users to ensure that your business easily fits into the platform and its audience. By knowing who you’re serving and how to reach them, you essentially find the right fit for your content overall.
As you dive into the best type of content on TikTok, keep the following in mind.
First, TikTok is all about creating visually appealing content. You simply need to check the trending page to find that out.
Also, keep in mind that most of the people on TikTok are between the ages of 16 and 24 but as the platform grows more age groups are getting involved.
You will need to approach engagement more creatively. If you’re hoping to come here with a serious sales pitch, you will not get far. Be fun and creative with your content.
Creating Attractive Content
With the two principles above, let’s look into the type of content you should create while on TikTok. To begin with, understand that you don’t need perfect, highly-polished videos. TikTok is more about simplicity than anything else. So, instead of making a large production budget, just get your phone and start filming.
As long as you keep your content funny and wacky, you can reach millions with amateur video quality. It’s all about being light-hearted and informal. If this tone doesn’t fit your business, TikTok might not be your preferred platform.
Capitalizing on TikTok Ads
Understanding its reach, TikTok recently introduced ad features to its platform. This feature is a significant boon for companies looking to sell themselves on TikTok.
With TikTok Ads, you can generally use the following ad formats:
a. In-feed native content
In-feed native content is basically an ad like the ones you see on popular social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. They are more like story ads, and they support several features like web clicks and app downloads.
b. Hashtag challenges
A hashtag challenge provides the best means of going viral via a promoted hashtag and ad campaign. If you’re looking to get user-generated content to promote your brand, this is the ideal way to go.
c. Brand takeovers
A brand takeover essentially allows a company to take over TikTok’s platform for a period. It is usually a day, and on that day, users will be able to create videos and GIFs with embedded links to landing pages, hashtag challenges, etc.
d. Branded lenses
Branded lenses are high-definition glasses like those you see on Snapchat. They allow you to meet with new users via branded content.
The Power of Branded Hashtag Challenges
If you’re really looking to get your brand on TikTok, hashtag challenges are a perfect way. With this approach, you can encourage TiKTokkers to develop or redesign content and incorporate your brand’s hashtag into them.
Several brands, including Chipotle and Guess, have used this trend with significant success.
When it comes to marketing your business, there is hardly a better way to go about it on TikTok than with a branded hashtag.
Call Up TikTok Influencers
Like any other social media platform, TikTok also has significant influencers who can help you build your brand. Simply pay them to participate in whatever you’re doing, and they can use their videos and reach to get their followers to do the same thing.
The benefit of these influencers is that they help you to do what you otherwise couldn’t with a regular ad. Millennials and GenZ are more opposed to ads. You can bypass that wall with an influencer and get your material in front of these people without them dreading the pause in their scrolling.
All in all, marketing on TikTok is definitely worth it especially if you have a younger audience. You just need to understand what works and what passes as useful content. From there, it’s easy to get your target audience to pay attention to you.
Do you need help with TikTok advertising? Are you a business owner or an agency, we offer white label advertising, contact us today!
5 Tactics For Great Customer Reviews
There are multiple factors that can affect the decision of a customer when making a purchase. A common approach for many is to ask their friends for recommendations or to conduct their research online.
Since buying online has become easier and faster than ever before, the internet often does a lot of the selling for a brand. This can have a major impact on whether or not a customer makes a purchase.
The reality is that the best sales representatives and marketers of a company are not the sole providers of sales. Existing customers also play a large role. According to experts, customers trust the recommendations of friends and family over any other type of online advertising from a brand. When there are no trusted recommendations, researchers found that more than 80% of consumers relied on online reviews instead.
For a business to keep up with the competitive, online-first market, they need to get their happy customers sharing positive reviews of their experiences. The good news is that most customers are happy to help. A majority of customers who were asked for a review were willing.
The real question is how does one get their customers to write these amazing reviews that help close deals? How do you ensure that customers are satisfied and happy enough to supply the positive reviews needed?
