Marketing Where?
Are you looking for a way to market your tourism business online, but you’re struggling to find a platform? First of all, congrats on expanding your horizons! Secondly, how does this sound to you…
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- one of the fastest-growing social media platforms worldwide
- it’s easy to activate your customers to promote with you (for free!)
- posts can trend even if you don’t have a lot of followers
- you get to market with fun trends and challenges
Sound promising? Great! Look no further then. Let us introduce you to TikTok, a popular video-sharing application that allows users to create and share short videos on any topic.
TikTok videos should inspire travelers rather than be heavy on details. They help destinations come alive through visuals, sounds, and spirit. It is the perfect platform to show the values of your business, share your everyday life, and experience moments together with potential customers.
Who Can You Find on TikTok?
The app reached one billion active users in early 2021 since its global release in 2017.
TikTok has approximately 80 million monthly active users in the United States alone. In addition, there are users almost everywhere in the world today as it’s available in 154 countries and in 75 languages. TikTok is banned in some countries for different reasons, but that does not stop it from being one of the most popular social media platforms.
In the United States, most TikTok users, 60%, are 16 to 24 years old, and 26% of the users are 25-44 years old. This means that most TikTok users are young adults aka the next generation of travelers.
What Can You Find on TikTok?
TikTok has two pages called Following and For You. The former shows you videos from the users you follow; the latter shows videos tailored to you by the app’s algorithm. The videos are set on autoplay, which means that users are exposed to new accounts every time they use the application. TikTok also has a Discover page that shows you the currently trending effects, hashtags, and sounds.
We have collected some of the other features into this convenient TikTok 101 guide.
How Can I Start Using TikTok?
Excellent question! Luckily, signing up for TikTok is very easy.
Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to get started on TikTok for business.
How Can I Follow My Performance on TikTok?
TikTok has a Creator Tools section where you can see if your content has reached the desired results.
In the Analytics section, the content provider can find analytics of engagement, followers, content, and lives for the last 7-60 days. In the engagement section, you can find the number of times viewers watched your videos, your profile was viewed, and the number of likes, comments, and shares your videos received in the selected date range. Creators can see the average engagement rate per post and analytics can also be found individually for each video. You can also discover more detailed analytics of your live streams and followers, follower growth rate, gender, top territories, and activity.
To get the most out of the analytics, make sure to change your account to a business one!
How Can I Improve My Performance on TikTok?
Advertisements are the easiest way. You can also track the progress of your campaign through your own hashtags. You should follow what hashtags others are using too, so you can join the popular squad.
TikTok videos often go viral unexpectedly, which means that more people find the video on their For You page. Even a sound can go viral on TikTok, meaning that many people start creating content under the same sound recording. So keep an eye on the Discovery page to know what’s trending and jump in!
Here’s an example of a viral TikTok. It was filmed in Finnish Lapland and now has 7.8 million likes and more than 36 million views. No doubt that the #finland #lapland and #northernlights hashtags helped.
@jarcce Last night we saw something grazy 😍🥺#northernlights #revontulet #suomi #finland #lappi #lapland #nightsky #videography
TikTok Marketing Success Stories
- Switzerland Tourism started with a purely organic marketing strategy and gained approximately 6500 likes per post for the first 6 months. Then they invested in four TopView campaigns and raised their likes up to 700 000 across all their posts – still mostly organically.
- Tour Operator Contiki created their own #contikifindyourpeople hashtag asking others to share their best travel moments. They improved their online presence and got over 1.7 million views.
- Tourism New Zealand took part in creating a gameplay walkthrough of the country to show potential travelers what New Zealand looks like. They collaborated with a popular TikTok user William Waiirua and made an in-feed advertisement. This greatly increased traffic to their site.
- The SunExpress airline also made an entertaining in-feed advertisement that highlighted the positive sides of traveling. They gained more than 120 000 visits to their website as a result.
- Singaporean cultural heritage hub Wisma Geylang Serai encouraged users to learn a traditional dance with their families. They did this by creating a #TepukSepuluh Hashtag Challenge campaign. It gathered 1300 TikTok video submissions.
Read more about the last three stories here.
Tick tock…Time to Start Marketing on TikTok
Our team recommends TikTok to anyone who hopes to level up their digital marketing game on social media, especially among younger people. We find it an addictive app that most of us use daily. We especially enjoy how destinations come to life with the videos and it’s interesting to see what happens behind the scenes at tourism companies. You can try something similar in your own marketing.
