TikTok has exploded in popularity in recent years, especially among younger demographics. With over 1 billion monthly active users, TikTok offers immense potential for businesses to leverage the platform for market research.
Using TikTok for market research provides several key benefits compared to other platforms:
- Access to a massive engaged audience, particularly Gen Z and Millennials
- Real-time insights into the latest trends and viral content
- Ability to easily create and test content to gauge reactions
- Data and analytics on video performance and audience engagement
- Opportunities for organic reach and visibility
In summary, TikTok offers a powerful way for brands to understand their target audience, identify new opportunities, analyze competitors, and test marketing tactics at scale. By leveraging the platform’s unique features for market research, businesses can gain valuable consumer and industry insights.
Understand Your Target Audience
Before creating any TikTok content, it’s important to research who is on the platform and active in your niche. Look at key demographics like age, gender, location, and interests to get a sense of your target audience.
According to TikTok Users, Stats, Data, Trends, and More, 53.4% of TikTok’s global users are female and 46.6% are male. The platform also skews young, with 43% of users between 18-24 years old. TikTok is most popular in the US, Turkey, Russia, and Japan.
You can dig deeper into niche-specific demographics by searching relevant hashtags, browsing sounds, observing trends, and connecting with influencers. Pay attention to the age, gender, interests, values, and psychographics of accounts engaging with content similar to yours.
Knowing your target audience inside and out will help you create the type of content that resonates and stands out on TikTok.
Analyze Trending Content
One of the best ways to use TikTok for market research is to analyze trending content related to your business, industry or target audience. The TikTok Trend Discovery tool allows you to see the top trending videos, songs, effects and more based on custom platform research. Pay attention to trends that align with your target demographics and business offerings.
Look at the top videos in your niche and analyze what makes them so popular and engaging. Is it the editing style, humor, dance challenge, useful information? You can garner insights into what your audience responds to. See what creative formats and content styles get the most likes, comments and shares. This can inform the type of content you produce.
Follow and learn from top creators and influencers in your industry. See what they are posting that is resonating. Emulate the formats and style that seems to be working well. Put your own unique spin on trends and themes.
You can also search key hashtags related to your business and browse the top videos under those tags. This shows the types of content gaining traction. Pay attention to any viral trends or challenges taking off in your niche.
Regularly monitoring trending content will keep your finger on the pulse of what’s hot on TikTok so you can apply those learnings to your own marketing campaigns and creations.
Research Competitors
One of the best ways to gain insights on TikTok is to research your competitors and analyze what they are posting. Here are some tips for researching competitors on TikTok:
Search for competitors in your industry by keyword or brand name to find their TikTok profiles. You can also look at who they follow and are followed by to discover more potential competitors.
Analyze the content strategy of top competitors by looking at the types of videos they post, their posting frequency, use of trending sounds, etc. Pay attention to their best performing content.
Look at engagement metrics like views, likes, comments, and shares. This can provide insight into what resonates most with their audience. Benchmark your competitors’ engagement rates.
Look for opportunities to differentiate and fill gaps not addressed by competitors. Identify areas where you can provide unique value to users.
Regularly monitoring competitors on TikTok can help inspire new ideas and keep your content strategy sharp. But avoid copying competitors outright.
Tools like Social Insider and Keyhole can help track and analyze competitors at scale.
Conduct Hashtag Research
Hashtags are essential for reaching new audiences on TikTok. Conducting hashtag research can help you identify relevant hashtags to use in your videos and captions. Here’s how to research hashtags on TikTok for market research:
First, search for keywords and phrases related to your niche, product, or target audience. Look at the results to find relevant hashtags that are already popular. For example, if you sell beauty products, search for terms like “beauty tips,” “makeup tutorial,” or “skincare routine.”
Next, use the TikTok search bar to look up specific hashtags. Check the number of views for each hashtag to gauge popularity and engagement. According to this source, hashtags with 500 million+ views tend to be more saturated, while those with 1-20 million views have strong engagement potential.
Track the engagement rates of different hashtags over time to identify trends. Hashtags starting to gain traction may present good opportunities. You can also use third-party tools like Flick to analyze hashtag performance.
Focus on finding relevant niche hashtags aligned with your target audience and product. Generic hashtags like #fyp are unlikely to reach your ideal customers. Get specific with hashtags tailored to your goals.
