TikTok has radically changed the way businesses interact with the internet. In the past, it was easy to use some images you found online and pump out high volumes of informative posts. While this strategy might still get results, now because of how TikTok works, users have gotten a lot more accustomed to entertaining videos that grip every second of their attention.
What has happened?
In the past, if a marketing director got a Canva subscription and read a few articles, they could grow a massive following on social media. Thanks to TikTok, this has now changed. Now users want to consume more stimulating video content. In turn, the algorithm of most social media platforms has followed suite trying to give the users what they want and is therefore heavily biased toward this type of content.
This is an excellent thing for creatives all around. Suddenly, creating something original is the best way to get people interested in your business, increasing the value of their creation. Video, and in some aspects music, has gone from being simply entertainment to a vital part of the sale funnel.
TikTok flipped the dynamic.
While TikTok alone is not why marketing has changed, it has undoubtedly highlighted the differences. Videos about the business and what the business offers tend to do significantly worse compared to a video created for the consumer. The change to fix this major issue is so simple it’s often a difficult pill for business owners to swallow. The answer? People don’t care about your business. At least not yet; you have to make them care.
How do you make people care?
People care about people, not about entities that want their money. Tell them your story. Please show them your human side, give them information that will improve their lives or inspire them. In other words create content that they are using the platform for.
Emotion is your ally.
People care about people, and people are emotional people. Instead of appealing to people’s logical side – give them emotion. In Jonah Berger’s book, “Contagious – why things catch on,” he provides an example of a Google design team that needs to market the search engine. At first, Google wanted to create “interesting” videos about the benefits of the search engine and how fantastic the technology is. The creative designers behind the project weren’t buying it.
Instead, they created this.
Yes, this is Youtube, not TikTok. But what Google did here perfectly explains why some video’s on TikTok do better than others and how TikTok changed the business world.
TikTok turned on the lights.
Having emotion in advertising has been important since the dawn of the internet. But for a while, only the business could afford to create the amount of content needed to stick out. They could leverage their money to get people’s attention. This is no longer the case with TikTok. Almost anyone can record a video with their phone and publish it.
Only good, unique content lasts.
While one might be able to still through a lot of money on a lousy campaign and force people to see it, this may actually hurt the company or the brand. How much do you love the terrible video’s that force you to watch 5 seconds on YouTube before you can skip them? Or even worse – the unskippables. Have you caught yourself auto-scrolling on TikTok video because you saw that a piece of content was “sponsored?” Your clients are likely doing and feeling the same.
Thankful we are in a day and age where the resources that companies were going to spend on creating ads can now be spent on paying creators to have better quality content, so the users want to share the content with others. This type of investment was not genuinely possible with other platforms. As only TikTok can get millions of views for free with a new account – all that one requires is high-value content.