Undoubtedly the most significant factor in TikTok’s success in recent times has been the speed of its ascent. It was the fourth fastest-growing free iPhone app in 2019. When you also include Android apps, TikTok ended up the second most downloaded app in the world during 2019. It now has 800 million active users worldwide. Yet many older, more traditional people have never heard of TikTok. And many who have written it off as merely a kid’s plaything. With current user numbers, however, that is a dangerous attitude to take – particularly if you are a brand selling to a youthful market. Luckily, many brands now recognize the importance of TikTok to the daily lives of Generation Z. They have discovered the enormous audience they can reach by working with some of TikTok’s best influencers. Here are 13 such brands, who have successfully undertaken influencer marketing campaigns on TikTok.
TikTok Influencer Marketing Case Studies:
1. Walmart
Even the world’s largest bricks and mortar retailer is getting into TikTok influencer marketing. Walmart worked with TikTok influencers for a Black Friday-themed campaign, using the tag #DealDropDance. Walmart worked with six influencers (Montanatucker, dreaknowsbest, bdash_2, kidrl, kingcamo_1, and OurFire) to encourage their followers to post videos of themselves expressing how Black Friday savings at the store make them feel with a jig. These videos were highly effective. The posts by the six influencers alone reached over 17 million followers. The campaign resulted in both influencers and everyday people filming themselves dancing in the aisles of Walmart, hoping to win a $100 gift card. Walmart has also undertaken other TikTok influencer campaigns. The previously ran a #SavingsShuffle campaign, that also focused on users dancing on the app, tagging Walmart.
2. ACCA
ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants), a leading international accounting body, are one of the more unorthodox brands to get involved with TikTok influencer marketing. They recognised that in order to deliver a disruptive brand activation that bolsters relevance with Gen Z, they had to experiment with a platform that is able to transcend traditional ad messages. With the help of leading influencer marketing agency Fanbytes by Brainlabs, they used TikTok influencers to visit accountancy firms and create killer ‘day in the life of an accountant’ content to share with their huge followings. This helped turn stereotypes from this: “dull, boring, elitist & exclusive” into this: “exciting, impactful & relevant” and as a result garnered 1 million+ views and over 100,000 hearts. Karen Smith, the Head of UK Marketing for ACCA expressed “partnering with Fanbytes by Brainlabs has given us expert authentic knowledge and insight as well as opening up engaged and relevant audiences we would not have had access to otherwise”.
3. Benny Blanco - Universal
US based singer-songwriter Benny Blanco, signed to Universal Records, teamed up with rapper Juice WRLD to release their new single ‘Graduation’. Looking to engage fans with the song they needed a campaign that would do more than just drive streams or likes on a post. This is why they partnered with Fanbytes by Brainlabs, a leading TikTok agency, to help come up with an innovative challenge idea and to identify the best TikTok influencers for the campaign. The creative idea featured around the reminiscing of their school years. They utilised classic TikTok transitions to show each stage of school, including graduating as the final part of the phases shown. The hashtag #schoolyears was used to tie all the videos together and the sound was uploaded to TikTok for the challenge. The results were outstanding with the #schoolyears generating 6 million views with almost 1 million hearts and over 81,000 user generated pieces of content was created. What’s more, the influencer videos had 15,000 hours of watch time and there was an overall engagement rate of over 20%. What was more astounding was that the challenge continued to grow past the end of the campaign and as the challenge idea became more cemented within the TikTok community. As a result, the user-generated content increased by 274% from 81,000 to 303,000. This caused the song to experience 4 months of sustained growth.
4. EA Sports
Although gaming companies tend to focus their influencer marketing on Twitch and YouTube, they also run campaigns on TikTok, in recognition of its young, tech-savvy audience. EA recognizes that TikTok does have a sizable gaming subculture. For example, the hashtag, #fortnite, has had 29.5 billion views. As a result, EA Sports has used TikTok influencers to promote several of its games. Apex Legends is a similar game in style to Fortnite. Although not as popular as its better-known competitor, #apexlegends has had 546.6 million views. EA Sports recruited influencer, Brent Rivera, and he made a comedy video of himself playing the game. This gave him over 900,000 likes. Another TikTok influencer, Gil Croes, shared a funny video of himself playing Plants vs. Zombies. Freestyle soccer player, Indie Cowie, promoted FIFA 20. She made a video freestyling in public and making a shout out to the game.
5. Educational Insights / Playfoam Pluffle
Educational Insights carried out a TikTok influencer campaign promoting their product, Playfoam Pluffle. Working with influencer agency, The Influencer Marketing Factory, the company identified ten relevant TikTok influencers with a cumulative reach of 14,800,000 followers. The influencers made and shared videos over four weeks, resulting in 2,500,000 video views, 470,900 likes, 1,500 comments, and 2,000 shares.
6. F’real
F’real worked with the HaueterFamily influencer account, run by Kara Haueter, who typically makes funny videos with her family about their everyday life. This was a typical HaueterFamily video, where they humorously promoted a F’real milkshake.
