It seems like every year there’s a new social media platform popping up and are rapidly growing in popularity. I remember when Snapchat was new as if it was yesterday. Next up on the list is TikTok and I wanted to shed light on why marketers should care about it.
What is TikTok?
TikTok is a Beijing-based video-sharing networking platform app. You can film and publish short videos up to 15 seconds long and share them with the world. It’s similar to Musical.ly because the parent company ByteDance actually bought it. It was originally released in 2016 in China and 2017 rest of the world but only gained popularity in the western markets 2019.
So why should you care?
You may have heard of the blue ocean strategy. In this case, new social platforms have a period of time where marketers are unsure if they should commit resources into it. Meanwhile, early-adopters are going to be making exponential returns on investment on these platforms.
It happened with Facebook, Instagram, Vine. All of these platforms were new and popular at some point and had a lot of eyes on them consuming content. It was only a matter of time before every marketer and their parent’s dog was making moves on them until they were over-saturated with marketers.
“Marketers ruin everything” -Gary Vaynerchuk
Now is the time
TikTok is in that perfect period of time where hundreds of millions of users are actively using it while marketers aren’t sure yet if they should start making waves on them. So should marketers care about TikTok? Absolutely.
Some stats to consider:
- 500-800 million monthly users, 50-100 million in the US
- 1 billion videos viewed every day
- 52 minutes spent in-app daily on average
With every new social platform comes with new influencers and more so with TikTok as it is aimed for content creators. It has happened many times before, Facebook, Musical.ly, Vine, Instagram, and now with TikTok. And with new influencers comes very low advertising costs. TikTok influencers with 2-3 million followers charge $600-$1000 for a post. Compared to Instagram where it would cost anywhere between $15,000 – $25,000 or more.
How can you capitalize on TikTok?
Companies can use TikTok as one of their marketing channels in a few ways. Firstly, companies can deal with content creators on the platform directly. Secondly, companies can use TikTok’s own advertising tools to promote their goods and services. Thirdly, companies can create their own content and share it.
Dealing with content creators
You can do research on different TikTok content creators by just Googling them. Make sure to check they are a good fit for your brand and your audiences’ match. Another good thing to check is their past brand deals and see how well it did on engagement.
Advertising tools
With TikTok advertising tools you can place ads on the app itself that direct users to your website, app page or promote hashtag challenges.
TikTok says that 35% of its users participate in challenges and 16% of all the videos on the platform are tied to challenges.
- Marketers can target users based on age, gender and geo-location as well as create custom audiences by whitelisting and blacklisting profiles.
- Marketers can purchase brand takeover ads for several different categories. Only one brand can take over a category for a day and are shown immediately when the user opens up the app.
- TikTok hashtag challenges on the platform encouraging users to generate videos of their participation in the challenge.
- TikTok hashtag challenge plus adds eCommerce functionality to the challenge.
Here’s a hashtag challenge that Chipotle ran on TikTok:
@daviddobrik #ChipotleLidFlip chipotle #ad
♬ Flip – Future
Original content
Creating and sharing videos on a video-sharing platform? Who would have thunk?! This is pretty straight forward. Create content that people find interesting and want to share. Here’s just one great example of Jordi Koalitic posting short videos showcasing how he creates his photos:
@jordi.koalitic Mix ⚡️ Best picture ? 👆🏼 #jordikoalitic #photographer #winter #trickschallenge #camera
♬ sonido original – jordi.koalitic
Great way to advertise your services as well as in Jordi’s case, Lightroom preset packs on his website.
In conclusion
As a growth agency, we are constantly looking for new channels to capitalize on and grow our clients’ companies. TikTok is just one of the latest ones on our list and we can see the potential in our digital marketing efforts. We’ll probably take a look at Byte and Facebook’s Lasso in a later blog post.
Looking to make some waves with your digital marketing?
Book a free strategy call below and let’s see how we can take your business to the next level.
