TikTok exists to create value for both users and brands. This all starts with getting to know your TikTok community and their codes — by that, we mean their way of doing things, expressing themselves and speaking to each other. TikTok is a platform with permission to be yourself: honest and unpolished.
Users and brands can quickly build a community of like-minded people - you may see Hollywood A-listers and world-famous recording artists on TikTok, but there are also many, many more inspiring, enriching videos from everyday folk - such as firefighters, nurses, schoolteachers, construction workers, pilots, and hairdressers.
Communities coalesce around their passions and interests, which influence the videos they are served in the personalised ‘For You’ feed. TikTok's intelligent content discovery process allows users to find fresh videos based on their viewing preferences and habits, thanks to an algorithm that uses an interest-based graph rather than a social graph like Instagram. This means brands who tap into audience interests can easily get discovered without having to amass large numbers of followers.
From a strategic point of view, getting to know your community and their codes is hugely valuable, because it lets you understand the passions and interests of your target consumers and create content that taps into these. If you and your content are obviously relevant to those interests, you’ll have a head-start when it comes to engagement.
Step 2: Start with an organic content strategy
A key attraction of TikTok is its simplicity. Setting up a Business Profile and posting organic content is where most brands get started, and it’s really easy to do. Better still, engagement rates are super high on TikTok, so posting simple but high-quality videos provides a great opportunity to get discovered and grow your following quickly – especially when tapping into the latest platform trends.
With a Business Profile, you can add brand messaging and links to an external landing page in the bio, as well as monitor and review what content works with a built-in profile analytics tool.
Over time, you can also branch out and become more sophisticated. You could, for example, achieve Business Privilege status, like Apple has; or develop relationships with Creators on the platform, who can help you both latch onto relevant content trends, originate your own and benefit from their organic reach and clout. Or you could follow in Pretty Little Thing’s footsteps and build a specialist in-house team to ramp up the volume of videos you post, making sure you never miss an opportunity to get your brand into the right conversations at the right time.
Being on TikTok is ultimately an opportunity for a brand to be discovered by millions of potential customers, have direct conversations and interactions with them, and build passionate communities around shared values and points of view.
TikTok’s Top View Ad format is perfect for driving traffic and raising awareness of launch campaigns and key brand moments. The format allows businesses to immediately capture people’s attention with a full-screen, sound-on ad which autoplays when they open the app.
Fashion house Balenciaga joined TikTok in December last year, with a mission to reach new audiences, and created a series of playful TopView ads which showed items floating in space. Using material that clearly showcased the brand and its products in a unique and interesting way, the ads drew people in and encouraged them to click through to Balenciaga’s website to learn more. The results were impressive, with the campaign achieving an 18% click through rate in both France and Italy.
© MMXX X—LABS
Follow your audiences. Get to know what they’re into, how they like to be spoken to by brands, which ones they endorse, and how and why they do so. You’ll soon learn the codes. Tap into them – humanity is at the core of it all, so show your brand’s human traits and instincts.
Once TikTok feels like familiar territory, you can amplify your communications in a few ways, just like Pretty Little Thing. Business Profiles, organic strategies and In-Feed adverts through the TikTok Ads platform can be set up and implemented without liaising with TikTok, but to make use of TikTok’s suite of advertising products, you’ll need to get in touch. TikTok has teams in key hubs across Europe who partner with creative and media agencies, and work directly with brands, offering platform education, media and creative guidance, as well as account and campaign management.
Brand and creative strategy teams will respond to briefs and work in collaboration with partners to plan the best campaigns for any brand’s marketing goals. They can also oversee audio licensing and arrange partnerships with Creators - TikTok’s most popular, creative and influential users. Below are some examples from brand’s who’ve already begun working with TikTok, and experimenting with innovative bespoke campaigns.
Step 3: Move on to TikTok’s innovative ad products
TikTok's view
Trevor Johnson
Head of Marketing, GBS, Europe
TikTok rewards good content, whether it’s created by popular tastemakers or first-time users. Every video has the same opportunity to get discovered and go viral. As a marketer, you should identify emerging and popular content trends that align with your brand and jump into them.