Run Polls and Surveys
One of the most effective ways to conduct market research on TikTok is by running polls and surveys. TikTok’s polling feature allows you to easily create polls with multiple choice questions to survey your audience. You can gain valuable insights by asking pointed questions about preferences, habits, and opinions. According to research by Formplus, the polling feature is simple to use – just tap the plus icon in the caption area when creating a video, select “poll” and add your question and answer choices. Polls can help you identify customer needs, product ideas, pricing feedback, and more.
Surveying your followers is another great tactic. Ask broader, open-ended questions through captions or video narration to get more detailed feedback. Make sure to explain why you are conducting the survey and how the insights will be used. You can even collaborate with influencers to survey their audience for wider reach. Analyze the poll and survey results to gain valuable customer insights that inform product development, content creation, marketing campaigns, and more. Just be sure to keep questions clear, concise and relevant for quality feedback.
Monitor Comments
Monitoring the comments on your own content as well as your competitors’ content can provide valuable insights into your target audience on TikTok. You can gain an understanding of the questions and concerns your audience has by reading through comments on your own videos. Pay attention to commonly asked questions as these could inform future content creation or product development.
You may also want to analyze the comments on competitors’ content to identify gaps or opportunities. For example, if you notice many complaints about a certain product, you could develop an alternative that solves that issue. The comments section essentially provides free qualitative data about customer interests, pain points, and more. Just be sure not to violate TikTok’s guidelines around scraping or collecting data.
According to Sprout Social, brands can encourage comments by asking a specific question, running a contest/giveaway, or collaborating with influencers. The key is driving engagement and two-way conversation through comments [1].
Test Ad Campaigns
Running small TikTok ad campaigns targeting specific interests and demographics is an excellent way to gain insights for market research. With TikTok’s sophisticated ad platform, you can set up A/B testing and get detailed analytics on conversions, cost per result, and more.
TikTok recommends starting with at least two ad variations and running them for a minimum of one week to gather enough data. Make sure to target a relevant, narrow audience that fits your ideal customer profile. The TikTok Ads Manager provides advanced analytics to compare the performance of your test ads.
According to TikTok’s best practices for split testing, “Set an appropriate test budget that’s in line with your overall campaign goals.” They also advise, “Give your test groups enough time in the auction to gather sufficient data before drawing conclusions.” Be sure to optimize your ads over time based on the results.
As explained on the TikTok Ads website, “Split testing allows you to test two different versions of your ads to determine which one performs best and optimize future campaigns.” This is an invaluable approach for leveraging TikTok ad analytics for your market research.
Sources:
https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/split-testing?lang=en
https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/split-test-best-practices?lang=en
Collaborate with Influencers
Partnering with niche influencers on TikTok can provide valuable insights into their audience demographics, interests, and preferences. According to Aspire, brands should look for influencers whose audience aligns closely with their target market. Reach out to micro and nano influencers in your industry to collaborate on branded content. Offer to sponsor TikTok challenges or hashtag campaigns that encourage user participation.
Contests and giveaways are another effective collaboration tactic. According to Later, when Guess ran a branded hashtag challenge called #InMyDenim, over 3.6 million videos were created and the campaign reached over 1 billion impressions. Analyzing contest entries and user-generated content can provide valuable demographic and psychographic data to inform your market research.
Conclusion
In summary, there are several key ways brands can use TikTok for effective market research:
- Analyze trending content and hashtags to understand current interests and trends among your target demographic.
- Monitor comments on your own content as well as competitors’ to gain insights into consumer sentiment and feedback.
- Run polls and surveys on TikTok to get direct input from users about preferences and needs.
- Test different types of ad campaigns and creative to see what resonates best.
- Partner with influencers to promote products and get real-time feedback.
The interactive nature of TikTok allows for brands to engage directly with users and potential customers. By leveraging the platform’s features for polls, comments, and campaigns, marketers can gain valuable consumer insights to then apply to product development, brand messaging, and advertising.
When analyzing the data and feedback collected on TikTok, focus on identifying overarching patterns and themes. Consider both direct feedback as well as indirect insights based on engagement and reactions. Use what you learn to make informed strategic decisions to better appeal to your audience.
