You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Opportunities on Tiktok?

In today's episode, Jeremy asks, I'm curious to know your thoughts about TikTok. Are there marketing opportunities there for brands, or will that end up killing the platform? Well, you can't really kill a platform uh with marketing. I mean, if it like any platform that has followers and fans, if you don't follow somebody, you're not gonna see their stuff. Um, and the best stuff that makes it to the front page even without you being logged in is not gonna be your marketing stuff.

So, as with any social media platform, it depends on your goals and your audience. So, what are your goals as a marketer? Are you trying to build awareness, which is one thing that TikTok is really great at? Uh, are you trying to do league conversion? Probably not the place to do that.

More importantly, what's your audience? TikTok, we know very little about the platform other than what was in a leaked adage deck uh a little more than a year, actually about a year ago, um, in which it said that of its 600 million users, 550 million were in uh Asia, mostly China, uh about 30 million users at the time in the United States. And the demographic skew very, very young, 13 to 24. Is that your audience? Is that the audience you're going after?

If it is, great. If it's not, then you know that. For some brands and for some companies and some products, that that's a slam dunk. That is exactly their demographic, that's exactly who they want to be in front of. And that's exactly who they want to appeal to for other brands.

That's a that's totally useless, right? It's totally senseless. There's no reason to be there. And now this is the important part. Can you serve the audience there?

So a lot of marketers, a lot of companies, make the uh ridiculous mistake that they just start throwing their stuff out there. Hey, check out our thing. Hey, learn all about us and things, and nobody wants that, right? Uh on LinkedIn, that's called a pitch slap, right? So the moment you connect with somebody, you get slapped with one of their sales pitches.

Nobody wants that. Can you, as a company, can you, as a marketer, make the kind of content that does well on TikTok? Can you make things that are funny, that are silly, that are uh music related, that are uh maybe not the most you know serious uh content, but really just really good entertainment. Can you serve that audience? Can you give your audience what they want?

Not what you want as the marketer, but what they want. Many, many, many brands struggle with this. About the only brands that don't really have a hard time with that as much are entertainment brands, where their mission is to entertain, to to give you entertainment in smaller doses in the hopes that you'll then upgrade to the larger doses on you know their whatever their paid streaming app or service is. And so when it comes to TikTok, can you create content that resonates with the community that blends in with the culture that's already there? Many brands can't do that, they just can't.

Their their own internal culture is so stuck on being self centered that they can't make that pivot. That's why a number of brands have done really, really poorly on uh any network where there is a strong subculture, like Reddit, for example. Reddit has a very clear, very strong subculture, neither right or wrong, but if you can't fit into the Reddit crowd, you will do more reputation damage than good. You will get roundly mocked, you will get uh strung up uh uh metaphorically, and it will not benefit your company. The same is true on TikTok.

TikTok has a culture, it is a very specific culture, there's a very clear culture in it, and if you are not able to blend in with it and align the the content you create with that, it's not gonna go well. So as with any social network, any new any new audience, any new environment, you've got to do a few things. Number one, sign up for it, number two, secure your name, right? That's pretty obvious, and then spend a whole bunch of time. We're talking weeks or maybe even months, just watching, just watching, just listening, uh, paying attention, making notes to yourself of what is working, what's not, what is popular, what makes it to the front page or the front of the app, what trends do you see.

And after you finish your period of listening, then you can start your period of engagement, uh, which is commenting, making friends, networking, things like that. And finally, you start creating. That's the sequence in which you tackle any new environment. It's very similar to you know, good old anthropology, where if you're trying to observe a society, um you spend a lot of time on that observation, you spend a lot of time on that note making, you spend time building relationships first, and only then do you start trying to uh be an active participant in that society if it's even appropriate to do so. Obviously for anthropological studies, it is not.

Uh, but uh for social media marketing, that's the way you'd want to go. The worst thing you can do is just start throwing the same crap that you put up on YouTube on TikTok, because again, uh at best you'll be ignored, and at worst you'll be causing uh actively damaging your your brand's reputation. So that's the thing. Try it out. Is there a marketing opportunity there?

Maybe, maybe not. Is the Chinese audience your market? Uh, there are certainly any number of resellers and uh fulfillment companies and and things like that that are uh based in China. If you want to reach them, that might be an interesting way to do it in a language uh and environment where you are not uh you're not as constrained. Certainly there are apps, you know, for example like Red that are uh very, very popular in China, but you had better speak Chinese to use it.

TikTok doesn't have quite uh quite as strong a language barrier. But if your audience is there, give it a try. Uh st see what's happening, and then make the decision like is this a place that we could meaningfully provide value? So that's the answer. I think there are some marketing opportunities for me personally, no.

Uh for my company, not right now. Uh, but maybe down the road. As always, uh good question. Leave your follow-up questions in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

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