How To Make a TikTok for Your Brand—Tips and Tricks for Making Better Content

TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms and serves as an excellent marketing tool for a reason. It is fast-paced and easy to scroll through. It has an excellent set of trendy effects and editing tools, and it has a huge potential to grow a brand's exposure in no time. Because of TikTok’s potential for massive reach, a large number of businesses are getting high ROI when setting up TikTok marketing campaigns—either organic or paid. TikTok doesn’t only pay off for businesses. Users who have proven themselves with a big following and constantly high-performing content can get rewarded for their efforts since TikTok pays dedicated content creators through the TikTok Creator Fund.Sometimes, the tremendous engagement figures even come spontaneously—a single video can go viral and make a brand or individual creator TikTok famous, but the vast majority of such success stories were carefully planned. If you get lucky enough to gain sudden popularity, it can be a turning point for the future of your business, but it’s important not to start off clumsily. If you’re not even sure how to make a TikTok account or get your content production on the road, you’re at the right place—we’ve covered all the crucial steps.

Getting Started on TikTok

Source: UnsplashFinding your way around TikTok and making successful first posts can get overwhelming if you’re new to the platform. To start your TikTok journey, follow these steps:

1. Set up a Business Account
2. Check out the Discover and For You pages
3. Film and upload your content

How To Make a TikTok Business Account

When it comes to account types, TikTok used to have several confusing options, including Pro Accounts and Creator Accounts. By the end of 2021, they simplified everything down to two choices—personal accounts (with access to Creator tools) and business accounts, recommended for professionals building their brand awareness on this platform.You can start by downloading the app from the app store for your device and following the simple sign-up instructions to open a personal account. After you log in, you can easily switch to a Business Account at no charge—the process includes these steps:

1. Open the TikTok app and tap the Profile icon in the bottom right corner
2. Tap the three parallel lines in the top right to open Settings and privacy
3. Choose Manage account
4. Tap on Switch to Business Account
5. Hit Next and select the category that best describes your business
6. Confirm everything by hitting Next one more time

Source: TikTok

How To Use the Discover and For You Pages

To find more ideas about the direction you want to go in with your future posts, you should first take a look at what’s trending by tapping on the Discover tab next to the Record button. It will show you all currently popular hashtags, sounds, and effects you can use, all sorted by the number of views.The For You page is what you will first get to see after you’ve set up your TikTok profile. It’s configured based on areas of interest you choose when setting up your account. As you start using TikTok more, this page adjusts shown content based on the videos, accounts, and hashtags your profile interacts with. The For You page is where you want your content to end up since it means increased exposure for your brand—more views, followers, and eventually, more loyal customers.You can use both of these pages to get a better understanding of the type of content popular in your niche or with your target audience even without switching to a Business Account, which offers a few more useful tools meant to aid your future content strategy.

Source: TikTok

How To Make a TikTok Video

As TikTok success depends on its users' creativity, both creators and marketing professionals keep exploring new hacks to make videos that will attract more views. Apart from selecting your content theme carefully, you need to pay attention to framing, sound quality, lighting, effects you’re using, and much more.Before you post a video, you need to opt for either making a new one with the in-built app camera or uploading an existing video from your phone.

Source: George MiltonAfter you’ve signed up for TikTok and researched some content ideas, it’s time to record and upload your first video. Here are the steps you should follow:

1. Tap the Record button at the bottom of the screen
2. Swipe up to upload a video from your phone or press the pink circle to start recording a new video
3. Tap the pink checkmark after you’re done recording and add sounds, effects, text, or stickers to your video
4. Hit the Next button to proceed
5. Add a caption and hashtags and review other settings
6. Upload the finished video by tapping the Post button

Fine-Tuning Your TikTok Videos

When recording a TikTok video with the in-app camera, you can see a couple of nifty tools located on the right side of the screen. Here’s how to use them to create better and more engaging content.

