TikTok sought to win over non-users in Korea by showcasing the usefulness of its content.
Objective:
TikTok users are not just watching, creating, and sharing short videos; they're discovering, learning, and setting new trends.
In Korea, due to K-pop's popularity, TikTok is primarily known for dancing videos or challenges, but many people were reluctant to try the app themselves. Indeed, responses to a survey returned some disappointing findings. Over 40 percent said that what they found on TikTok was not useful and that they were not "into" the content of the platform. Over 35 percent said that they did not want to try TikTok themselves.
TikTok believed that featuring useful content people didn't know TikTok had could help position the brand as a useful platform for everyone.
To advance this objective, TikTok undertook a campaign to share the usefulness of its platform and change user perception from "not for me" to "for me."
Target Audience:
TikTok's research showed that TikTok's usefulness and relevance scored lower among non-users compared to users. This finding led TikTok to believe that encouraging non-users to try TikTok could effectively improve the perception of the brand. Thus, TikTok chose 2,049 non-users as its target audience.
Creative Strategy:
TikTok's journey started with a question: Which content do people find useful?
The brand looked at content Korean users thought was "useful" and chose three categories:
TikTok then selected videos that were already on its platform in each category and created a brand film showing how "useful" TikTok could be. The next step was to encourage people to search and discover more useful content on TikTok.
The campaign launched a social media event suggesting trending keywords every week. Users were asked to search for useful videos on TikTok and share them with others.
Context:
TikTok's campaign moved away from highlighting the brand's message in one-way communication. Instead, the brand designed an interactive campaign with various activities that showcased TikTok's usefulness.
Overall Campaign Execution:
TikTok's campaign had three specific objectives:
Mobile Execution:
To promote campaign awareness and improve TikTok's trust index within a short timeline, the brand used TV and digital media that showed higher consumption and that were considered trusted media sources by the targets.
For TV, TikTok maximized campaign impact and its exposure rate by leveraging the 2022 World Cup games with TV commercials around important matches.
For digital, TikTok used global leading video and social platforms and leading local platforms to reach the targets widely and rapidly. In addition, the brand focused on promoting lifestyle, food, and travel content that aligned with the creative theme to achieve higher ad engagement from the targets.
TikTok saw impressive improvements in various brand indices:
TikTok also generated positive sentiment online as TikTok's brand positive sentiment increased 8.57 percent and its positive campaign sentiment increased 29.55 percent.
In the end, TikTok achieved campaign effectiveness and efficiency by attaining a higher TV gross rating point (over 40 percent) and click volume than planned.
