Author: Franz Malten Buemann

In just a few years since its initial launch, TikTok has become one of the most popular social platforms in the world. Although TikTok itself has huge traffic, many brands still have a long way to go in the social media marketing layout of the platform. In order to help more brands do TikTok marketing, this report studied more than 300 brands and nearly 650 TikTok brand marketing videos with high traffic and analyzed the marketing plans of companies including Amazon, Apple, Samsung, and Chevrolet on TikTok. Based on the results, we sorted out the marketing programs that were effective for sellers. Including: which big brands have used TikTok for marketing; how often these brands post on TikTok; the channel and video level indicators of these big brands on TikTok; the style and content of TikTok videos with good marketing effects. The 15 important data sets include:
50% of the top brands (including Google, Facebook, YouTube and IKEA, including brands with a volume of more than one billion U.S. dollars) have not yet established an official account on TikTok; The TikTok account update frequency of the brand with the best data performance is 3.52 times/week; If the number of fans increases by 1%, the average number of views per video will increase by 0.65%; 80% of the videos with good data have a soundtrack. As far as it seems, light and cheerful songs are more popular; The average number of views of a single video of technology, food and game brands is the highest; Among the brands studied in this article, So Satisfying, Samsung, TikTok, Chevrolet and Flighthouse are the five brands with the highest average views of a single video; Among the top 10 videos played, 5 were created by TikTok; Among the brand marketing videos studied in this article, 90% of the videos have product placements, and 30% of the videos use humorous methods to implement advertising placements; Within the scope of statistics, about 25% of the videos have celebrities, celebrities or Internet celebrities’ participation; The video of promoting brand activities attracted nearly 20 million views; Creative videos with animations and pictures can often attract more than 11 million views; The average length of the video description copy is 87 characters (the upper limit is 150); The video description has an average of 3.26 tags; 87.3% of videos contain at least one tag; An average of 12 user participations per 100 views (user participation includes user behaviors such as likes, comments, and sharing).
You can read the rest of the article by clicking this link. Best wishes to everyone who wanna master TikTok to promote brands.
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One of the most frequent questions we get from aspiring and current inbound marketers is, “How do you manage all of that content?”
The answer: we rely on an editorial calendar in Google Calendar to stay keep our content organized.

There are a lot of great calendar tools out there you can choose from. In fact, for those of you who are HubSpot customers, there’s a marketing calendar built right into HubSpot’s software. But after trying a ton of other solutions, our team found that we really operated the best with just a simple Google Calendar. In fact, this has actually been the longest-running editorial calendar solution our team has ever seen.
Here’s how we set it up.
Follow Along With Free Editorial Calendar Templates

Download the Template for Free
1. Download HubSpot’s free editorial calendar templates.

First thing’s first: Download the calendar templates, above (they’re free.) By doing this, you’ll have three editorial calendar templates on your computer to use at your leisure: one for Google Calendar, one for Excel, and one for Google Sheets. In this blog post, we’ll be going over how to import the Excel template into Google Calendar.
2. Customize your template and prepare for import into Google Calendar.
By default, the publish dates on the templates you download will be stamped for the year 2016. Feel free to change them to the present year in the spreadsheet itself — you can also drag them to the dates of your choosing after you upload the file into Google Calendar.
Google Calendar makes it easy to load a calendar you might have pre-created in another program into Google. This includes Microsoft Excel. Here’s how to import the Excel calendar template you downloaded in the previous step into Google Calendar:
3. Open Google Calendar.
Once you’ve downloaded (or, for that matter, created) a calendar that opens in Microsoft Excel, it’s time to open Google Calendar. Just make sure you’re already logged into the Gmail account you want this calendar to give access to.
4. Use the lefthand dropdown menu to create a new calendar.
Now it’s time to set up your Google Calendar to accommodate the information in your Excel spreadsheet. First, go into your Google Calendar and click the plus sign to the right of “Other Calendars,” as shown in the screenshot below. In the dropdown menu that appears, select “Create new calendar.”

