With over 2 billion downloads worldwide, TikTok has to be a consideration for every company as a marketing channel. On this episode I am going to share what I found in the 11 modules housed on the TikTok Business Portal, and talk about the 3 ways companies are using TikTok for branding, publicity and direct sales.
TikTok users spend 45 minutes on the app on avera Over 63% of TikTok users are between the ages of 10 and 29 Females on TikTok outnumber males nearly 2:1 in the U.S.
These brands are using TikTok already: KFC Germany, Silver Swan brand in the Philippines , VinFast e scooters in Vietnam, Iberdrola for World Environment Day, Nike, L’Oreal, Rexona, KIA in Korea, Mercedes in Europe, Amazon Prime, Studio Canal in Germany,
So should you?
About the show: SPEAK|Pr is for business owners to #getnoticed and is brought to you by entrepreneur Jim James who has started 8 businesses on 3 continents out of the same suitcase.
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
With over 2 billion downloads worldwide, TikTok has to be a consideration for every company as a marketing channel. On this episode I am going to share what I found in the 11 modules housed on the TikTok Business Portal, and talk about the 3 ways companies are using TikTok for branding, publicity and direct sales.
TikTok users spend 45 minutes on the app on avera Over 63% of TikTok users are between the ages of 10 and 29 Females on TikTok outnumber males nearly 2:1 in the U.S.
These brands are using TikTok already: KFC Germany, Silver Swan brand in the Philippines , VinFast e scooters in Vietnam, Iberdrola for World Environment Day, Nike, L’Oreal, Rexona, KIA in Korea, Mercedes in Europe, Amazon Prime, Studio Canal in Germany,
So should you?
About the show: SPEAK|Pr is for business owners to #getnoticed and is brought to you by entrepreneur Jim James who has started 8 businesses on 3 continents out of the same suitcase.
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
Today, we're going to talk about the power of TikTok, and whether to TikTok or not to TikTok for our business. For those of us that have got kids and even that don't, we know it's become a global phenomenon in the last couple of years, so much so that it's been downloaded over 2 billion times. The average TikTok user spends 45 minutes on the app, although with my children, it's well over that. So, the question is, should we use it as business owners? And if so, how are we going to leverage the power of TikTok for our own businesses for public relations and advertising? Back in 2016-2017, my daughters loved to make videos using an app called Musically, an app that was developed in China. We were living in Beijing at the time. This Musically caught on, because kids could take short video segments of music and share them with their friends. This app became super popular and was rebranded TikTok in 2018 when it was bought by ByteDance and, of course, now it has gone global. The mission statement, as explained on the website of TikTok, is to capture and present the world's creativity, knowledge, and moments that matter in everyday life. The reason that TikTok is a subject of a public relations podcast is because we're seeing it everywhere now. I went to Starbucks with my daughters yesterday, and I saw a young lad who must have been 11 years old, and he was wearing a sweatshirt with the TikTok logo on it. In the same way that people wear an Adidas or a Nike sweatshirt, TikTok has become the new cool. It's also become something that, whenever I turn around, my daughters are showing me, but it's not just for small enterprises and for young people. As we're going to discover, TikTok has become an extremely powerful marketing franchise. I decided to check out the business side, because I'm interested in whether I should promote EastWest PR on there and whether I should recommend TikTok to my clients. If you go to TikTok for Business, you can sign up and get a free account. When you log in to their website, you'll see 11 modules including an introduction to TikTok, how to create ads, the structure, the format, the reporting, the creative optimization, how to do split testing, and even the creative best practices. It allows you to have three different people running the account. This very neatly packaged owner manual along with a control panel like a Google AdWords center is giving you everything that you need to start in the business of buying ads on TikTok. To some degree, it's superseding Instagram and Pinterest, especially for the younger audience. It's on another level, as is it is building communities by encouraging users to share their passion and their creative expression through their videos. This is also simplifies video In the older days of public rel tions, we'd have case studies where we would interview people to get a testimonial for a pr duct or service they were using Now, everybody is making videos and showing them in real time wi hout the client actually being i volved in that at all, so it's real people making real content and it's promising the opportu ity to turn a culture into cult-like following. Accordi g to my 11-year-old, there a e now different sections and di ferent communities inside ikTok. It's becoming segme ted as people are starting to cr ate mini-groups or mini-cultures There are communities on ports, on food, on fash on, on DIY, and so on. editing, as it can easily be done now on the app. When you're looking to create an advertising campaign on TikTok, you can choose which audience groups you want your videos to be shown to. This is the element that I thought was most
interesting:
