As a Muslim business owner or a marketer working for a Muslim business, you must engage your audience where they hang out. It is however never the case that all platforms where your audiences hang out are engagement-friendly.
For a long time TikTok was the kind of platform where it was hard to engage audiences efficiently as it had no business-friendly built-in resources like Facebook and Instagram does. That has now changed.
In June 2020 TikTok announced to advertisers that it’s open for business with their launch of the TikTok For Business platform. It provides brands and marketers with tools for creativity and storytelling. The idea behind TikTok For Business is to boost engagement and help brands build relationships with audiences more effectively and more meaningfully.
TikTok has launched a new Marketing Partner Program with partners across various areas of expertise. The new Marketing Partner Program will help businesses find new ways to engage with their audience and help marketers express themselves more creatively.
Covering All Aspects of Social Media Marketing
Looking at some of the partner categories for the Marketing Partner Program, it’s obvious that TikTok is aiming to have every aspect of social marketing on its platform covered:
- Planning, creating, optimizing, and measuring marketing campaigns.
- Sprinklr – A world leader in Customer Experience Management (CXM).
- Generating inspiring, effective creative content.
- QuickFrame – A popular marketplace connecting brands to video creators.
- Providing Virtual and Augmented-Reality services to brands.
- Byte – A Mar Tech agency that combines technology and creativity to solve brands’ challenges.
- Providing a suite of measurement solutions in order to effectively target, measure, and analyze campaigns.
- Kantar – A world-leading data, insights, and consulting company.
How Popular is TikTok – A Statistical Overview
800 Million Active Users
In July 2020, Datareportal published Global Social Media Overview ranking TikTok 7th out of 16 social media platforms. This is based on its 800 million monthly active users.
Two Billion Downloads
TikTok has gone from strength to strength. Statistics from April 2020, show that the popular video app has been downloaded more than two billion times globally on both the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Multiple Use a Day
BuildFire reports that three-quarters of all apps are downloaded, accessed once, and then entirely forgotten. TikTok statistics, on the other hand, show that 90 percent of all TikTok users access the app on a daily basis. In fact, a study observing the behavior of TikTok users concluded that TikTok users are extremely active: 68 percent of TikTok users watch someone else’s video and 55 percent upload their own videos.
Is TikTok a Good Match for Muslim Businesses?
Target Audience
Can Muslim businesses benefit by advertising through TikTok? We cannot give a definite answer to this question, especially because TikTok is only starting to open the doors to advertisers. However, from a general perspective, it all depends on the business. If your business targets Generation Z audiences then you need to be on TikTok.
According to the same GlobalWebIndex report mentioned above, 41 percent of TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24. It all makes sense given the fact that the founders decided to target kids under 18 from the start.
With about 66% of Muslims globally under the age of 30, it does look like TikTok could be a good place to engage that particular Muslim audience. Question is, are those young Muslims on TikTok?
Audience Engagement
The opportunity for the mentioned age group on TikTok is evidenced by the number of young Muslims creating and sharing content on TikTok. At the time of writing this blog, the hashtag #Muslim has 13.6B views and the hashtag #Islam has 20B views.
During the past Ramadan, a Muslim student from the UK posted a video showing him and his friends having to break their six-year-old tradition of meeting up for iftar ( breaking fast) due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The video went viral with over 98k views as many Muslims were relating to his TikTok.
At the climax of the student protests in India in December 2019 Muslim students took to the video app to make a stance. The hashtag #JamiaMiliaIslamia that’s used to create awareness currently stands at 4.7M views.
What About Muslim Businesses That Don’t Target Gen Z
With TikTok, just like any other social media platform, you should expect the older generations to catch up. Of course, you cannot wait around for that to happen.
You need to go in there and establish yourself while organic reach is still strong. We have all seen organic reach dwindle on Facebook and Instagram once the advertising money from brands started rolling in.
Regardless of whether your target is Gen Z or not, TikTok and other social media platforms should not be your primary tools for making revenue from your target. It should be one of the many ways you engage audiences and warm them up to your brand.
Have a Good Online Marketing Mix
A good online marketing mix is what will make you successful. A good resource to read and understand the online marketing mix is The 7 P’s of Online Marketing Mix by EngaioDigital.
A core element of the online marketing mix is Promotion, the ‘P’ that advertising falls under.
If you are looking to cut through the noise and advertise to Muslims specifically, you should work with Muslim Ad Network.
With over 10 years in the field and a reach of more than 250M Muslims of all ages and walks of life globally , Muslim Ad Network is the largest Muslim advertising platform online.
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