TikTok Advertising: How To Use It For Your Business
TikTok is a video sharing focused social networking service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. Launched in 2016, TikTok saw its monstrous worldwide success when it purchased its Chinese competitor, Musical.ly, on August 2nd, 2018, adding to its database over 200 million accounts.
Although TikTok was fairly known by late 2019, the pandemic’s worldwide lockdowns skyrocketed the app’s downloads. In the first quarter of 2020, TikTok registered a record-breaking downloading rate, which resulted in over 315 million downloads in only 4 months’ time. Now, the social media giant has over 1.1 billion monthly worldwide users, making it the fastest growing social network ever to reach this gigantic popularity score on the global scene.
Today, the app is available in over 150 countries, and has been downloaded over 200 million times in United States alone. Its main reach is among teenagers and young adults, with an age average between 18 and 24 years old, predominantly females.
Let’s discover this intriguing platform in more detail!
How does TikTok work?
Users create, post and watch 15-second clips collaged over music or soundbites that they can overlay with filters, special effects and other video-editing features on the app, for free. With an impressive variety of digital effects to enhance the quality of the video, TikTok offers their users professional editing features rapped in a user-friendly technology. TikTok has proven over time its addictive nature, as its users seem never to be getting enough of those 15-second clips.
Is TikTok interesting for your business?
If your target audience is among teenagers and young adults, with an age average between 18 and 24 years old, predominantly females and it’s mostly focused on engagement, then, yes, TikTok would be a great asset to add to your digital marketing strategy.
Because of its high engagement rate, TikTok can be used in all the phases of the customer journey funnel. It draws awareness, forms consideration, retain the user’s attention over time and could even drives on-spot conversions. TikTok’s mass popularity forces even the most skeptical eyes to turn its way, because the enormous reach it gained over the last 3 years is simply undeniable.
Below, a few statistics that show why businesses cannot afford to ignore TikTok:
- Over 1.5 billion downloads on AppStore and GooglePlay
- It’s available in over 150 countries
- 90% of TikTok users open the app more than one a time a day
- On a daily basis, there are on average 1 million videos viewed on TikTok
- The average user spends more than 50 minutes per day on the platform
- 1.1 billion users worldwide
TikTok Content Creation
TikTok creates the perfect space to market organically, since it’s characterised by a lot of user-generated content. Like other companies tried and succeeded, your business can adopt the challenge feature TikTok is famous for and create your own hashtag challenge. Let your followers create the content for you, while they have their fun with it.
Make marketing that doesn’t disrupt, but engage. Generation Z is a big fan of online engaging and searches for virtual communities to join that share their values. This is a tremendous opportunity for your business to chase. As youngsters are the biggest fans of TikTok, your business can create smart ways to engage with their desired target audiences.
The platform is still at its rise. So, the sky is the limit. Many record-breaking techniques and ideas are yet to be discovered. With TikTok’s meteoric reach, all you need is imagination and creativity. Embrace the new potential we’ve been given, and boost your business’s success on today’s social media rockstar.
Some best practices on organic posting
The Canadian footwear brand is approaching fats 200,000 followers in only a couple of months of presence on TikTok. Their strategy includes giveaways, and user-generated content to create more engagement.
This game’s specific apparel has its own place on TikTok’s feed. The way Spikeball Inc. managed to attract over 1 million followers on their TikTok page is by capitalising on popular trends.
Relatively new on TikTok, Guess is off to a pretty solid start. Heading to 70k followers on their page, Guess successfully runs challenges on TikTok. The first one they made reached iconic success with over 38 million views, and a huge amount of UGC and customer engagement; the hashtags challenge : #InMyDenim. The challenge reached its success by engaging the audience to take part of the Guess community, while associating the concept of beauty and empowerment with the brand’s identity.
TikTok Advertising
For those who want to advertise for their target demographic, TikTok offers a couple of ads options:
- In-Feed Video: ads appear on the ‘For You’ page, much similar with Instagram and Facebook In-Feed ads.
- Brand Takeover: ads appear when a user opens the app, and occupy the screen for 3 up to 5 seconds without the option to skip it. Afterwards, the ad will also pop up in the ‘For You’ feed, with the option to add a clickable hashtag or link.
- Branded Hashtag Challenge: user-generated content is made, following a pattern created by the brand (ex. choreographed dance). The videos created by the TikTok users are posted with the brand’s hashtag and they show near the top of the ‘Discovery’ page. Clicking on the hashtag leads to a collection of posts bundled to the same hashtag.
- TopView ads: Like Brand Takeovers, these ads display on full screen too, only for 60 seconds this time. Also, this type of ads are on delayed play, meaning they can pop up after the app’s been started, during the user’s scrolling.
- Branded Effects: They are customised sticker or filters, with the brand logo, or other recognisable visuals, that users can overlay on their self-made videos. Each new beaded effect has an availability of 10 days.
TikTok Ads Manager
The interface TikTok provides for ads set-up is user friendly. After creating the ad-which does take a talented eye to pull off well-, there’s the cover selection, preview of the creation, ad text insertion, and lastly, call-to-action addition. After publishing the ad, there is a detailed way to track its performance and give you the possibility to adjust settings every step along the way with only one click form the control panel.
Best practice on TikTok advertising
This company uses the platform to pitch their business concept and benefits in only a couple of seconds, using user-relatable content.
Need help with moving your business towards the TikTok platform?
Do you feel overwhelmed by the complexity of setting up a campaign on TikTok? Does the newness of the platform give you too much uncertainty, or do you not know how to start video creation? In that case, the help and advice of a marketing agency regarding your desired TikTok content optimization or TikTok ad management may be an interesting option for you.
Need help setting up or optimizing your TikTok campaigns? Our Social specialists are always open to help you further!
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