TikTok Marketing For Beginners – TikTok has seemingly emerged out of nowhere to become one of the world’s most famous apps. It started as a moderately popular video-sharing app known as Douyin in China and TikTok in the rest of the world. However, in 2018, it acquired Musical.ly, a more well-known app, and migrated all of its non-Chinese users to a new merged TikTok platform. In its home country, the company still runs Douyin as a separate app. It should come as no surprise that advertisers have started to recognize the platform’s potential. This is our TikTok marketing guide, which offers ways for companies to capitalize on TikTok’s young audience.
TikTok Enjoys More than 800 Million Installs
Most marketers (and business managers) over the age of 30 who have never heard of TikTok is probably the most critical impediment to TikTok marketing success.
It’s been in the news a few times recently due to questions about its protection for children. After a High Court in Madras ruled that TikTok was promoting pornography and other illegal content, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ordered the app to be removed from app stores in early April. The ban was lifted on April 22 after TikTok performed a more comprehensive analysis of its content, deleting over 6 million videos that it claimed violated its terms of service and community guidelines.
Apart from that, TikTok has exploded in popularity in the last year. During the first half of 2018, the app was the most downloaded free iOS app. In October 2018, it was also the most popular app on Google Play. In November 2018, TikTok was ranked third in the world.
As of March 2019, TikTok had over 1.1 billion installs. It was downloaded over 660 million times in 2018, with an additional 188 million downloads in Q1 2019. Every month, more than 500 million people around the world use TikTok. Since India accounts for 43 percent of TikTok’s global customers, the short-term ban must have been a big source of concern for its executives (remembering that these figures exclude the Chinese users of Douyin).
What is TikTok?
TikTok users are encouraged to upload short videos. The majority of Musical.ly’s former users posted videos of themselves lip-syncing to music videos. The participants who were more skilled, enthusiastic, and technically proficient posted original content videos, and it was these people who became the platform’s influencers.
While you can build and share 60-second Stories-style videos, most TikTok videos are up to 15 seconds long.
The original TikTok and Musical.ly also catered to the same demographic of teenagers and tweens. As a result, it’s no surprise that the combined TikTok caters to people aged 13 to 24.
One trend that has changed as the site has grown in popularity is that the types of videos people post have become more diverse. They aren’t all music anymore. Up-and-coming comedians, skateboarders demonstrating their talents, pranksters, musicians, fashion buffs, aspiring beauticians, and art enthusiasts all take advantage of the opportunity to share videos showing their talent. People are now also uploading videos of themselves using their favorite items on social media.
Of course, not everyone on TikTok has the confidence, capacity, or skills to make videos. Many TikTokers, like many YouTube users, are only searching for interesting videos to watch.
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TikTokers are not expected to follow anyone. They can open their app, navigate to their Discover tab, and begin watching videos that appear to be exciting or entertaining. They can also use hashtags to find videos on subjects they’re interested in.
Most TikTok users, on the other hand, will develop preferences for certain types of videos over time. They are more likely to subscribe to channels that post “their” types of videos daily. Every TikToker has a profile page that showcases the videos they’ve posted.
Who Uses TikTok?
With a female bias, Musciall.ly deliberately targeted Generation Z. It’s too early to tell if TikTok has changed for the better. However, younger people continue to prefer it, with 66 percent of users under 30. Females make up a comparable proportion of TikTok users.
It has a broad appeal, with significant numbers of users in the United States, India, and China, in the form of Douyin. Douyin has 400 million monthly users, according to the company.
Since 2017, Douyin has been working in China. About half of its users were under the age of 24 at the start. Those early Douyin users, in particular, tend to have stuck with the platform as they’ve grown older, implying that the average age of Douyin users has steadily risen. Just 31.8 percent of Douyin users were under the age of 24, with 23.4 percent of users aged 25-30 and 23.4 percent of users aged 31-35 as of February 2018. It will be essential to see if a similar pattern occurs with TikTok in other parts of the world.
How Can Brands Use TikTok?
