How to promote products overseas on TikTok?

In the past few years, the advertising market seems to have fallen into a "vicious circle" - with the maturity of factors such as programmatic buying and indicator assessment, brand owners seem to have forgotten their "original intentions" and excessively pursued purchase volume conversions, thus ignoring brand reach.

But they seem to have forgotten that, according to the marketing funnel, brand awareness and reputation must come first before purchases can occur naturally. In this context, the requirements for brand marketing have risen to a new level - reliable results that truly touch users.

At this year's Cannes Lions International Creativity Festival, ByteDance's short video app TikTok shared how TikTok achieves real connections between brands and users, especially Generation Z users, through the value of "authenticity" and UGC.

What makes TikTok different

The core purpose of marketing activities and brand marketing is to reach users and change their minds. Therefore, the means of marketing activities and brand marketing must also evolve accordingly as users change.

What brands need to realize is that the Z generation of consumers, who have truly emerged as the mainstay of consumption, have shown significant differences from the previous generation of consumers:

1. Their attention span has been reduced to less than 10 seconds;

2. They are more cautious about advertising;

3. These young consumers are also less willing to interact with brand content than consumers in the past;

4. But at the same time, they are pursuing simpler and more direct ways of communication, and they enjoy the immediate “satisfaction” and happiness brought by consumption;

"The new generation of consumers is telling us loud and clear that if we want to keep up with the times, we have to adapt to their style and learn their language."

This also means that good content must accurately hit the user's interests in a shorter time, use their language, and establish real communication channels with them.

This is also the core theme that TikTok and its influencers shared at the Cannes International Creative Festival: only authenticity can win, and everyone can be a creator.

Andrea Okeke, the original comedy short video expert who shared her work with TikTok at Cannes, is one of the emerging top creators who publishes her own short video comedies on TikTok. There are also several other successful cases on TikTok. What they have in common is that they resonate with users by showing their true selves and using their real and high-quality content, thereby gaining recognition from users. In addition to traffic, they gain more influence on their personal brands and the output of their positive personal values.

And under TikTok's content recommendation mechanism, the high-quality content they produce, just like they would have been buried, is able to reach the right users by virtue of their own excellent qualities - success is determined by content quality, not just the number of fans, which is a great incentive for users who are capable of producing good content. In particular, the internet celebrity system of platforms such as Youtube and Instagram has been formed for many years, with the top players being stagnant and few new opportunities, which makes TikTok a new opportunity platform.

This recommendation algorithm mechanism not only ensures that TikTok can efficiently surface high-quality and valuable content in diversified overseas markets, but also gives TikTok a unique way to reach users through links. This is the “source” of marketing effectiveness, which cannot be matched by the simple and crude methods of buying volume and placing ads.

This approach has also made TikTok successful overseas. TikTok provides users with an immersive short video entertainment experience, allowing users to feel relaxed and express themselves authentically. Based on this model, TikTok has mastered the methodology of truly communicating and interacting with users, which enables TikTok to help brands establish their own content strategies and bring brands and users closer together.

The potential that UGC brings to brands

However, for brands, there are still some core differences between the overseas advertising market and the domestic market: compared with the domestic market, the overseas market is more mature and requires not only "exposure" but also "interaction", "impression" and "participation". This requires brands to transform their thinking on content production, from the past one-way PGC content production to content and gameplay that can stimulate the next step of UGC interaction and joint participation.

The proportion of PGC, OGC and UGC has changed significantly in recent years. The P and UGC parts have shown a sharp growth trend. Both the user usage time and the average number of views on the mobile screen have exceeded 50%, while OGC content accounts for less than 1/4 of the usage time and the number of views.

The rise of UGC is not only due to the desire for expression and interactivity of the Z generation user group, but also due to the value of the UGC content itself. For users, UGC is a form of content that can truly inspire, empower and connect them, rather than just passive consumption.

Taking TikTok's product form as an example, UGC means that users have been inspired (Inspire) from being simple consumers and have a desire to express themselves; then, based on TikTok's convenient and easy-to-use functional attributes, they can easily shoot, edit, and compose videos, and obtain effective self-expression tools (Empower); and by participating in various challenges and activities, as well as imitating and following KOLs, users are able to establish connections with brands, KOLs, and communities, and become connected members of the platform (Connect), which not only satisfies users' desire for self-expression, but also realizes the connection between users and brands.

The data also confirms users' willingness to participate. On TikTok, 83% of users have posted videos on TikTok, and 35% of users have participated in challenges. Users are not only passive consumers, but also active creators and participants of content.

Content that can involve UGC interactions also performs better in terms of data. Another set of data released by TikTok at the Cannes International Creative Festival showed that compared with traditional brand advertising or feed advertising models, TikToK's tag challenge + brand takeover + in-feed advertising model increased the ad re-viewing rate by 5.4 times, the favorability by 12.6 times, and the preference by 3.5 times.

For example, in Italy, where more than half of women do not participate in sports, Nike found that although girls do not go to the stadium, they are keen on dancing. Taking this as a starting point, Nike invited TikTok influencers to customize dance content related to sports such as basketball, football, and boxing, and called on netizens to imitate or create secondary creativity. In the end, 24,000 users participated in the challenge and took the first step towards exercise. This is a considerable level of participation for Italy, where the Internet population is less than 40 million.

OPPO's short video marketing plan for overseas Generation Z also incorporates corresponding interactive elements. OPPO launched a dance challenge on TikTok, creating brand-exclusive BGM and dance patterns, and inviting influencers and celebrities to participate. Due to its deep penetration into the cultural trends of the new generation, the communication activity achieved good interactive effects, with the video being liked more than 320,000 times and receiving more than 13,000 comments.

(OPPO launches a hashtag challenge on TikTok)

“The brands that are most successful are those that embrace the creativity and authenticity of the TikTok community. By learning how to leverage TikTok marketing, brands have the potential to reach a demographic that would otherwise be very averse to advertising.”

A valuable and high-quality advertisement, delivered to the right people in the right way, will not only not damage the user experience, but may even stimulate the user's creativity and real participation, and build a true resonance between the user and the brand.

Therefore, creativity and authenticity have become TikTok's powerful tools for brands to reach young people of Generation Z.

Spending money on a billboard in Times Square in New York is not effective brand marketing because you won’t know whether your ad is effectively reaching your target audience or their response. From this trip to Cannes, we can see that TikTok provides a more challenging marketing method for the new generation, encouraging brands to return to user psychology and brand value itself, and consider how to build brands and establish connections with consumers from a longer-term perspective, rather than just looking at ROI.

Related reading:

1. Where is TikTok advertising displayed and in what form?

2. How to open a TikTok advertising account? | TikTok advertising agency

3.TikTok advertising promotion, what are the advantages of advertising?

4. How does TikTok advertising cost, promotion price, advertising costs!

5. Introduction to TikTok advertising, promotion account opening, marketing platform | TikTok advertising agency

6. Overseas Promotion丨How to get millions of views on TikTok?