Should your travel retail brand be on TikTok? With the popularity the platform gained over the past years, the answer is now obvious; yes, you have to be on TikTok. The brands that are able to leverage TikTok to build a community will have a significant advantage over their competitors. TikTok is the best opportunity out there to get eyeballs, build trust, acquire new followers, and customers.
What kind of results can a travel retail brand expect on TikTok? How should you position your brand in the first place, or how should you even shoot your videos? These points will be covered further down, but first, let’s start by covering the advantages of being on TikTok for a travel retail brand.
The incredible organic reach
One of the key factors that sets TikTok apart from other social media platforms is its organic reach. Anyone that posts a good video on TikTok can go viral, anyone ! It doesn’t matter if you’re new on the platform or have thousands of followers. If the algorithm thinks your video is good and people are watching it for a long period of time, you have good chances of going viral.
Here’s an example of one of the different business accounts I manage. The account is @eezly.quebec specifically targeted for a Quebec, Canada, audience. In 24 hours after publishing the very first video on this account, we got 8k followers and this video now has over 500.000 views. Isn’t that crazy? With one single video, we reached half a million people for … free.
Building an audience
It brings me to the second advantage of why your brand should be on TikTok. Building an audience is a key to success for any company. In the previous video example I shared, we grew a community from 0 to 8k followers in 24 hours without spending a dollar on ads. Fast-forward to three months later, today this account continues to grow on a daily basis and now has over 32.5k followers. Building such a large community in such a short period of time at no cost is pure gold and any brand can do it.
We now have over 700 new customers that came from TikTok in this short period of time. We have an engaged community that share ideas with us and help us optimize our product by giving us feedback for FREE.
Nothing guarantees that you will have the same results in such a short period of time. Before launching this account, I had already spent over a year creating 700+ TikTok videos. I learned how to make good videos that people want to watch and engaged with. And it’s not that complicated. First, you need to find the ideas for your videos.
Finding video ideas
How to find TikTok video ideas for your brand? The easy answer is to do trends. But, I don’t recommend your brand doing more than 10% of your videos based on trends. You don’t want to be known for just doing trends. You want to create good content that represents your unique brand DNA and that your community will engage with.
To find ideas, look at what other creators are doing in your niche and analyze the videos that are working good and the others that aren’t. Look to find patterns and start creating your own videos around it by staying true to what you stand for. Don’t copy, or else your content won’t be original, and you’ll be known as a copy cat. Test out different video concepts based on the data you gathered and figure out which one resonates the best with your audience.
The key to quickly finding video ideas again and again, is to create video concepts that are easily duplicable. The structure of the videos stay the same but the content itself changes. Once you have a concept that works well and that you can replicate over and over again, you have your golden ticket to growing your community rapidly.
Making good videos
Many brands try to promote their product or service in their videos, and it’s a mistake. Users go on TikTok to be entertained, not to watch ads. They want to watch the best videos out there based on their preferences. What you don’t want to do is to have a selling mindset when creating TikTok content. You want to have a value sharing mindset where you are giving something to your audience in exchange for the time they spent watching your video.
What I’ve learned that works really well is to promote your brand indirectly through the content you create. The main focus of the video should be related to your industry, but it shouldn’t be centered around your product or service. You want to create stories that indirectly show the value of using your product. This strategy has helped me grow two different business accounts with a combined follower base of 49.5k. @eezly.com & @eezly.quebec. The best part about it is that it can be done for any type of products and services and for B2C and B2B businesses.
Monetizing your audience
Once you’ve started making good videos and you’ve grown your community, how do you monetize it? There are two simple ways to monetize your TikTok audience for your brand.
The first option is to position your brand as the expert in your industry, where your audience will listen and trust the information you share to them. By positioning yourself this way, you have the opportunity to collaborate with other brands where you can do collaborations in your own videos. This strategy offers you the chance to get paid to do your own marketing.
The second option is to get your community to buy your product or service. The easiest way is to put a link in your bio that redirects to your website. My favorite strategy to acquire customers from TikTok is to talk about my brand for not more than 10 seconds before I show the final part of the video. Just like YouTube video creators who promote brands in their videos for a minute or two, you can use the same strategy for your own brand in your own videos. It works really really well when done properly.
About the author
Phil Dallaire, is the founder and CEO of eezly, a technology company that compares pricing in Quebec, Canada. Phil was previously in the travel retail business before recently coming back to helping brands benefit of the unbelievable opportunity TikTok has to offer. Over the past years two different business accounts on TikTok for eezly, one in French and one in English have been created with both accounts combining to over 49.5k followers without any marketing budget expense.
Phil Dallaire is a member of the JES Partner Programme and is available to provide travel retail brands and retailers with TikTok consultancy, contact us at office@jes-partnerprogramme.com for more details or visit www.jes-partnerprogramme.com .