ENGAGING WITH A GEN Z AUDIENCE ON TIKTOK

4 Key Lessons for Brands Looking to Engage with Gen Z Audience’s on TikTok

At this year’s YMS: Online, there was one brand on every delegate and speaker’s lips; Tik Tok.

Arguably, the most impactful social media launch since Snapchat in 2011, Tik Tok has taken over Gen Z and has, therefore, very quickly become a focus and considerations for brands looking to reach this audience.

To help brands to navigate this new platform, Seed has pulled out its 4 key lessons for brands looking to reach audiences via Tik Tok.

When working with creators aka influencers on TikTok it’s much harder to predict campaign results based solely on audience size. Unlike Instagram where your audience opportunity size is determined and limited by the number of followers an influencer has, Tik Tok bases its algorithms around the content.

The For You Page (FYP) means users are served content in line with what TikTok has determined they like rather than just the content of those they follow, allowing creators with 0 followers to gain 100,000s of views on a video overnight. This paves the way for a more inclusive and diverse platform, where creators don’t feel pressured to drive up their follower count to cut through.

For brands this also means you don’t have to pay for macro-creators to achieve macro-results. If you get the right content creators for your brand, you are able to blow other platforms out of the water.

TikTok only launched its ads manager for businesses in 2020, therefore its ad offering is very much still in the infant stages, and whilst this brings limitations around targeting, it means that for the right campaigns the Cost per Results (CPR) are significantly cheaper than competitor platforms.

In our most recent campaign, we’ve achieved Costs Per Click (CPC) as low as £0.11. The same can be said when working with creators. Linking to our previous lesson on content over creators, brands don’t have to rely on expensive creators to achieve results. For most of our campaigns we work with relatively unknown but credible and creative creators whose personalities and passions align with our brands. Their ability to create authentic content means a great ROI for brands when the content takes off.

Of course, as the platform evolves, creators will no doubt become more commercialised and the ad climate will become more expensive but for now it’s a great time to test a campaign on the platform.

The Tik Tok audience is continuing to grow and evolve and with that the Tik Tok community is establishing its own subcultures and for every brand, there’s a relevant trending topic and conversation to engage with.

Audiences are joining the platform in droves every day, and as TikTok begins to learn what this new audience likes it will serve them historical content that’s performed well with audiences with similar behaviours. This means that a bulk of the content audience’s view every day will have been created weeks if not months earlier.

For brands this means a move away from the short window of opportunity on other platforms where 99% of results are achieved within the first 24 hours and opens the door to content which can maintain growth in reaching new audiences over a longer period of time.

TikTok provides an honest, in the moment snapshot into the lives of its creators and when one creator uploads a video that resonates, other creators will replicate it and a trend is born. For brands wanting to keep their finger on the pulse with this audience, engaging on TikTok and tracking these trends provides a good steer on what matters to this audience right now helping brands to know how and when to engage with them.

And this extends beyond the digital walls of the Tik Tok platform with trends born on TikTok now having monumental cultural impacts on the world around them. From determining which songs achieve chart success to which products sell out in store, brands can try get ahead of and get involved in these moments by tracking what’s happening on the platform.