It was the world’s least expected fight—and the least expected victory. On one side was the President of the United States and his online campaign guru, Brad Parscale. On the other side were some teenage K-pop fans and TikTok users. One was the leader of the free world with a nuclear arsenal and a multi-million dollar professional organization. The other was a mixture of well-meaning young people with no school, too much time on their hands, and some catchy dance moves.
But the teenagers had something that Donald Trump and Brad Parscale didn’t have: an innate understanding of the new social media world.
Facebook is now sixteen years old, which means that many of TikTok’s users weren’t even born when Mark Zuckerberg was rating women in his dorm room. Twitter is the place journalists go to argue. With travel vloggers grounded by coronavirus and restaurants closed, Instagram is now all about pouty-lipped beauty influencers who are all dressed up but have nowhere to go.
But TikTok is thriving. The platform was launched in 2016 and had reached a billion downloads by February 2019. It added another half a billion more over the next eight months. It’s now believed to have more than 800 million active users, which makes it more popular than LinkedIn, Twitter, or Pinterest. Some 41 percent of those users are aged between 16 and 24. Mostly, they upload short videos in which they create dance memes or show off their pranks. Grown-ups have largely ignored it, just as young people are ignoring Facebook and Twitter.
So while Brad Parscale was using Facebook and email to promote President Trump’s Tulsa rally in June 2020, TikTok’s teenagers were quietly urging each other to prank the president by loading up on free tickets but not attend. Parscale was taken in. “Over 1M ticket requests for the @realDonaldTrump #MAGA Rally in Tulsa on Saturday,” he tweeted before the event.
Little more than 6,000 turned up. They left two-thirds of Tulsa’s BOK Arena empty and forced the president and vice-president to cancel an address to an overflow to which no one flowed. TikTok’s users couldn’t have stopped attendees from wanting to enter the arena. But they would have confused Parscale’s algorithms so that he wouldn’t have known how few people were planning to attend and didn’t have a chance to cancel or book a smaller venue. The result was an embarrassing flop for the president, a victory for TikTok’s teens—and a demonstration of the importance of a social media platform that so many people have overlooked.
There are no excuses for overlooking it now. Business owners looking to reach new audiences need to understand how TikTok works and how to engage with it to promote their brand and land sales.
How TikTok Works
One reason that TikTok has been able to take off so quickly is the ease with which it grabs users right from registration. While other social media applications require users to first build lists of people to follow before they have content to view, TikTok throws content at users right from the beginning. That content is also relatively constrained. The platform is best known for demonstrating catchy dance moves, lip-syncs, and jokes. One feature on the platform allows users to add their own video to a clip using the original video’s audio. It makes turning an upload into a conversation very simple.
It also makes the content very easy for people not interested in pop music or juvenile jokes to ignore.
But while the content and the audience differs from other social media platforms, TikTok does have plenty of similarities. Content is visual and made up of short videos, like the now-defunct Vine or Instagram stories. Some young people with inviting content and a knack for self-promotion have managed to turn themselves into influencers. And as brands have signed up, hoping to cash in on those 800 million young viewers, TikTok itself has now rolled out a fairly complex advertising solution.
The result is that TikTok hasn’t just proven that it has a large audience that matters. It’s also ready to accept brand campaigns to reach that audience. There are three ways to do it.
Build Your Own Brand on TikTok
The most straightforward way for a business to market on TikTok is by building its own channel. The TikTok account becomes another way to reach audiences in addition to the Facebook page, the Instagram account, and the Twitter stream. Brands with strong presences on TikTok include the NBA, online clothing store American Threads, and footwear firm One Pair Sneakers. Baby and toddler products are also popular on TikTok, says Kendall Fargo, President of GrowMojo, a social media marketing agency that has been promoting clients on TikTok for the last year. “Since the young adult and parent segments on TikTok are quickly growing, any brands that want to sell products or services to those customers are a natural fit,” he says.
The first challenge for businesses building their own channels then is first to create unique content formatted for TikTok: short, catchy videos. It’s an additional burden on the creative budget and requires its own team and its own tracking. “It is also important to understand that TikTok is different from Instagram and to succeed with this new audience you need to embrace that edgy aspect of TikTok,” says Fargo.
The second challenge is that the brand needs to build a following. That doesn’t happen quickly and it should happen organically which means that the benefits don’t start to flow until long after the investment has been made.
Building a brand channel on TikTok is something that a small business should be doing anyway, particularly if its products are geared towards young buyers. The strategy is usually to include a link to the company’s website or online store in the bio, an easy way to bring viewers from a desire generated in a product video to a purchase made in the store. TikTok also now offers a “Shop Now” button that Kendall Fargo says is generating “tremendous success” for companies that sell unique products.