5. Fill out the details of your new calendar.
Fill out the fields that appear on the next screen. This includes a brief description of your calendar, as shown below, to give people proper context when you invite them into this calendar. When you’re done filling in the details, click “Create calendar.”

6. Import your XLS or CSV file from the same dropdown menu.
Using the same dropdown menu you used to create your editorial calendar, you’ll now import the Excel file itself into Google Calendar. Click that plus sign and select “Import.”
Click the upload box that reads “Select file from your computer,” and locate the file entitled “Blog Editorial Calendar – Excel” that was included in the ZIP file you downloaded in Step 1, above.
7. Select which calendar to add this file to.
In the second box below your imported file, click the “Add to calendar” dropdown. Be sure to choose the name of the calendar you just created from the dropdown menu, as shown below. Then, click “Import.”

8. Click Import.
Once you’ve uploaded your Excel file and selected the calendar you want to add this file to, click “Import.” You should see an Import calendar dialog box telling you that seven events were successfully imported. Click “Close.”
Now, if you didn’t change the dates of the first seven assignments in the original Excel document, you can now. Navigate to January 3, 2016, which is the start of your calendar. Be sure all of your other calendars are temporarily hidden by clicking the colored box to the left of the calendar name. On the week of January 3, 2016, you should just see one “Blog TBD” calendar event on each day from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Use the edit window of each assignment to change the publish date. For example, if you’re satisfied with the 10 a.m. publish time, you can simply change the date from January X, 2016 to January X, 2021. Each assignment will then appear as event blocks in your 2021 monthly calendar view.

9. Determine your publishing schedule.
Now that you have your calendar created, it’s time to fill it in with assignments for the year. This is when you have to make some decisions about your blog’s publishing schedule.
While the Excel file you imported accounts for one blog post per day, this doesn’t mean you need to publish seven days a week. Maybe you want to publish every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Or perhaps you plan on publishing on just Thursdays. Remember, the key to successful blogging is quality over quantity.
Don’t overcommit to a blogging schedule if the quality of your content will take a hit. How often your company should blog will vary depending on your business goals and resources. 
If you decide to decrease the number of days you want to publish, click on the calendar event of that day and select “Delete.”
Even if you wanted to publish multiple times a day, updating this calendar is as easy as adding an event. Select a slot on your calendar to add another “Blog TBD” event and copy the default description from another one of the events you imported.
Next, it’s time for some minor adjustments. Currently, the “Blog TBD” events are set for 10 a.m. Feel free to move these events to whichever time your blog publishes during the day. 
10. Set up recurring events.
Now that you have your publish dates and times set, you can make these recurring events on your calendar. If you have a regular publishing schedule, like every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 a.m., then put that in as a recurring “slot” on your calendar. It’s okay if you don’t have a piece of completed content — or even a working title — to put there yet. It’s just a reminder that you want to publish something that day.
To add your recurring slot, click on your first “Blog TBD” event and click the pencil icon to edit your event. This will take you to the details of the post, where you can create a custom recurring schedule for each assignment, as shown in the screenshot below.
You can set the post up as a recurring post so it automatically appears every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 a.m. (or whatever days and times you want).

Once you’ve selected the recurring days, hit “Done” and “Save,” and you’ll have an editorial calendar framework to work with.
For now, keep the title of the event as “Blog TBD,” but feel free to customize the description with any extra details you want to be sure you include for each post. Wait to invite any guest, as we’ll use this to assign posts to an author once you begin filling in your topics. With everything complete, click “Save.”
If you don’t have a recurring schedule like this, you might not be in need of an editorial calendar just yet — but it is a good way to set goals for yourself. If you know you want to publish a certain number of posts each week, even if you don’t hit every single slot, it’s a good reminder for yourself and your team that this is something you should all be striving for.
11. Fill your publishing slots.
Now that you know all of the slots you want to fill, you gotta actually … you know … fill ’em. (If you don’t have topic ideas yet, check out this free topic idea generator. It’ll give you some good ideas for content to put in the calendar.)
Let’s say one of the posts you want to write is “10 Surprising Facts About Tapirs,” and one of the posts you’ve already written and want to publish later is “Think You’re Cut Out to Own a Tapir? Read This First.” Cool! Just add ’em both to the calendar by clicking on “Post – TBD” on the correct date, choosing “Edit Event,” and then changing the “Post – TBD” text to the actual title of the post.

