If you are a TikTok non-believer, you likely poke fun at the platform as a silly waste of time for teens. You may not see how a music-focused app where young people form dance lines to Wiz Khalifa’s “Something New,” or where hashtags like #idknever top the charts, would make sense for your food and beverage business or marketing strategy. As a small business owner and TikTok skeptic turned believer, I am here to lovingly tell you that you are wrong. Below are the top myths I’ve heard around why TikTok doesn’t work for food and beverage brands, along with some solid reasoning around why they are indeed myths.

Myth #1: TikTok’s Audience is Too Young

TikTok was launched in 2016 and has since accumulated 800 million active users worldwide. Keep in mind that where it took Instagram 6 years to get to the aforementioned monthly active users count, TikTok did it in half the time. Moreover, TikTok is currently the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store, and the most downloaded app of the past decade.

TikTok’s audience does indeed skew young at 41% of users between the ages of 16 and 24 (this was TikTok’s intended audience from the start). However, the number of older folks using TikTok is growing exponentially. In less than 18 months, from October 2017 to March 2019, the number of adults using TikTok in the US alone rose from 2.6 million to 14.3 million (that’s a 5.5x increase).

This growth in the number of adults using TikTok follows the demographic patterns of social media platforms that came before it. Facebook began with college students, then aged up to older adults, before getting to our parents and grandparents who are now sending us friend requests weekly. The same happened with Instagram and Snapchat as well. It seems that TikTok is following the same trends and, if that is the case, it will be the goliath social media platform of tomorrow.

This means regardless of whether your food and beverage company targets kids, teens, or adults – quite a few of your target market is already on TikTok and many more will follow. But let’s just say, hypothetically speaking, that it is only the younger crowd who are currently on TikTok. We cannot discount the value of that youth generation for one very simple reason: teenagers influence the buying behaviors of their parents.

So let’s say that you are a modern, innovative CPG yogurt company. You create a TikTok account where you participate in trending food hashtags, create 15-second recipes that use your yogurt, and maybe some of your team members even create fun dance videos. You catch the attention of a sizable teen audience on TikTok who thinks your content is funny or is intrigued by the easy recipes you post. When it comes time for those teens’ parents to grocery shop for snacks for the family, you will be that top-of-mind brand that they’ll ask for.

Another thing to point out here is that these now teens and young adults will grow older. So while this may not sound promising to you if you’re looking to make a quick buck, for the many out there looking to build a substantial brand, this is a critical point. For example, if you or your company’s goal is to be a global brand and you’re still quite small, you know that you have many years or even decades of work ahead of you. This means it’s important that your efforts today reap fruit far down the line. In other words, the teens of today may not be your target market, but nurture that audience now and you can win over loyal customers who found an affinity for your brand at a young age.

Myth #2: TikTok Does Not Work for Companies

To determine whether any marketing approach is successful, we must first determine the desired outcome or goal. If your goal is to post on TikTok once a week and see an uptick in your revenue after a month, TikTok (or any other platform for that matter) will not work for you. Social media as part of a content marketing strategy, is a long-term play. It requires:

  • Posting regularly (ideally daily)

  • Creating content that is valuable to your audience

  • Producing content that is contextual to the platform (TikTok posts tend to be shorter – about 15 seconds)

  • Crafting content that is aligned to your brand

  • Posting consistently over a long period of time

Remove any of these ingredients from the above formula and your brand will not gain the exposure and traction needed for your social media strategy to work. That said, posting highly valuable, short pieces of branded content regularly over time on TikTok does work for businesses. Why? Because TikTok is where underpriced attention currently lives.

Underpriced attention is tied to the evolution of social media that we discussed previously. As the demographics of each platform ages up, the apps begin to monetize through ads. And as ads infiltrate the platform, they are prioritized in people’s feeds – thereby decreasing organic reach and requiring brands to pay for attention. The more companies pay for ads, the more expensive it becomes, moving attention from underpriced to overpriced. 