But the brand channel alone won’t deliver results until it’s built its audience and its reputation which is why companies also turn to advertising.
Advertising on TikTok
TikTok is relatively new to advertising. Although the app started experimenting with select campaigns in 2019, it didn’t open its self-serve ad platform until spring 2020. It now offers five kinds of advertising products, including in-feed videos that let businesses push their content into a user’s “For You” feed. Other products give brands a kind of splash page on app opening. Too Faced, a lip gloss, used a Brand Takeover ad to present a five-second video to users when they open the app. The ad made use of a vertical split-screen to show the before and after effects of using the product.
More unique to TikTok though, are Hashtag Challenges which seed a branded idea into the TikTok community that the brand hopes will catch on. Mercedes Benz used this approach to create its #MBStarChallenge. It invited TikTok influencers—or “creators” as TikTok likes to call them—to imagine their own versions of the car company’s logo, including the use of a new, catchy soundtrack. The brand then promoted some of those videos using some of TikTok’s other ad products to encourage the TikTok community to take part in the challenge. The result was the creation of more than 185,000 videos from over 73,000 TikTok users. They generated over 180 million views, adding 30,000 new followers to Mercedes’ page and generating a CTR of around 17.5 percent.
“The TikTok advertising marketplace allows businesses to start with a small advertising budget and grow their investment as they see results,” says Kendall Fargo. “Since the CPMs on TikTok are lower than other established advertising platforms it is a great way for businesses to get more customers with less competition.”
The strength of Mercedes’ campaign was in the willingness of TikTok users to participate. It’s one thing to view content; it’s much more engaging to take part in the production of that branded content. But it’s also notable the campaign started with an approach to the app’s biggest creators. They were the ones who set the scene and gave Mercedes its first audience. TikTok might be competing with Instagram and YouTube but it’s doing using the same influencer-based promotions that have given a prominent role to some social media stars—and made them fortunes.
The Influencer Marketing Factory, a two-year old social media firm that recently expanded its influencer marketing from Instagram and YouTube to TikTok, started using influencers on the platform on behalf of music labels. They also now work with app-makers and retail firms.
“Instead of hard-selling a product, service or app, we prefer having creators and influencers soft-sell them,” says Alessandro Bogliari, the agency’s co-Founder & CEO. The company tries to include the promoted item in a funny and entertaining TikTok video.
The cost of working with a TikTok influencer begins at $15,000, says Bogliari. Investments as low as $1,000 often fail to show results and can create the impression that the platform doesn’t work when the campaign just needed a bigger budget. The return on that investment depends on the type of product, user experience, and purchase flow. Apps, says Bogliari, can take time to see a conversion because there are so many points in the process at which the user can fall away. Users need to click to the app store, make the download, register, and finally make the in-app purchase. For an e-commerce business, the process is friendlier. “The user clicks on the TikTok link in the bio and uses the influencer’s promo code to get a discount, and in that case it’s easier to calculate the ROI of that campaign. The important thing is to track everything.”
TikTok’s Young, Active Audience
So small businesses have no shortage of strategies that they can use to market themselves on TikTok. They should be creating their own accounts, and producing the kind of edgy, quirky content that wins views, builds hashtag challenges, and grows followers. They should also be matching those videos of the products in their stream to a link in the bio to convert that interest into purchases. In time, as the audience grows, that stream of content should translate into brand awareness and increased sales.
They can also run advertising campaigns, which they can do with a small budget, and they can work with influencers, an approach that requires a bigger budget. Both methods can fast-track brand awareness, especially if the content of the campaign is fun and lively.
But all of those options still leave one weakness in the platform. TikTok is remains primarily a platform for young audiences. Kendall Fargo says that he is seeing the 25 to 45 age group growing quickly. “Companies that are targeting this segment are already having success and we expect that to continue to improve,” he says. Alessandro Bogliari says that he has also seen a greater integration of millennials over the past few months but he still expects his influencers to be trying to move people aged under 35.
That means that if you’re trying to sell products suitable to a more mature audience, you’re going to be in the wrong place. No matter how edgy your videos, or how catchy the dance moves, the audience isn’t going to be buying pills for their arthritis or packets of Werther’s Originals. But the presence of brands like Mercedes and Kia’s compact SUV on TikTok suggests that brands do see the benefit of creating positive brand awareness in the platform’s young audience so that they’ll know what to buy when they’re ready to make their purchase.
TikTok’s audience might be young now, but they’ll grow older—and they’ve already defeated a president.
Recent Comments