How marketers should take advantage of TikTok

TikTok is great for awareness and expanding reach, creating audiences and finding new audiences however, there are some tricks of the trade that marketers need to understand when using the popular Gen Z app.

Taz Papoulias, head of strategy and media and True Sydney spoke to Digital Nation on how marketers can use TikTok to grow their brand presence with younger generations.

He said, “My generation goes to YouTube to learn things, and Gen Z is going to obviously TikTok for their how-tos. If you can build a big audience that trusts you, and the majority of Gen Z to trust TikTok platforms, then you can engage them.”

While this might be the case, Papoulias highlights some factors marketers need to understand.

“The problem is, there's a fine line there. When you're trying to advertise on Discord, Snapchat or another platform, somebody's having a personal conversation, you're interrupting them, so that advertising is disruptive. That's why sometimes those channels don't work as well.

"We're finding interaction rates on Facebook are dropping, because if you're posting something that you ate at lunch, talking to mum and dad, the same thing on TikTok, you're making video and all of a sudden you see an ad for a lawyer, it's disruptive. You're in that casual zone, it's your off time. So why would you interact? It's very hard, you need a lot of repetition and you need a lot of frequency,” he said.

When advertising on TikTok, Papoulias said there needs to be constant repetition of a brand’s message.

“What we find is if you're looking to spend, a million dollars as an example, normally, your frequency for a campaign in general might be two or three times for any platform. On the social media channels like TikTok where you're being more disruptive, you need higher frequency and you need to be less intrusive,” he added.