Recently, Business Insider posted an article about TikTok and its immense marketing potential for brands that take the app seriously. While largely ignored by brands until recently, TikTok has paved a path for marketing success for some savvy (and some lucky) companies. Here, we’ll take a deeper dive into some key points of the article and provide our take too.
Here’s some of what Business Insider had to say:
“TikTok is being tapped by brands like Grammarly, which have found success through viral trends and free advertising on the app.
In January, [dance student] Ari Pine gained over 50,000 followers in 72 hours after choreographing a video setting the audio from Grammarly’s YouTube ad to a dance — a trend which quickly picked up steam, spawning 50,000 new videos within days and over 100,000 to date.
While it wasn’t Pine’s first time creating a dance for popular commercial jingles, it was the first time a company’s jingle really took off on TikTok — in part because Grammarly picked up the trend itself.
Though Grammarly had been mostly inactive on TikTok, the company’s Head of Communications, Senka Hadzimuratovic, said the trend caused interest in the brand to spike as Grammarly’s followers increased by 481%.
After Grammarly released its own video response to Pine, Hadzimuratovic said the trend changed how the company approached the app. It helped Grammarly realize the potential for advertising on TikTok.
For many brands, TikTok is largely an untapped platform. GrowMojo Marketing President Kendall Fargo told Insider even brands that advertise on the platform are still learning how to cater to TikTok’s audience.
“TikTok is not like other social media platforms. It’s not Instagram,” Fargo told Insider. “TikTok has a much higher bar. You need to meet people where they are. You need to make people feel like you are part of the TikTok community. If it looks like a polished marketing video, they’re just going to skip it.”
Here’s what we at Blue would like to add about the article and above excerpt:
Marketing Your Brand on TikTok
This article spotlights the marketing potential that is just waiting to be tapped on the TikTok app. But what it leaves out is a bit of crucial information that brands need to know. In the United States, TikTok’s users are 60% female and 40% male. But a whopping 80% of the app’s users are between the ages of 16-34, according to TikTok itself.
If you’re a brand whose ideal customers are in that 16-34 age range, have you explored how TikTok can support your marketing goals? Like many companies, yours might be wondering if TikTok is just a temporary trend. How many of your resources (and budget) can you really be expected to allocate for an app that only a year ago, the former U.S. president was trying to have banned?
TikTok Growth and What it Means for You
Times, trends,and administrations change. Not only have attempts to ban the social media platform halted; TikTok has grown from roughly 27 million U.S. users at the beginning of 2020 to more than 100 million to date. Can any business that caters to target customers aged 16-34 really ignore 100 million users all congregating on a single app?
What the article and the Grammarly phenomenon show is that companies don’t have to invest hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars for the app. Finding relevant influencers who can promote a company’s products has amazing potential, and it’s an affordable form of digital marketing.
If your company is ready to test the TikTok waters, contact Blue Interactive Agency. Let’s partner together to create a plan to use this app to your advantage!
