In The Era Of Big Data, How Can Brands Collaborate With Digital Media Platforms?
Big data and digital technology are changing the online behavior of individuals, as a result, the world of marketing is revolutionized by these changes. The channels of content creation, communication and promotion are restructured with digital technology development. Data evidence shows that “40% of brands plan to expand their data-driven marketing budgets, while 88% of marketers used data to enhance their understanding of the customer”. In the era of big data, how to communicate and understand customers from a data-statistical and digital perspective has become the priority of a brand.
Due to the digitalization of customers, purchase behaviors have been transferred from bricks and mortar to e-commerce in recent years. The traditional brand-build channels and strategies are no longer effective as before, and the COVID pandemic is actually accelerating this trend. Rebecca Stewart provide a data proof for the influence of the pandemic on Chinese e-commerce market: “Over the last 12 months, the pandemic has only accelerated the businesses’ e-commerce experimentation in the Chinese ad market; which according to R3 grew 23% in 2020 despite deep cuts to ad budgets globally as marketers invested in short video, e-commerce and social media.” As a result of this transformation, brands are showing increasing interests in the area of social media marketing. More and more brands start to collaborate with digital media platforms and utilize the strength of social media.
To adapt to the new digital ecosystem, brands must realize that the major consideration of social media marketing is not to sell products, but to connect audiences. Social media provides brands a strengthful tool to build relationships with their customers. Brands should learn how to listen and discover social trends and events appearing in social media platforms. Brittany Harshbarger, senior manager of growth at Vita Coco, indicated that how they consider Tik Tok as a tool to build brand personality, “We leverage TikTok as sort of a research platform, but also a media platform to discover new events and trends — that speed to create connections with our consumer”. The cultural and social trends are changing rapidly in the short video platform like Tik Tok. In some cases, following events and trends in social media platforms is even more significant than content creation.
There are two measurements for the social media marketing of brands, traffic and speed. For a brand at a digital platform, traffic is more important than short term sales because keeping an increasing traffic is consistent with sales increase in the long term with the increase of brand followers and awareness. The future of brand competition in social media platforms is not competing market share, rather competing traffic. Moreover, The speed of brands’ response to a trend in social media is the key to earning traffic. Brittany Harshbarger mentioned how speed determines the winning in the media space: “If you don’t have ears to these platforms, by the time you read about a trend in the press, it’s already peaked in popularity, and you’re too late”. If we consider trends in social media are waves, brands must stand on those waves, not just follow waves which have already passed by.
There are many effective social media platforms for brands to implement their marketing campaigns . We choose Tik Tok as an example because TikTok has been the fastest growing social media platform for the past two years. The COVID pandemic stimulates the growth of Tik Tok and makes it become the most-downloaded app. As a short video platform which has 800 million active users worldwide, many trends of social media start at TikTok, and brands can stimulate their traffic by being at the forefront of these cutting-edge trends. Marketers do not need huge budgets for content creation and this gives brands an opportunity to cut through hot topics.
There are four ways for marketers to use TikTok:
