Why Retailers Should Use TikTok for Their Brands

TikTok is one of the social media platforms with the best opportunity for a brand to go viral. Having around 800 million active users worldwide by the year 2020, TikTok is an advertising haven for brands. Most brands have not yet embraced TikTok, but they need to embrace it to stay relevant. TikTok is also good for business as it will help brands reach their audience.

With the recent COVID-19 outbreak, most retailers across various industries have temporarily closed down business, which has brought forth an urgent need for retailers to have an online presence.

Why Focus on TikTok?

TikTok is known for its constant singing, dancing, and lip-syncing challenges. The users share videos, and just like everyone, you get a chance to be famous once you trend. Most TikTok users are below 30 years. This is why most western brands have started exploring this social platform as a marketing tool and a strategy for targeting and expanding to a young consumer base. Most brands now want to experiment with TikTok Videos.

Why as a Retailer You Should Use TikTok

Market Reach

As a retailer, if you are capable of conveying an authentic and original voice of your brand on the social media platform, you will be able to endear your company with TikTok users all over the world. The users will help you boost your brand identity, awareness, and value.

The good thing about TikTok is that people do not necessarily need to follow your business account so they can discover your content. Rather, the app contains a ‘discover’ page, which automatically feeds the people with videos that they may find entertaining. People can also search for videos by following hashtags related to the topics they prefer, which is useful in brand awareness.

User creativity

TikTok consists of very many engaging and funny videos that can be useful to a brand by attracting the young generation’s attention. Retailers need to understand that the videos’ content leads to viral sharing, and if done correctly, it may result in sales and a high Return on Investment (ROI).

At TikTok, users share quirky short videos. Consequently, this is an ideal space for retailers to create videos that will help reach the younger consumer base.

Affordability

Many brands are struggling in optimizing marketing budgets as they try to push for global growth. For the small and medium enterprises that are finding it hard to take their goods and services to the outside world due to massive marketing campaigns’ unavailability, TikTok provides a low-cost marketing opportunity.

Brand localization

TikTok is well known for its localized video marketing, leading to high engagement rates in nations such as India and China. Also, the cultural strategy at TikTok helps brands to publicize their content in regions they would wish to while also linking retailers to the local talents. With the TikTok localization strategy, users are encouraged to create relevant content while also integrating universal trends in localized flavor.

How Retailers Can Make the Best Out of Tiktok

It is very simple to use TikTok to market your brand. If you are looking to utilize TikTok for promotion, you can follow these three tips:

• Create a channel with your brand’s name where you will be posting videos relevant to your brand
• Use social media influencers to help you get your content to a larger and well-targeted audience
• Use the new campaign options at TikTok by paying to advertise.

TikTok is quite fascinating, and its popularity is rapidly growing daily. However, you should realize that the app is still very new. Therefore, many brands are skeptical about joining the bandwagon.

Nonetheless, if a brand can start by investing in it now, especially if it makes sense for your business’s persona and goals, it can give the retailers a head start to grow a dedicated following. As seen in other established platforms such as Twitter, growing a dedicated following can be a challenging task.

How Retailers Can Advertise on TikTok

If you want to market your retail store, you need to make use of paid ads. You can start by infeed native content. Infeed native content supports goals such as website clicks as well as conversions. Brand takeovers are also available on TikTok. They are a type of advertising that allows any brand to take over TikTok for an entire day by creating hashtag challenges or incorporating pictures, GIFs, and videos with embedded links to a specific landing page.

You can also use hashtag challenges and sponsor them to help in gaining traction rather than trying to make organic challenges to be viral. Lastly, you can advertise through branded lenses that allow you to make branded 2D and 3D lenses where users can apply their faces and pictures.

Benefits of Using TikTok for Your Retail Store

TikTok has a vast audience. If you want to reach a wide audience, it is crucial that you launch on the platform. Many businesses have started creating videos, and this shows that the platform is not a fad.

TikTok has become very popular all over the world. This means that your retail store has the opportunity to reach out to its market on a global scale. Thus, it’s a good way of localizing your marketing strategies; campaigns can be created in different languages to make it possible to relate to different markets.

The platform is unsaturated. Most brands are competing in the more established platforms such as Facebook and Twitter; therefore, TikTok remains unsaturated. There is little competition for businesses at TikTok, making it a good platform for getting a wider reach.

The platform allows for an anti-marketing marketing strategy. TikTok helps retailers make their ads feel less invasive by making their videos feel like a part of the platform. With TikTok, you get social media exposure without making your audience feel like you are pushing too hard.

TikTok ads and videos get the attention of the users. When people are viewing videos, in most cases, they will pause from what they are doing so that they can watch it. Hence, video marketing is a good marketing tool when done right. When you are a true part of the community, you are able to generate a lot of interest from the users,

TikTok will always update you on the trends. Trends change daily, and businesses may lack time to get in on such fun. To stay relevant, you need to be updated on the latest trends. When you log in daily at TikTok, you are sure to be updated on the daily trends. You can join the challenges and hashtags without incurring any production costs as there are no props involved for TikTok videos. Once you do the challenge, you are done for the day and can now enjoy your view count.

Since there are no production costs for your videos, they look more authentic, and the users become more accepting of the raw content you produce. Hence, users are able to relate more to you this way and build trust in your brand.

Final Thoughts

TikTok has become very popular among retailers. To create brand awareness, identity, and value, brands are moving toward TikTok videos. Although there may be many challenges for the business owners, they must keep up with the latest trends to stay relevant and increase their sales and ROI using TikTok videos.

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