Now, let’s say you don’t actually want to write “10 Surprising Facts About Tapirs,” and you want your colleague to write it instead. To assign the post an author, you’ll invite them to the event as a guest. To do this, click on the event, hit “Edit Event,” then invite that colleague to the post by typing his or her name or email address into the “Add guests” box, selecting “Add” when their name pops up, and hitting “Save” on the event once you’re done.

Now, anyone can see who is responsible for writing the post that’s going up in that time slot.
You can take it a step further by adding details to the “Description” box of the event, as shown in the large box in the screenshot above. You might include a quick synopsis, the keywords you plan to target the post for, the target audience you’re trying to reach, and the offer or CTA you will direct the reader to at the end of the post. Don’t forget a due date for the draft.
Before Google Calendar will let you save the event, you’ll see a dialog box asking if you would like to change just this event or all of the events in the series. Select “Only this event.”

Repeat these steps to assign each blog topic today and in the future.
12. Share your editorial calendar with others.
Now that you have your calendar set up, you can start to invite people to see it. I’d recommend you start with your immediate team and regular contributors — as well as anyone who regularly asks you about publishing content on your company blog.
To share this editorial calendar with people, simply find your editorial calendar under “My Calendars,” as shown below. Click the three dots next to the calendar name and then select “Settings and sharing” when it appears in the dropdown menu. You’ll be taken to the same screen we saw when you first filled out the details of your editorial calendar in Step 2.
Then, you can add in the names of people with whom you’d like to share the calendar and set the right permission levels for each invitee.
It’s wise to keep those with the permission settings to manage changes and sharing to a minimum so there aren’t too many cooks in the kitchen — but I recommend you let everyone see all event details so it’s clear exactly what content is going up in each slot.
Under the “Share with specific people” heading, enter the email addresses of those on your content team and decide if they have viewing, editing, or admin privileges. Save your updated settings.
Why Using Google Calendar as an Editorial Calendar Works
I mentioned earlier that we tried a lot of different editorial calendar solutions, and this is the only one that’s stuck for more than a couple of months. I think one reason for that is because we use Gmail for our corporate email, which means everyone on our team is already in Gmail (and their calendar, specifically) all day. As a result, it isn’t hard for people to form a habit of checking the editorial calendar, because it’s not difficult for them to find it.
Google Calendar also makes things really easy to move around and schedule because … well … it’s already a calendar. It has all the functionality you need to schedule stuff out and let the people who need to know about it know. When we were using other solutions for this, we were trying to hack a calendaring function instead of just relying on one that already existed.
Along those lines, adding people to view your calendar is simple, which makes it easy for multiple teams to collaborate, see what’s being published, and figure out when they might be able to launch content and campaigns.
Finally, this sets a precedent for other teams to coordinate with you in a really simple way. You can have a calendar for upcoming campaigns, offers, social media pushes, product launches — you name it. And you can all share those calendars with one another for a single-screen view of everything that’s going on so you can coordinate more easily.
Are there other solutions of there for maintaining an editorial calendar? Of course. But if you’re looking for a minimum viable product, and a free one at that, this ain’t too shabby. It’s kept our content team sane, agile, and transparent for quite some time — and I think it could do the same for you.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Emerging technologies always encourage scrutiny and critical analysis, and ad tech is no different.
This discipline has been around for a few years, but it’s only recently caught the attention of savvy ad tech agencies. In the era of big data, they’ve recognized having ad tech company relationships makes them more powerful and attractive to clients.
The age of social media has forced agencies to investigate innovative ways to interact with relevant users, rather than relying on typical broadcast or digital media buys. And the advantages for agencies investing in ad tech are plentiful. Global advertising is forecast to recover to 10.4% growth, reflecting a total spend of $634 billion
But there’s still one issue: many young ad agencies are still trying to figure out what exactly ad tech is — and how they can best use it to their advantage.

