With a record-breaking 315 million new users during the single quarter, TikTok managed to make a breakthrough from being a new, weird app for teens into a mainstream!
The never-seen-before take-off was soon followed by many brands joining the TikTok club with an idea to reach their audience on the hottest platform at the moment. There’s no doubt that TikTok dominated the social network landscape of 2020 and that businesses have an enormous opportunity for advertising at their hands. But, is it the right time to start using TikTok for brand marketing as well?
TikTok in a nutshell
Described as “THE destination for mobile videos“, TikTok currently surpassed the marks of 2 billion downloads worldwide and 800 million monthly active users. It is now available in 154 countries. A year ago we could certainly say that it was a „Gen Z thing“. But, if we fast forward to this day, everything has changed. Now, pretty much everyone is on TikTok. By numbers, 41% of active users are between the ages of 16 and 24, but there’s been a big shift in older generations in the past years. Even so, if we judge by numbers, based on demographics, TikTok might not be the best call for consumer marketing, despite the growth in popularity among Millennials. Or might be just a perfect one? Let’s find out!
Being personal on TikTok is a good call
Although TikTok is experiencing a period of expansive growth in terms of users, its marketing options are still in infancy. On other hand, TikTok made a revolution in the field of influencer marketing and established a new culture of communication for brands with their audience. We can call it a platform that leaves no space for faceless, branded content with nothing to offer but product or service. That’s why many brands decided to put a face of well-known and popular influencers in front of their business. Also, there are a number of examples where entrepreneurs became extremely popular figures on TikTok. And definitely it’s possible to promote your knowledge, business and be informational with funny, creative and authentic content based on human-to-human interaction.
Ideas can take you far
Content is certainly a king on TikTok. Even the slightest sign of a sales-pitch approach in your videos and they will be skipped! And this principle applies to paid ads as well. Many brands had to face it and make a switch in their tone of voice and creative approach to click with their audience on TikTok. It doesn’t sound promising, but it opened a lot of opportunities for businesses. Maybe your business is oddly satisfying to watch, maybe it can respond to a trending challenge in a unique way, or describe something relatable with a perfect song – there’s a lot of ways to stand out. It takes courage, some thoughts, creativity and, most of all, time. But, once you hit the spot where your brand fits TikTok and its users, you’ll be on the roll!
Check out Brendan, who runs @paintturner and has almost five million followers. His videos are very simple, without any comments or music, just paint, shaking and revealing final results. He is engaging with his followers by taking requests from his TikTok comments and his followers love his content!
Introduce yourself to the people
Thanks to its algorithm, TikTok can turn anyone into a viral sensation. Many individuals and brands used this feature to build a large base of followers on their TikTok profiles. So, investing in TikTok is a good place for building brand awareness, but if we talk about leads, sales and conversions it’s not as effective as some other social platforms.
Many marketers use the fact that Gen Z’ers are the primary audience on TikTok to avoid it. Yes, many of them are still teenagers, but there’s still a lot of college graduates, young professionals and even older individuals spending their time on TikTok. They own and run businesses, have significant buying power and deciding to introduce yourself to them is never a bad call. Who knows, maybe your viral video will be in front of your next client during a lunch break!
Take a hint from Professional cleaner Vanesa Valdez who is showing TikTok users how to make their homes sparkling clean with tips and tricks from her personal experience. Who knew that cleaning could be this fun?
Takeaway
Looking at the way TikTok performed in 2020, we can only expect trends to continue – Enormous growth, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon! And with new users, more and more brands will jump aboard and with them, we will have new tools and opportunities developed by TikTok. On top of that, gross revenues of the platform more than tripled in just the first 3 months of the year. Remember how Instagram started? The platform that was meant to be a way to share pictures with friends now has more than 25 million brand accounts.
TikTok has a long way to go. But the moment to start leveraging it is right about now. Sooner, the better. It never hurts to experiment. At the very least, TikTok will surely bring you a lot of fun! And if you need professional help mapping the uncharted waters of TikTok, consider GrowMojo, a specialized TikTok agency, as your partner. Feel free to contact our team anytime and let’s rock this boat named TikTok together!
