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7 Pros and Cons of Doing TikTok Marketing You Need to Know

It’s not always fun and games in the world of social media – not even on Gen Z’s seemingly favorite platform, TikTok. Because just like its older competitors, there are pros and cons of doing TikTok marketing that could make or break your social media strategies.

Having been in the business of social media marketing services for so long, we know that with every platform’s benefit, comes a downside. But don’t you worry, as those disadvantages are something you shouldn’t fear given the right knowledge on how to tackle them head-on.

Through learning and understanding both the advantages and disadvantages, you can strategically act on leveraging and working around them. And make sure to learn them quickly because given the news of TikTok’s accelerated efforts to optimize it for advertisers, the platform will soon be populated by brands far and wide. This makes it imperative that you learn whatever you can about the platform and its audiences.

Below, you’ll read our own tally of the pros and cons of doing TikTok marketing to get you started on assessing its fit in your overall digital marketing strategy.

Pros and cons of doing TikTok Marketing

Apart from TikTok marketing tips from the experts, it’s important that you also form your own opinion and scale an approach on how to do TikTok marketing for your business.

With this information, you can not only scale for success, but also optimize to plug-up holes in your social media marketing strategy. Let’s start off with the cons.

Cons of doing TikTok Marketing

1. Content format limitations

There’s no arguing with the statistics of video content consumption and how it underscores the continuing rise of the format. And it’s not hard to tell that the trend with audiences young or old isin favor of video content, especially on TikTok.

But video content isn’t the be-all and end-all digital marketing solution your business should be relying on. And if you’re looking at platforms where you are able to share a diverse range of content formats, then this is where TikTok might not be able to help you.

If you’re aiming to market on TikTok, you will not be able to post ads that are simply in the form of static graphics. This means that you will always have to produce videos and that may come as a strain on your budgets.

How you can work around this:

Gladly, user behavior on the platform shows that some favor grassroots and sometimes low-production value videos. This means that you can simply shoot with your smartphone, make a few edits in-app, and voila! You have a video that’s ready to use for your ad campaign.

If you look closely at the video above, you can note that it’s a square slideshow video that was originally posted in Lazada’s other social media platforms. They simply repurposed the slideshow for their TikTok page, and even added a TikTok soundtrack to make it more native for the platform.

2. Not-so-quick and easy production

Contrary to the previous point, are the users who prefer high-production value videos.

These kinds of short videos are not any less difficult to produce than the longer ones like you watcg on YouTube. In fact, with the goal to entertain their audiences, creators on TikTok spend a significant amount of resources to come up with content.

Local TikTok influencer Tiffany Jillian Go (@tiffanyjillian on TikTok) who regularly produces recipe videos on the short-video platform comments that, “shooting videos…entails a lot of behind the scenes prep[arations]. It’s not just about shooting a video and publishing it – it’s about telling a story through a visual medium.”

According to Tiffany, producing “high-quality, engaging videos worth watching and revisiting” is a process that will always entail costs, and that some professional creators still struggle with this.

If you’re a small business or creator like Tiffany, you have to understand and embrace off-the-bat that producing a video is not a walk in the park. Even a 15-second video can’t be as easily produced alone versus if you had a team that can produce videos for you.

Shooting a video eats up a lot of time that you could spend managing other aspects of your business. Although there are arguably rawer productions on the platform that do work, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

How you can work around it

While you’re cashing out to advertise on TikTok anyway, make the investment worth your while. Here are a few ways on how you can do that:

Take a look at how ecommerce marketplace Shopee shared their TikTok on their Instagram page below.

View this post on Instagram

3. Advertising costs can balloon

On top of the costs of producing quality videos, advertising on TikTok isn’t exactly the cheapest thing to do.

If you’re still unfamiliar with the TikTok Advertising, it may come as a shock to you that the minimum daily budget you can alot for an In-feed Ad is priced at PhP1,000 (roughly $50). With that sum, you’ll ahve to be discerning and prudent about allocating your resources for ads.

Make sure to constantly mind your targeting and advertising costs. Always ask yourself:

Putting into action the answers to those questions will help ensure that you don’t go overspending your budget.

