Social media marketing is nowadays one of the most effective forms of Internet Marketing. Many companies all around the global are investing in marketing campaigns on the most popular social networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. During the last couple of years enterprises are offered with one more option: Advertising on TikTok. The latter is a social networking service for video-sharing, which facilitates the creation of short lip-sync, comedy and talent videos. In the last two years, TikTok has become the biggest video community that is dedicated to the younger generations.
TikTok is available as a mobile app and has a growing momentum. It was the most downloaded app in the US back in October 2018, despite being a Chinese app. Currently, it’s available in more than 150 countries and in 75 languages worldwide, while it has been downloaded more than 1 billion times. Furthermore, it is among the top ten most downloaded apps of the previous decade. Even if one does not know about TikTok, these numbers are by themselves enough for one to consider TikTok in his/her marketing strategy. Nevertheless, there are more reasons to pay attention to TikTok, beyond the growth of the platform’s community.
Why TikTok for Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing budgets are limited and hence marketers should be effective when allocating them across the different social media channels. In this context, one must justify the budget allocated to each channel, based on business criteria. Here follow some good business level justifications for including TikTok in your marketing strategy:
- TikTok is a new and alternative acquisition channel: In an era where mainstream social media are becoming saturated, there is always a need for alternative, yet effective channels. Currently, Instagram is full of fake profiles, while Facebook shows signs of decline in developing world markets. Thus, the very high prices of Facebook and Instagram campaigns are not always justified. TikTok offers an alternative channel, that addresses new demographic segments and enables differentiated content marketing strategies.
- Virality: Marketers are always looking for content that can become viral. TikTok provides a compelling virality proposition for specific types of content like songs and music labels. Based on proper agreements with influencer marketing agencies, enterprises can use TikTok to make songs go viral and therefore to rapidly create awareness. Specifically, as soon as influencers use a song as the soundtrack of their videos, the awareness of the song can increase significantly.
- Targeting specific market segments: TikTok is an excellent choice for targeting specific segments of the market. For example, it is highly popular in many Asian countries including China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Therefore, it provides very good marketing opportunities for brands that want to target these countries. Furthermore, TikTok has proven to be attractive to the younger generation, as nearly half of its users are between the ages of 16 and 25. Hence, it’s ideal for the marketing of goods and services that are appealing to these age groups. One may argue that the power of the latter groups is limited. Nevertheless, their influence on higher-income groups (e.g., kids influencing their parents) should not be underestimated.
- New Trends: TikTok is a medium that enables new trends such as memes, lip-synced songs, full videos, and duets. The latter involves adding new features over existing videos leveraging on their audio. These trends can be combined with the creative power of marketers and content creators in order to provide effective forms of advertising.
Seizing TikTok’s Marketing Opportunity
Given these potential benefits, companies have to seek effective ways for integrating TikTok in their marketing campaigns. Here are some tips and best practices:
- Understand the Rules: First, it’s important to understand how TikTok works, including what is possible and what can’t be done. For example, it’s not possible for a user to add a link to their organic videos. Thus, TikTok cannot drive traffic to a specific web site for advertising purposes.
- Identify and prioritize marketing targets: Marketeers have to specify the intended use of TikTok in-line with their business objectives. In most cases TikTok is used for one or more of the following purposes: To create brand awareness, to make a song viral, to boost the launch of a new product and to promote an app that can easily found by search.
- Evaluate the merit and need for spending money on TikTok Platform Ads: Similar to other social networking platforms, TikTok allows linking to selected content, provided that money is spent on its ads platform. Thus, TikTok marketeers need to assess whether they can get value out of such an investment.
- Collaborate with the right influencers: Influencers can boost your marketing message on the platform. Thus, it’s important to build proper relationships with them. In several cases it’s advisable to partner with an influencer marketing agency that could help you in getting in touch with proper individuals and groups. Influencer marketing agencies can also help one identify the most effective influencers. The latter are not necessarily the ones with the most followers. Rather other parameters like the number of “hearts” (i.e. likes) and comments that they receive, as well as other engagement parameters should be considered as well. Influencer marketing agencies can help you calculate and benchmark engagement rates, prior to selecting the proper influencer partner.
Along with its benefits and opportunities, TikTok has been accused of introducing potential risks especially for Western companies. For example, according to some American organizations TikTok could pose a security threat to the West, given its affiliation with Chinese companies. Moreover, the United States Federal Trade Commission has recently, in 2019, fined TikTok’s owner for collecting information from minors, in-line with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Likewise, data transfer class action lawsuits have bee also filed against TikTok. Despite these allegations and potential risks, the TikTok opportunities for Internet Marketing cannot be ignored. It’s a prime social medium for reaching to younger users and it seems to be growing very fast in an era where mainstream social networking platforms are exhibiting signs of saturation.