At this time, TikTok already has an ads platform. However, the organic reach is still very much possible and the attention is still underpriced. 90% of TikTok users are on the platform multiple times a day, with a daily time spent of 52 minutes (equal to Instagram). We’ve had first-hand experience of TikTok’s organic reach potential. With just 9 followers, we were able to get 1.4 million views on a simple, 5-second video showing how to peel a mango. Just a few days later, we used a trending hashtag (#lonelychair) and TikTok’s Green Screen effect to create a post of a house made of bread and peanut butter. This video got over 140,000 views and nearly 8,000 likes. Comparatively speaking, we’ve been posting on Instagram daily for the past year and haven’t been able to reach anywhere near those numbers, not even on paid ads.

Indeed, these examples are purely anecdotal and they have, by no means, propelled us into TikTok stardom. We have since posted videos that get fewer than 100 views. However, these are just a few examples of how authentic the organic exposure currently is on TikTok. If you post something valuable, interesting or entertaining to the audience – you get free attention. If your content is lacklustre, it flops – simple as that.

We also connected with Kyle Offutt of Pinole Blue (products made from organic blue corn) to get his take on the company’s experience on TikTok. In his words: “The business results are crazy. Lots of online orders and some restaurants have reached out.” Just one month after posting their first video, Pinole Blue is at nearly 9,000 followers, several thousand views per video (with some videos in the tens and hundreds of thousand views), and almost 100,000 likes. Pinole Blue is proof that TikTok works for companies.

Myth #3: TikTok is a Fad

This myth is harder to disprove given it is too early to know if TikTok will die off prematurely. But what we can tell you is that whether it does or does not go away, it doesn’t matter. You will gain value from using TikTok regardless of its lifespan for a number of reasons. To explain why, let’s envision a scenario where you’ve been using TikTok for six months. You’ve posted and engaged with the audience every day, put in an immense amount of time and resources, and gained a substantial following. Then the social media grim reaper comes along and poof, TikTok is no longer. Would all of your efforts have been in vain? Not necessarily. Here’s why:

Firstly, all of the technology, functions and features in TikTok will be carried on, in one form or another, to other apps. It may be adopted by Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook or the mystery app of the future. In any case, those features will go somewhere and your ability to use that technology will continue to come in handy as you push your social media marketing strategy forward. You will now have the knowledge to craft musically entertaining content, appeal to a younger audience, and use creative and storytelling tools. This is similar to the way using Myspace helped people use Facebook, or the way Facebook helped with the use of Instagram.

Secondly, apps may disappear but your brand will not. The goal with content marketing is always to build a brand. Not a brand only on TikTok, or only on Instagram, etc. If you’ve properly positioned and marketed your brand, it should be app-agnostic and stand on its own. No rise or fall of any single app should be able to take down your brand. That said, if TikTok goes down, you can take the brand equity you built on TikTok with you. Your brand will continue to be recognized on other platforms, stand for the same values, offer the same quality of products, and appeal to your audience nonetheless.

Speaking of your audience, that brings us to the third reason why the death of TikTok would not reset your efforts: TikTok’s audience will move to another platform. Again, it may be an existing platform that we know and love, or it may be something completely new. Wherever that may be, as a strategic marketer, you will be there and you will still be able to engage with that audience. That’s the beauty of building a community around a strong brand, it’s not easily shaken. People won’t forget that pasta company that first taught them how to cook Italian food, or that tortilla chip company that makes hysterical salsa dancing videos, just because an app tanks. A solid brand is bigger than any app.

Final Thoughts

To revisit the evolution of social media platforms, none were impervious to the inevitable group of doubters. Whether it was Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or the like, each app has been labeled as frivolous and just for the young. And each and every time, the skeptics fell to the wayside as the apps rose to the top. Of course, there were quite a few social media tools who didn’t make it very far – such as Vine, Meerkat and Friendster. But there is still so much to be learned about social media marketing just through the use of such apps, even if their popularity is short-lived.

For the reasons listed above, I implore all food and beverage companies to get on TikTok right now. Because as the app gains popularity, it will become more difficult to organically reach the audience and build a following on TikTok. Especially for the small brands out there with little to no marketing budget, this is your time to shine. TikTok is the perfect medium for the bootstrap marketer or business owner with tons of tenacity but little money. It provides opportunity for startups to beat out the more established competition through creativity and grit alone.

Julee Ho Media is a boutique photography company specializing in CPG, food and beverage brands. Click here to get a quote and discover how we can help elevate your brand.

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