it enables you to create what they call a lookalike audience. You can create a custom audience, which is where you define the demographic and the geography. It's now in over 150 countries and 75 languages, so it really is a global platform. Once you've created your custom audience, you could then create a lookalike audience which are people that, if you like, overlap with your current audience. We often talk about building out audiences through these networks from concentric circles where we may share to, for example, an age group, but a different geography or an interest in one thing like pets or fashion. So, this ability to find lookalike audiences seems a really interesting iteration. I then wondered, "How much is this being used in real terms by businesses?" They have case studies on their website, one of which is how KFC Germany has been using it to reach millennials, and in the UK and Europe, KFC has been using TikTok to promote the fact that they're restarting their takeaways again and home deliveries. The Silver Swan brand in the Philippines has been using it for their cosmetics brands. The VinFast e-scooters in Vietnam have been using TikTok as well. Iberdrola, a continental European telco, is using TikTok to talk about World Environment Day, and they're doing that by using hashtags. Nike, Loreal, and Rexona, so sports brands, cosmetics brands, and personal hygiene brands alike are also using TikTok, and they're using it with a combination of both advertising and user-generated content. There's a perception that TikTok is for the young, but it doesn't seem to be that way. Some people are aiming ahead of the curve. Kia, the Korean car company, and Mercedes in Europe have been promoting their cars on TikTok. So, the assumption that TikTok is just for Gen Z seems to be untrue, and we're seeing more and more businesses starting to think about this 15- to 30-second video as being a way of making interesting and very low-cost commercials. Studio Canal in Germany, the French broadcaster, is launching its new German content on TikTok, so there's definitely some interesting international mixes going on here. There were 219 million installs in Q4 of 219. But in Q1 of 2020, there were 315 million TikTok downloads. Clearly, many people are being enticed with the new captivating content they see. Interestingly enough, the US is the leading market for TikTok, interesting in that it has its own domestic players like YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook, but it seems like people are turning away from those and using TikTok instead. $50 million was spent on TikTok alone in America in February. They're making over a billion dollars in revenue per year, so it's pretty amazing considering this company was only bought in 2018 drom the Musically people in Shanghai. The demographic shows that 63% of Tiktok users are between the age of 10 and 29. Actually, 29 is starting to get up, but if you think about that, then some 37%, over a third, are in their 30s and even 40s, which are young early adopters. Females on TikTok outnumber males nearly two-to-one in America and worldwide. It's been seen perhaps as a female-friendly platform where people are sharing, and I know that most of these brands we've talked about are cosmetics brands, because they lend themselves to the selfie and the short video. However, Mercedes, Kia, Amazon Prime, VinFast, these are not How can we use TikTok for public relations if we're not interested in buying ads? Well, one of the key ways is the use of influencers, who are people with a following, and getting them to create a TikTok video and using hashtags in their post. In the past, an influencer would be an editor, and they would publish under a well-known brand. But now, influencers are using channels like Facebook or Twitter to create their own followings. The publishing platform now is a generic one, and people who have got good things to say are becoming the influencers. You can hire an influencer; some have got up to gender-specific brands and they're still getting a lot of 10 million followers. And if they create a video and publish that with hashtags, those hashtags can create a link to a real website, and this is where the big brands are going with TikTok. What they're doing is they're creating hashtags and links to their mobile commerce platforms and web pages. attention. Majority of people on TikTok are using android, and these campaigns are leading to stores, for example, on Etsy, or main brand stores on eBay or Amazon, so it's possible then to have content created by influencers advertising in the same way that one might advertise on WeChat, Weibo, or Twitter. People are now buying ads on TikTok and getting people to come just as interstitials in the same way they would be doing programming on television. We're getting a blend then between people who are creating content already, people buying hashtags, people buying adverts, and the other is where we're seeing public relations companies creating challenges for users and inspiring people to generate content and repost it. This is happening when we're challenging people to cook, for instance, and post it and see how many likes they get. Actually, the game on TikTok is the same game as YouTube, Facebook, and Pinterest. It's all down to eyeballs. It's down to who has the greatest following, and how you can reach out to them. The only difference is the format, wherein it's short-form video set to music, and the audience is a little bit younger, a little bit more dynamic, but it's 100% mobile. If that's the audience that you're selling to, if that's who you want to attract to buy, partner with, or become staff, then TikTok may be worth a second chance. If you're interested to go and see what sort of money you need to spend, then go to TikTok for Business. I started this, because TikTok is plainly a presence now with 2 billion downloads that no one can afford to ignore. The question is, is it a platform that we need to take seriously or not? But that'll really come down to who we're selling to and what we're selling those people. With that, I hope you learned how much of an impact TikTok can create for your business and how you can take maximize that platform. This is the program for business owners who are looking for ways to unlock the value of their business by using tools like TikTok and some of the 8,000 marketing technology platforms that are available to us, most of which you can use for free.