Source: Shingi Rice

Adjusting the Speed

TikTok in-app camera allows you to adjust the speed while recording. Speeds 0.3x and 0.5x slow down the video, and the 1x option is the regular shooting speed. Options 2x and 3x speed up everything, which can be useful if you want to post a shorter video or get a comedic effect. Here’s how to set up or change the recording speed:

1. Tap Speed in the top right corner of the camera screen (if you don’t see the options by default)
2. Locate the Speed Options (0.3x, 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 3x) above the Record button
3. Tap on the preferred option

Setting the Right Video Length

You can now make TikTok videos of varying duration—from 15 seconds up to 3 minutes. Since shorter forms generally perform better and bring more favorable video completion numbers, some consider 3-minute videos kind of a gamble—when it comes to promoting brands on TikTok, the longer formats might not suit everyone. It’d be best to do some research before selecting the right format for your next post or content in general. While TikTok is dominantly used for entertainment, there is a lot of educational content around that uses longer forms. After all, attracting viewers boils down to this simple rule—if you provide value, they will come. Here’s how to adjust the length of your video:Videos Recorded In-App Existing Videos

1. Tap Record when you open the app
2. Choose 15 seconds, 60 seconds, or 3 minutes right above the recording button
3. Start recording

If you choose, for example, the 15s option, you won’t be able to go over that limit, but you can record less or adjust the duration of your clip in the next screen:

1. Tap Adjust Clips (the second option from the top)
2. Slide the red bars left or right to crop the video the way you like it

1. Tap Record at the bottom of your home screen
2. Swipe up to see your gallery or tap Upload to the right of the recording button
3. Choose the video you'd like to upload and tap Next
4. Slide the red bars left or right to adjust the video length

Adding Music to Your Videos

Source: Amanda VickTikTok got famous as an app for dance crazes and catchy music. New users are often wondering how to add music or sound effects to their posts to make TikTok videos more interesting for their target audience. The app contains a huge number of songs, including the latest chart-topping hits, that users can add as a background for their videos. Business users have the Commercial Audio Library at their disposal, with over 500,000 tracks that can be used without worrying about copyright infringement. Here’s how to add a song from TikTok’s library to your video:

1. Launch TikTok
2. Tap Record
3. Record a new video or upload an existing one from your gallery
4. Choose Next and tap on Sounds
5. Use the More option to find your preferred song or effect
6. Tap on the song you want to use

How To Make a Video Montage on TikTok

TikTok allows uploading more than one video within one post—for instance, with Duet and Stitch features, you can have videos playing side by side or incorporate up to five seconds of another user’s video in your post. While the Duet and Stitch features are great for reacting to existing content, a more common TikTok editing technique that doesn’t involve other users’ videos is blending several different scenes into a single post. It sounds complicated for the inexperienced, but you can do it in less than a minute. The easiest way is to make a video montage with the TikTok camera, following the steps below:

1. Launch the TikTok app, hit Record, and select the right video length
2. Choose the effects that you wish to use, if any (you can add them later as well)
3. Create the first scene by tapping the Record button to start and to finish
4. Repeat the process for the next scenes—TikTok allows you to continue recording where you stopped
5. Tap the pink checkmark to see your montage and add sounds, stickers, text, etc.
6. Hit Next when you’re done and write a caption, insert hashtags, and adjust other settings
7. Tap on Post

How To Be Good at TikTok

Anyone can learn how to use the app to create and upload videos, but to promote your brand and eventually start making money from your TikTok presence, you can’t keep pumping out content without a lot of thought. You have to create content that resonates well with your targeted viewership. So, the real question is how to make good TikTok videos—like influencers Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae Easterling or brands with excellent TikTok campaigns, such as Chipotle or Netflix. Here are some pro tips to follow:

• Skip unnecessary introductions—Straightforward videos are more popular on TikTok, and you should start off with a bang. Give your best to attract the viewers’ attention from the get-go and create interesting videos worth rewatching
• Use well-performing hashtags and trending sounds—It’s important to label your posts with trending hashtags and sounds as they’re an opportunity to increase views from your target audience and boost your follower count. You can find the most popular hashtags in the Discover tab, but make sure that they work well with the topic of your content—piling up popular yet unrelated hashtags won’t do good for your content strategy long term
• Collaborate with other creators—Try out influencer marketing by partnering with a popular TikTok creator whose target audience mostly overlaps with yours. Take an example of Fenty Beauty partnering with Kali Ledger, known for her makeup and hair tutorials
• Make your content relatable—Check how Netflix does it. They’re doing great on TikTok because they’re repurposing the scenes from their most popular shows, adding humorous comments to make them relatable

Source: Netflix

Don’t Know How To Make a TikTok That Dazzles? Kubbco’s Team of Experts Can Jump In!

