TikTok is a great tool that synchronizes with the younger audiences and has racked up millions of downloads globally. Big brands are effectively using TikTok for its brand awareness rather than generating traffic or leads and Marketers promote their brands on different channels to attract required and relevant customers. Brands need to be creative and innovative to truly gain attention from the audience.

TikTok helps brands to engage the younger audiences by showing the lighter sides of the brands through funny videos, challenges and other major strategies. Start branding and promotion through TikTok as an effective medium, get maximum reach at least investment.

The following are the best practices around TikTok marketing, and this is a great time to start getting inspired by brands.

Tactics Brands Can Employ On TikTok

1. Behind-The-Scenes:

TikTok is a hub for creativity and humor. Make your company more relatable and trustworthy by showing the different sides of your company. The more original and creative content is, the easier it is for others to share. This technique is an exponentially effective piece of content that can be created reasonably unique.

2. Experiment:

Unlike social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, TikTok doesn’t have as many norms, rules or best practices about what works and what doesn’t. TikTok is incredibly new, find something new, funny, interesting and just try doing it and find how many likes, comments, and shares it gets.

3. Engage With Audience:

The more you engage with the audience, the more fans base could grow. Start engaging your audience with videos, challenges, creative ideas and aim to interact with others. TikTok Challenges are the pillars of promoting brands and events as they show the relevance of the product. Businesses seek help form third party providers to reach new audiences by increasing TikTok Likes, Comments and Impressions which gains brand popularity.

Reasons Why Brands Consider Using Tiktok

1. Native Ads

TikTok’s full-screen mode helps in advertising your brand’s products and services and it is the best tool for businesses to get noticed and clicked.

TikTok In-feed advertisements provide the best options of adding website links, and order now buttons on the ads itself which direct users to the page without leaving the application. These ads are unskippable, can be designed in multiple ways to attract customers. The account holder can view the insights for each ad to keep track of click-through rates, total views, impressions, and engagements.

2. Hashtag Challenge

In Hashtag Challenge, TikTok users get to see a specific type of banner ad that would take users to the landing page of instructions and rules of the featuring challenge.

Depending upon the content and engagement, the ad would get traffic on the discover page. Each hashtag challenge ad traffic can be measured with insights that include ad views; user-generated content, ad clicks, number of banner views, and engagements.

3. User-Generated Content

User-generated content is an ultimate expression for user engagements that has dramatically increased the popularity for marketers over the past few years. It is potentially capable of working successfully for the social advertisement of brands and easier for nonprofits and businesses with less engagement.

User-generated content is similar to the hashtag challenge, which involves TikTok users to upload videos by doing whatever is asked in the challenge. The best way is to encourage the audience to promote your brand or businesses cause by creating and uploading suitable content.

4. Brand Takeover Ads

Brand takeover ads play an important role in TikTok advertising where images, short videos, and GIFs acts as the predecessor of the brands landing page or hashtag challenge. It is an effective advertising technique because; TikTok marketing tools are simple, user- friendly that has got great effects on marketing or branding a particular product or service.

Brand takeover ads are category exclusive, you have to be a significant brand to stage a TikTok brand takeover and hence only a single brand can take over a particular category per day. Brand takeover ads reach can be measured by impressions, click rates, and view rates insights.

5. User Demographics

TikTok is focused on younger audiences when compared to Facebook which targets everyone. They targeted millennials not only for their customer acquisition campaigns but also because TikTok built an application with a UX that is user-friendly. TikTok mainly focuses on the front camera, to create viral video content which has enabled many millennials to become TikTok Stars.

TikTok is growing despite being similar in style to various other popular platforms. TikTok is definitely a go-to platform for businesses and brands that want to reach an audience of younger generations.

6. Participation

User-generated content enables users to post ideas and content by themselves tagging the trending topic and concerned brands. This type of method promotes causes and brands with tools and features that make it easy for users.

User participation is considered the most accessible and engaging mode in the TikTok advertising strategy. For example, the restaurant owners run ads in such a way to attract customers to participate. They add the DIY (Do It Yourself) option along with the menu, where users can select it and video the way their food is made as per their choice of ingredients. The User participation engaged more users to film their experience with the TikTok app which encouraged more users to participate.

7. Influencer Marketing

There are many young stars on TikTok who are incredibly popular with their fans, which makes TikTok an ideal platform to engage in influencer marketing. TikTok with its fun and addictive format has seen a massive surge in users and has over 500 million active monthly users globally.

