TikTok For Business: News For Creators, Brands And Advertisers

The popularity of the youngest and most light-hearted social network does not stop. Here are the tools that the platform makes available to professionals who want to use TikTok for the promotion of brands within social media marketing strategies TikTok, the Chinese social entertainment giant, is now a complex and multifaceted marketing tool with multiple practical uses for companies. Added to the light-hearted and young character is the concreteness of the professional tools available to brands, creators, and advertisers.

TikTok: A Global Phenomenon That Companies Should Not Underestimate

TikTok was born in 2016 in China as an evolution of Musical.ly. This platform allowed you to produce simple and short homemade music videos where you could show off your artistic skills in dances and imaginative lip-synch battles. In 2021, it was the most downloaded App in the world, reaching the milestone of 1 billion active users worldwide, with an increase of 45% compared to 2020 and surpassing, in terms of viewing time and use of the platform, even  YouTube itself, considered the global video entertainment giant.

Blake Chandlee, President & Global Business Solutions of TikTok, began with this premise at the event on Tuesday, 28 September, which saw marketers, entrepreneurs, and creators from all over the world connected via streaming to listen to the latest news dedicated to the business world. 

“We are the company that has created a new way of generating online content, new entertainment, with products and solutions capable of stimulating engagement, with a true ecosystem of commercial solutions for companies and with an innovative sales funnel, based on creativity, interactions, the relationship between brand and creator, effective and authentic storytelling, security and transparency.” 

A strong testimony to this comes from a recent event, which saw TikTok at the center: the Tokyo Olympics.  The numbers speak for themselves: if there were around 17 million spectators connected to the inaugural ceremony of the sports event, it would leave you speechless to think that there were 29 million views of a single video of the athlete Sunisa Lee, posted on TikTok to celebrate her own gold medal. 

She is the gymnast herself who intervenes during the streaming to talk about her joy di lei and also her amazement di lei at having had so much success on the social network. And it’s not the only event to become TikTok-centric: Milan Fashion Week 2021 itself has been heavily moved to TikTok, with brands of the caliber of Prada sharing live broadcasts of their fashion shows.

Creator, Entertainment, And Storytelling: The Evolution Of Advertising

Once upon a time, there was advertising, the classic, top-down one, where the values ​​​​of the Brand were communicated unilaterally and passively “accepted” by the public. Nothing could be further from Today’s marketing, especially if you think about social platforms. Nick Tran, Head of Global Marketing of TikTok, intervenes, stating: “Today we need to change the way we entertain people, with emotion and with the enrichment of mere information. 

As? Through creativity, content must be relevant, authentic, dynamic, and immersive but also transparent. It’s not just about watching, but about interacting, sharing, and getting excited together .” The TikTok community, varied and inclusive, has exciting numbers. From an internal survey presented at the event, 46% of users enjoy content on TikTok without interruptions or distractions, without doing anything else in the meantime, with a very high degree of attention and involvement.

Not only that, 64% of people feel part of a real community: here, talent and originality reign supreme, without limitations or discrimination based on gender, race, social class… And finally, a notable fact for all those companies that still say: we are not suitable for TikTok, it is better to stay on traditional channels. According to the “Neuro-Insight Report” created by the platform, TikTokers consider 23% of the videos present on the creators’ media more memorable and communicative than the canonical TV commercials.

Ray Cao, CEO of TikTok, explains it this way: “TikTok has changed the way we tell stories, with big implications for advertisers. Millions of people go to TikTok to be entertained: now, if ads are loved as much as pure Entertainment, the result is crazy for everyone. In this way, a virtuous way of perceiving the advertising message is created for brands, for creators, and for users, who must live in harmony .”

Advertising, therefore, losing any connotation of commercial forcing aimed at obtaining a mere transaction, must connect brands and users through creators, making it fun and an added value for the potential consumer, who will feel close to the importance ​​​​of the Brand, part of a “family” that loves those same products and contents, and therefore naturally led – not pushed – to conversion.

New Tools For Sales And Analysis

For example, TikTok Shopping has been strengthened, an thee-commerce platform that allows users to purchase products directly within the social network without having to leave or be redirected to external sites or landings, thanks to special sticker links and in-app features. According to Ludovic de Valon, Global Head of Native and Brand Advertising Solutions, the best ads, the best-performing ones, are those that have the style of classic TikTok content, with 10% more audience responsiveness compared to other social platforms. 

An ad that doesn’t look like an ad and is, therefore, more effective. In this sense, activations on the platform are increasingly more significant, just as the campaign measurement tools are increasingly precise. TikTok Creator Marketplace was recently launched, a portal where supply and demand meet for creators and brands: how it works is very simple: the Brand needs to provide a brief, and creators can apply and then be selected by companies based on the following of their channels and the style of your videos.

The platform also helps to create more performing ads, with special formats such as Spark Ads, a type of ad with 240% more effectiveness, as the ad enters the organic feed of the target audience. However, transparency is guaranteed by the wording that ascertains its “sponsored” nature. Advertisers and creator communities, therefore, must work together to create perfect content. Influencers are actual celebrities, each on their social network – some on Instagram, some on YouTube – but on TikTok, this status is perhaps even more felt.

What to do, however, for those companies – perhaps in the B2B sector – that struggle to find representative voices among TikTok creatives? The platform has also thought of this: thanks to the Business Creative Center, a tool that helps create simple but impactful videos in pure TikTok style for all those organizations that want to be creators themselves.

For example, the Dynamic Scenes function is an automated way of creating variations of the same video, assembling different sections until the best performing and highest quality combination is found.  There are also pre-set video templates, in partnership with Vimeo, which can be customized to obtain simple and well-made shots with minimal effort. It is essential, in fact, that the format and dynamics of the video content are recognizable and familiar to users.

Other exciting features include Instant Pages, landing pages that load very quickly and, from the video, allow the user to navigate other content of the Brand without leaving the TikTok ecosystem, or StoryTime videos, which would enable to see the behind-the-scenes of the making of the video itself, an excellent way to show the real faces of the company teams, gaining in authenticity and spontaneity.

Measurement tools are also constantly evolving and becoming more and more reliable, combining a more quantitative side with a qualitative one. On the one hand, the Reach and Frequency dashboard provides advanced reporting, which helps manage campaigns and even predict their results. They even have predictive models, which help planning and allow perfect budget optimization.

On the qualitative side, TikTok Brand Lifts Study is a tool used internally to administer short, interactive surveys to users to understand the accurate perception of what they love and what they expect from the platform’s contents and brands.

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