Now that you've learned a bit about the platform and have seen examples of how businesses are using TikTok, let's help a sample business grow their presence and brand. Meet Carlos who runs Inu and Neko a pet grooming business in New York City, which he started after finding a lack of quality pet services in his neighborhood. Inu and Neko has been growing your presence on social media for awhile. Now Carlos is looking to grow a presence on TikTok. Businesses who really want to see their brand grow and want to optimize their usage of TikTok, needs to have a marketing strategy for it and we'll help Carlos create this. What is the marketing strategy? It's simply a plan for what you want to accomplish with your content, a plan for creating that content, and a plan for tracking if that content was successful and then further optimize it. Marketing isn't just creating content, but everything that comes before it and after it. Let's go over the steps to creating a successful marketing strategy for Inu and Neko's TikTok account. First, let's take a closer look at how Carlos at Inu and Neko plans is marketing and decides on what he wants to accomplish. A marketing strategy starts with identifying your audience. Carlos has already identified his stores audience as pet owning city dwellers between ages 35 and 50, concerned about providing specialized care and healthy food for their pets. Not necessarily a TikTok audience. But Carlos has created fun pet videos that have gotten a lot of engagement from a younger audience on Instagram, stories and Twitter. Carlos thinks he could target a younger audience with content like that, whose parents maybe in Inu and Neko's target audience. Next, Carlos wants to take a look at what his competition is doing on TikTok. He finds the hashtag, groomers of TikTok to see what's popular in the trends, and checks to see if some of his brick-and-mortar competition is on TikTok, and how they're using the platform. This will give them a sense of where he can fit in and where he can differentiate. Now Carlos wants to create some goals for Inu and Neko's TikTok account. Since he's just started, his goals will be simple, grow followers and engagement. As Carlos plans out his goals, he makes them SMART goals; specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Having a goal of gaining followers on TikTok won't really help him see whether he was successful or not. It's too vague, but having a goal of gaining 200 new followers on TikTok over the next three weeks is an example of a smart goal. In order to measure whether he has goals will be successful, Carlos identify some key performance indicators or KPIs, to measure. KPIs are the metrics that will help you evaluate whether you are successful in achieving your goal. For example, if Carlos has a goal of increasing followers and engagement, he would measure his change in followers and the amount of engagement per video. Now that Carlos knows the current trends, what businesses are doing on TikTok and what his industry is posting, it's time for Carlos to plan his content. In the next videos, we'll talk more about how to create engaging videos, how to create a content calendar, and how to use videos to grow a brand. For now, we'll say that Carlos starts creating videos and posting them on TikTok. But does Carlos just post them and then leave them? No. Now he needs to evaluate how well they did to know whether his contact achieved what he wanted to achieve. Carlos now looks at his TikTok insights and analytics to see his change in followers and increasing engagement. The KPIs he determined before in the planning stage, Carlos found that he achieved his goal of gaining 200 followers in three weeks on TikTok, but engagement proposed was lower than he wanted. He can now strategize and optimize his next round of content. For example, Carlos decides to keep posting similar videos, but we'll ask more questions of his viewers or begin doing response videos to encourage more users to comment and increase engagement. To review, a marketing strategy consists of planning what you want to accomplish, which includes determining your audience, looking at what your competition is doing, and creating goals and KPIs. Then you want to focus on planning and creating content. You should then evaluate the success of your contents by measuring and analyzing your KPIs. Finally iterate and optimize your strategy for the future. In our next video, we'll talk more about businesses, brands, and how Carlos can expand Inu and Neko's brand on TikTok.
