TikTok’s Role in Today’s Marketing Strategies
As big as TikTok is and as much attention as there is in it, it’d be misguided to simply run a campaign there expecting to see an immediate boost in sales.
This is the same with any single media. Each type of media, whether it’s outdoor, TV or a social one, has its own characteristics and role to play in a greater scheme, so it’d be incorrect to expect big financial outcomes off of a single implementation.
The biggest role of TikTok ads is their overwhelming ability to gain recognition
The spontaneous behavior of its users combined with catchy music and visuals play a role, like a TV commercial, and help to strengthen brand awareness.
Like the example given in our insight on TikTok’s Consumer Generated Ads, the mobile payments service PayPay’s "#PayPayDance" campaign allowed users who see a post with the specific hashtag to remember the brand name and catchphrases. It delivered a positive feeling to the viewer and creator as well.
A consumer generated ad for PayPay on TikTok delivers a positive vibe for both the creator and viewer
The more you reap, the more you whither
Working in digital advertising, we've seen many cases where budgets are only spent on "reaping" ads that lead directly to purchases and fail to focus on acquiring recognition.
In almost all of these cases, the conversion rate is low and growth is slow.
“The key to brand growth is to significantly increase (new) customer acquisition. Brand reduction begins when customer acquisition fails.”
- Takumi Kato, Executive Officer at Ezaki Glico (and ex-P&G Marketer)
Brands that are growing continue to acquire customers by continuing to gather recognition.
While many want to run conversion-based ads aimed at Amazon purchases, in our experience, we’ve have seen a 1.3x increase in sales in one month by adding social media marketing measures focused on gaining recognition to complement the Amazon ads.
Only focusing on measures to get direct conversions will result in severe limitations.
Guide people to purchase instead
TikTok ads can be run in parallel to conversion-based ads as a complement.
Some may look at the example we gave of a TikTok campaign in Japan and think, "Well, we're on a tight budget, and it's hard to launch a campaign enticing users to post submissions out of the blue."
While it's easy to envision an ideal situation, we understand how marketers feel as they struggle with a huge amount of work and the reality that things often don't go as perfectly as planned.
But make no mistake: TikTok ads will become an integral part of marketing efforts, along with ads on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Because of that, we need to try out things as much as we can in order to accumulate knowledge on what works best for our brand.
TikTok’s ads can be delivered on any budget, and can be aimed at bringing top-of-the-funnel awareness to users through vertical video on smartphones as well as direct them to product pages, like a company's eCommerce site or Amazon.
We recommend ¥300,000 JPY/month (just under $3k USD) or more to get meaningful results.
The reality is advertising has to change because people have changed
We are now surrounded by a huge amount of content every day, both online and offline. So, users don't show much interest when a banner suddenly appears and says, "Click here for details" anymore.
That's why the first thing to do is to get people to remember your brand through videos and campaigns that they can enjoy consuming. If you say, "Here are the details" afterwards, you've already introduced yourself, and more users will think about taking a look.
TikTok’s Tools Help with Video Creation
We know it is a bit difficult to go from zero to posting with music and dancing, but you don’t necessarily need to have some teenage girl dancing in some flashy video. We recommend actually using TikTok for yourself to see the variety of videos actually there first.
Even with still images, the TikTok app helps in transforming it into video with a few simple actions. Of course, it's difficult to say whether a single still image can produce great results, but it is great that TikTok helps you be creative enough to be accepted by users without having to spend a big budget like you would with TV commercials or YouTube ads.
TikTok automatically created this from still images of our company character
“Consumer is boss”
In the age of social networking, it can be difficult to decide the best route to take before starting.
It's actually up to the user to decide whether something is interesting or good.
That's why it's necessary for each of us individually to accumulate our own knowhow by formulating a hypothesis, testing it, seeing the results, and trying out different approaches.
We are often told a lot of different things by books, white papers, and case studies. Things like users are more likely to accept videos with an amateurish, homemade feel, for example. However, there is a big difference between simply having read that and truly knowing the reality of it in relation to your brand from actually doing it.
If you’ve read this far, I’d like to encourage you to just create an account, take a look at the posts and start.
