Make no mistake about it, building any kind of brand on the internet and offline usually takes a tremendous amount of time and money. Nike and Apple, amazing global brands as they are, obviously did not materialize overnight.
In fact, if you were to look at the billboards in your area, you would notice new brands and new logos being put up. And usually, when people hear about them, they don’t quite know what to do. They quite can’t make a sense of this new brand.
So, the company behind that brand keeps that brand visible until something sticks. Who knows when that might happen? In the meantime, they’re burning through a tremendous amount of cash. It is no surprise that a lot of people have a bad taste in their mouth when they hear the phrase “build a brand.” They think that it’s going to take up a ridiculously long amount of time, matched with a tremendous amount of money.
I don’t really blame them for thinking that they’d rather spend time and money doing something else. The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. The good news is that you can, with the help of TikTok, one of the fastest-growing social media platforms on the internet, build a brand quickly. Social media marketing using video doesn’t have to be expensive. Here’s how you do it in a nutshell.
First, you need to get a list of all your competitors on the internet. Once you’ve compiled this list, either directly, or through the help of a virtual assistant, the next step is to see if your competitors have a presence on YouTube and TikTok. The best-case scenario is when your competitor has a channel on YouTube and has a solid presence on TikTok. Don’t count on it though.
Oftentimes, most of your competitors would be found on YouTube and maybe only a few, if at all, are present on TikTok. Don’t let that freak you out. Once you find their channels, take a look at what they talk about. In other words, pay close attention to the themes of their videos.
Why should you care and why does this matter? Well, you have to understand that your competitors are not stupid. They’re not going to create video after video, talking about a topic they know full well that nobody cares about. If they’re talking about a topic consistently for a long period of time, you can bet that there is big enough audience interested in that topic.
You should listen. You should come up with content that mirrors that topic. I’m not saying that you should directly copy everything that your competitors are doing. But at least they are pointing you in the right direction so you can produce videos that your target audience members have at least a good chance of being interested in.
Once you’re able to do that comes the hard part. You’re basically going to have to produce video after video of topics that you know have a high level of interest in your niche. Now, what makes this situation difficult is that you’re going to be stuck with a chicken or egg problem.
For you to build a following for your video, you have to have a lot of viewers. For you to have a lot of viewers, they have to know that your TikTok channel exists. What if you’re starting with zero? Or your starting with a small trickle of traffic? This is where social proof comes in.
Most people would not agree to this, but a lot of people will only watch a YouTube video if they see that it already has thousands of views. At the back of their minds they’re thinking, why should I waste my precious time watching a video that very few people have bothered to watch? The fact that it has such a low view count must mean that there is something wrong with the video. Why should I waste my time?
This is always going on. This is always going to be a factor. And that’s why you need social proof. Social proof means getting video views from a specialized provider so you can build up organic interest in your TikTok videos. It’s not much different from building social proof on Instagram.
People are not going to bother with an Instagram video if it doesn’t have enough initial views. Once it reaches over 1,000 or even 10,000 views, then people can take a risk watching that video. But prior to that point, forget about it. People have better things to do.
So, understand how social proof works and using the kind of signals your competitors are sending you through their video selection, you will be able to reverse engineer them. Buy Tiktok likes to get the ball rolling.
If you play your cards right, you will be able to build a brand on TikTok much faster than your competitors. How come? Well, you just studied what they were doing so they ended up doing your homework for you.
