5 Ways Brands can Leverage TikTok
There is a new force to reckon in social media.
Couple weeks ago, Viral Access shared an article regarding our thoughts of TikTok app as the new big thing for influencer marketing. We mentioned that thanks to the dynamic nature of social media ecosystem, users are always looking for a new way to to accommodate their new needs for self-expression, interaction, and engagement.
This is where TikTok comes in.
Launched back in 2016 as a video platform where people could share and edit videos, TikTok has since then garnered an impressive follower base and is currently used in more than 150 countries.
The idea of the platform itself is nothing new. TikTok is basically an app that encourages users to upload short videos, usually around 15–60 seconds long. But it doesn’t stop the platform from being downloaded more than 660 million in 2018 alone and has more than 500 million people using the app each month worldwide.
How brands can leverage TikTok
TikTok’s tremendous growth and popularity certainly bring to mind the concept of influencer marketing. Many brands do a combination of running their own channels on TikTok and working with influencers to spread content to a broader audience.
Here are some of the TikTok marketing strategies from real-life brands to inspire your next campaign.
1. Hashtag challenges
One of the most common strategies found on TikTok community is challenges. These challenges are then labelled with “#” to increase its virality online and make it memorable. With this strategy, brands can easily collaborate with influencers to inspire user content creation, resulting in a content-rich environment, not just comments and shares.
Michael Kors partnered with three fashion KOLs on Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese name), to promote a #CityCatwalk challenge by sharing videos of them doing a catwalk with Michael Kors’ products. It is estimated that the KOLs’ clips were streamed for over 5 million times, with 30,000 users posting their own 15-second catwalk videos using the hashtag.
2. Interactive user generated content (UGC)
Generation Z loves the full immersive experience. That’s why they hardly react towards traditional TV ads. TikTok’s videos offer potential to attract bigger user’s involvement. Brands can encourage their customers to share videos of themselves using or interacting with their products.
Chinese restaurant Haidilao started a DIY menu campaign with TikTok. Customers who selected the DIY menu item can create their own unique off-menu dish and then shared the experience on TikTok. Ultimately, more than 15,000 people requested the DIY option, with more than 2,000 people uploaded videos of their creations and 50 million people viewed the videos.
3. The good old influencer partnership
The key to influencer marketing success is setting appropriate goals and targeting a specific part of the purchasing funnel. Brands need to ensure that the TikTok influencers they collaborate with remain authentic for their campaign to succeed. Moreover, most TikTok users value originality and creativity more than high video production values so it’s okay for your videos to look amateurish as long as it remains fun.
Universal Pictures, for example, have dabbled in TikTok influencer marketing campaigns. To promote the premiere of its film, The House with a Clock in its Walls, the studio scouted popular creators to share branded content.
4. Custom stickers
One of the easiest ways for brands to connect and engage with their audience is through an interactive interface, such as stickers. Brand-sponsored animated stickers are not new as they are often heavily featured on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and other mainstream platforms, but still, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t work in a new platform.
Pizza Hut utilized custom stickers during one of its campaigns, featuring their brand colors as the iconic red hat, sunglasses, and their shopfront as stickers for users to accessorize their clips with. The result? Users love it. Videos featuring Pizza Hut’s stickers were streamed for over 1 million times.
5. Authentic content that fits the platform’s audience
Sure TikTok might have been famous for its music-related video clips at the beginning, but as more users jumping into its bandwagon, the platform evolves into a fully interactive social network that offers a unique opportunity for brands to visually present their personalities.
Adidas is one of the brands that fully embraced TikTok. The brand mainly uses their Douyin account to market their sub-brand, Adidas Neo, that specifically targets younger audience. The brand fully localized their products by producing original content specifically for Tiktok. They partnered with local celebrities who feature Neo’s products as part of their active lifestyles.
In conclusion
We guess the most important question that everyone would like to know the answer to is: how long will TikTok fever last?
Chinese social networks landscape is notoriously known for its fast-paced characteristic where platforms come and go in a speed of light. But TikTok has created a strong foundation for brands to stay on the top-of-mind of their consumers.
As long as it can keep its content fresh, authentic, and interactive for its users, we believe in TikTok’s potential to grow even more both in China and internationally.
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Viral Access is an AI and data-driven social communication company — we help you tell your story through social media. We pair your brand with relevant micro and nano influencers that help you increase awareness, engagement and conversion. We have the systems and team in place to support large scale communications throughout Asia.
For business inquiries, contact us at: info@viralaccess.asia