Trevor Johnson
Head of Marketing, GBS, Europe
TikTok's view
All this creative energy doesn’t die away when projects end. Return on ad spend is maximised on TikTok because user-generated content (UGC) campaigns also trigger earned media opportunities. Videos are shared across social media channels - Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter - meaning your campaign will often earn extra attention beyond TikTok.
Trevor Johnson
Head of Marketing, GBS, Europe
TikTok's view
Inspire Creativity. Bring Joy. Build Brands.
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Got any questions for TikTok? Email us and we'll get the best questions answered in an upcoming article
Got any questions for TikTok? Email us and we'll get the best questions answered in an upcoming article
Got any questions for TikTok? Email us and we'll get the best questions answered in an upcoming article
TikTok is still a new and young platform, and its capabilities are still developing. While it has already established itself as a positive, enriching place for users; it has also proved to be the perfect tool to achieve brand awareness and interaction through traffic-driving campaigns with incredibly high click-through rates.
All the while, the user base is continually growing and maturing, more markets are opening across Europe, and more measurement partners are being added. TikTok’s Creator Marketplace – which brings brands together with its best, brightest users – is also launching in more countries this year.
There’s plenty more to come for marketers on TikTok. And the clearest way for brands to take advantage of its vibrancy, and the fast-moving cultural trends it embodies cre-ates, is to keep connected with communities and keep an eye on the platform’s con-stant evolution.
Step 4: Keep evolving your approach
TopView is my favourite format - highly polished, glossy ads work just as well as a more native, UGC feel. The view-through and click-through rates are higher than anywhere else on the internet. On TopView, you’ll find the big and the beautiful – music artists, tech companies and film studios have all taken over our most premium space.
Trevor Johnson
Head of Marketing, GBS, Europe
TikTok's view
Got any questions for TikTok? Email us and we'll get the best questions answered in an upcoming article
Creativity on TikTok: how brands are embracing the popular video app
TikTok has become the go-to destination for people looking for fun, entertaining and inspiring short-form videos. But how can advertisers make the most of the app? In the second instalment of our partnership series, we explore how brands from Balenciaga to Mercedes-Benz and Converse are using TikTok to drive engagement, raise awareness and reach new audiences, and offer some advice for those who are new to the platform
By now, you'll have all heard of TikTok: the short-form video app that has taken the world by storm. Since its launch in 2017, the platform has established itself as a place for positivity and creative expression - bringing joy to millions of people - and has become the most downloaded video app in the world.
For brands, TikTok can deliver a big audience, but it delivers even bigger engagement. Take one of the most popular trends on the platform right now – #ratethings, where users post videos rating anything and everything with a score out of 10. That hashtag has had over 1.3 billion views from the hundreds of thousands of videos users have created. Or the #FlipTheSwitch trend. Even though it is over a year old, people are still creating videos with their friends and family where they swap clothes at the flip of a switch, and video views have rocketed past the 6.1 billion mark.
So where do brands fit in? Many brands have already embraced the communities, platform codes and ad products that are present on TikTok, and are seeing impressive results. Brands as diverse as Pretty Little Thing, Converse, Balenciaga and Mercedes-Benz are posting on the platform in a variety of ways. Some are interacting with communities through Branded Hashtag Challenges; others are using impressive organic strategies managed by in-house teams; while some have staged ambitious through-the-line campaigns, mixing TikTok, Creators, competitions and events to produce significant spikes in brand awareness and engagement.
As with any emergent platform, the way brands use it is still developing – and fast. For those who are new to the platform, we've put together some advice on how to approach the app, and rounded up some of its most successful and innovative campaigns.
Step 1: Get to know your TikTok community and their codes
Pretty Little Thing has done a great job when it comes to engaging with its community and trusting TikTok Creators to tell its brand story. The fashion brand operates at a faster speed than most; and has a full in-house studio set-up, which enables it to produce content specifically for TikTok in line with the latest in-app trends.
