Utilizing TikTok for Advertising and Marketing

If you’re familiar with the platform TikTok and have followed it for it’s brief time, it’s surprising to learn of it’s reach today. Approaching almost 1,000,000,000 users worldwide, it is certainly something to pay attention to and a social media platform that seemingly has the pull and interest of a lot of people.

Considering whether the platform is a viable option when it comes to advertising and promoting products and services first requires understanding the particular population it resonates with. And if your products and or services are within that target group then TikTok is certainly a platform you want to use to engage that group. When comes to driving attention TikTok is at the pinnacle of that science and they have done a good job in developing the user interface to ensure attention; because marketing today is about grabbing attention for your products and or services, any tool that facilitates and enables frictionless engagement with your content is an asset we want to invest in.

In the marketplace today differentiating your products from your competitors comes down to an ability to grab attention through whatever creative means are at your disposal. For instance, if you look at the vehicles on the market today, they generally look the same and all have the same features, there really isn’t anything special about one or the other. Or, consider the various types of soaps and body wash on your local store shelf, they all do the same thing, they all smell great.

Though what differentiates one from the other, is the story being told and how well that story is engaging with an audience. And while today everyone is attempting to engage with an audience in various ways, the ability to grab attention is still the most important asset in marketing. The social media platform TicTock has optimized itself towards engagement. Every point of use from uploading photos, to interacting with the posts you like, to hashtags, everything has been refined for engagement, more so than in the other social media platforms on the market. The totality of this fact makes it scintillatingly promising. However at this point in time there is still a somewhat limiting factor with TikTok and that is that it currently does not have a self-serve advertising system.

Using Twitter Facebook or LinkedIn for promoting and advertising your products, services and or content is relatively easy by way of them having an infrastructure for self-serve advertising. This means that you can go into their system, configure and set up your campaigns, put in your credit card and start running your ads. However the process of promoting on TikTok is not as yet so simple. At this point advertising on TikTok requires and involves the process of creating and sharing videos with hashtags and through, engaging with their popular influencers and through other organic means.

The 3 ways to promote on TikTok

Given the lack of a self-serve advertising system within TikTok, there are three major ways to promote on the platform, all involving an organic, hand-on operation. However the hands-on approach of promotion on the platform, can ensure a return on investment that may not be possible on the other platform. Here are the approaches.

Create your own channel

Generally users of the platform don’t visit the app in search of products and or services to purchase, they visit the app for entertainment. And the videos certainly are entertaining and addicting. It’s not surprising to log into the app to watch one video and spend 30 to 45 minutes viewing various video content. It is exactly this addict-ability that makes the platform particularly ideal for engagement. In promoting any products, services and or content, the first way to capitalize on this is to create a channel in order to post and engage with the platform.

When it comes to boosting your content and ultimately your account, it comes down to consistency, hashtags, and spending time to understand productive ways to engage your audience. The key here is engagement, engagement through content relating to your products and or services. Whatever the theme, you want to make it a habit to share video content consistently that are particularly relevant to the brand.

The success of the TikTok app is dependent on the characteristics of a younger generation of the population that are active online today. Nowadays, you want to create fascinating videos that entices and grabs attention, for the simply fact that this is what is shared and spreads. Whenever you become successful at engaging your prospects, the TikTok app will be able to optimize your engagement.

Share content or campaign on other social media platforms

Whenever you share your contents across a wide range of other social media platforms, you’ll increase your chance of widening your audience. Yes, users of the TikTok platform are usually people of a younger population and this should be taken into account with any marketing campaign. However, other social media platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook, or even Youtube, boasts of more general demographics ranging from children to youth and then the elderly.

Don’t see this as a redundancy, generally with social media when we have content, we want to share it across multiple social media platforms so a given content for a Facebook page would generally be repackaged and shared on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and other social platforms in order obtain the maximum exposure.

Partner with influencers

As a platform TikTok has grown to a point where many producers are making full-time income, some of these producers have over 1 million followers, and the most popular of these video producers have 4, 5 or even 6 million followers. Now these are whom we call influencers. Generally from a marketing standpoint, working with influencers provides a great way to obtain massive exposure.

The large number of followers these influences have, when they post about your product or service, it is shared with all of their followers. Consequently this is one of the most effective marketing tactics within this platform. Now you don’t always have to work with large influencers with millions of followers, a particularly effective marketing strategy is to work with even those with small followers, think of numbers somewhere in the thousands, 25,000 and 50,000, that’s enough for an e-commerce site to see a significant visitor count

Of course, payment is required for these influencers to use a given product or talk about a service on-camera or otherwise feature your brand in their videos. However because we’re dealing with individuals it is then easier pick and choose and negotiate an investment.

Overcoming TikTok’s lack of self-serve ad platform

With all that this platform has going for it, the most unfortunate aspect of TikTok as of this writing (December 2019) is it’s lack of a self-serve ad platform. According to various reports, there are speculations that they are working on a self serve ad infrastructure. Hopefully, the platform is expected to release it in the future.