If you’ve ever scratched your head at the terms “programmatic” or “omnichannel,” you’ve likely already heard a little about what ad tech does (though you may not have even realized it). Programmatic advertising, for instance, buys target audiences instead of time slots: Think about buying ad space that reaches a particular demographic wherever it is instead of buying a prime time TV spot and hoping the right people are watching.
Omnichannel marketing reaches target consumers across all channels — mobile, video, desktop, and more — within the context of how they’ve interacted with a brand (those first seeing an ad will receive a different message from those who have engaged with that brand a number of times). Omnichannel and programmatic aren’t the only two tools within ad tech, but they are two of the most revolutionary.
That said, ad tech is designed to help advertisers make better use of their budgets. Ad tech methodologies deliver the right content at the right time to the right consumers, so there’s less wasteful spending.
Today, ad tech methods supported by influential data allow agencies to make wiser placements that effectively position advertisements when and where they are needed most. This helps reduce wasted efforts and gets ads to users at critical touchpoints, meaning it’s helpful for both brands and consumers.
Instead of the standard sort of placement buys, ad agencies can integrate their ads using high-level data and technology. It’s a logical next step toward seamless integration and high-impact, value-added placements. And it’s redefining how agency planning and strategy teams look at media.
The Benefits of Advertising Technology (AdTech)
Ad tech has plenty of moving parts, which means there are countless opportunities for agencies to set themselves apart. The diversity of ad tech data allows for more granular and relevant targeting and integration. It also necessitates leaning upon trusted ad tech solutions and platforms to get the most out of every ad campaign.
One major effect for agencies and their clients is a noticeable improvement in prospect interactions. Thanks to ad tech, brands can now connect all advertising channels. This means saying goodbye to clunky, unnatural advertising that irritates users and frustrates agencies and their clients. Instead, cross-platform uniformity ensures brands are reaching users consistently and logically.
Ad tech has also allowed retargeting to enjoy growing popularity — so much that it represents about 90% of all advertising costs. In other words, it’s not going away.
The problem is that it can be too intrusive, which leads to reduced effectiveness. By taking advantage of RTB options fueled by ad tech data, agencies can drill down and target only those audiences most likely to convert, without badgering those who aren’t.
Connecting the Dots Between Ad Tech Companies and Agencies
Knowing that they need each other to thrive, agencies and ad tech companies are on a joint mission to figure out how to forge long-lasting relationships. Deeper connections tend to occur naturally through regular communications, realistic expectations, and thoughtful customization.
Communication
Touching base regularly and working transparently between both parties is essential. There can no longer be a “set it and forget it” attitude in the online ad industry.
With new integrations between data, tech, and content, there needs to be consistent party involvement from start to finish. To this end, media publishers are having more discussions with their agency partners about content and other creative efforts than ever before. That makes it imperative for ad tech organizations and agencies to have an “open door” policy.
Expectations
Quick turnarounds are another key factor to keep an eye on in the relationship between agencies and ad tech pros. Everyone wants rapid turnarounds, but sometimes things can get lost when too much is happening at one time, and sometimes quality is compromised.
Do you want something mediocre that’s finished tomorrow or something impressive you have at the end of the week? You likely want the latter. Project management helps smooth out the flow between ad tech and agencies and ensures more successful campaigns.
Customization
Imagine you’re a consumer who just saw a mobile ad that piqued your interest. When you go to browse on your laptop, you see the same ad. Then you see the same next time you’re on YouTube, then again before your next Hulu binge session. Seeing the exact same content becomes annoying, and your interest inevitably lowers.
That said, there can’t be a repurposing of content and strategy across all channels — that’s a dinosaur-era approach destined to backfire. Agencies and brands are realizing that they need to customize creative assets for each channel and integration. It’s no longer acceptable to have a mentality of “matched luggage” when it comes to media. Agencies can work hand-in-hand with an ad tech partner to achieve exceptional outcomes through data interpretation.
Advertising Technology Trends
1. AI AdTech
Programmatic advertising has continued to grow and one of the evolutions of the process is using automated, artificial intelligence. AI can automate the ad purchasing process so advertisers can target more specific demographics.
As advertising technology becomes more complex, the demand for it to be automated will continue to grow. Not only does it make media buying easier, but AI can also make real-time adjustments across all channels.
2. Self-Service AdTech
One of the latest trends in ad tech is the adoption of new technologies that offer self-serve options. For example, with AdVendio users can significantly reduce operational costs and time needed to manage clients by providing a branded platform for end-to-end ad campaign management. This means low-budget advertisers can scale their business efforts.
This gives advertisers more control and makes it simpler for advertisers to set up and manage advertising campaigns.
3. Header Bidding
Header bidding is an automated auction technology, which allows publishers to sell their inventory to advertisers through many Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) while receiving bids from multiple advertisers simultaneously.
With header bidding, publishers can receive bids from multiple advertisers at the same time. We anticipate this becoming a bigger trend because it ensures that advertisers receive a reasonable demand base price for their ad inventory.
AdTech Solutions
Mobile AdTech
When it comes to finding ad tech solutions, you might consider breaking down what type of advertising you’re doing. For example, if you’re only going to be advertising on mobile devices, you can use mobile ad tech solutions.
One mobile ad tech solution is Basis. With this software, you can plan, buy, analyze, and streamline your mobile ad campaigns. This software has robust business intelligence, workflow automation, and is powered by artificial intelligence.
Another example of mobile ad tech is Celtra. With Celtra, marketing teams can design, approve, and deliver digital assets for their mobile advertising campaigns.
Online Advertising Technology
Online advertising technology is a solution that will help you advertise online, regardless of device type. A great example of this is AdRoll. With this ad tech solution, you can find more customers, build profitable relationships, protect your customer data, and improve your advertising results.