On TikTok, brands can market themselves in three ways.
- They can create their channel and upload relevant videos via their channel.
- They can work with influencers to spread the contents to a broader audience.
- They can pay to advertise on TikTok; however, TikTok advertising is still in its infancy, and there isn’t yet demand for it as there is for YouTube. TikTok, on the other hand, may grow in popularity and recognition over time.
Many companies combine running their platforms with collaborating with influencers to reach a larger audience. You could implement any of the suggestions below on your sites, or you could recommend that your influencers build and distribute content like this.
Hashtag Challenges
Challenges are most the essential part of the TikTok culture. TikTok users enjoy taking on challenges and creating and sharing videos in response. These challenges are typically given a #-tag name to make them memorable and easy to find.
Jimmy Fallon’s #tumbleweedchallenge was perhaps the most well-known challenge. He challenged users to post videos of themselves falling to the ground and rolling around like a tumbleweed while listening to western music in the background. This resulted in over 8,000 submissions and over 10.4 million interactions. Since then, Jimmy Fallon has continued to return to TikTok challenges.
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On TikTok, brands can also promote hashtag challenges. If your organization has its TikTok channel, you’ll probably want to partner with influencers to get your #hashtag challenge off the ground. People can participate in a #hashtag challenge on TikTok with just a few clicks once it is launched.
User-Generated Content
Brands can either use their TikTok platform for this form of marketing or collaborate with influencers to inspire their followers to build user-generated content (UGC) that supports the brand somehow.
The total immersion experience enthralls generation Z. That’s why they don’t watch conventional broadcast television at home because it’s too passive. Generation Z prefers to be a part of the process.
You’ll get a lot of buy-ins if you can find a way to inspire your customers to post videos of themselves using or engaging with your goods in some way.
Haidilao, a Chinese restaurant, discovered this by including a DIY option on its menu. Customers who preferred the DIY menu item made their one-of-a-kind off-menu dish, which they then filmed. Since Haidilao is based in China, they invited their customers to share their videos on Douyin.
Following the success of a few patrons’ culinary efforts, others flocked to the restaurant to create their meal and film. Over 15,000 people requested the DIY option, and 2,000 people uploaded videos of their creations, which 50 million people viewed. We’ve also created a tool to act as a guide to TikTok Influencer earnings. This should help you find out how much influencers charge for user-generated content promotions.
Traditional Influencer Marketing
Of course, the same powerful marketing tactics that work on other video-based sites like YouTube also work on TikTok. Your TikTok influencer campaign should be successful if your product appeals to an influencer’s target audience. In most cases, you should delegate content creation to influencers because they know what their followers enjoy.
Setting appropriate targets that address a particular part of the purchasing funnel is always the secret to influencer marketing success. For influencer marketing to work, TikTok’s young broadcasters must stay real to their fans.
Often, what a company has to do is inspire influencers to film themselves wearing or using the sponsor’s product in videos. This approach will only work if the influencer is someone who will typically use the product. Attempting to convince an influencer to endorse an inappropriate product is futile. You won’t be able to sell nursing homes or hearing aids on TikTok.
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Another consequence of TikTok’s young clientele is that flash camerawork and high video production values are less appealing. You must trust your influencers enough to allow them to create their videos in their unique way, even if they seem amateurish to a marketer’s eye. Originality and fun are more critical to TikTokers than the content of your videos.
TikTok Advertising
Over the last year, TikTok has experimented with ads, but it has yet to establish a structured profit-sharing scheme. They are, however, moving closer to a stage where more people will be able to use the site for advertising. In January of this year, they began running short advertisements.
In late 2018, they produced an advertisement pitch deck that highlighted the types of advertisements that could be made available to brands on Musical.ly in the future. The document was leaked to Digiday. The following are examples of ad forms that could be used:
- Brand takeover
- In-feed native video
- Hashtag challenge
- Snapchat-style 2D lens filters for photos.
TikTok is currently testing advertisements in the United States and Europe.