So, you have your social media team in place - you've employed the millennial guy with the beard and the girl with the tattoo to come up with those socially savvy ideas and tactics to get you more 'likes' and build out the vanity metric of followers.

But there’s more to marketing than trying to find that silver bullet for 'going viral' without a following.

There’s ecommerce, search, video, and even app installs. In other words, performance advertising. 

Getting retail and brand advertisers to see that, however, is another story. To them, TikTok is either a social network or something else entirely; in short, a conundrum.  

Hands up - who has a dedicated 'TikTok team?

“Generally, we are still working with social teams, rather than dedicated TikTok teams, and they have their own budgets,” said Joe Saw, director of communications at influencer marketing agency FanBytes. “However social budgets are certainly trending upwards.”

Today retail brands need to become media companies in their own right, especially if they are to cut through the huge swathes of content being created every single minute of  the day, especially by non corporate creators and certainly without the constraints of the 'brand police'.  

Platforms like 'TikTok'  might look like light years away from where you and your customers are sat at the moment, but this isn't just a Gen Z geeky thing. 

This is the 'now' direction of travel for enabling a powerhouse of commercial opportunities allowing you to remain front of mind in a world where your website is quickly becoming the last place your consumer will go - however!

TikTok isn’t a social network — at least not in the traditional sense. 

People don’t open the app to see posts from their friends. They open it to watch creators. And yet, retail and brand advertisers continue to call it exactly that.

The app drives nine times more engagement than Facebook, per data the company shares with marketers. 

Moreover, advertisers on TikTok average 21 times more reach than Facebook or Instagram. Oh, and the engagement rate per follower on TikTok averages 8% per follower versus 0.09% on Facebook and 1.6% on instagram.  

"Spending on the app continues to grow at a clip. It now accounts for between 10 to 20% of ad agency Mekanism’s ad spending on social media. Even those marketers who aren’t as confident in TikTok plan on doing more there eventually. The app’s share of Tinuiti’s social ad budgets is still in the single digits, for example, but spending on it grew 160% for the year to March 2022".  

Video search on it's own isn't something new, the basis of this has been around for years, it's utilised by your set-top box, or Smart TV leveraging something called 'ACR' which stands for 'automated content recognition'. 

This is the technology that companies use to learn about your viewing habits in order they can serve you more of those digital intrusions they call 'adverts', and now platforms like TikTok (others are available) are placing the consumer in the driving seat by providing them with the ability to 'pull' the information they want, and act with 'intent' and all on their terms - not YOURS!.

This next phase of TikToks growth will be further down the marketing funnel. 

It’s been the plan ever since the app made a beeline for commerce in 2019. Even back then, decision makers were wary of becoming another avenue for cheap reach for advertisers. 

They saw commerce as a way to show marketers that TikTok could be a place for their performance dollars as well as their branding ones.  

So instead of thinking 'advert's what's your plan?