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Another example of online advertising technology is the Google Marketing Platform. You can manage all your campaigns, from search engine display advertising, to retargeting, to display and video campaigns.
Video Advertising Technology
When you’re creating your ad campaigns, it’s important to be creative and think beyond display search advertising. You can use video ad tech solutions such as Tik Tok Ads. With this solution, you can tap into unique engagement solutions and immersive formats to creatively and authentically connect with audiences around the world.

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Another example is StackAdapt. StackAdapt is a self-serve advertising platform that specializes in multi-channel solutions including native, display, video, connected TV, and audio ads.
Native Advertising Technology
Native advertising is when paid ads match the look, feel, and function of the media format in which they appear. One ad tech solution for native advertising is Taboola. With Taboola, you can reach new audiences and place your ads in a media format that’s similar to that of your ad.
Another example is Outbrain. This advertising platform helps global to emerging brands connect with consumers on the open web through engaging ad formats that inspire action.
Reaching Higher With Ad Tech
Ad tech has grown rapidly, and it’s showing zero signs of slowing down.
As it continues its spread, agencies will be able to take advantage of ad tech’s opportunities to develop more integrations, more data sharing, extended reach across all channels, and cleaner integrations against content.
When ad tech and agencies partner up, user experiences will be increasingly polished and positive, and agencies will get the reward for their commitment to embracing the benefits of a lasting relationship with ad tech providers.