A Quick Guide for TikTok Marketing

3 Minutes

TikTok recently hit 1.5 billion downloads, and has now started to attract attention from brands looking to market in a new way and to a younger audience. Originally known as Musical.ly, TikTok is a social app used to create 15-second videos. It has a very similar vibe to Vine as many use it to create short funny videos that go viral. 

Earlier this year, TikTok launched the beta version of its ad platform. Big name brands like Nike and Apple Music and Guess have already started utilising the unique ad creation features on offer. TikTok offers a wider range of creative marketing options in comparison to Snapchat or YouTube.

Here is a quick round up of some of the options available. 

TikTok Paid Advertising

TikTok advertising currently requires a minimum daily ad budget of $20 and a total ad budget of $500, making it a little pricier than other social channels. You really need to consider whether the platform is right for your brand. TikTok reported that 66% of their users are under 30. If you’ve been looking to hit a younger demographic, this could be worth the ad spend. 

Other paid advertising options are available and these can be set up through a representative. These include:

Branded Lenses

Similar to the face filters offered on Snapchat, lenses offer brands the chance to create a filter that promotes their brand. This filter is pushed out to users and they are encouraged to create content. This is a chance to get really creative, it has to be something interesting that users will want to create content with. It could also be used alongside a hashtag challenge. 

Hashtag Challenge

Create a sponsored hashtag challenge that encourages users to share content on TikTok on your brand’s behalf. This can be a paid campaign or you can do it organically, but you’re probably only going to benefit from this if you’re already an influential brand. 

Brand Takeover

Guess promoted their hashtag challenge campaign with a brand takeover, followed by an influencer campaign to demonstrate how the challenge worked. The  6-day campaign, #InMyDenim, gathered over 5,550 user-generated videos, 10.5 million video views, 14.3% engagement rate and over 12,000 additional followers for Guess on TikTok.

In-feed ads

These will either appear at the bottom of organic videos or in the video queue. This will depend on the product being marketed. 

Paid advertising has lots of potential. TikTok is quite versatile in comparison to its competitors and it provides the opportunity to market your brand in ways you may have never considered before. To help get you started, TikTok provides a little inspiration

Influencer Marketing

A lot of brands opt to use a combination of a few different kinds of marketing. 

Influencer marketing can be really effective, but can also be costly depending. It’s important to do your research, don’t just pick someone because they have the biggest following. Find someone that makes sense for your brand and someone that you trust will be able to professionally represent your company. 

You also have to trust that they know what their followers are looking for and what kind of content their followers will respond well to. Try to make the creative process collaborative.

Organic Marketing

You can set up a brand profile for free and start generating your own content like you would on any other social platform. Take advantage of the unique features offered. 

As previously mentioned, you don’t have to pay to run a hashtag challenge, and there have been a lot of successful campaigns. 

Jimmy Fallon’s #tumbleweedchallenge led to over 8,000 submissions and more than 10.4 million engagements. In celebration of national avocado day, Chipotle launched a TikTok campaign called the #GuacDance challenge. Customers uploaded videos of themselves dancing to express their love of the food. This campaign received 250,000 video submissions.

There is no clear way to know how much potential TikTok has for digital marketers and brands. It has the potential to be the next big hit but it’s success is determined by the popularity of the app itself. It will be interesting to see whether this is a passing fad or something that grows into a lucrative advertising platform. 

Wish is an award-winning integrated marketing agency, get in touch to discuss your social media strategy.

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