As a Chinese social network created by Bytedance in 2017, TikTok enables its users to produce, publish and watch short music videos. Its primary target audiences are young people under 24 years old. Moreover, it has been increasingly popular around the world, including the United States, Japan, Thailand, German and France et al. There are over 500 million users of this app globally per month. In other words, TikTok has noticeably become a significant channel for marketers to reach consumers. However, different from other platforms with traditional ads, the marketing on TikTok is new and closely related to content.
For instance, there are mainly two approaches to raise brand awareness. On the one hand, it is common for brands to cooperate with influencers on TikTok. These influencers tend to be those who attract numerous followers by posting funny and impressive videos. In this way, their followers would establish an emotional connection with them and further trust their recommendations. In China, well-known influencers, such as Jiaqi Li who is really dramatic and good at selling lipstick products, have a profound impact on consumers and motivate them to purchase specific goods. As a result, it makes sense that brands would like to invite these influencers to endorse their products on TikTok and make more young audiences exposed to the brand in this way.
On the other hand, brands may make efforts to produce great original content and short funny videos to appeal to their target audiences. This requires both their creativity and ability to make a close connection between content and the brand. Nevertheless, compared with the grass-root influencers, the official account of a brand may find it harder to convince audiences by posting creative videos that are easily considered as advertisements.
Under this circumstance, nowadays more marketers are inclined to adopt content marketing strategies on TikTok in partnership with influencers. The brand or product is promoted in an implicit way as the influencers may pretend to use it in real life and share it naturally to their followers. But with the prevalence of such strategies, it seems that consumers become growingly aware of the business intention of influencers and arguably decrease trust in them. Accordingly, I wonder how effective this new marketing on TikTok will be in the future and which strategy may be further developed to replace the existed one. Overall, marketers need to make more efforts to take good advantage of TikTok as an essential platform to talk to Gen-Z and Millennials in the long run.
Reference
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-tiktok
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