The next frontier of Digital Marketing: TikTok!
The deadliest digital marketing agency competitor with the potential to bring Facebook to its knees lately is none other than TikTok. It’s rampant, unregulated digital marketing reach can only be tamed by us, the digital marketing agency. Read on.
Challenge for a Digital Marketing Agency to Leverage TikTok?
While the sensible part of the country goes ‘Oh lord, it’s back.’, we marketers must go ‘Thank the lord, it’s back.’ Here’s why – it’s a 120 MILLION PLUS monthly active Indian user-market! After it’s ban, the number is only on the rise. Overall, TikTok added 188 million new users in Q1 of 2019.
Indian users made up for almost half the new TikTok populous.
When Brands joined Twitter, they were facing a great rise in problems from their customers. This was a challenge digital marketing agency had to overcome. A new job profile needed to be created as a solution, as we now call it – ORM or Online Reputation Management.
What is TikTok?

TikTok is a short-video sharing social app for creative digital expression.
It is this wow factor of TikTok that made it an almost over-night marketing success last year. To the point that it’s going toe-to-toe against the all-father of digital marketing platforms, Facebook with its record 1 BILLION download milestone last Feb. This was a big opportunity for all the digital marketing agency.
The Scenario
What did we do?
Challenge videos
The Indian POV
The Common Fuss
What did Brands do?
Opportunities for Brands on TikTok

The #hashtag Challenges
Huawei leads the way

They’re the first thing your user will see when they open the app and can direct them to your website or hashtag challenge. Users can skip this ad and continue to use the app. Your objective is to ensure that they watch the whole thing and not skip or close the app instantly.

As with Instagram Stories, they’re interactive sponsored marketing posts that you can promote your digital brand with. Keep in mind that these ads are just as easy to dismiss by users. Catching their attention needs to be content-oriented.

Getting Started with TikTok
- Start by creating a Hashtag challenge integrated with a brand lens. Hashtag challenges are fun activities that include lip-sync, dance moves, wacky skits and such. The easier it is to do, the more chances to make it engaging.
- Select a popular track or audio clip. The right piece of sound can snowball your hashtag challenge to viral video fame across other digital marketing platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Music plays a very important part in creating Tik Tok campaigns. Make sure you are on top of music trends, both local and international. You can also use custom audio like Budwiser used for Spotify ads with DIVINE. Remember the KiKi challenge?
- Cross-promote the social challenge buzz on your brand’s other digital marketing channels and on other digital marketing agency as well. This will prompt your audience on other digital platforms to keep a lookout for something interesting coming soon. On TikTok, use Brand Takeover ads to build the marketing buzz.
- Get TikTok micro influencers to participate through paid partnerships. Give the challenge some time to build an organic digital base. Use in-feed native ads to promote the marketing challenge.
- Once you notice the numbers rise, get digital macro influencers to participate. Again, give time to grow the challenge organically. Closely monitor the digital growth ratio, When it looks like your challenge is losing momentum. Have micro influencers make tutorial videos on YouTube/Instagram/Facebook. This step is vital to maintain the momentum of your challenge, especially when you need to reach your next impressions milestone.
- Finally, when you have reached the peak of your impressions campaign, surprise them all with a Giveaway. (Optional)