Just when we thought we couldn’t consume more social media than we were already, along came a short form video platform called TikTok.

What is TikTok?

TikTok was launched internationally in September of 2017 and was the merging of three separate platforms (Musical.ly, Douyin, and TikTok). Originally it was used by people who could choose from a huge database of songs, filters and movie clips which they could lipsync to (don’t tell me you didn’t have a good sing along yourself!!).

However, the platform that sits here today is a very different proposition. Whilst the algorithms are still beavering away in the background, working out what content to put in front of you next, it’s the content itself which has transformed as well as the numbers of users that use the platform on a daily basis (now 1 billion a month!).

In a crowded world of digital marketing, we are more generally seeing brands struggle to establish share of voice and capture the attention of their potential buying audience.

Tasked with the goal of increasing the share price of Meta year on year, Mark Zuckerberg has come up with several innovations to drive top line revenue, which includes simply serving more ads.

(I just went onto my Facebook feed and out of the first 10 posts, 3 of them were ads).

As an agency we are being asked daily by our clients how do we stand out, increase awareness, capture attention, and what can we be doing that our competitors are not?

Here we demystify some of the stigmas attached to TikTok.

3 reasons why your brand should be advertising on TikTok:

Distribution

You can have the greatest and most persuasive content, but if you do not distribute it in the places where your potential buying audience is, then it is pointless.

We hear it all to often

‘we only promote ourselves on this platform’

Or

‘we don’t believe in that platform’

High performing digital marketing is placing your brand in front of your potential buying audience at just the right moment. The more you make your potential buying audience know you exist and persuade them that what you have is of value to them, the more you sell.

So, go where your potential buying audience is and ensure you distribute your content in these places.

Myth: only young people use Tiktok

Reality: 64% of TikTok users are over the age of 24.

TikTok’s demographic distribution is not that dissimilar to Facebook’s (which is now apparently only for old people!).

Go where your potential buying audience is and distribute your content there. TikTok has your customer and a lot of them. Not only this, but it is currently the most effective distribution channel of video content which dominates most other forms of content when it comes to engaging with your audience.

 

Lack of competition

TikTok primarily built its platform to attract users and place content in front of them that they would find interesting and continue to watch.

As TikTok is a privately held company and you cannot buy or trade shares in their business, their strategy (up until recently) has been focussed on content, with advertising being somewhat of an afterthought.

As a result of this, TikTok is currently an underused platform when it comes to advertising and it’s likely that none of your competition is using it for this purpose and making the most of this great content distribution channel (and if they are I don’t see many doing a good job of it).

This gives you the opportunity for your brand to stand out and be noticed.

We have seen first-hand the benefits of this first mover advantage with significantly higher click through and purchase rates than other platforms such as Meta and Google.

However, I want to make something clear: the tide is about to come in.

More and more brands are starting to see the platform for what it can do for them and launching advertising campaigns. We therefore encourage you to make this move now before it becomes more of a video version of Facebook or Instagram with nearly as many ads as organic posts.

An example of how the platform is starting to change is last year when we partnered with a very large travel platform and worked with TikTok in order to be able to configure their pixel so we could capture events on our data partner sites. Up until that point you were unable to create targeted enough audiences which were valuable enough to advertise against and it was hard to place your ad in front of the right person at the right time. This is now changing.

Myth: TikTok is for generic content and not for targeted advertising

Reality: You can now place a TikTok pixel on your own site and retarget your own 1st party data as well as partnering with agencies like us who are able to create highly targeted audience segments (identifying your customers) through our partnerships with airlines and travel booking platforms.

 

Advertising vs organic content

There is currently an obsession to produce the next viral video on TikTok. This is seen as the cheapest, quickest and most effective way of getting yourself or your brand instantly in the hands of millions of people globally.

However, only a very very small % of organic posts do go viral on TikTok and many of those which do (outside of a cat falling off a wall) are the result of a huge number of videos being posted before you arrive at the point of going viral.

Myth: you need to produce multiple videos a week to be noticed on TikTok

Reality: advertising on TikTok does not require you to produce more than one video in order to be successful. By advertising against a targeted audience, you can get your content in the hands of your potential buying audience without the need to produce a large amount of content and hoping that it organically gets picked up by the algorithms.

There should, therefore, be a clear distinction between what constitutes as posting advertising and what constitutes organic content posts. One requires a large investment in a content team to produce 3-4 pieces of content a week and the other requires a relatively small investment in targeting your potential customers and placing an ad in front of them.

 

TikTok and the Fundamental Marketing Principle

Our intention was to help you understand TikTok a bit more and to understand the untapped potential it could bring your brand. So, we hope you have found this useful. We believe in the basic fundamental marketing principle of placing your brand in front of your potential buying audience at the right time.

Go where your audience is an engage them. TikTok can be a very effective platform to be able to do this and you don’t have to make a large amount of content before you start to see any results.

We look forward to seeing you all become TikTokers.