TikTok is an addictive and engaging short video sharing platform that is continuing to gain popularity. TikTok influencers at their best, dominate the channel by creating fun and entertaining content to engage the audience. Brands get collaborated with influencers as they can help in reaching a larger audience base.

Brands need to ensure that they strike a genuine relationship with their TikTok influencers so that they remain authentic to their audience.

8. Improve Followers Engagement

Brands need to improve followers’ engagement to take TikTok marketing to the next level. Follower’s engagement would ensure that you do not give any room for the audience to stop following you.

1. Pose a question– Ask concerned questions with your fans to make them feel engaged. Make sure you ask open-ended questions regularly.

2. Engage with other brands– Engaging with other brands is a beneficial aspect that allows you to make your brand popular in other ends. Share contents that are objectively useful. Traffic generated would lead to sales.

3. Feedback– Get feedback from customers and make your brand relevant to your audience.

4. Respond to everyone– Value your customers by responding to their comments. The more valuable the response you provide; the more loyalty you earn in return.

5. Hashtags– Boost your brand visibility with the proper use of hashtags. Generally, posts with hashtags get more engagements when compared to posts without hashtags.

Conclusion

TikTok marketing is most suitable for building engagement, enthusiasm, and reach rather than direct selling. Most brands increase brand awareness by marketing on TikTok which in turn increases popularity, credibility, and potential user engagements. TikTok is surprisingly loved; indeed it is one of the most downloaded applications in the world.
TikTok marketing strategies for businesses have now set new trends, popularity, and reach capabilities that are rising each month passing by and marketers must consider using TikTok as one of their marketing media if they haven’t done yet.

This guest post was written by Sarah from Trollishly.

You may have a vibrant, visually stimulating and feature-rich WordPress website, but if it is not optimized for search engines, it doesn’t really have much value. In fact, search engines don’t really care about the website design or the high definition, attractive images you have put up. All they care about are quality content, alt tags, keywords, good URL structure, and much more.

Fortunately, WordPress is a hassle-free CMS platform which makes it easy to configure almost all the aspects of your website.

A clear sitemap, relevant keywords and good quality content makes it more likely that Google crawlers will rank your website highly on search engines. Conversely, broken links, duplicate content and non-responsive web design can bring your rankings down.

A robust WordPress setup can make it easy for bots to crawl through your webpages and give your business a boost.

Here are some important WordPress SEO tips to apply on your website, which can help to boost your SERP rankings:

Create Well-Structured Permalinks

Permanent links or “permalinks” are automatically generated by WordPress. These URLs provide the path or link to the web pages and posts. The default permalink generated by WordPress are numeric and they do not provide any clear or useful information to search engines. For instance,

www.example.com/?p=123

Such a permalink will not do any good for your website to rank higher on search engines. Instead, using clear and descriptive structure that defines the content of the page will make it easier for search engines to understand and boost the ranking of the page.

Long-tail keywords in the permalinks can enhance the search engine rankings. The reason for this is that long-tail keywords are mostly precise and not very competitive. Hence, customizing permalinks is the way forward to ranking higher on SERPs.

Want to quickly find a high volume long tail keyword for your target keyword? Use KeywordTool. It’s free, and it’s quick.

Changing the permalink structure of web pages in WordPress is quite an easy task. Just login to the WordPress website backend, navigate to settings, click on the permalink tab and change it accordingly.

Set-Up Yoast SEO Plugin

This plugin assists you in building an optimized website. The Yoast SEO plugin highlights the problems and provides suggestions to fix them. The plugin settings also give you better control over how your links are displayed.

Here is how Yoast plugin helps in website development:

• Analyses structure of your content by pointing out long sentences and paragraphs, lack of transition words and much more.
• Examines keyword density and provides suggestions to lower or increase it.

• Follows the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease formula and suggests changes accordingly. This technique analyses the sentence structure to make sure you are creating readable content.
• Meta descriptions play a major role in ranking your web pages on search engines. The Yoast SEO plugin gives you the place to create your own meta description while simultaneously indicating if it is optimized according to Google algorithms.
• Yoast SEO plugin will warn you if there is a page on your website that has not been updated in the last six months. Because outdated pages can pull the ranking of your website down.
• With the paid version of Yoast SEO plugin, you will not have to be worried about the redirection of a page when you delete it. It easily redirects old URLs to new ones.
• Social Sharing is made easy with Yoast SEO plugin. It has an built-in ability to share information on social media.

XML Sitemap Can Boost Rankings

A sitemap is a must for all WordPress websites. It is a list of all the pages in a website. Hence, sitemaps enable search engines to crawl your website better, as it displays the structure of your website.

