TikTok has announced to advertisers that it’s open for business. The company officially introduced a new brand and platform called “TikTok For Business” that will serve as the home for all their current and future marketing solutions for businesses. At launch, the site will include access to TikTok ad formats, including its model product - TopView, which is the ad that will appear when you first launch the TikTok app. Other products under this TikTok For Business umbrella include In-Feed Videos, Brand Takeovers, Hashtag Challenges and Branded Effects. In-Feed Videos can be up to 60 seconds in length and run with the sound on. Brand Takeovers are the three to five-second ads that can be either a video or image. Hashtag Challenges allow brands to participate in the user community by inviting TikTok users to create content around a hashtag of their choice. This includes Hashtag Plus, which also adds a shopping feature to this experience. Meanwhile, Branded Effects allow brands to insert themselves more directly into the content creation experience. The effects allow a brand or product to be added to a video in a 2D, 3D or now AR format in either the foreground or background of the video. These can also be combined with Hashtag Challenges to boost engagement with the brand. In addition, TikTok is also launching a new e-learning center that will help business users to learn about their ad offerings. Including product guides, resources and creative best practices to help businesses launch successful campaigns or learn about the Branded Effects Partner Program.
TikTok For Business will help businesses grow targeted campaigns, optimised for a sound-on mobile environment. And offer ‘unique engagement solutions’ and ‘immersive formats’ to boost connectivity with the audience. TikTok’s managing director for global business marketing, Katie Puris has said “With the launch of TikTok For Business, we set out to embrace the creative, positive, and real moments that make our community so special with solutions for businesses to connect and grow with our wonderfully expressive community. As we continue to build a platform where brands bring immense value to the user experience, we’re excited to continue investing in solutions that give brands a platform to inspire others, be discovered, and meaningfully connect with the TikTok Community.”
What Tiktok can offer for businesses is a way to resonate with their growing audience without being the biggest advertiser with the highest spend. Tiktok says it can help brands ‘be found’ by its audience, offering the chance to scale and be creative. TikTok wants to offer unique engagement opportunities and wants businesses to become part of the culture and of the popularly growing TikTok community.
Two marketing consultants Lucio Ribeiro and Sergio Brodsky, have taken full advantage of TikTok’s new marketing platform and have launched an agency solely dedicated to TikTok marketing - ‘Tik My Day’. Lucio Ribeiro said: “Tik Tok compares to nothing I’ve seen before. Its uniquely accurate personalisation algorithm makes it not so much a content platform but an AI hub, predicting and serving relevant videos to viewers, which makes users want to engage with its content. They have the audience, the smarts, and the positivity.” Their agency is offering the ability to go live with a campaign in 48 hours. It will deliver the strategy, media and creative execution, whilst leveraging TikTok’s cultural trends. Today TikTok has over six million users in Australia and has seen a surge in downloads since COVID-19 lockdown began. Sergio Brodsky said “TikTok is more than just social media. TikTok is a phenomenon, and any media strategist should be looking at it to understand trends before they emerge. It has become a cultural barometer and participatory destination unlike any other for brands and audiences.”
Their example of just how powerful TikTok’s platform can really be in social media marketing has shown the speed at which things can change within this industry and how important it is to be keeping up to date.
Social media marketing is a constantly moving target. In order to stay in the game you have to keep up to date with what's trending, and continually change and adapt your strategies for them to remain effective. The launch of the new platform aims to move TikTok from being a place where marketers and businesses can experiment, to one that demands a seat at the table alongside other social platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat.
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