Be a little weird on Tiktok = Sales

Tiktok can be a really great tool for marketing games, apps and websites if used in the right way.

What is the right way?

By telling a short story.

Being a little different, being quirky, experimental, interestingly educative or entertaining.

Like many online businesses, Lala Hijabs began during the pandemic. After losing their jobs and everyone ending up in quarantine, Sana and Will Saleh joined Tiktok like everybody else to help pass time.

More than that, the couple started sharing their custom made tie-dyed hijabs on the app as well and before they knew it they were getting questions on how one could place an order. Viewers loved the designs that they were coming up with.

After gaining over 50,000 followers and one million views in only one night thanks to a viral video, the Saleh’s decided to invest their life savings to start Lala Hijabs and mostly rely on TikTok for marketing.

They mostly post videos on behind the scenes, hijab tutorials and product launches. Their Tiktok account has 144k followers, 4.2 million likes accounts for 60% of their sales.

In 2021 Arc’teryx which has a line of outdoor waterproof jackets, started a trend where people were taking videos in the shower while wearing their waterproof jackets.

This trend lasted for months and a lot of the videos were doing up of 500K views on Tiktok. This brought a lot of attention and awareness to the brand.

Nobody takes a shower in a jacket but the company was quirky enough to think where else could they test out this waterproof jacket that would create a video that’s funny, shows what the product can do and is entertaining.

Before releasing his mobile game, Stephen, the maker of Kanairo101 had made a few animation reels that showcased the different characters in the game and the story behind the game itself.

The reels were quite entertaining with one getting to about 580K views. This was all the marketing he needed to do that helped the game get to 5K downloads after the initial release.

Tiktok or rather BookTok has helped many independent writers sell thousands of copies of their books that nobody would have known existed simply because of cool one minute reviews.

BookTok, the sub-community on Tiktok with 244 billion views focuses on reviewing books and literature. Creators from this community make videos reviewing, discussing, and joking about the books they read. These books range in genre, but many creators tend to talk about young adult fiction, young adult fantasy, and romance.

This community has become so popular and helps drives sales so much that leading book retailers such as Barnes & Noble have had to add a category to their catalogue called BookTok.

There have also been some controversial products that went viral on Tiktok and turned out to be total scams like the Pink dressing sauce by a chef called Pii (@chef.pii). Pii became famous posting videos of herself dressing food she had cooked with the pink sauce.

Questions started arising from viewers when she wouldn’t say what was in the sauce that made it pink. When she finally started selling it, buyers found many flaws in her product like errors in the labelling and errors in the nutritional facts label. Packages that were sent out even exploded before reaching the delivery address.

Pii maintained that it was just a case of business going bad because she had gone viral too fast and that it wasn’t a scam.

Tiktok is the wild west but can also be a source of great educative content which in turn leads to sales. If used how Tiktok should be used, it can help bring a lot of eyes to whatever it is that you are building or selling.

Tiktok rewards and optimizes content based on four core metrics: Originality, play duration, search value and audience engagement. The last two are more often a consequence of the first one so try to be original and entertaining.

Allow yourself to try different.