The brand’s creative team constantly monitors the platform for trends where they can offer their viewpoint, and are able to turn things around incredibly fast, acting more like a content publisher than a fashion brand. All this has paid off: Pretty Little Thing currently has nearly 700,000 followers on TikTok.
Building on their organic success, Pretty Little Thing ran a Hashtag Challenge to great success in 2019. To celebrate the launch of a branded track and clothing collection with will.i.am, it encouraged users to create a video showing off the looks that make them feel most confident. Six thousand users created over 7,000 videos, with total views on the Challenge page reaching over 8.3 million with 1.2 million interactions.
Pretty Little Thing: reacting to TikTok trends
Mercedes-Benz: creating a Hashtag Challenge
Aware that Gen-Z and millennials tend to be motivated more by experiences and emotions than objects, Mercedes-Benz launched a creative challenge, which invited users to reinterpret its iconic star logo.
Using the hashtag #MBStarChallenge, the brand invited users and TikTok Creators to re-envision the logo in their own unique way and place it in new visual contexts. TikTok users were told to ‘let their star shine’, the only limit being their own creativity.
Mercedes-Benz kickstarted the campaign by inviting TikTok Creators from the UK and Germany to showcase their own versions of the Star (all set to a bespoke soundtrack created for the Challenge), driving 2.24 million video views.
From here, the brand used a two-pronged advertising approach to boost exposure and strengthen the campaign. Two premium TopView Lite (previously Brand Takeover) Ads presented the campaign in the brand’s own vision, while a selection of four In-Feed Ads, which repurposed Creator videos, fit seamlessly into the ‘For You’ feed, providing a credible window into the brand on users’ native feeds .
A Brand Banner ad on TikTok’s Discover page was implemented to drive users to the main Challenge page, maximising reach and hitting every corner of the app’s ecosystem from advertising to organic engagement.
The end result: over 180 million total video views, over 75,000 participants in the #MBStarChallenge, and over 30,000 new followers on Mercedes-Benz’s TikTok brand profile, bringing Mercedes-Benz to a new audience, and vice-versa.
Balenciaga: Tapping into the power of Top View
Many brands are getting their audiences to create ads for them through Hashtag Challenges – in other words, brand-sponsored viral movements, which invite users to generate content with a branded theme and share their videos under the same hashtag.
Creators are always used to kick-start campaigns, setting the tone for the community to follow and recreate. They know exactly what works for the platform, and can produce content based on briefs from brands.
Earlier this year, Converse approached TikTok with a brief to engage audiences with an ongoing Creative All Star Series program that brings together Converse’s global collective of creatives. Through a Hashtag Challenge Plus, the brand invited TikTok’s community to customise their Converse and share their creations using the #ConverseAllStar hashtag. The Challenge kicked-off with some of TikTok’s top Creators, including @tootymcnooty, @surfaceldn, @jamesllewis and @vexx. Submissions included leather work, digital adaptations, painting, hydro dipping, doodling, accessorising and even sculpting a pair of Converse out of Blu Tack.
Following on from the success of the Hashtag Challenge Plus, those same Creators moved from a digital to a physical space and showcased their talents in real life at Converse’s Creative All Stars Series in London’s Hoxton Docks, where they spent two days customising shoes and clothing for attendees. The event was also live-streamed for those not able to attend.
The partnership was the first to hero TikTok’s Creators with a real-life event, bringing together Converse fans and TikTok’s creative community. “We were thrilled with the scale of the partnership, as well as the level of creativity from everyone who took part,” says Max Firth, Western Europe brand director at Converse.
Global celebrities such as Justin Bieber have also made TikTok a key part of their online presence, cross posting their content on other social media sites. Earlier this year, Bieber created a TikTok video promoting his new single, Yummy. He also posted it on
Instagram, where it received 2 million views within an hour of sharing, and it’s now been viewed over 13 million times on Instagram and 108 million on TikTok.