Meanwhile, if you’re really struggling with managing this aspect of your TikTok marketing efforts, you can always solicit the help of professionals in paid advertising. Doing so can help keep your ad spending optimized, thereby reducing your long-term costs for campaigns.

That said, thankfully there aren’t many downsides to advertising on TikTok. You’ll find that reading the pros of doing TikTok marketing below that these disadvantages are easily offset by the benefits.

Pros of doing TikTok Marketing

1. You increase and widen your audience-base

The goal of every brand is to always increase brand awareness, and this is something TikTok excels at. This is thanks mainly to its popularity with Gen Z and younger millennials.

Add to that, these audiences are also more engaged in TikTok compared to other platforms. So what does that mean for you as a brand? Simply that if you want to tap into a fresher audience and increase awareness for your brand, you can easily find them among the one billion monthly active users on the app.

But apart from the sheer size of the user-base, TikTok also boasts a diverse audience for an equally diverse topic range. With the breadth of topics covered on TikTok, it’s almost impossible for you not to find an audience, no matter what your niche is.

How you can best maximize this benefit

In order for you to reach a wider audience, you can explore:

In collaborating with influencers, bear in mind that you should allow them to lead the creative direction. That way, you and your collaborators can come up with content that best suits their audiences’ tastes. Take a look at how Pampers Philippines (@pampersph on TikTok) did it with actress Rica Peralejo-Bonifacio for a campaign promoting how cool and comfortable their Aircon Pants.

2. For You page as the default when you enter

If you’ve explored TikTok enough, then you would know that the For You page is the first thing you see by default. Why is this important, you ask? Because unlike Instagram or Facebook, for example, TikTok’s For You page puts content outside of those posted by your followed accounts in the spotlight.

This simply means that whether or not a target audience is following you:

In a social media landscape where consumption behavior has shifted to be more engagement and discovery-focused, this not only benefits you as a brand or creator, but also the audiences.

How you can best maximize this benefit

Increase your chances of showing up on the For You page by:

3. Audiences can engage in different ways

This third advantage of TikTok marketing is closely related to increasing and widening your audience base. As mentioned earlier, TikTok is a platform designed to encourage people to engage.

The most effective creators and brands on TikTok maintain the awareness of this nature of content consumption on the app to maximize both awareness and engagement. TikTok has a number of features that help with this at your disposal, like:

Check out this example of a video Stitch engagement effort from the National Basketball Association (NBA). In this scenario, the NBA is asking you to tell them that you’re an NBA fan without telling them you’re an NBA fan. Although that may sound confusing to most of us, to people on TikTok, it translates immediately as a challenge to prove your knowledge about something by providing non-contextual or vague proof of it.

Clicking on the Share button to the right of the screen, a user can access the different sharing tools they can choose from. If you’re not inclined to create a video of your own and share it on your feed, then you can just as well share it on your other social media channels, as long as the due permissions are granted by the user.

How you can best maximize this benefit

You can amplify your reach and engagements by:

4. Ad performance metrics are easily trackable via TikTok Advertising

During the early stages of TikTok’s launch, it was very hard to track the performance of specific campaigns. Before, you could only estimate the performance of your videos through likes, comments, and the other engagement options that we mentioned above.

But now, with TikTok Advertising you can not only guarantee that you will reach audiences, but also track, measure, and evaluate them properly. With the help of this platform, you can:

It’s getting even tougher to compete for audience attention on digital platforms nowadays. Arming yourself will the skills and mastery of this tool will be critical for the continued success of your brand online.

How you can best maximize this benefit

Marketing on TikTok, just like how it’s done on any social media platform, should always meet a concrete business objective. You can help get more solid and valuable insights and actions by making sure that:

Key takeaways

It’s easy to get caught-up in wanting to jump onto new changes that happen in the digital marketing scene. However, not every shiny new tool for marketing can be a fit for your brand. TikTok marketing is no exception.

Asses first its benefits and downsides before you begin investing in these new strategies. Some other things you can continue to keep in mind are:

Want to get started on TikTok marketing but would like to learn more about its ins and outs first? Let’s have a chat about it and we’ll gladly help you come up with a strategy. Just send the Propelrr team a message via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

This content was originally published here.

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