5 Reasons TikTok Marketing is On the Rise

If you’ve turned on the news recently, you’ve probably heard of TikTok and TikTok Marketing. Indeed, the app is so popular that it has been making waves not only in the cultural sphere but in the political world as well.

And honestly, even though more and more brands are jumping on TikTok, the competition is still fairly slim.

Getting on the platform now is a great opportunity to be an early adopter of a potentially market-changing tool.

That’s why in this article we’ll go over 5 of the reasons that TikTok should be in every business’s marketing toolbox. We’ll cover ads, different types of content, and some of the idiosyncrasies that make the platform unique. Let’s go!

5 Reasons You Should Be Using TikTok Marketing for Your Business

TikTok is without any doubt the hottest new social media platform around. So keep reading to find out why you should be TikTok for marketing your business. This article will definitely help you make up your mind!

1. TikTok Influencers

Influencer marketing has been around for a while now. If you don’t already know what it is, here’s a quick primer: you get in touch with an Instagram influencer who has a sizeable following and pay them to post about your products.

This type of marketing is particularly effective because it comes across more like a recommendation from a friend than as an advertisement.

It instills trust in the viewer and makes them more likely to buy.

TikTok influencer marketing takes this to a whole new level. While Instagram marketing is still effective, the platform has been inundated with brands trying to take advantage of the strategy.

As a result, there’s a growing number of Instagrammers who just tune out sponsored posts in the same way they’d tune out any other advertisement.

TikTok, on the other hand, is a new platform that is far less salesy.

Because it hasn’t been as widely adopted by businesses, it retains more of the personalized flair that Instagram had before it became so commonly used for marketing.

What Does the Tiktok Demographics Say About That?

Plus, if your products appeal largely to a younger demographic (13 to 24), TikTok is a perfect fit.

A whopping 69% of all users on TikTok are between 13 and 24, with 27% between 13 and 17 and 42% between 18 and 24.

So, if you’re trying to reach this demographic, TikTok is a golden ticket.

Overall, the hardest part of getting into TikTok influencer marketing is simply finding the right influencers for your brand.

As powerful as TikTok marketing is, you still need to make sure the person you pick is in the right niche, you probably wouldn’t want to use a male fitness influencer to market a new women’s fitness program, for example.

To find an influencer, you can either search around on the platform yourself or use a tool like Influence Grid.

Influence Grid helps you sort through influencers by providing information on their stats, including their follower count, views per video, and likes per video.

This can help you get a better idea of the types of results you can expect with specific influencers.

2. TikTok Ads

TikTok ads are a relatively new addition to the platform. They mark TikTok’s entry into the ad space as a direct competitor to Snapchat and Instagram.

Overall, TikTok ads are quite similar to other paid social media ads, but they do have some quirks that marketers should be aware of.

There are five types of ads you need to be aware of:

1. In-Feed Ads
2. Brand Takeovers
3. TopViews
4. Branded Hashtag Challenges
5. Branded Effects

Now, before we get into the differences between each of these, it’s important to note that paid TikTok ads are more expensive than ads on most other social media platforms.

That’s why TikTok ads are out of reach for many small businesses. However, if you have a larger budget they can be a useful addition to your strategy.

3. Diverse Content

TikTok is not just a new social network, it’s a new medium for online expression.

Just like the invention of vinyl records spurred the popularity of the two-minute single, TikTok is bringing bite-sized media to the forefront, and creators need to learn the ins and outs of this new form.

This means that you can’t just import your Facebook and Instagram posts to TikTok and vice versa.

Although you’ll need to double up on your social media efforts, it also gives you a license to experiment with new ideas that you wouldn’t try on other platforms.

While Twitter is focused on text, and Instagram is centered around images, TikTok is all about sound and video.

It’s hard to have a successful TikTok post without some interesting audio and eye-catching visuals.

Popular TikTok posts generally fall into one of two categories: music and comedy. While serious posts do exist, most people use TikTok to watch short, loopable comedy clips or videos (particularly dance routines) set to catchy songs.

As a result, TikTok is an exceedingly informal platform — coming across as too professional or salesy won’t sit well with your viewers.

So, even though you may maintain a very professional appearance on Instagram, you’ll probably want to tone it down a bit and get silly for TikTok.

4. Higher Chance of Going Viral

TikTok democratizes content in a new and unique way. Unlike most social media platforms, which decide what content to serve you largely based on the poster’s popularity.

TikTok has confirmed that follower counts do not directly influence what content shows up in your feed.

What does this mean? Essentially, you can have an overnight success after posting just one video.

With follower counts out of the picture, the new guy has just as much chance of going viral as the mega pop star.

For example, after posting just a few videos of his ice cream acrobatics, bubba_ice was able to rapidly grow his account. Now, his account sits at a cool 1.3 million followers and 21.6 million likes.

5. TikTok Isn’t Saturated

TikTok is still a very new platform. It was initially released just four years ago in 2016, and only really started hitting the mainstream in 2018, when its parent company decided to merge it with the now-defunct Musical.ly.

TikTok for Business is even newer, which launched in July 2020.

This leaves TikTok ripe for innovation and new voices. Many major brands have yet to migrate to TikTok despite having a solid presence on Instagram and Facebook.

A few examples of brands that aren’t on TikTok include The New York Times, Subaru, CVS Pharmacy, and, believe it or not, Pepsi.

TikTok is still in the realm of the first adopters, at least from a marketing and business perspective.

As a newcomer to the platform, you have less competition, and fewer big names are fighting over the same target audiences.

However, just because the market is unsaturated doesn’t mean that it’s easy to see success.

It’s quite possible that one of the reasons many household names haven’t set up profiles on TikTok is because they don’t know what type of content to make.

Wrapping Up

TikTok and TikTok for Business are kind of like the Wild West of the social media world. They’re shrouded in political controversy, and it’s such a new medium that no one really knows how to use it yet.

But that means there are lots of great opportunities for your business to become one of the trailblazers. If you hit on something, you could end up setting new advertising and content paradigms.

Overall, there’s no substitute for rolling up your sleeves and trying TikTok marketing out for yourself. If you haven’t yet, download the app, flip through some videos, and see whether it fits into your business’s marketing strategy.