Celebrities aren’t the only reason TikTok is now driving contemporary culture, however. The platform has become a breeding ground for new movements, and trends often start on TikTok before going mainstream. Dalgona whipped coffee (the strange but delicious South Korean instant-coffee drink) became hugely popular after appearing on TikTok, as did the Renegade dance, a massively popular piece of choreography created by Jalaiah Harmon, a 14-year-old dancer from Fayetteville, Georgia, USA.
Converse’s Hashtag Challenge Plus
TopView is my favourite format - highly polished, glossy ads work just as well as a more native, UGC feel. The view-through and click-through rates are higher than anywhere else on the internet. On TopView, you’ll find the big and the beautiful – music artists, tech companies and film studios have all taken over our most premium space.
TikTok's view
Trevor Johnson
Managing Director, Global Business Marketing, Europe
Got any questions for TikTok? Email us and we'll get the best questions answered in an upcoming article
All this creative energy doesn’t die away when projects end. Return on ad spend is maximised on TikTok because user-generated content (UGC) campaigns also trigger earned media opportunities. Videos are shared across social media channels - Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter - meaning your campaign will often earn extra attention beyond TikTok.
TikTok's view
Trevor Johnson
Managing Director, Global Business Marketing, Europe
Got any questions for TikTok? Email us and we'll get the best questions answered in an upcoming article
TikTok rewards good content, whether it’s created by popular tastemakers or first-time users. Every video has the same opportunity to get discovered and go viral. As a marketer, you should identify emerging and popular content trends that align with your brand and jump into them.
TikTok's view
Trevor Johnson
Managing Director, Global Business Marketing, Europe
Got any questions for TikTok? Email us and we'll get the best questions answered in an upcoming article
Follow your audiences. Get to know what they’re into, how they like to be spoken to by brands, which ones they endorse, and how and why they do so. You’ll soon learn the codes. Tap into them – humanity is at the core of it all, so show your brand’s human traits and instincts.
TikTok's view
Trevor Johnson
Managing Director, Global Business Marketing, Europe
Got any questions for TikTok? Email us and we'll get the best questions answered in an upcoming article
Creativity on TikTok: how brands are embracing the popular video app
TikTok has become the go-to destination for people looking for fun, entertaining and inspiring short-form videos. But how can advertisers make the most of the app? In the second instalment of our partnership series, we explore how brands from Balenciaga to Mercedes-Benz and Converse are using TikTok to drive engagement, raise awareness and reach new audiences, and offer some advice for those who are new to the platform
By now, you'll have all heard of TikTok: the short-form video app that has taken the world by storm. Since its launch in 2017, the platform has established itself as a place for positivity and creative expression - bringing joy to millions of people - and has become the most downloaded video app in the world.
For brands, TikTok can deliver a big audience, but it delivers even bigger engagement. Take one of the most popular trends on the platform right now – #ratethings, where users post videos rating anything and everything with a score out of 10. That hashtag has had over 1.3 billion views from the hundreds of thousands of videos users have created. Or the #FlipTheSwitch trend. Even though it is over a year old, people are still creating videos with their friends and family where they swap clothes at the flip of a switch, and video views have rocketed past the 6.1 billion mark.
So where do brands fit in? Many brands have already embraced the communities, platform codes and ad products that are present on TikTok, and are seeing impressive results. Brands as diverse as Pretty Little Thing, Converse, Balenciaga and Mercedes-Benz are posting on the platform in a variety of ways. Some are interacting with communities through Branded Hashtag Challenges; others are using impressive organic strategies managed by in-house teams; while some have staged ambitious through-the-line campaigns, mixing TikTok, Creators, competitions and events to produce significant spikes in brand awareness and engagement.
As with any emergent platform, the way brands use it is still developing – and fast. For those who are new to the platform, we've put together some advice on how to approach the app, and rounded up some of its most successful and innovative campaigns.
Step 1: Get to know your TikTok community and their codes
