The Guide to Making Good TikTok Videos for Business

If you are aiming your product or service at a young audience, there is no excuse not to use TikTok for your business. If that’s not enough, bear in mind that TikTok was the most downloaded app in 2021 with a whopping 656 million downloads - that’s double the population of the USA.

When it comes to selling products directly to consumers the story doesn’t change, with TikTok being the number one app for driving consumer spending. With that said, time is precious and you need your marketing efforts to offer constant return on investment. In this guide we’ll be offering the five steps for making good TikTok videos for business.

5 Tips for making good TikTok videos for business are:

1. Collaborate with influencers
2. Use relevant hashtags
3. Limit video length
4. Encourage interaction
5. Post at the right time

Let’s break those 5 tips down and get some social media case studies involved.

1. Collaborate with Influencers

Gymshark was one of the pioneering brands of influencer marketing. In fact, they were so early in the trend that it wasn’t even known as ‘influencer marketing’ at the time as founder Ben Francis looked to bring his favourite social media fitness stars into the ‘Gymshark Athlete’ club.

And whilst big influencers may be out of reach, you can still benefit hugely from including micro influencers in your TikTok video. And with the influencer marketing industry set to reach $16.4 billion in 2022, there are plenty of influencers to choose from.

When it comes to selecting the right influencer, it’s important to consider the following:

What is their engagement like? 

This can be more important than followers. Just like it can often be harder to gain a repeat purchase from a new customer, it can be harder to retain engagement from a new follower. 

You want viewers of your TikTok video to be commenting and replying to get that algorithm working in your favour, so make sure the influencer is known for this.

Does their personality fit your culture? 

Remember, audiences will compare themselves to the influencer of choice, so ensure they’re a great role model for you and for society in general. A great way to identify the right personality is to follow the influencer long before enquiring, watch their content untill the end and read the comments - you’ll soon get an idea of whether their personality is right for your TikTok video.

What’s their demographic? 

Whilst TikTok is hot with young users now, it’s important to target the specific demographic who are most likely to convert. So consider the age and gender of your ideal customer and find the perfect influencer with that demographic audience.

When it comes round to the video shoot, try to be creatively open to suggestions and feedback from the influencer. Remember that they’ve quite possibly made shed loads more content than your business - they’ll know what the audience likes to see and engage with.

2. Use Relevant Hashtags

The important word there being ‘relevant’. Use the discover tab in TiKTok to see which hashtags are currently trending and use relevant ones in your TikTok post.

Hashtags are a way of categorising content and have two main functions:

1. Making your content easier for others to find.
2. Making it easier for TikTok’s algorithms to understand.

You can add hashtags to video captions to help essentially label your content. Importantly, those hashtags are clickable: if you tap one hashtag, you’ll be taken to a search page with other videos that are also labelled.

Whilst you will be tempted to find reasons why broad hashtags are relevant to your TikTok video, if it’s completely relevant then it will ultimately impact your engagement negatively - engagement is what makes TikTok so special, it thrives on it.

3. Limit Video Length

Attention spans are shortening and it’s largely social media as the cause, with that said it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The speed in which young people can consume content and learn about your product or service is increasing, this means you can film less content and gain even better engagement.

Even TikTok themselves have admitted that their users have short attention spans. According to WIRED, 50% of TikTok users said they found videos longer than one minute to be “stressful,” while one in four of TikTok’s highest-performing videos fall in the app’s recommended optimal video length of 21-to-34 seconds.

This means you need to fit your entire message into less than 30 seconds of video to be within a shot of creating a good TikTok video for your business. But fear not, we have prepared some fantastic examples of short TikTok videos by other businesses here.

This video from StudentBeans is one of the very best, generating over 9.7 million impressions and a view-through rate of 60%:

4. Encourage Interaction

Central to TikTok’s rise is its algorithm which considers interaction and engagement very heavily when it comes to deciding what content a user will see. Therefore, making it easy for users to interact with your business video on TikTok is essential.

Here are three tried and tested ways you can encourage users to interact with your TikTok video:

1. Reply to comments with video content - TikTok is the only social network which allows users to seamlessly respond to comments with videos, and users absolutely love it.
2. Use analytics - Use TikTok Analytics to learn which of your videos has gained the most interaction, and use that to inform new content.
3. Use the Q&A feature - This feature can be found in creator tools and allows users to ask questions through a submission box which will then showcase them on the creator’s page. Once questions are posted, the creator can reply to them with a video.

Follow these three tips whilst posting as consistently as possible and your business videos on TikTok will soon be trending with your target audience.

5. Post at the Right Time

There’s no need to necessarily deep dive into any analytics or statistics here, by profiling your ideal customer, and understanding their daily habits and routines you can work out exactly when the best time to post is.

You’ll want to aim for a time where not only users will be active on TikTok but also when users will have the time to see more of your videos and purchase your product or service.

For example, if you’re targeting young professionals between the ages of 25 and 34, uploading your videos during the morning on weekends or during the evenings during the weekday is your best bet. 

Whereas if you’re targeting students, there may even be some less competitive times like 2 or 3am when students are returning home.

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We are Aura Ads, a unique performance creative agency designed for D2C eCommerce brands. We help clients sell more online and grow at scale with our bespoke video and static creative, delivered on a monthly basis. Find out more about our TikTok creative services, and book in for a 30 minute chat about how one of our content plans can help your business grow.

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