So, are you finally ready to take your business to the next level with TikTok? What TikTok trends do you think would suit your marketing strategy? Or perhaps has TikTok ever helped you discover a new travel destination? We’d love to know what you think in the comments!
Here’s one more beginner’s guide to the basics of TikTok for those of you just signing up for the app.
To explore similar marketing opportunities, check out our article on Instagram stories and reels.
Thank you for this great introduction to TikTok, as someone who is a complete stranger to the app you almost have me tempted to sign up!
I think the visual social media plat forms are the ones that best work for tourism since they make it easy for people to want to replicate the images/videos or to see the featured places in person.
When it comes to TikTok I am especially intrigued by the Duet function and challenges:
Duets seem an amazing way for cultural exchange! I imagine filming something very ordinary in your everyday life: e.g. this is what I eat for breakfast, this is the dairy counter at my local grocery store… and then get your followers to add their video showing what the same thing looks like in their country. I imagine the response video could be surprising, whether due to the similarities or die to the differences. It’s also a great way to show that maybe we are not so different after all even though we may look different on the outside or live half-way around the world.
Challenges could be a great way to get people to travel to specific locations if the challenge is depending on being in that location. E.g. asking people to stitch together a video of the market place/church/notable feature in 5 Finnish villages that have fewer than 100.000 inhabitants – this could be a way to drive tourism away from congested areas to those location that might benefit from an increase in tourism.
Since I have no experience myself with TikTok feel free to correct me in case my above notions are completely incorrect! 😀
Hi Liisa!
Thank you for your comment. And wow, what ideas! The use of duets and stitches with your ideas could even trend in TikTok in my opinion! Some tourism actors should use these ideas, and then tourism could potentially increase in smaller areas! I recommend that you download the app, it’s a lot of fun but really addictive! 😀
Hi Aino, Sanna, Juulia and Nataliia!
Thank you a lot for your blogpost, attractive and informative.
In particular the part when you make the reader reflect about “This means that most TikTok users are young adults aka the next generation of travelers.” To underline the growing value of the social network.
One of the things that intrigued me since the beginning is the “lucky” connected to TikTok. How the way to go viral is something connected to fortune. I remember when during 2020 Covid started to spread and we were all home I tried to create contents about a voluntary experience I had in 2019 in Indonesia on TikTok but all my efforts trying to post at the right time, with a short description and the right hashtag. But nothing worked.I just gave up.
But for many people that was the occasion to show themself and thanks to the platform I actually found a lot of inspiring people and place to visit.
But I remember also the “power” of TikTok during the last American president elections, that definite shows the power of this platform..
But going back to your work. I think the language you used is very attractive and engaging, the paragraph are of the right length with bullet points, useful links and video, images..
So again thank you for this very well done blogpost!
Hi, Laura!
Thank you for your comment. Yes, there definitely is a lot of luck that plays into accounts succeeding on TikTok – this can be both good and bad. That’s why we recommend companies to invest in advertisements at least every now and then 🙂 It’s interesting to hear thoughts from someone who’s experienced the account from a creator’s point of view. Thank you again!
Hi Aino, Sanna, Juulia and Nataliia,
Thank you for your interesting blog about TikTok. While reading it I learned a lot of new things, so that is great! TikTok is a trending and new social media platform. I agree with you that using TikTok for marketing is a great idea. As a business you have a lot of different possibilities to market your product on this app. The usage of TikTok can be quite difficult, so I liked that you gave an instruction and a video that can help you out. The blog itself was easy to read and had an good structure. I liked that you gave me so many new facts and information about this app. Overall you did great!
Hi Daphne!
Thank you for your comment and kind words. It’s quite fascinating how many ways there are to market on an app that strictly focuses on sharing short videos, isn’t it? We’re glad you enjoyed the post, thank you again 🙂
Super good! I especially appreciated your examples of best practices.
Hi Outi!
Thank you for your comment. We are happy to hear that you enjoyed our blog post 🙂
I found your post to be very detailed and informative relating to the business side of Tiktok. Tiktok to me has a very different way of marketing compared to other social medias. Or at least for me, as I mostly see brands making less serious posts incorporating current memes to their posts. I agree with the part you wrote about how you can start trending even without many followers because of the fyp. I also liked that you have added the Tiktok marketing success stories as they were a very interesting read.
Hi Samuel!
Thank you for your comment. TikTok does indeed provide a platform for less serious marketing making it attractive to many – people aren’t usually interested in advertisements, so it’s often a positive thing if marketing doesn’t actually seem like advertising 🙂 Thank you again!