How Founders can Leverage their Personal TikTok to Supercharge Growth: Part 1
The first part of case studies ft. creator startups Stan and Clara to attract customers (and even venture funding!)
ICYMI: Last week we highlighted 3 different styles of successful TikTok ad creatives and shared exactly how you can replicate them for your brand.
This week, we’ll be chatting through:
How the relationship between a brand account and their founder’s *very* public social media presence has evolved with the introduction of a new platform and content format
Sharing trending sounds & filters you should be featuring in your next video!
How Founders can Leverage their Personal TikTok to Supercharge Growth
Today, attention is scarce, making brand marketing and storytelling more important than ever. Potential and current customers want to understand why they should buy your product over others.
A founder’s social media presence can act as a key, powerful channel to tell this story - shedding light on the realities of what it takes to start a business and their personal values that influence how the business is grown.
Whether it’s a creator SaaS tool, an e-commerce business, or a new social app, a founder’s TikTok can supercharge growth in a way that no other social channel can.
Here’s a look at two brands who leveraged their founder’s personal TikToks to reach millions of customers, and even investors, overnight:
Meet Christen, founder of Clara — the “Glassdoor for creators”
Christen first became active on TikTok at the start of the pandemic, using her account to share big tech career-focused content including resume and interview tips, vlogs of her day in both the Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok offices where she worked in various community roles, and additional advice on how to land your dream job
She built an audience of nearly 350k with her content, which she was able to lean on when she decided to leave her full-time job and TikTok to start Clara– a platform that serves as the equivalent of “Glassdoor for creators.”
Her video announcing her departure even went viral, with 427k views and 500+ comments. And although she was no longer at TikTok full time, the platform remained a huge part of her overall marketing strategy for growing Clara.
She shifted her personal TikTok content to speak more directly to Clara’s target audience: content creators on the app. This allowed her to attract and onboard users with next to no budget, while still staying true to elements of her original content format – now just shifting to cover a day in the life of a startup founder.
Meet John, founder of Stan — the creator monetization tool
John Hu has been sharing content covering all things finance, investing, and startups, on TikTok since October of 2020 and today has built an audience of over 50k on his personal account
At the time Hu already had an impressive background – from holding positions at both Goldman Sachs and Norwest Ventures, to quitting that finance career to attend Stanford business school – and used his account to provide his audience with helpful advice as he navigated his own personal career shifts.
During Hu’s time in business school, he made the decision to launch a startup: Stan, a monetization tool for content creators. He then took his audience through the process of starting a business– from hiring, to fundraising, handling rejection, and even how he made the decision to drop out of Stanford to pursue Stan full-time.
Similar to Christen, John had established himself on an app full of Stan’s target audience, content creators, and slightly shifted some of the content on his personal page to speak more directly to potential users, all while continuing to share all the behind the scenes of launching a startup.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series (dropping next week) where we’ll be highlighting two more brands plus the key takeaways & learnings we can attribute to this strategy!
🎵 Trending Sounds
Using trending sounds is key to growing on TikTok. Sounds help increase your chance for virality as well as increasing your video’s average watch time. Every week, we’ll round up a couple trending sounds that we think you should pay attention to, and how you can use them in your content.
What this sound is: An excerpt from the DJ Khaled song “Major Bag Alert” (literally), this sound is being paired with creator’s videos poking fun at scenarios where one party knows they will be getting that bag, if you will, with next to no effort on their part. For example, hair color companies when girls have a minor inconvenience.
How your brand can use it: Brands can use this same trend format to highlight a stand-out value prop, edge they have over their competitors, or any other bag-worthy feature from the POV of a customer, employee, or even the product itself using the green screen eyes and mouth filter.
“Captain”
What this sound is: A clip from a song by artist Nutcase 22, this sound has been used by creators sharing examples of the types of questions that when ask, you’d much rather disappear than remain in that moment requiring to answer them.
How your brand can use it: To hop on this trend, pair the sound with either a very outlandish or painfully obvious comment/question received by the brand’s social team. An “embarrassing” fact about the brand, founder, or other reps can fit here as well.
If you like what you see, please share with a friend!