TikTok Marketing Strategies to Beat Your Competition

Wondering how to compare and beat the competition on TikTok and outpace their growth with your TikTok marketing skills? TikTok is a formidable tool in online marketing now and understanding the basics of the game can help you do wonders. In this article, I have shared some of the best TikTok marketing strategies that you can use to beat your competition on TikTok by stealing their ideas and planning your own ones.

Let’s start with the basics. Let’s first understand why TikTok is a great platform to invest your time and efforts.

Table of Contents

Why TikTok?

TikTok has grown greatly to become one of the best online platforms for increasing reach, next only to Instagram. With each passing day, more and more people and businesses are joining and using TikTok.

According to current estimates, TikTok has 1.2 billion users garnering billions of impressions daily, making it one of the largest social networking sites based only on Videos.

By using TikTok, brands have increased their sales multiple folds, and this ratio will improve constantly if the marketing experts are to be believed in.

Why do Competition Analysis on TikTok?

Everyone is working hard to achieve a growth boost on this platform. Everyone has a plan, right? Your competitor must have one as well. Right?

What if we could copy already working strategies and make those our own?

This is the essence of competitor analysis. By tracking what your competitors have been doing, you can create a game plan of your own, add some improvements and win over them in their own game.

There is a catch, though. Not everyone knows how to properly use the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses to (their) own advantage.

In this article, I will help you create a game plan and show you how to effectively compare yourself with your competitors and beat them in the game on TikTok.

Let’s first see how you can compare yourself with your competitors on TikTok.

How to compare yourself with your competitors on TikTok?

To compare your TikTok account with your competitors, you just need to follow some simple steps.

Know about your TikTok competition

Your competitors can vary quite a bit depending on what your TikTok account deals with and how popular or obscure that concept is.

For example, suppose you operate a TikTok account that aims to provide information related to Blockchain, and more specifically about NFTs. In that case, you will probably have to deal with more competitors than you initially expected because these topics are pretty widespread at the moment.

You can search for hashtags related to these niches and find accounts performing well. See what they are doing and create a game plan of yours.

One more problem about such topics, like NFTs, is that these are new and ever-growing. You can call these “exploding topics”. As time passes, you will be getting competition from more businesses and people. So, you need to plan your things accordingly and must prepare yourself to be flexible as per your needs.

The competition in this niche is high. But that’s not due to the number of accounts posting about these. There aren’t many TikTokers publishing about Crypto and NFTs. Instead, competition is high because the number of people seeking such videos is less and everyone wants to be seen.

On the other hand, if you are a model creating dance videos and lip-syncs, you will have lesser competition not because of the number of competitors but due to the volume and reach of such videos. Millions of accounts post such videos, but equally, more people are interested (called volume) in such videos.

Whatever may be the case, use the hashtags to find the top accounts and see what they are doing to get more likes and followers. Understand why they are successful — theoretically. I mean, if this account @x, who is creating videos that contain Texts and Graphs, is more successful than this account @y, which is creating videos that show only him talking about the subject matter.

If such is the case, opt for the more successful model and favorable to your business plan. Using the same strategy, shortlist some TikTok accounts — so that you can analyze these accounts mathematically and create a better plan to beat them.

Once you are done with all these, you need to analyze the facts and statistics now.

Take a close look at their followers and view counts. Try to answer some questions:

Do they gave a large fan-following than you?

In most cases, the answer will be YES.

See where you stand in the competition. Do you need to buy TikTok followers, or the organic methods will suffice?

See, people are more like to follow someone on TikTok if that person already has more followers.

Like I am more likely to follow @x, who has 1.3million followers, than @y, who has only 3787 followers.

This is simple prejudice, and an average person thinks that someone with more followers will have better content and will be worth following than someone who has not many followers.

Do they target the same audience as yours?

Sometimes, the audiences may differ even if you are in the same niche. Let’s take an example.

Suppose I am creating videos about Personal Finance, and so you are. Personal Finance is a broad topic, and I may or may not cover the same micro-topics as yours. Plus, our languages can be different.

We may also be targeting personal financing in different currencies (like I may be covering EURO-based personal finance, and you may be covering USD-based personal finance). And above all, the location of our target audiences may be different (like Europe vs. the Americas).

In any of the cases listed above, try to see the areas of intersection and areas where the audience of your competition is different from yours.

What are the most liked videos of your competition?

Try to find your competitors’ most successful TikTok videos and understand why these were successful? And also, note what they did to make it more interesting than others. Then, can you mimic the idea and create a similar video of your own? Do this for 5-10 competitors, and for each competitor, list at least 3 videos that were successful. You already will be having ideas for 30-great TikTok videos. Right?

We are done here. Since the start, we have been making comparisons, but now is the time to go meta. So now we will go to the motivation phase.

Believe that you can do this. It will take some time, but better planning and content will always yield better results.

Even if you compete with the biggest competitions, don’t worry too much. Aiming for sky-high will surely take you to somewhere high. TikTok is partially a game of luck.

Who knows when your video gets featured “For You” page, and the next you see exploding reach and followers. So all you need is to create exciting content, use proper hashtags and keep your failure rates low.

“Keep your failure rates low.” Why did I say that?

This clearly means not losing to your competition in terms of quality. Always create content that can make your followers stick to your videos. Gaining new followers is important but don’t lose the followers that are already on your side. Create videos that are worth sharing and the rest will follow.

Create a script that you think will be able to get more likes per 100 views. Higher the likes to view ratios help you grow in the Algorithm of TikTok.

Try to add as many relevant hashtags as possible and ask your viewers to follow you in the captions.

Marketing strategies for outpacing your competitors on TikTok

A photo of two dogs quarelling. — This isn’t what I mean, but whatever.