Figuring out how to create attractive content, plan a successful TikTok campaign, or use paid TikTok advertising is not as easy as posting your first ever video on this platform, and it’s impossible to invent a standardized approach to it. What may bring excellent results to one business and help them grow brand awareness might be of no value to another. There are all sorts of questions related to TikTok campaigns that arise sooner or later, and only experts can provide complete answers—How should I target the right audience? What is the key to going viral? How can I handle multiple social media channels and cross-promote my TikTok content?Dealing with those questions on your own or with a small in-house team can easily become overwhelming.

Common Mistakes Businesses Make

If you feel as if you’re trying hard on TikTok and your profile stats remain more or less unaffected, it might be time to reconsider your tactics. Some of the most common challenges businesses face regarding their social media presence include:

• Lacking awareness of the complexity of social media marketing—Many don’t realize the amount of work behind social media content production and non-conventional marketing approaches social media entail

• Not being aware of the target audience's structure and needs—To conduct a successful marketing campaign on any social media platform, businesses need to pinpoint their target audience, identify the trends within their social media activity, and learn what interests their future followers. Without a thorough understanding of who you’re posting for, it’s impossible to create content that will attract views and followers to your profile or eventually increase your revenue
• Not investing enough resources—Relying on a single person or small in-house teams with restricted resources doesn’t suffice—there’s more work behind a fruitful TikTok strategy than you might think at first
• Hiring agencies with limited or no experience in social media—To give you the best value for your budget, an agency you choose has to have an in-depth understanding of different social media and digital habits of new consumers, as well as a wide-ranged, tech-savvy team of experts whose working methods and objectives are aligned to perfection

How Can Kubbco Approach Your TikTok Strategy?

Kubbco is a social media agency that knows what it takes to make a brand successful on TikTok. Our team applies the latest trends and updates to transform fruitless social media strategies into masterstrokes, using the power of analytics, creative content, and paid media to drive the desired outcomes. Our diverse experience and a large team of experts bring a holistic approach to the needs of every client. Here’s what our process involves:

1. Analyzing your audience, their social media activity, consumer habits, and shared interests to come up with engaging ideas for your future content
2. Producing content that your brand will benefit from the most—our team consists of first-class professionals in photography, videography, graphic design, writing, and much more
3. Helping you invest your resources smartly by continuously monitoring your profile performance, making use of stats that indicate what brings results and what does not
4. Expanding your brand’s reach via paid campaigns, including partnering with influencers and pay-per-click ads

How To Make a TikTok Campaign Fabulous—Check Out Our Success Stories

Source: MatasThe largest Denmark beauty and personal care brand reached out to Kubbco in the late spring of 2021, wishing to do better on TikTok. Together we came up with a strategy unique to the brand’s message but still up to date with the ever-evolving TikTok features and trends. Here's what we accomplished in 5 weeks:Total Views5.6 millionTotal Interactions209,000New Followers13,500Number of Videos25Videos With Over 100,000 Views25Viral Videos (Over 1 Million Views)8Another Kubbco client, OLAPLEX, has also seen mind-blowing results after we made a detailed preparation for their TikTok campaign and created effective content based on the client’s goals. During a five-week period, our videos attracted 5.1 million views. Two of them went viral (with over 1 million views), and the view count on six posts went over 100,000 views.

If you’re thinking of promoting your brand on TikTok, reach out to our team anytime. Kubbco experts will help you set a strong strategy based on your brand's message and build your TikTok presence from the ground up. In case you just want to stay in the loop on all the biggest updates in the world of social media and receive useful tips, sign up for our newsletter.Featured image: Cristiam Oliveira