How To Use TikTok Challenges To Increase Brand Awareness

TikTok challenges can be initiated by individual users or brands who want to attract the target audience. They let people show the creative sides by adding spin to the original version of the challenge. 

A successful branded challenge can create a great impression among the target audience, thus boost engagement and sales. Choose to either jump in on the ongoing challenges or create a brand new one to see how your brand can benefit from these creative tools.

What Are TikTok Challenges?

TikTok challenges are how people do the same things repeatedly and show different interpretations of that challenge. A challenge could be a dance, lipsync, or real singing, or it could be an actual challenge like doing something athletic like doing push-ups or a plank challenge. 

How do TikTok challenges get started? Anyone can launch a TikTok challenge, either or individual users or brands. The point is that the challenge needs to be fun, creative and relatable to take off. 

The funniest thing about these challenges is that you can see multiple people’s interpretations and versions. A challenge might start one way, and thanks to people’s creativity, it might end up being a completely different thing down the road.

For influencers and content creators, it’s one of the fun ways to gain more exposure by approaching a larger audience. Challenges are an effective approach to encourage your followers and target audience to build and circulate content related to a brand’s product, boosting brand awareness.

How To Use TikTok Challenges For Brands

Here how brands can gain more traction and build a good image to their target consumers by utilizing challenges on TikTok. 

Get In On Existing Challenge Trend

The fastest way for brands to use challenges on TikTok as leverage is to join in an already trending challenge. 

Most TikTok users often follow the trending hashtags linked to such a hashtag challenge. As a result, brands can effortlessly get more views and drive more traffic to their profile by deploying this tactic.

The first way you can get involved in challenges is via the For You page. The algorithm is sending you different challenges and sounds that you’re likely to love. 

Once you find something that seems to suit your brand products, then click the original sound. By doing so, you can see an assortment of videos and challenges using that trending sound.

Another way you can jump on the TikTok challenge bandwagon is by identifying trending songs or sounds. Click on the Create button, then tab Sounds. A window will show up with a list of all top-rated sounds. 

As these sounds are gaining traction, there is a high chance that the challenges that incorporate them are trending as well. The next move is to save them to your favorites and start creating your new content. 

Never forget to create some twist to set your videos apart, which increases the chance of them going viral.

Select Relevant TikTok Challenges For Your Brand

It’s important to decide which challenges you can get involved in as a brand. It makes sense for a clothing brand to choose to join in a fashion-related challenge, but it’s not suitable for food and beverage brands. 

In the same vein, participating in a makeover challenge might seem like the right move for a cosmetic brand, but it’s not something that works for others.

Nevertheless, you cannot choose any challenge that suits your brand or niche, and there are a whole lot of non-industry-specific challenges to partake. 

You can start with a TikTok dance challenge, and subtly incorporate the product you want to promote, or at least your brand into the challenge video. Get your creative juices flowing, and you can get the best out of these challenges and create a huge impression on your target audience.

Add Branded Twist

Once you pick up a challenge, the next step is to create videos and add interesting elements to spice up the challenge in your own way. You can either contact influencers with a solid following base to do that job for you or simply ask your staff to do so.

While asking your staff to be in the challenge appears relatable and authentic, collaborating with an influencer is a safe choice if you just establish an account and are not familiar with this social media platform.

We will get into more detail how to collaborate with TikTok influencers to get the best results in the “promote your challenge” section below. 

Create Your Own TikTok Challenge

You can initiate challenges for your business and promote them. That’s said, it is easier said than done to get all the factors for the challenges to take off.

Creating branded challenges is all about testing and tweaking, so maybe one challenge doesn’t do so well, but another one might be awesome. Additionally, it requires creativity, research, and time.

If you’ve got a great idea and can generate a relatable challenge to TikTok users, it’s worth trying. 

Chances are you’ll create a viral video, and your brand will gain substantial clout for it. Or at least, you’ll have some great user-generated content and a decent number of followers out of it.

Learn From Other Brands

To ensure your branded challenges work, you need to do your homework and look at other brand’s experiences to learn from them. Research some successful challenges, either from your competitors or brands in other industries. 

By examining the concept, target audience, promotion tactics, and the benefits, they can gain from the viral challenge’s success.

Also, past popular challenges can be a great source of inspiration. Identify the theme of content that your target audience, and devise your challenge based on that theme to draw attention.

Lay Down Clear Rules

It’s important to describe the challenge as clear as possible and how your audience can be part of it. 

If the challenge involves some forms of dance, the dancer in the original video should make the choreography easy to imitate. If you want the participants to feature your products, then show them how to incorporate them into the challenge by showing them first.

A good example is the #inmydenim challenge launched by Guess. The rule is simple and plain: All you need is to make a transition from your messy look to the best-dressed appearance with denim. 

You might notice that the brand didn’t require people to put on their products as it might appear forceful and reduce the scope of the TikTok challenge and the number of participants.

Or, as with the #TooSickToBeSick challenge, the brand let their creators set good examples first. Then, they suggest the audience pick one of the transformation styles to create their video content or even let them get loose and come up with their own crazy ideas. 

By showing what participants exactly need to do, the challenge will be more appealing to people, thus increasing the chance that it goes viral on the platform.

Promote Your Challenges

One of the most common ways to extend the reach and boost the popularity of the challenge is to collaborate with influencers. You can ask influencers to make and share the challenge with your branded hashtags. 

Doing so will inform their followers about the challenge, and there’s a high chance of some of them participating in it.

If the number of TikTok users reaches a specific threshold, the branded hashtag will be featured in the Discover section. Then, the chance of your TikTok challenge going viral will be considerably higher.

All in all, there’s no better way to give your challenge the desired leverage than paying for influencers. Besides, cross-promoting the challenge on other social media platforms can help, especially if you have a strong fan base on other platforms.

Mucinex’s first TikTok campaign effectively uses influencers to increase the reach of its over-the-counter product. 

It let the influencers and TikTok users take on a transformation challenge, a familiar theme requiring utilizing transitions. Users have to edit their video to get a seamless change from one video to another.

To participate, people had to create and publish a video showing their two contrasting conditions: being too sick and so sick. The video had to be posted along with the tag #TooSickToBeSick, and the aim is to boost the exposure of their cough medicine.

The challenge gained remarkable traction, raking in more than 889 million views in total. 

This success is due to their decision to cooperate with four TikTok influencers, including Jaydencroes, dreaknowsbest, Nick Tangorra, and OurFire. The combination brought 1.8 million likes and more than 20.000 shares for the challenge.

Conclusion

TikTok hashtag challenges are our favorite tool when it comes to reinforcing brand awareness and product exposure on TikTok. 

A single trending challenge can be enough to generate more following, positively engage your existing followers, and show that you’re building a brand with real efforts and organic content. 

Follow our tips to take your TikTok challenges to a whole new level and help your social media marketing goal take off faster.