TikTok Trends: A Guide for Marketers

TikTok is a fast-moving platform. Trends come and go quickly, and in order to be successful on the app, you need to hop on trends as quickly as they come.

But in the corporate world, things can get bogged down by tasks, approvals, and scheduling — making TikTok a hard platform to moderate as a marketer. However, it’s not impossible to take advantage of popular TikTok trends for your business! By keeping a few simple tips in mind, you’ll easily be able to adapt the most recent TikTok trends to grow your business!

Find Your Voice

If you’re an established brand, you likely already have your brand voice nailed down.  If you don’t have your brand voice established in a formal document yet, it’s time to do that. This will help inform how you write copy for everything your brand does — from social posts to website copy, in addition to your TikTok videos.

Are you going to be informative, teaching viewers something new? For example, if you’re a skincare brand, you could educate users on how to use a specific ingredient correctly. Or maybe you’re going to be funny, using the app to humanize your brand. You can certainly be a mix of both, but it’s important to have a strategy, just like any other platform.

Stay on Top of Trends

Look, I’m not saying that you should get paid to watch TikToks all day… but you do need to stay on top of trends. If you’re browsing and night and come across a new trend, make a quick note to yourself to look into it the next day at work. Or, if you have the team resources, you can have someone report notable trends to you.

Either way, you can’t afford to just browse TikTok once a month and assume you’ll see success. You need to be on the social app regularly in order to understand the depth and success of trends.

Have a Plan

While it’s impossible to predict TikTok trends, you should still have a plan and a process for hopping on trends when they appear. Streamline your video creation and approvals process to accommodate for a faster turnaround time.

Do your social posts typically need to get approved by multiple stakeholders? See if you can narrow that down to one person. Set a timeline that posts need to be approved within a certain time frame so you can keep everything moving.

Rather than filming a whole video just to have the concept shot down or heavily edited, create a script and video outline, attach a similar video that uses the same audio, and send that out for approval. Once the concept is approved, you can film and post the video.

Having a seamless plan will allow you to create timely videos while still ensuring you get approval from the correct people in your organization.

Act Fast

This is arguably the most important part of TikTok — staying on top of the trends. TikTok trends often only last a week or two, meaning you can’t take weeks to create a video. As we’ve stated earlier, having a plan of action and approval will help expedite the process while still allowing you to create high-quality, viral content.

Stressing the importance of timeliness is critical to getting stakeholders to respond quickly. Ensure everyone understands the importance of staying relevant while still staying true to your brand.

Additionally, if you have a busy schedule, you can block off one afternoon a week to batch create content. Get all content ideas approved by then, and spend a few hours creating a few videos to post over the next few days. A few simple changes (like a different hairstyle and shirt) will allow you to easily create different content.

Interested in advertising on TikTok? The social team at Blue Wheel can help. Reach out to learn more.