F’real Foods sells milkshakes at gas stations and convenience stores across the US and Canada. The Haueter family’s video didn’t make any reference to the benefits of the F’real product, but they made use of the product in a way that would stick in the audience’s mind. The campaign also helped build up F’Real’s official TikTok account. The company now has 524.7K followers and 9.7M likes. F’real has generated millions of views and likes on its TikTok videos and earned more than 120 million impressions from TikTok users filming themselves making shakes, using the hashtags #freal and #frealmilkshake.
7. Ralph Lauren
Ralph Lauren negotiated the creation of TikTok engagement videos from influencer Diana Silver. The fashion brand chose to tie this campaign in with the US Open Tennis Championship. That event uses the extremely popular hashtag, #USOpen, which now has nearly 8 Million views. This gave Ralph Loren access to two audiences, followers of Diana Silver and people who search for the #USOpen hashtag. Ralph Loren married the two audiences together, by using the custom hashtag #WinningRL. They tied this hashtag around the following challenge: “Are you winning at real life? 🏆 Tell us how with #WinningRL and we’ll pick 3 champs”.
The first three Diana Silvers each received close to 100,000 likes. Yet, the custom hashtag managed 600 Million views. This shows how everything managed to work together, resulting in magnified results.
8. Navneet
Navneet Education Limited provides supplementary study material and other education products. Their line of products includes 21 MLQ Sets that aim to help students with quick last-minute revision. They created a custom hashtag, #SmartTayari, which they hoped would create awareness on how the MLQ Sets could help students in their study. Navneet chose to work with TikTok influencers, who understood the brand message and were in sync with the brand tonality. Navneet also created two videos in Hinglish and Marathi that they published on their official YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram pages. The campaign consisted of a month-long series of quirky, engaging, smart content on the brand’s social media channels, followed by a TikTok influencer campaign. Eight TikTok influencers worked with Navneet to convey the campaign message. The TikTok part of the campaign generated 3.4 million views and 1,600 comments.
9. TROPICO
TROPICO is a brand of tropical juice drink. The company worked with Upfluence to create an influencer marketing campaign on Instagram and TikTok to promote the drink. They called their campaign the “True Colors” campaign, and it resulted in more than 439,000 engagements through 21 influencer collaborations and 68 publications. TROPICO aimed to improve its social media visibility on both TikTok and Instagram. They wanted to reach and convert a younger generation that could amplify the brands’ new values and image. Their second goal was to target a young audience in their home country of France. Regarding the TikTok part of the campaign, influencers made and shared nine TikTok videos to a community of 1.8 million followers. This resulted in 61,000 likes and 267,000 views. They made a point of selecting young influencers who share a diverse set of backgrounds, personalities, and styles.
10. Target / Vera Bradly
Target worked with TikTok influencer, (who has 2.9 million TikTok followers), in a back-to-school themed campaign. She uploaded video clips showing her visiting Target, buying Vera Bradley self-care products, and using them at home as she prepared for the new year of school. The goal of the video was to raise awareness of both Target and the Vera Bradley X Venues self-care product collection. Victoria Bachlet is most popular with teen and young adult women, making her an ideal influencer for this campaign. Although Victoria clearly labeled the video as an ad, it still felt like one of her usual videos, making it more like an endorsement rather than a native ad.
11. Blinger / Wicked Cool Toys
Blinger worked with TikTok influencer, Jasmine Gonzalez, in a recent campaign for their Wicked Cool Toys’ Blinger kit. In the video, Gonzalez takes her brother’s shoes, decorates them with her Wicked Cool Toys’ Blinger kit, then returns them to her excitedly happy brother. The video shows a before-and-after of the shoes, and then focused on the pure joy of her little brother when he got his shoes back. As with many of these influencer campaigns, the TikTok video is humorous, rather than hard-sell. It also showed how people could enjoy shoes decorated with the kit.
12. Doritos
PepsiCo-owned Doritos has marketed alongside Super Bowl for nearly a decade now. Obviously, much of this has been traditional TV marketing. However, they decided also to utilize TikTok and YouTube influencers for their 2020 campaign. One of their 60-second ads featured Grammy winner and Oscar-nominated western actor, Sam Elliott, in a comedic dance battle over Cool Ranch tortilla chips and featured Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” song. The actor and the rapper “dueled” with killer dance moves, with the rapper winning the battle for the bag of chips.
The video became viral on Doritos’ YouTube page, with over 16 million views. However, Doritos decided to expand the campaign, with the ad encouraging viewers to show they have got “the moves to make it to The Cool Ranch, ending with the hashtag #CoolRanchDance. This set up a dedicated TikTok challenge. They also collaborated with nine influencers who made sponsored posts. Almost 3,000 users have created dance videos using the challenge’s official sound clip on TikTok.
13. MPL
MPL or Mobile Premier League is a popular gaming app in India. They worked with Virat Kohli as their brand ambassador. MPL has cash games of all types, e.g., fantasy cricket, Rummy for cash, poker, fruit chop, fantasy football, fantasy basketball, and more. They recently began working with multiple Indian TikTok influencers to promote their fantasy cricket app for the upcoming IPL. They see influencer marketing being the way forward for marketing after the Corona pandemic.
