A Smarter TikTok Growth Strategy
The Short Form Video Battle
The race between Meta, YouTube, and TikTok for short-form video dominance intensified this summer. To make the platform feel more like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram introduced product overhauls, including prioritizing creator content in users’ feeds over content from friends and family. Google doubled down on its investment in YouTube Shorts despite the heavy financial costs.
In an ever evolving marketing ecosystem with an influencer-centric core, spending marketing dollars effectively on an influencer campaign is challenging for record labels and independent artists alike. Knowing the best platform to maximize reach and value is crucial. While every social media platform is fighting for their share of the short-form video market, TikTok remains the most prominent tool for record labels and artists.
The Influencer Ecosystem
TikTok’s power to create global awareness for a song has resulted in an influencer-leaning ecosystem. Now influencers with large followings have the leverage to demand substantial fees for a single post containing the artist's sound. This means that an influencer campaign can be a valuable way to promote new music on TikTok - IF your profile is primed for the collaboration and you’ve paired the right influencers and campaign creative with your sound.
This paid influencer culture has created influencer agencies, companies that facilitate campaigns with TikTok influencers who agree to post an original sound or song on their profile in exchange for a fee. This partnership can increase the success of an artist or record label’s social media campaign, but it layers additional costs onto an increasingly expensive strategy.
Why Influencer Campaigns Can Be A Wasted Opportunity
If your TikTok profile has low engagement, you’ve struggled to post consistently, or you are brand new on the platform, running an influencer campaign can be an *expensive* gamble.
Record labels have flooded the influencer marketplace and thus driven the cost of influencer campaigns up. Furthermore, even though influencer agencies do their best to pair influencers with artist sounds that feel on-brand, they have limited control over what content the creators will actually post when they implement an artist’s song or unique sound.
Consequently, artists often spend a significant portion of their marketing budget on a handful of influencer posts that:
a) May or may not be on brand with the message of the song
b) Accumulate likes, views, and follows on the influencer’s profile rather than the artist’s
c) Are hard to directly monetize
Even if the content is on brand, appeals to your target audience, and accumulates 3 million views, there are still risks. If the daily sound usage and corresponding increase in views on videos containing the sound doesn’t scale according to what the algorithm’s are looking for, TikTok will see a sudden spike in engagement as unnatural and suppress the content. If your sound is algorithmically suppressed in this way, there’s little chance of going viral or enjoying any sustained success from the campaign.
So, what happens when you are a month away from a crucial release, you have no organic traction on TikTok, but you want to create the opportunity for virality on your new release?
Enter: TikTok Sprint Campaigns
A Smarter TikTok Investment for Record Labels and Artists
Instead of wasting precious marketing dollars promoting content on influencer profiles you don’t own, invest in your own channel by driving views, followers, and likes to your content, on your profile. By combining a high quantity of optimized TikTok posts on your profile with strategic TikTok advertising, all views, comments, and traffic will be directed back to your account instead of someone else’s.
Deciding If A TikTok Sprint Is The Right Choice For Your Project:
You want to run an influencer campaign but your TikTok profile has little historical activity
You are about to release an important single or album but you have less than 1,000 TikTok followers
You’ve spent marketing dollars on video content and want to maximize the assets on TikTok
You have a strong following on other social platforms and want to invest in views, followers, and sound usage on your own TikTok before investing in someone else’s
TikTok Sprint Success Stories From Alchemy Artist Services
Alchemy Artist Services recently ran a TikTok Sprint with up and coming artist Nicole Serrano.
Nicole debuted her “Nice To Meet You” song and video during Good Morning America’s Faith & Pride Program as a way to publicly announce to her fans that she is a lesbian. As a way to celebrate her own coming out story and to empower any of her fans that may be living in fear of coming out, Alchemy Artist Services launched a TikTok Sprint campaign to amplify the song and video release.
Over the course of our two-week campaign our team:
Created, edited and optimized eighteen short-form video clips from the official music video to highlight content
Ideated a Pride Month transformation challenge to increase user-generated content using the official sound
Launched strategic TikTok interest ads to analyze and amplify the best-performing content from the campaign
These efforts resulted in a 14,558% increase in Nicole’s TikTok following and over 850K views on official “Nice To Meet You” content on Nicole’s profile, creating a consumption lift on both Spotify and YouTube.
How To Make The Best TikTok Investment
If you’re ready to see similar results on your next TikTok campaign, here’s what to do:
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Include links to music, any video content, and the dates of release
Alchemy Artist Services is ready to elevate your content!