Sitemaps enable search engines to crawl all webpages you want to make visible. Higher the number of indexed pages better the visibility of your website.

Sitemaps are not for navigation or internal linking; these are for search engine spiderbots to help your website rank higher in SERPs.

Primarily there are two types of sitemaps:

– HTML
– XML

An HTML sitemap is visible to the site visitors and assists them to navigate to specific pages. HTML sitemaps are known to enhance the user experience. On the other hand, XML sitemaps are preferred by search engines. XML sitemaps make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl them and are often hidden from the website visitors.

Having a sitemap for your website is important, and it really doesn’t matter whether it is generated on HTML or XML format.

But, search engines prefer XML sitemaps, and there is no reason to make things difficult for it.

You can easily generate an XML sitemap for your website by using Google XML Sitemaps. It is an extremely useful WordPress plugin.

Produce High Quality Content And Optimize It

High-quality, relevant content can propel high rankings for WordPress websites, at the same time bad or plagiarized content can cause Google penalties which can be impossible to recover from.

Characteristics of high-quality content:

• Unique – Do not copy anyone else’s work and project it as yours. Google knows all and it will penalize your website for doing so. Topics or ideas can be similar but not the content. If you pick-up something always provide the source instead of claiming it to be yours.
• Credible – If you are sharing a statistic you must acknowledge the source of the data. Factual data is important for developing credible online content.
• Useful and informative – People seek useful and informative content on the internet. If your content educates and informs, it will be considered to have higher quality.
• Error free – Grammatical mistakes can be a turn-off for readers. Therefore, check your content before posting so that it is free of typos, factual errors and style issues.

Along with creating quality content, equal attention must be paid to optimizing content too. Keywords, meta tags, meta descriptions, are all important aspects of content optimization.

Good keyword research is necessary to ensure that the content you have created is found on search engines. Focusing on long-tail keywords, avoiding usage of high-volume keywords, and using a good keyword research tool is the key to apt keyword optimization. Also, upgrading your old high-ranking blog is highly recommended.

Pay Attention To Site Speed

Site speed refers to the speed with which your WordPress website opens when a visitor either manually types the URL or clicks on the link to reach your website.

The average site speed is about 8.66 seconds, however, Google recommends to reduce the time to below 5 seconds.

Good WordPress site speed can put you ahead of your competitors. For instance, your website takes less than five seconds to load, and your competitor’s website takes seven seconds. Google will make sure that your website appears before your competitor.

Apart from that pages with a slower load times tend to have higher bounce rates.

What Can Lower Your Page Speed?

• Heavy Images – Large Images can increase the site load time. Hence, compress images and choose PNG or JPEG formats to make sure images don’t cause any speed issues.
• External Media – Videos are highly valuable but can cause the site speed to increase. Host your videos on third-party services such as YouTube or Vimeo. They embed the video on your site. This helps you save space as well as quicken loading time.

You can check you website speed by using Test My Site Tool.

Fix Broken Links Regularly

What is your reaction when you click on a link and you see such a result?

Isn’t it annoying? You were looking forward to some relevant information by clicking on the link, instead all you get is “page not found” message. Such links are referred to as broken links.

Almost all WordPress websites have a few broken links now and then, and these few rarely create havoc. However, there are reasons to avoid excess 404 errors on your website.
Here are a few reasons why broken links must be fixed:

• Broken Links Can Pull Down SEO Rankings
  Search engines rank websites by crawling web pages and their links. And if there are broken or dead links on your webpages, it will stop the bots from crawling your website. This will ultimately lead to the pages and links not getting indexed.
• Broken Links Repel Visitors
  A visitor clicks on a potential great link hoping to find some information, but gets a 404 error instead. No points for guessing, they will get annoyed and decide to come back to the website again. This can affect your website traffic and conversion rates. It is worth it to fix those broken links.

WordPress broken link detecting plugins can easily check for broken links which you can fix accordingly – remove or replace them.

Wrapping Up

It might sound harsh but if your WordPress website doesn’t appear on the first page of relevant search results, it might as well be invisible. Luckily, following simple WordPress SEO tips can boost your rankings on search engines drastically.
Here patience is the key. By implementing each of the above tips, you may not reach the desired top ranking instantly, but you will definitely see great improvement, for sure.

This guest post was written by Vishal Vivek, an Indian serial entrepreneur. He is founder of SEO Corporation. The Times Group has recognized him as a legendary entrepreneur and published his biography in the book, I Did IT (Vol 2) when he was 30.