Below are 5 tactics that can help companies obtain great customer reviews:
1. Optimize the Content
Reviews can appear unsolicited from both satisfied and dissatisfied customers on third-party websites. When people are on your site, however, it’s best to ensure that they can easily leave reviews there.
Optimizing your website, social profiles, emails, and even blog posts can provide people with an easy way to write reviews. This includes:
- Installing website badges to quickly direct visitors to your Facebook, Amazon, and Yelp pages.
- Optimizing the website for mobile devices to accommodate users who arrive while performing searches on their phones.
- Keeping requests short if asking for customer reviews via email.
2. Provide Incentives
Customers value their time, so it’s important to ensure that brands are giving them reasons to leave a review.
Providing them with incentives can make customers want to provide their feedback. These incentives can come in the form of coupons or discount codes. Brands can also encourage entries to a contest to win gift cards or even cash.
3. Meet Customers in the Middle
Avoid emailing customers to ask them to leave a positive review on third-party channels like Yelp. Rather, you should ensure that your request matches the avenue where you want your customers to provide their reviews.
When deciding to send out an email to ask customers for reviews, ensure that the email has direct links to the exact place where you want them to leave their honest feedback. For example, brands that wish to obtain reviews on Facebook should request via Facebook Messenger. When asking for customer reviews from different platforms, it’s essential to make the request as integrated as possible. One of how this can be done is by linking to a Yelp page via the email signature.
4. Respond To All Reviews
No one is perfect, and mistakes can happen despite the effort made. Nothing can stop a customer from leaving a disappointing one-star review on your website, Facebook page, Google My Business, or Yelp listing.
Despite this, brands should always take their time to respond thoughtfully to these customers without being defensive. The best thing you can do in this scenario is to attempt to work out a resolution. This may even benefit the business in the long run.
Customers are humans too, and the idea of a compassionate and empathetic customer service team from a brand can have a positive effect. This will eventually lead to an increase in total reviews, especially good feedback.
5. Share Positive Reviews From the Past
When a company begins receiving positive feedback from its customers, it can keep the momentum up by highlighting and sharing the reviews with others. Doing so can inspire new customers in following the act and leaving great reviews themselves.
On TripAdvisor, Yelp, Google, and other review websites, it’s possible for business owners to pin specific reviews that are helpful. This is similar to upvoting, which can move reviews further up on the website so that more users can see them.
Ensure that you periodically do this for positive reviews so that the brand page consistently highlights the top feedback.
Another way is to share positive reviews via your social media channels to open up this option for the audience there. It’s possible to format positive feedback as quotes on Instagram or reshare positive reviews on your Facebook page for followers to see.
Social proof is one of the best marketing tactics available today. This means that if customers can see other people sharing positive reviews, there’s a higher probability of them doing the same.
Aside from securing new reviews from customers, companies should also spend time promoting positive feedback across their social media channels.
The Bottom Line
No matter the type of business you own, the truth is that online reviews have a huge impact on bringing in more customers.
To start gathering customer feedback at scale, the best approach is to incorporate it slowly into your business process. This begins with having an active strategy for customer service and online reputation. Brands can use templates and ask existing, happy customers for their reviews.
The more positive reviews that a business has, the more trustworthy they appear in the industry. This in turn creates trust in potential customers who discover the brand online.
This is also why companies should not shy away from simply asking their customers for a review. You can make it easy for people to provide positive feedback by asking at the right time and right place.
Tracking Your SEO Success With Google Analytics
Google Analytics has become an all-in-one tool that businesses worldwide require to ensure that their online efforts aren’t wasted. Considering that just about every company in today’s world now has an online presence, firms will need a reliable and effective strategy to acquire new customers — one such strategy is to get their businesses online and directly in their target audience’s faces.
However, building a website alone isn’t merely enough. You also need to ensure that it is performing as it should and that your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts are bearing fruits. Barring that, you’ll pretty much be spending so much money without getting much in terms of results.
