Media beyond marketing

The #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt community has garnered over 22 billion views globally. Aref Yehia, Head of Retail & E-commerce Business Partnerships, Global Business Solutions, MENA for TikTok explained how brands can embrace community commerce.

What role does TikTok play across the retail customer journey? At what stages of a shopping journey does the platform become most relevant? 

When we think of the traditional steps of a shopping journey, we usually refer to a traditional marketing funnel that starts with awareness moves to consideration and then ends with a conversion. What we are seeing today is that TikTok’s customer journey is collapsing this funnel. The way our community engages is not a linear path to purchase but is more like a flywheel. Everything starts with our community at the centre, actively discovering and engaging with content that is relevant to them which is brought to them on the For You Page. They engage and co-create with brands that they find relevant to their community and act in the moment. We find that this resonance leads to passionate community commerce, which brings the stages of discovery and purchase closer together. It is an evolution of product placement and an acceleration of word of mouth, and one of the best examples on it is the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt community which has garnered over 22 billion views globally.

How can retailers and brands utilise the platform beyond marketing?

I like the reference to “beyond marketing” in the question, because indeed we are embarking upon a new era of marketing. There’s a paradigm shift taking place, changing the way brands and consumers connect. The days of brands interrupting a user’s content experience with an irrelevant message are numbered. Today’s consumers look for experiences that are interactional and collaborative. TikTok happens to be at the centre of this paradigm shift and can help brands leverage it. Real people drive culture on our platform through their authentic voice and unpolished content, and that is why we tell brands and retailers “don’t make ads, make TikToks.” The platform allows retailers and brands to engage directly with our communities, with 73% of users saying they feel a deeper connection to the brands they interact with on TikTok vs. the other sites and apps they use, creating a deeper feeling of trust and authenticity.

How can retailers make the most of TikTok to increase brand awareness and conversions?

Our suite of video-first ad formats can be optimised and combined in many ways to increase brand awareness and conversions. Some examples of the ads available through our Ads Manager include Spark Ads which we launched last year in the region. Spark Ads enable brands and businesses to boost not only their own popular organic posts, but also amplify relevant content shared by the creators, and they are flexible and can be optimised towards different business objectives. We also offer TopView, a marquee product, where when you first open the application, you can see it as the first piece of content; and TopFeed, a premium placement for brands to own the first ad slot during a user’s session on TikTok. It is worth noting that all our advertising formats are rich with sound-on and are displayed full screen. Other solutions such as the Hashtag Challenge can turn a campaign into an engagement event at scale, inviting the community to co-create with brands. To drive conversion, we highly recommend tapping into the power of Dynamic Showcase Ads, which help serve hyper-relevant ads directly from the product catalogue of the brand to the right potential consumers.

Back-to-school and holiday season including Black Friday, White Friday, Cyber Monday etc. are huge opportunities for retailers to increase sales and customer engagement if done right? How can brands use social and community media platforms during the peak season?  There are indeed huge opportunities for brands and retailers for peak shopping seasons and celebrations. I can’t speak for other social and community platforms, but on TikTok, authenticity is the primary ingredient for any business’s success on the platform, so they should always keep in mind what best matches their brand’s personality and identity online.

Here are 3 tips to leverage TikTok’s ad solutions and embrace their full potential while planning for Black Friday:

• Start early, build an audience: It’s not a secret that Black Friday is when all advertising platforms get flooded with communication from most retail and e-commerce players. You’ll have a short period of time to make the absolute most out of it and maximise your sales. Turning a blind eye to the # of competitive advertisers and hoping for the best to keep winning in the regular auction campaigns across platforms doesn’t work – as they say, ‘hope is not a strategy’. So, what should you do?  Start early! Use the month of October to run reservation ad solutions, such as TopViews and Branded Hashtag Challenges, and build audiences on our platform. You can then share these newly built audiences from your reservation accounts to your auction accounts and retarget them with different campaign objectives.
• Leverage creators to make your ads native: How do you make your ads during Black Friday less intrusive and more native to the community they’ll appear among? Leverage that exact community. TikTok Creators are a great entry point for brands during Black Friday because they are the lifeblood of our community and have automatic credibility within their own sub-communities. In fact, creators get 2X the engagement compared to Ads with other types of creative assets. And remember… it’s not about the size of their followers. Whether they have millions or thousands, the community still engages with their TikToks 2x more. The TikTok Creator Marketplace is the easiest way for identifying the right creators for your brand and getting in touch with them.
• Drive a healthy balance: Our reservation and auction solutions are better together. These solutions help you power through the brand funnel. 9 in every 10 TikTok users who saw ads on our platform took action after viewing the ads. 1 in every 3 ended up purchasing items from the brand after viewing the ads on TikTok. Our solutions are differentiated with our unique, video-first approach towards digital advertising. It’s also important for brands to keep in mind that a sustained approach, rather than an approach that focuses only on specific seasonal moments, will yield stronger brand affinity within the community in the long run.

Influencer marketing is increasingly being questioned, especially in this region, when it comes to authenticity and ROI. How do you think influencer-brand-user relations will evolve? 

At TikTok we prefer to refer to them as creators. Creators live and breathe TikTok which means they have a full grasp on TikTok trends, tricks and techniques for creating resonating content that’s native to TikTok. Because TikTok creators are so authentic, they’ve built a strong sense of credibility and users trust them. So, they’re more likely to listen to what creators have to say, including when they talk about products or brands. This has implications for purchase decisions. 71% of TikTok viewers say that qualities related to a creator or influencer’s authenticity motivated them to buy from a brand. We believe that brands and retailers will slowly begin to move away from transactional endorsements and traditional product placements towards more authentic collaborations with creators.

Is TikTok planning on introducing new features on the platform for the region’s retailers in the coming months? 

Last year we announced our partnership with Shopify in the region, giving merchants a unique platform to reach new audiences in an engaging and creative way like nowhere else. We are always exploring new ways to support and bring value to our community, including brands and retailers. This year we have recently launched podcast series focusing on the future of retail to equip the business community with insights and trends on the future of retail and commerce in the GCC. In this series, leaders from across the industry will share their thoughts and experiences, best practices and tips to prepare for the future of retail and all the upcoming shopping festivals that drive major revenue for our region.