Discovering New Ways of Mobile Advertising with TikTok
When it comes to unlocking new ways of advertising, it’s crucial to strike the iron while it’s hot. While performance marketing, search engine marketing and social media advertising are “safe bets” and here to stay, they are also already saturated with advertising dollars driving up costs. For untapped opportunities, it’s time for mobile advertisers to explore new marketing channels.
Enter TikTok, an iOS and Android social media video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. Originally launched in 2017 by ByteDance, TikTok merged with musical.ly the following year to create a larger video community and quickly gained traction among young audience. The app makes it easy for users to create and share videos with special effects filters, stickers, and many experts dubbed it as a sleeping social media giant. Content on TikTok has an unpolished, authentic look that makes it highly engaging and viral. During a phase of explosive growth, TikTok was 4th in generating the most global downloads for iOS and Android. It ranked in the top 10 out of 19 countries/regions for both iOS and Android. The app has 800 million app installs across 150 countries/regions and engages users in 75 languages.
TikTok is just now opening up opportunities to brands and marketers, so it’s still a bit of the Wild West, like Facebook was for advertisers 10 years ago. As the platform is now in hyper-growth phase since the last few months, they are unable to keep up with increasing demand from advertisers. To get around this, they have opened up the platform to some trusted agencies and official partners, whose role is to enable advertisers to make the most of Tiktok’s offering during the hyper-growth phase, by bringing the platform and advertisers together. This means that intrepid marketers and brands who wish to enter this new social network and seize their chance before everyone else catches up, should partner up with Tiktok’s selected agencies - starting now.
Here, we’ll share expert tips on the different ways that brands and apps can market on TikTok using their performance marketing solutions to unlock the power of this channel, while the platform is still young and growing rapidly:
Get to Know the TikTok Demographic
Currently, TikTok is primarily used by teenagers, followed by millennials and older users. The audience also skews slightly more female than male. While usage is a little different by country, generally, engagement is really high and users are in the app around 43 minutes or more per day; opening the app up around 8 times per day (with an average user session time of 8.95 minutes), and viewing videos monthly in the multi-billions.