To help with all of this, we have Google Analytics — a tool that provides insights into how your website performs online. They say, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” When it comes to SEO, measurement and insights will go a long way in determining overall success.
It’s easy for you to look into your SEO efforts and believe that keyword ranking alone is the most critical metric. After all, the more keywords you have, the higher the chances of getting traffic. However, solely focusing on your keywords won’t give you a holistic view of your SEO efforts and what it does to the organization.
By going more in-depth, you can understand what truly matters — organic keyword searches and how they lead to business profits. Gaining this understanding is what Google Analytics offers you.
So, how do you know whether you’re doing SEO right? How can you get Google Analytics to help show you the insights you need? What do you have to focus on? We’ll look into these below.
First Things First: Have Goals
You can’t know how well you’re performing in business if you don’t have objectives and goals. So, for your SEO efforts, do the same thing.
What do you want your SEO efforts to achieve? Are you looking to improve site visits alone? Do you want to use SEO for increasing sales? Whatever it is you plan to do, make it explicit and let it be known. It will help in shaping your work and letting you know whether you’re still on track.
Engage the Custom Segment Section
For a long time, the Custom Segment feature has been the primary part of Google Analytics. It is especially popular because it extends your target audience’s details and helps you gain even more insights and information about the people who make up your market.
All you need to do is enable the Google Analytics SEO dashboard and monitor all SEO results. The SEO dashboard will showcase reports that track data from several sources and channels towards your site. Some of the data it provides include:
- When users visit your site and how long they stayed
- The pages the user visited, from the landing page to the moment they left the site
- The device that the user used when logging on to your site
- Which of your goals was achieved
Often the data that this section provides will be instrumental in helping you understand the nature of your traffic and the people who visit your site. You can also gain insights into some of their activities and use those to make better decisions.
Measuring SEO Traffic Quality
Measuring quality isn’t an exact science — especially when it comes to SEO. Some believe it to be subjective, while others don’t. However, even many people who think that you can measure traffic quality tend to stop at the search metric.
In truth, there are better ways to measure your SEO tariff quality. The most common tool is the Assisted Conversions report. With this report, you can set a date range and compare the traffic you got within that range with the previous method. Eventually, you’re left with a periodic comparison of conversions that you get from search directly. In the event of checking multiple visits to your site, you can also see the conversions where search helped out.
With this report, you can easily check for improvements or declines in your search traffic quality. If you find that conversions from search are decreasing, but your overall search traffic is growing steadily, you can easily see that the traffic coming from search isn’t of the highest quality.
Simultaneously, if you start focusing on a more refined set of keywords and see that conversions from search traffic are growing, you can easily see an improvement in SEO traffic.
To use the Assisted Conversions report, simply go to the “Conversions” section. Click on “Multi-Channel Funnels,” and you’ll see “Assisted Conversions.”
Focus on Site Loading Speed
Loading speed is critical when it comes to building a site. In fact, your site shouldn’t load for over five seconds. If loading takes too long, visitors will skip the site entirely.
Considering that it is a critical aspect of SEO, you will need to focus on site speed and optimize it. Monitor the metric across different platforms and keep it at its optimal levels. This way, visitors can engage with your site pages and improve conversion rates.
Google has a Speed Analyzer Tool that you can use to test your site’s speed. You can monitor the metric on Google Analytics to find more details.
Consider Your Best-Performing Pages
One of the best ways to replicate results and know where you stand will be to consider some of your best-performing pages across the board. With this data, you can essentially replicate the same components that these pages have and use them to optimize the views on your least-performing ages.
Essentially, look through your top pages every month and optimize them for the following:
- Conversion
- Readability and user intent
- Freshness (essentially, update their content if the need arises)
The truth is that some pages will perform better than others. So, you can easily get what works for the big hitters and use them to improve the conversions and views of the least-performing pages. It’s that simple.
