For a person to be unaware of what TikTok is in this century, he must be living under a rock. Why TikTok marketing is essential for all brands and businesses has long been debated, while many other brands have jumped in on the trend and leveraged it significantly.
This app for sharing videos became famous in 2016 when it was a musical lip-syncing app and had the name musical.ly.
China created an app called Douyin that same year, and the international version of the app was known as TikTok in 2017.
Many audiences of TikTok followed musical.ly at that time, so China decided to merge both of them as TikTok in 2018, and TikTok became insanely popular quickly.
With over 2.6 billion downloads and about a billion active monthly users, it has surpassed other social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
TikTok as the Future of Marketing
On this social media platform called TikTok, users upload funny and entertaining videos of 15-60 seconds.
TikTok provides opportunities for in-app editing and uses various filters, fun effects, music overlays, and the videos it creates integrate with other social media platforms.
The popular content formats on TikTok include comedy skits, lip-synching videos, tutorials, dance videos, and much more. You are allowed to optimize your videos on TikTok using the trending hashtags to ensure the videos uploaded are discoverable.
The reach you get from TikTok is better than most other social media platforms, which helps to increase the chances of the videos you create going viral. This platform is therefore solely meant for the creativity of users to be expressed in a marketing haven.
More and more brands are considering this app as an essential tool for marketing because the popularity of TikTok has increased each passing day.
We can proudly affirm that TikTok is the future of marketing because of these facts:
- Type of Media
TikTok is a social media platform that provides users with a visual experience and promotes excessive consumerism because there is only a little available to read.
TikTok is a video-based platform, unlike Facebook, which is still a platform that passes its information mostly in textual format. This is why the content of TikTok is far more consumable than that of Facebook.
Hubspot says that 54% of consumers prefer brands that create more video content. To satisfy these users’ demands, TikTok is a platform that brands can use for their video marketing strategy to tap into a younger market.
2. Nature of Content
Businesses that provide services for the 16 to 24 age demographic know that their target audience is more interested in being entertained than in political and social news.
While we all view TikTok as an entertainment platform, Facebook, on the other hand, has transitioned slowly into a social media news platform. This means that the nature of the content on Facebook has changed from its previous pure entertainment content to news-related ones.
This proves that for the younger population looking to be entertained, TikTok is a much more attractive platform due to its dense entertainment content.
This is why, if your Business targets a younger demographic, a digital marketing platform you should look towards monetizing is TikTok.
3. Celebrities On TikTok
TikTok’s popularity cannot be attributed to the product or its marketing but to its hype. Therefore, TikTok is a highly personalized platform.
With the rise in the number of TikTok downloads, it has become inevitable for celebrities and high-profile people to take an interest in the platform.
Like Guardian said, “The success of any burgeoning app is often tied to the early adoption of a key celebrity.” For Snapchat, it was taken by the celebrity Kylie Jenner whose influence made her fan base follow her to the app.
Similar trends have been noticed on apps like Instagram, and Twitter, where celebrities joining them has resulted in a massive surge in user activity.
Now that Jimmy Fallon, the host of The Tonight Show, has joined TikTok, it could result in a rise in popularity of the app. Apart from Jimmy Fallon, other celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Amy Schumer, Paris Hilton, and Marshmello, amongst others, have joined the social media app. As they joined, they have brought millions of young followers to the platform.
The following sections elaborate on the top benefits of marketing through TikTok and how you can help create catchy marketing campaigns using video.
Why Tiktok Marketing?: Reasons Why Marketers Must Be on TikTok
Why Tiktok Marketing? It is no longer new information that businesses not on TikTok are missing out on a lot.
Here are reasons why it is a must for marketers to be on TikTok.
1. TikTok For Business Makes Marketing Easy:
There are a lot of benefits of using TikTok for Business to market your brand because with TikTok having predominantly the youthful demographic, you have the opportunity to connect and engage with many young members of the platform’s audience.
For advertising, TikTok for Business is a great, fully-featured platform. This is because you can get all needed to launch an impactful marketing campaign.
TikTok for Business allows you to achieve everything you want from your video marketing campaign, creating an ad or setting a budget, finding the best audience, or evaluating data.
TikTok for Business helps brands test their creative acumen while designing their marketing campaigns. And they also have their e-learning center (Ads Manager) that is all set to keep you more informed if you need help creating authentic, eye-catchy ads.
2. Choose From a Wide Range of Ad Types
Another benefit of TikTok for Business is that you have the opportunity to create innovative advertisements that suit all the needs of marketing and make your brand popular with the masses.
Using a TikTok for a business account, you can design branded challenges for users and invite them to participate in these challenges.
