How TikTok Marketing Has Unlocked a New Frontier for Big Brands

However, it’s not only our personal lives that have been informed and affected by social media, but our professional lives  as well. This is particularly true when it comes to the marketing industry. Thanks to social media, marketers have more prolific and powerful tools than ever before to engage their target audiences and shape their brand.

Today, one of the most important and influential of these platforms is TikTok. Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly evident that TikTok marketing has unlocked a new frontier not only for mom-and-pop startups but also for big brand enterprises. This article examines the role of TikTok in transforming big brand marketing.

What is TikTok marketing?

In a nutshell, TikTok marketing refers to the strategic leveraging of the platform to more effectively connect with target audiences in highly innovative forms. Strategies could include anything from leveraging the market reach of the TikTok influencer to supporting brand transformation through cobranding to harness the power of “experience” marketing.

For example, a TikTok marketer may invite target audiences to record a TikTok video of themselves searching for or trying out a product or service for the first time, such as creating a video of a teenager shopping for her first Coach bag or visiting the Ulta counter to purchase her first cosmetics.

TikTok experience marketing could also include the solicitation of customer videos capturing live events sponsored by big brands, such as a TikTok video of a concert sponsored by PepsiCo.

The mission and the value of TikTok marketing lie in the channel’s capacity for engaging audiences and for demonstrating how a brand is encountered and experienced in the daily lives of ordinary consumers. This represents a decided and often highly effective shift away from more traditional, formulaic and homogeneous campaign strategies.

Lowering costs while increasing interest

Among the greatest benefits of TikTok marketing is that it offers tremendous cost-effectiveness without compromising efficacy. In an age of dwindling profit margins and persistent economic volatility, even big brands are seeking to streamline business operations and shrink expenditures where they can.

TikTok marketing provides an effective medium for slashing marketing costs while expanding market reach. It enables customers to become marketers and influences and it replaces vast production budgets with low-cost, ad hoc, often customer-generated video marketing content.

Giving customers what they want

One of the greatest threats big brands  face is staleness. Once a brand has grown too large, too well established or too familiar, it can easily lose its capacity to excite and engage. This is particularly true for brands with younger generations as consumers.

Gen Z, in particular, is not likely to be moved by a more traditional, antiquated approach to marketing. They’re unlikely to be inspired by appeals to tradition and nostalgia. The employment of TikTok marketing skills enables companies to reach young audiences where they are and use the channels they prefer — namely, video social media content easily accessible on mobile devices.

Not only does the use of TikTok marketing enable established brands to refresh their image, but it also helps them to transform their relationship with consumers. No longer are the big brands distant and faceless entities, or some giant corporate conglomerates that neither know nor care about the consumers they serve.

Through TikTok, marketers, corporate decision-makers and consumers have an unprecedented opportunity to interact with one another, often in real-time. This means that not only can marketers keep their finger on the pulse of the market, but also that they can respond with greater speed and agility to evolving customer needs and expectations.

Thus, TikTok can be used to disseminate product and service reviews and align with service innovation and improvements. Marketers can, for example, use TikTok to address customer complaints or concerns or to demonstrate modifications made based on customer feedback. There are a few marketing strategies that are more effective than those which illuminate a company’s commitment to improving customer satisfaction.

Final thoughts

TikTok is far more than a fun way to pass a lazy afternoon. For savvy marketers, it can be a powerful tool for engaging audiences and for bringing older, established brands to life. Indeed, TikTok marketing has unlocked a new frontier for big brands seeking to develop new markets and grow existing ones. At the same time, the platform offers significant cost savings while expanding market reach far beyond anything traditional platforms could aspire to. The key is to be creative, unleashing the power of the TikTok influencer and capitalizing on the interest generated by novel experiences captured on video for mobile devices.