Launched in 2016 originally as Douyin for the Chinese market, TikTok is the result of ByteDance’s efforts to optimise its value proposition for foreign economies without breaking China’s censorship laws.
Available in both Android and iOS versions, TikTok rivals social media giants like Facebook and YouTube, and is Snapchat’s single largest ad spender—despite being its most significant competitor.
ByteDance, the owners of TikTok, reported that the platform has more than half a million active profiles of users who are spread out all over the world. The app is among the top 10 most recognised social network applications, outshining the likes of Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn although these were launched much earlier than TikTok.
Because of the software’s simple UI/UX design, any content creator—regardless of age and expertise—can easily sign up and find their way through the app.
TikTok is a sensation in the West and the East alike. The app is popular in Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and other Asian territories. Additionally, while Facebook and Instagram took 4 and 6 years, respectively, to reach 500 million active users, TikTok only needed 3 years to become a hit. Since its official launch in 2016, the app has been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times by Apple and Android users—and the figure continues to rise by 6 percent every year.
TikTok’s primary target market is young consumers. More than 40 percent of the app’s users are 16 to 24 years old, according to the 2019 Global Web Index. 45.5 million of them are Americans, while China has 150 daily active users. The Indian demographic represents about 45 percent of TikTok’s consumers and content creators, which translates to more than 200 million profiles.
With such impressive figures, marketers must pay attention to the TikTok wave or they will risk losing out on the following social media marketing advantages.
An increase to your organic reach
A significant advantage of TikTok marketing over other channels like Instagram and Snapchat is your brand’s capacity to quickly generate buzz using organic content, thereby reducing ad expenditure while still making it big online.
The platform’s Hashtag Challenges allow marketing teams to rely on user-generated content and the easy possibility that their branded content will go viral, gain traction and product awareness and get faster results.
For example, e.l.f. Cosmetics (e.l.f is an acronym for eyes, lips, and face), a U.S. beauty brand that specialises in selling affordable makeup products, recently launched a campaign on TikTok targeting the Gen Z market segment that garnered nearly two billion views in less than 14 days. Any brand that produces standout content for and invests in TikTok marketing is bound to establish real-connections and increase user-engagement exponentially.
Added value with reduced costs
TikTok is making it more expensive for paid content to reach its users so that creativity and only veritable creativity reigns.
This is why they increased their Cost Per Mile. In fact, TikTok’s Cost Per Mile (CPM)—the money that advertisers have to pay for every 1000 views—is a whopping $10. Instagram and Facebook’s CPM are only $5.12 and $5.14, respectively.
Because of TikTok’s high CPM, marketers are opting for organic reach. With this option, they are given the best of both worlds: reduced costs coupled with the possibility of reaching more people and making a buzz with purposeful and creative content.
While other sites are making it harder and more expensive for brands to increase their reach organically, TikTok does not prioritise pay to generate value propositions.
Influencer marketing still works!
Due to the fact that the platform is still expanding—even with a CPM of $10—word of mouth strategies like influencer marketing campaigns are still relatively cheaper. Whereas most Instagram and YouTube content developers expect thousands of dollars in proceeds for their collaborative ventures, brands tend to use hundreds of dollars on TikTok marketing for similar viewership.
What is more, as a young social media app, competition among marketers is yet to peak like it already has on Snapchat and Instagram.
Therefore, each TikTok campaign is likely to reach a comparatively wider audience and massively improve your brand positioning in marketing.
Add a layer of fun to your digital marketing game
You can use TikTok marketing to take your fans behind the scenes and showcase your brand’s inner workings. Some of the moments you can share are product ideation processes, different production phases, and official launches.
As long as you avoid sharing business-sensitive/crucial information, and being too sales-oriented with your content, your brand can make its digital marketing efforts quirky and fun.
Like Snapchat, TikTok also has built-in creative tools such as customised stickers and filters. Users can also import new templates from Giphy. These branded stickers are useful for increasing brand awareness in a fun environment, without the need for overly elaborate campaign messages. By matching your stickers’ design and text with the trending hashtags and topics, you make your content more likely to be shared.
Summing everything up…
Marketers need to pay attention to the TikTok wave because it is an all-in-one social media marketing platform: affordable, leaves you enough room for creativity and expands your reach. Most importantly, it adds a layer of fun to your digital marketing game and notably to your marketing team as a whole!
The app’s impressive user growth statistics and the decision to prioritise organic content over paid ads set it apart as an entertainment platform that fully engages its users while still improving brand positioning.
If the daily active user profiles continue increasing at the current rate, TikTok’s audience could surpass the combined total of all the other famous social media sites. It is thus imperative for your brand to establish a presence on the platform before your competitors dominate the app.
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