3 ways to step up your short-form video and TikTok growth strategy

Video content is king. There’s no denying the dramatic increase in video consumption across the globe. According to InVideo, individual Internet consumers spent an hour and 40 minutes per day watching videos in 2022. TikTok, in combination with COVID-19 lockdowns that began in 2020, created a perfect storm for the endless scrolling of quick entertaining and informative video content.

What we in the industry didn’t know in those early days was whether short-form video content was here to stay once the lockdowns ended. It is my argument that short-form video is here to stay and in a big way.

Today it is more important than ever to prioritize short-form video content along with having some form of presence on TikTok or one of its major competitors. The fact that influencers are moving their strategies to shorter-form content is a clear signal for startups to follow suit.

Getting started with short-form video

It can be tedious and time consuming to build out your short-form content as a startup founder, so I’ve distilled it down to three easy steps:

1. Competitor analysis
2. Ideate on content pillars
3. Hire creator talent

The easiest path for creating your short-form video strategy is to look at what your competitors or top brands are doing. They have likely given their content a good amount of thought, and if you’re stalking bigger brands, you can certainly be assured that many resources went towards their strategies. If you’re in the supplement space and want to look outside of direct competitors, search for #supplements, #vitamins, and other relevant hashtags to get content ideas from creators as well.

At Coinbase, I had many strategic syncs between the internal team along with bringing in outside creative agency talent that helped us formulate content and ad ideas. One of the creative agencies I worked with only made TikTok short-form content, and they prided themselves on being up to speed on the latest trends and styles.

Once you have a list of content pillars you’d like to use, create a doc outlining exactly what you want for each video. You’ll want to have bulleted pointers that you’d like creator talent to touch on, the setting and format of the video (i.e., lighting, selfie-style, etc.) and any ending call-to-action. From there, it’s time to find and hire talent that can shoot these videos for you.

This is where creator marketplaces such as Billo or Backstage will help speed the process of finding talent, collaborating with them, and managing payments. These marketplaces keep it very simple for finding the right demographic of talent that fits your consumers’ persona.

TikTok-specific Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While creating content for TikTok, it’s imperative to think about how to best optimize for SEO because of growing search trends on the social platform. A recent Pew Research Center study found that ~40% of Generation Z prefer researching topics on TikTok over Google. Let that sink in.

3 ways to step up your short-form video and TikTok growth strategy by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch