Marketing games on TikTok

TikTok is here to stay. And the good news is that you can use it to promote games without having to be a dancing teenager. At 1minus1, we’ve been running a number of TikTok campaigns, and–more good news–it’s a great platform to look to onboard the kind of users that will bring you a return.

It’s pretty clear that TikTok will join Twitter as a core part of a fundamental gaming marketing arsenal. It’s a significant–at least experimental– marketing opportunity right now whilst it isn’t over-flooded with advertising. Soon, of course, it will be saturated by ads, but there is some great potential on the platform right now, particularly if a game is being advertised worldwide.

Why TikTok?

TikTok is currently the fastest growing social media platform in the world, with:

• 2 billion total downloads
• 600–800 million monthly active users
• A 5–10% engagement rate
• Average daily use of 6 times, for a total of 62 minutes

TikTok’s audience is still pretty young, but it’s maturing very quickly, in the same way, that Instagram did. Adoption starts with the innovators (frankly this is the kids) and making its way up into older age groups.

Fortunately, the TikTok algorithm makes it very easy for advertisements to gain viral traction as well as the standard PPM impact for your advertising.

Understanding TikTok’s algorithm

TikTok’s algorithm is very different from Facebook and Instagram. This is partly what makes the platform so special; it’s possible to get millions of organic views without having a single follower. Whereas on Instagram, your posts are displayed to your followers only, on TikTok, your videos are first displayed to a small group of users, and if they engage, the content is displayed to more and more people. Even better, if you ‘go viral’, it makes it easier for you to go viral again and grow more in the future.

Growing organically: using TikTok’s creative style to get viral

Every advertiser and content creator dreams of their content going viral, and unfortunately, as you might imagine, there is no hard and fast formula to achieving this. There are however some key elements that will make a difference — that put your content in the best position possible to achieve an impact.

Here are the essential elements to make a viral TikTok:

• Choose your theme wisely. Content should be funny, educational, innovative (with exceptional editing for example) but most of all, be very engaging. Catching the audience’s attention in the first 2 seconds is critical. To do so, avoid videos with only gameplay. Moreover, your video should be maximum 15s. If you can make a video without spoken language, it’s a real bonus as it removes the language barrier. So you have more chances to get viral.
• Overlay Text. This adds a lot of value and fun to the videos. You might think to create your own text content to embed directly into the video you create — don’t. It makes it much harder to iterate and localise your content. Use Tiktok’s overlays.
• Use popular music or sound, chosen from the TikTok library. This isn’t always what you want when advertising a game, because you will have your own ideas about the sound design and composers you are using, but honestly, it’s important to shift your mindset on this one. Choosing music used in trends or from the ‘viral’ or ‘popular’ category in the TikTok library will increase the number of people watching your video. It doesn’t need to be remotely game-related, just popular.
• Descriptions. Don’t describe what is happening; use them to add value to your video. The description can complement your live-action or gameplay, or alternatively add to it by injecting additional narrative.
• Hashtags. In TikTok, hashtags are used to organise the content. Carefully choose them according to the audience you want to reach (e.g #gaming #newgame). Use 3–7 of them for each video — don’t flood it, but make sure you have some spread across a few relevant topics.
• Special effects. Effects in TikTok are visual overlays or games created by TikTok that make it easier for users to create creative and funny content. If you jump on a trend (see below) by using a popular effect, you increase the chances of people watching your video because they know what to expect. Sometimes creating something different isn’t the right thing to do.

TikTok makes it easy as it ever can be to go viral organically even if you don’t have the best content with the highest production values. In fact, On TikTok that’s absolutely what you don’t need:

• Your videos don’t need to look studio-like to get viral. The more your content looks ‘TikTok organic’, the better you will perform. Don’t worry about quality, it’s the quantity you need to care about. It’s a hard one to get your head around, but you need to bear in mind that TikTok content has a short lifespan. If you try and create a Steven Spielberg level production it’s not going to make it any more likely to gain traction. In fact, it could be less likely to do so.
• ‘You don’t have to be creative. To get viral, you could simply jump on TikTok challenges and trends. It’s not difficult to identify these; if you see something popping up in your feed three times or more in a day, that means it’s a trend. Trends are created by other users, contrary to ’challenges’, which are created by TikTok. It’s best to catch them as early as possible. Obviously, you’ll need to choose trends and challenges that are relevant to gaming or make them relevant to your game. Find ways to tie the theme in.
• Be authentic… and have fun! Isn’t that great? The more genuine are, the more chances you have to succeed. Perfection is very much the enemy of good on TikTok.

Get inspired for advertising on TikTok: tips for gaming

If you have a marketing budget, Tiktok is a great and relatively cheap platform for your games as the platform is not saturated yet– there aren’t that many people advertising. The opportunity is there.

Here a few tips for your gaming ads:

• Collaborate with gaming influencers as talents. Create your own content, share ideas with them, or hire them to create your ads’ creatives, and ask them to share those ads on their organic feed too.
• Creatives: In our experience, it’s best not to start ads for games with game footage. Instead start your ads with live-action/humans, as people tend to scroll down right away if your ad doesn’t look organic. Once you have a TikTok user engaged you can switch to gameplay with overlay text that highlights the best features of your game.
• Use the most popular gaming videos on Tiktok as inspiration for the intros of your ads:
• Cosplay videos. If some characters are suitable for cosplay in your game, ask your talents to try it out. There is some fantastic cosplay stuff out there, and great organic game cosplay. Jump right into this.

• Dancing or singing linked to the game. Remember that at its heart, Tiktok is a music/dancing/lip-sync app. If you can make it work you should try it.

• Linking the Game to real-life topics. Set it up like a meme, comedy, educational … or just fan edits.

• Link artistic videos to the game. These are popular because they can be very satisfying to watch. You can hire an artist very easily, and this remains low-cost. Kick open the door and show viewers the drawing process itself, painting … anything that makes it look and feel organic.

• Don’t be afraid to be ‘stupid’. If you are worried about street cred, TikTok probably isn’t the place for you. Being popular on TikTok often comes from not giving a f**k. Have fun with it, throw it all out there, be human, be you, and breathe fun into the content you produce.

Summary

There are so many things we have learned about advertising games on TikTok. It’s been a reset in many ways — making us find ways of looking at things differently, of getting used to a world where quantity matters far more than quantity, where great production values are a bad thing. Madness, essentially.

To discuss your TikTok and other social paid and organic advertising campaigns, drop Charlotte or Jonathan a line on Linkedin or visit our website at 1minus1.com (worth a visit anyway, it’s pretty cool if we say so ourselves!).