TikTok Marketing For Beginners - A Marketer’s Guide to Advertising on TikTok

TikTok has grown as an option for a marketing campaign for its inclusive, active, new-gen, and popular features.

TikTok has gained immense popularity since its inception and becomes the most downloaded apps in the world. It was started in China in quite a humble way from a simple video-sharing app- tagged Douyin.  In 2018, it bought the app, Musical.ly and, this proved to be the turning point. This mixing got even the non-Chinese users to get using TikTok. The company still operates Douyin as a separate app in its home country. Owing to its growing popularity and huge followers the companies have started to use it for marketing campaigns.

Marketers or business managers were unaware of TikTok as it had its target audience, mostly below the age of 30 specifically, between the ages of 12 to 25. However, it grew significantly and was adopted by many celebrities and actors, that it became a household name. It was the most downloaded app in 2018. In October 2018, it was the most downloaded app from Google Play. Overall it ranked third in the world in November 2018. The figures show its mass appeal. It has over 1.1 billion installs in March 2019. More than 500 million people from all parts of the globe use it monthly. TikTok has 43% of its global users from India alone. 

There are ways in which marketers can make the most of TikTok for business, but then need to understand the basics of TikTok analytics marketing. Using analytics data from Analisa.io as an analytics tool is a domain that is gaining popularity.

What is TikTok?

TikTok is a platform where users can simply upload their videos lip-synching to the music videos. It is an interesting and entertaining platform. The influencers (talented and technically sound) on TikTok take a further dig and upload the video with original audio content.

TikTok targets audience from the age group of 13-24 -year- olds. As the app grew, the content also started to grow. TikTok encourages 15 seconds long videos to 60-second storie types videos. With the growing popularity of the app, the fan base is also increasing. It is no longer just music videos, but now there are performances by pranksters, stand-up comedians, dancers, fashions buffs, craft funs, DIYs, and even the videos that are shared with some products being used. Thus this became a type of TikTok ad and attracted the marketers for campaigns.

Users of TikTok:

The users of TikTok analytics show mostly to Generation Z with a female bias. It has 66% of its users under the age of 30, and also, 66% of its users are females. It has worldwide users, mostly in the USA, India, and China.

How to use the TikTok marketing campaign:

There are three ways in which the brands can use TikTok ads:

• Create their channel and upload videos of their products or services on the channel.
• With the influencers, they can spread the content to a wider audience.
• TikTok ads can be used as a model for advertising products or services. Although it will be too soon for ads on TikTok. The app is not as big as Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. Still, with the passage of time, it will gain popularity and become an established platform for advertising.

Brands usually work in a combination with the above-listed ideas. They create their channels and work with influencers to promote their products or services. There are ways in which the marketers use their channel or work with influencers to promote their marketing campaigns:

• Hashtag challenge: challenges are loved and accepted on this platform. A challenge is taken up and a video is made to fulfill the challenge, and it has given a #-tag name to make it easy to find and memorable. Brands can encourage hashtags challenges of using their products. They can either put up the challenge on their channel and ask for videos or work with influencers to start the hashtag challenge.

• The influencer way of marketing: the influencer marketing techniques as seen in a video-based platform like YouTube will work on TikTok also. Ask the influencer (who suits your product) to create video content regarding your product. The influencer knows what kind of content is liked by their followers and will create content accordingly. There are even TikTok analytics and an analytic tool like Analisa.io that can help to target the right influencer.

• User-generated channel: this type of TikTok marketing can again be done by own channel or with the help of influencers to encourage their followers to create user-generated content (UGC) to support the brand. Generation Z loves inclusive advertising in place of the passive mode. They would prefer to use the product and advertise it rather than sitting at home and viewing some ads on the sitcom. If the users are made to use your products and share videos of it, the product will get high buy-in.

• TikTok ads: TikTok has started to experiment with advertisements. There is no formal set-up for profit sharing, but they are getting to set up a way where more and more marketers will be able to advertise and promote their product. From January 2019, they started with short ads. Currently, it is testing the market for ads in the US and Europe. An advertising pitch deck was started in late 2018. This pitch deck specified the types of ads that can be shared by brands. It also has a lot of ad pitches that can be made available to brands on TikTok.

The list of available ads are as follows:

• Brand takeover
• Snapchat-style 2D lens for filters for photos
• In-feed native video
• Hashtag challenge

Marketers are using new and unconventional ways of advertising, and in the list, TikTok is emerging as it new, inclusive, active, and has immense scope for the display of talent.