1. Determine Your Goal and Target Audience

TikTok is home to a large number of Generation Z, and also a growing platform of millennials. Each generation has its own group of audience with unique inclinations for content and products. Therefore, "who" and "how" you are going to reach them should be the first step in your campaign planning journey. 

Firstly, determine the high-level business objective of the TikTok campaign such as brand awareness, product awareness, customer activation, or sales, then dive into the details of social media goals that would fulfill your business objectives. Do you want to build a community with a niche audience? Do you want organic visibility by joining hashtag challenges or creating your own seamless hashtag? Or, do you want to soft-sell and focus on entertaining viewers with only subtle hints of your product in the TikTok post?

Once you decide on the above, you will have a better idea of whether to create your own content or partner with influencers, get the relevant TikTok analytics and insights to zero-in on your target audience, and then push your marketing message purposefully and effectively.

2. Identify The Profile of Your Audience

After having a rough idea of your goals and objectives, it is crucial to do a proper target audience profiling, especially if you intend to work with TikTok influencers. This means selecting several creators or influencers that match the profiles of your audience and analyze their profiles as a reference. 

This is the best way to get acquainted with your audience's taste and behavior. By actively profiling the audience of your brand versus other brands’ or influencers, you will be more equipped with insights to plan a TikTok campaign that will maximize your marketing. TikTok analytics could help you retrieve data about those audiences, showing you their active times, top hashtags, and even captions.

3. Identify Your Competitors

Successful social media brands are those that know their target market’s consumer behavior well and target them with data-driven precision. If you are still in the process of discovering and learning about your audience, the best way to speed up the process is by analyzing competitors and outsmarting them.  Use TikTok analytics to find out your competitors’ social activity and performance, including their best engagement time and posts. TikTok hashtag analytics can also help you to research their prior campaigns, by showing you the submissions, engagement, and growth. 

4. Co-create Content

On TikTok, the best source of engagement is participation from user-generated content (UGC), because it is viral, engaging, and organic at the same time, which is the beauty of TikTok marketing.  To incite such reactions, your brand needs to be able to create content that is intimately relevant to your target audience. This is why many successful brand campaigns have adopted a co-creation method with influencers or micro-influencers. This is to let the creation of the content run as organically as possible and integrate seamlessly with users’ For You Page. 

As Jacob Pace, CEO of Flighthouse said, about 60% of TikTok’s population, "Gen Z does not mind being marketed to as long as it is quality content." Quality content requires you to know about the audience and build a sense of community with the audience. Oftentimes, the best person for the job is the creators. So keep an open mind and collaborate!