If the challenge is fun and out of the box, it has more chances of going viral on the platform and will generate more publicity for your brand.
As a Tiktok marketer, there are five types of ads you can use on TikTok to drive traffic. These are top-view ads, in-feed ads, hashtag challenges, brand takeovers, and branded effects.
3. Redefine Influencer Marketing
TikTok has now become a hotspot for influencer marketing. Recent studies have shown that influencers on TikTok have an engagement rate of 17.96%, while the exact figures for Instagram and YouTube are rated at 3.86% and 1.63%, respectively.
Therefore, partnering with an influencer to say positive things about your brand can have a lot of profound benefits.
An influencer can talk about your products or services in their video. It can also post your website link in its video description and motivate its followers to visit your website and purchase your products.
4. Reach the Audience That Matters
Finding the right audience is a crucial part of online marketing, and TikTok gives you the opportunity you need to reach the audience that matters the most for your brand. But, it is essential to know that TikTok is not the best platform for your brand to get an older audience.
More than 60% of the users of TikTok are in the age group of 16 to 24, or we could increase the maximum age to 34, and more than 80% of users fit in. So, we could say TikTok is the best platform to catch a young audience.
5. Create Content Like a Pro
TikTok mainly thrives on viral content. You, therefore, need a strong audience connection to make your brand super popular. These all can be easy when your brand uses the best video editor.
Top-class video editors, such as InVideo, allows you to design a video in a way that is suitable for the platform you wish to upload your video to.
So, Twitter videos have a look and feel slightly different from YouTube videos. While YouTube videos might inform you in a slow-paced manner, TikTok videos must be clear, detailed, and fast-paced.
6. Hashtags Infuse Life Into The Marketing Campaigns
TikTok hashtags help you reach a more organic audience. This is how you can frame a marketing strategy with the help of hashtags:
a. Find Trending Hashtags: These hashtags can be found on the ‘Discover’ page. Find out if your hashtag fits your brand or Business or if it doesn’t, and post with a trending hashtag.
b. Look at the Influencers: The hashtags used by influencers can give you some hints, and you could copy them to test the effect.
c. Use Standard Hashtags: There are generally popular hashtags, such as #viral, #love, etc. You can make use of these hashtags to check the impact.
7. The Focus is Back on Content
TikTok is primarily content-driven, unlike Instagram. So, content is crucial for your brand to market on TikTok as it can scale up your marketing output.
TikTok users prefer if you do not make ads and focus more on entertaining people. Therefore, you should find what ideally excites the viewers and choose the content that best matches their needs. Once your content has the elements that can make it go viral, it will rank up on the ‘For You’ page of many users and make your brand more visible.
8. Your Creativity Gets The Right Recognition
TikTok is a perfect place to get recognized for being different and show your creativity. Therefore, make sure to design content that provokes discussion and sparks conversation.
If you can trigger a trend, you will feel spellbound by the enthusiasm of the user surrounding your content. And the more they interact with your ad topic, the more publicity you will get.
9. Decode the Readymade Analytics to Gauge The Performance of Your Marketing Efforts
TikTok, like other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, allows you to go through the metrics and measure the performance of your video ads.
But the ‘Analytics’ feature is available exclusively to TikTok Pro account users.
If you are wondering how much the TikTok Pro account costs, it’s good to know that it is free. You only need to activate the feature and see every necessary detail about the content, followers, and visibility.
10. Catch Trends Early and Define Them
The latest trends yet to get popular can be identified excellently on TikTok as its algorithm makes it easy for anyone to spot the latest trends and create relevant content.
Another fantastic thing about TikTok trends is that they constantly change, this means it will be fun for you as you create the content and test them to make your audience happy.
Conclusion: Why Tiktok Marketing?
So back to the question, why Tiktok marketing? For digital marketers and social media marketers, it would be an unnecessary knee-jerk reaction to give up on TikTok right now.
This is because the platform has shown incredible progress and is in a position of a powerhouse as a platform for marketing.
So, brands should still consider creating their strategies for it, even if they want to wait out this problem before they execute them.
Though Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube had a clear monopoly, TikTok has shaken up the digital marketing world. But based on the statistics and analysis of TikTok, it is clear that TikTok has caused a disturbance to that monopoly.
So if you ask if TikTok is the future of digital marketing, you’ll see from the information already given that it is indeed.
Unless TikTok is banned for good in India and the US, coupled with Bytedance not moving its Headquarters out of China, it is very likely that TikTok will realize its potential as a true force in digital marketing.
It will also become a new platform that businesses will have to use to find a competitive edge and match those competitors with those who successfully did it before them.
RELATED: The Complete Guide To Tiktok Marketing (Everything You Need to Know)
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