Marketing On Tik Tok

What Is TikTok?

OK let’s start at the beginning by asking the question ‘What is TikTok’?

TikTok is a social media platform that allows you to post a video onto the platform for anyone to see.  This could be a video of you eating dinner, doing a dance, doing a prank, it is really down to you.

TikTok really blossomed during the COVID-19 lockdown as people were at home, bored with nothing to do except mess around trying to get likes and comments.

The platform is unique, and very new to the world of social media.  Different to Instagram and Facebook, TikTok is a Chinese owned platform (ironically) that is used by millions globally.

It is addictive and uses an algorithm to send you videos it thinks you will be interested in watching.

Influencers use ‘tags’ so that their videos are picked up either on your feed (for your page FYP) or in categories such as ‘food’, ‘cheeseburger’, ‘window cleaner’ etc.

Can Marketing On TikTok Be Successful?

Social media marketing companies can help you get attention, by using ‘influencers’ to help market your products or services.

It is just a case of finding the right one that is appropriate for your products/services.

The cost will vary depending on how popular they are or how many followers they have.  Some have a following of a few hundred thousand, some millions.

What Is A Social Media Influencer?

A social media influencer is someone that uses the platform with the purpose of generating an income.  For each comment and ‘like’ they get for a video, they receive income from TikTok of 2 cents (US currency) per thousand likes.  The goal being they get millions of likes to generate anything like a reasonable daily income.

Some examples would be the following:

• Mikaylah – A US based teenager that takes imaginary questions as a radio presenter often based around a sexual note.  Her videos are around 30 seconds long.
• Laurence – A UK based influencer that shares his weight loss journey by videoing what he eats for breakfast or ‘dinna’.  His videos are normally a minute long and are mostly filmed from his kitchen.  Laurence has 3.4 million followers.
• Lauren Sarah – A UK based 22 year old that has an interest in fashion.  ‘I am going out, so lets get dressed’ is how she starts her videos which are usually around a minute long, filmed in her bedroom.  She has 250K followers.
• The Smithy Family – Based around Nick (the father), they film silly clips around their house or garden doing a variety of dances, pranks, food related content.  They have 3.4 million followers.
• MashtagBrady – A UK based influencer that started off reviewing cheeseburgers to find ‘the UK’s greatest cheeseburger’.  He has diversified in recent months to reviewing other things.  He has 1.7 million followers

All social media influencers started off themselves, for fun, then finding that with so many followers, using an agency to manage gives them a full time income.

Marketing on TikTok is very new, and seems to have evolved into a very powerful form of marketing that is used by both global brands and independent sole traders.

The new career path of becoming a ‘social media influencer’ is due to be launched as a university course!

Affiliate Marketing With Tik Tok

Marketing on Tik Tok is big business for both micro and global brands.

Influencers are used to promote normally products but also services of brands to generate sales.

For example, a food reviewer influencer could review a new mustard brand, then advising to use a promo code to get a discount.  The mustard company will then pay a commission on each sale which is easily tracked through the promotion code.

Tik Tok affiliate marketing can help connect you to suitable influencers, alternatively you can go through a social media influencer company.

Tik Tok offer 3 different affiliate marketing options:

1. The Tik Tok Shop plan is where pay a flat commission on all your products (say 3% of the sale) to the influencer.
2. The Open Plan is where each product has it’s own commission rate agreed with the influencer.
3. The Targeted Plan allows you to invite specific influencers on specific products/services.

Creators/influencers use this to generate income along with the number of video views they get.  This is called the  ‘creator fund’ and Tik Tok pay around $25 per million views.

Marketing on Tik Tok is continually evolving as many people are switching their careers to being ‘content creators’.

How To Win With Tik Tok

Since followers of influencers is global, getting a specific target audience is difficult.  Certainly your brand/product/service is unique, you may be looking to get views in a certain geographical area, or to a certain demographic group.

While Facebook has a very proven advert targeting system, using an influencer is more tricky.

Marketing on Tik Tok is very new and is still evolving.

If you are a global brand, and are looking for general or global brand awareness (such as Pepsi, Deliveroo or Justeat) it is perfect.  If you are a sole trader gardener, TikKok may not be suitable.

Lots of brands (such as Five Guys) post their own videos on TikTok and do not use influencers.  If you have the time, this is how you can win.  You can even share them on other platforms (such as Facebook) to get double to exposure.

Marketing Agencies Working With Social Media Influencers

There has been a lot of marketing companies that now ‘manage’ social media influencers, to get their cut of this growing market.

They will keep the influencers on their records and pair them up with suitable brands that want to get their products seen by millions.

Food brands, perfume brands, shops such as Amazon or ASOS all use social media influencers to get brand exposure.