With millions of people surfing TikTok every day, many brands and creators have been leaving no stone unturned in promoting themselves on the platform. By now, you must’ve understood how you can analyze your competitors’ promotional strategies and your standing in comparison to them.

Let’s now discuss how you beat the cutthroat competition on TikTok and make your ventures more successful than ever.

There are eleven tips that I would like to offer you.

Let’s see these in detail.

Don’t go in without a goal

Like other social media platforms, TikTok has been emerging as an engaging platform by virtue of its excellent content. However, if you’re hoping to use it for promoting your brand or talent, then you must create trustworthy and strikingly noticeable content relevant to the same.

While doing so, you must determine your overall goal and niche to gain more success. I’ve already shown you how you can research your competitors and figure out the kind of videos they post, who their target audiences and their interests are.

You can subsequently use this newly acquired knowledge to create the best content and gain more visibility to outpace your rivals.

Follow TikTok trends closely.

You must be familiar with the way trends start and end overnight on every social network.

TikTok is loaded with different kinds of trending content – from music and videos to hashtags, effects, and various challenges. Thus, it is crucial for you to closely follow trending content in order to get likes quickly for TikTok videos relevant to those trends.

Don’t worry if you find yourself wondering how to find trending content among millions of videos on TikTok. You need to regularly snoop around your competitor’s profile and track songs and hashtags on the platform.

You also need to follow these trends regularly and use them to make your account grow.

Make sure to regularly publish content

If you want to get ahead of your competitors on TikTok and get more followers within a short time, then you must build a social media community.

You have a better chance of receiving potential followers and a high engagement rate by putting in the effort to create attractive content and publish it regularly.

Although it is obviously a pretty simple strategy, it is surprisingly effective and yields excellent results almost every time. The formula is quite straightforward – the more videos you share, the more followers you will get soon enough.

Put up or join hashtag challenges

TikTok provides numerous features for people to promote themselves and their brands in various ways. Hashtag challenges provide one such great opportunity to invite bigger audiences and motivate them to engage actively with you.

By using this strategy, you can encourage users to post videos of themselves using your brand’s product. You can also participate in popular hashtag challenges on TikTok yourself and share your video thereafter.

Hashtag challenges at TikTok essentially serve as ads that help you increase your engagement level and spread awareness about your brand or talent.

Develop a good reputation among TikTok influencers

If you want to establish a solid online presence on TikTok, then influencer marketing is arguably the most powerful tool you can use.

It is more or less the best hack for getting your content out to highly engaged audiences. Since influencers are effective advertisers, they play a crucial role in scaling out your brand to the right people.

Influencers produce high-quality content using different social media platforms and build solid relationships with their audiences there. Thus, you can promote your content among bigger audiences by working in conjunction with TikTok influencers.

Not only will it help you effectively reach out to the target market, but it will also help you save a lot of valuable time.

Realize the importance of interaction

Effective communication and interaction are the key components of user engagement. If you manage to develop a good bond with your audience, they will surely remember and keep coming back to you.

TikTok comments are a good way of interacting conveniently with your followers and fans. Make sure you comment on other users’ posts as much as possible and encourage them to comment on your videos too.

By posting constructive and positive comments, you will attract more audiences and encourage them to follow your account regularly.

Add appropriate effects and filters to your videos

The competition on social media platforms like TikTok has grown intense that it’s important to realize one thing – namely, if you’ve been thinking of something to promote yourself better, then it’s likely that your rivals have already been using it. Thus, simply making a good video is no longer sufficient to catch your audience’s attention.

It needs to have proper clarity and content visibility in order to leave a lasting impact on your viewers’ minds.

You can effectively outsmart your competitors by prudently using appropriate filters and effects in your TikTok videos.

They will become viral on the TikTok For You page and attract a large number of users to your profile.

Use TikTok ads

TikTok’s advertising feature is another effective strategy for outpacing your rivals on the platform. It is especially useful for businesses and brands that are aiming to build a colossal user base.

TikTok offers numerous ad features to help you generate better engagement and higher revenue for your website.

In today’s digital world, memes have grown to become a universal language of sorts for all groups of people.

They quickly capture the audience’s attention and deliver the intended message effectively.

If you’ve ever opened TikTok, you surely must’ve come across the countless witty, humorous, and easily understandable memes over there.

TikTok memes are also helpful because they cheer up your audiences and encourage them to keep revisiting your profile. If you don’t have enough engagement on TikTok, then I advise you to keep uploading memes regularly.

It is a highly recommendable content strategy for motivating your users to spend more time with your content and increasing your engagement level.

Cross-promotion is an excellent strategy for creating a wider marketing reach and promoting your brand globally. If you have an account on other social media platforms, then you can promote your TikTok content over there.

By promoting engaging and relevant content to your audiences over there, you will give them the chance to follow your TikTok profile as well.

Regularly track your campaign’s success

We’ve already seen how creative content strategies, hashtags, effects, and filters are great strategies for making your TikTok campaigns succeed. However, the most basic strategy for evaluating your campaign’s success is to use an analytics tool.

If you haven’t been receiving satisfactorily good engagement for a long time, then you must identify the mistakes you’ve been making and plan how to amend them.

For this purpose, TikTik provides handy inbuilt analytics options to help you get invaluable insights into the growth of your business. These include details about your profile, videos, and followers in the last one to four weeks.

Conclusion

Social media experts have been predicting for a long time that TikTok will be playing an enormous role in social media marketing in the future.

That prediction has consistently been proving to be true. As a result, the competition on TikTok has been increasing exponentially every day as well.

Thus, it is more important than ever to compare your competitors’ performance with your own and work on rectifying your weak areas.

I hope this article helps you do just that and achieve incredible heights of success with the help of this amazing platform.