How Businesses are Taking Advantage of TikTok
In November 2020 I decided to shop at American Apparel brand, Aerie, for nothing in particular. Before I had the chance to even step foot into the store, an Aerie employee notified me that the so-called “TikTok leggings” had gone crazy. A week prior to this, Hannah Schlenker posted a 15-second video of her dancing to Drummer Boy by Justin Beiber on the social media platform, TikTok. Shortly after, the video went viral but for an unexpected reason — Schlenker’s leggings. Though the video was unsponsored and had nothing to do with the leggings, viewers loved how the Aerie Crossover Leggings looked on Schlenker, and they were soon completely sold out. Since then, the video has racked up 7.7 million views. According to an Aerie spokesperson, the leggings have sold out over six times and have a waitlist of more than 156,000 people (Stessman, 2021).
TikTok Explained
Tik Tok is a video-sharing app that allows users to create and share 15-second videos on any topic. Users can also add music, captions, effects, and hashtags to their videos. Users are able to like, follow, and share other user’s accounts and videos. The social media platform was first released under the name Musical.ly in 2014 but was later reinvented as TikTok after a Chinese company named ByteDance took over in 2018. After becoming TikTok, the platform’s content became much broader. The range of content along with how simple it was to post videos attracted many new users to TikTok. Currently, TikTok has 689 million monthly active users worldwide (Influencer Marketing, 2020).
The Beginning Of Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing first started on Facebook when it launched ads and branded pages in 2007. This allowed the platform to reach $150 million in ad revenue within a year, causing other social media platforms such as Twitter to follow Facebook’s footsteps. Since then, from the digital marketing perspective, social media marketing has gone from an “advanced level tactic to a fundamental must-have.” Social media giants are making billions off of ad revenue, allowing them to release services on their platforms to make marketing easier for businesses. Such services could range from helping brands connect with campaign consultants to making advertising more creative. (The Evolution of Digital Marketing: Social Media Marketing, 2017).
So Why TikTok?
For now, TikTok stands as the most downloaded app. When comparing TikTok to platforms like Instagram and Facebook, levels of engagement on TikTok are about 5% higher with each post. (Grills, 2020). But what lures businesses is how easy it is to sneak in ads on TikTok. Audiences, especially the mass majority of younger ones on TikTok, are already accustomed to realizing when a post on social media is an ad. TikTok ads are able to appear in a user’s feed like any regular video and businesses try to make them as natural as possible. Tiffany Ou, the general manager of a mobile ad platform that helps brands market on TikTok, stated that “TikTok ads are a lot easier to resonate with the users, when they watch them they don’t even recognize they’re watching ads.” Now this tactic is more than necessary when appealing to Gen Z and Millennials, the sole contributors to online shopping. TikTok has several methods for brands to advertise on the platform. The most common, in-feed videos, are normal video ads that appear in the mix of videos in users’ feeds. These ads are posted on the brand’s TikTok account. Brand takeovers are landing page ads that appear and take over the screen as soon as users open the app. Branded AR are custom filters and stickers created by brands for users to use. Lastly, branded hashtag challenges are brand-sponsored hashtags that encourage users to add to their videos. The extent of methods gives businesses various options to make it easier to appeal to the audiences they target (Epstein, 2020).
Influencers in Business
Along with all the methods of advertisement named, the most influential of them all is sponsored content. Brands are able to partner with popular influencers on the app to create sponsored videos on their own feeds for their followers to see. One of the most groundbreaking examples of this was when American fast-food chain, Dunkin’ Donuts, partnered with 16-year-old tiktoker Charli D’Amelio. D’Amelio is currently the most popular creator on TikTok with 114 million followers. After seeing that D’Amelio often featured her drinking Dunkin’ coffee, the brand quickly jumped to collaborate with her to make her own coffee. The Charli, a cold brew coffee, was released on the Dunkin’ menu on September 2, 2020. VP of brand stewardship for Dunkin’ reported that The Charli had resulted in the chain selling hundreds of thousands of drinks within the first five days of its launch. Additionally, the launch day set a record for the number of daily users on the Dunkin’ Donuts app, where users could preorder the beverage for pickup. On the day that the drink arrived, D’Amelio also triggered a 57% increase in daily app downloads (Weiss, 2020). The Charli was so successful that Dunkin’ further collaborated with D’Amelio to release The Charli Cold Foam on February 24, 2021 (Dunkin’, 2021).
But What About Unsponsored Videos?
Aside from the formal marketing strategies brands use, many brands’ products such as the Aerie Leggings get popular from unsponsored viral videos made by normal users on the platform. Whether the video was about the product or not, these videos are not a brand’s doing. Unfortunately, not much is known about how exactly a product goes viral on TikTok. TikTok did reveal how their algorithm works. There are three factors. User interactions: videos you like or share, accounts you follow, comments you post, and content you create. Video information: details like captions, sounds, and hashtags. Device and account settings: language preference, country setting, and device type. Based on this, videos that often go viral include popular hashtags, songs, or trends (McGlew, 2020).
Conclusion
As someone who has been on TikTok since 2016, seeing how much growth and impact the platform has gained in the last year is astounding. Since virtually anyone can advertise on TikTok, more and more small businesses will pop up. Whether big or small businesses, TikTok will change the world of marketing forever.
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