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Event Marketing on TikTok: 8 Must-Try Ideas

Event promotion and social media have always been a match made in heaven. Event marketing on TikTok is no different. From event ticket sales to drumming up new event clients, event professionals can take advantage of this creative and far-reaching platform to capture the right audiences. Whether you’re just getting started on TikTok or are brushing up on TikTok event marketing techniques, we have ideas for every skill level.

In this post, we cover everything you need to know to find and sell to your most ideal event clients and attendees. If you’re looking for tips on everything from TikTok paid advertising to creating organic content, we’ve got you covered.

Explore 8 actionable ways to take advantage of event marketing on TikTok:

1. Try Tiktok Paid Ads.

A mixture of organic and paid ads is a winning strategy for any social media platform. Whether you’re starting your marketing campaign fresh or need extra support on an existing strategy, TikTok offers a variety of paid ads you can use to market your events business.

Before you can start advertising on TikTok, you need to register as a TikTok Business account. They only need basic information such as email and name to verify that your business is legitimate. It will take TikTok about 24 hours to review and approve your new account. Once approved, you can start publishing ads!

There are five types of paid ads on TikTok: TopView, Branded Hashtag Challenges, Branded Effects, Brand Takeover, and In-Feed Ads. While you can use a combination of all five types to advertise your event or event business, you’ll likely want to focus on using ad types that work best for the various event marketing stages. 

For example, TopView and Brand Takeover ads command attention by using full-screen displays, which are great for selling tickets. Branded Hashtag Challenges and Branded Effects tailored to your event style are useful for engaging audiences during single or multi-day events.And In-Feed ads can be used to keep the post-event hype up as you get ready to announce next year’s presale. 

If creating and managing your paid TikTok advertising is a challenge for your team, consider hiring a freelancer to work with you on a specific campaign. They’ll be able to focus on making the right content, A/B testing, and audience engagement metrics with a greater level of experience and specificity since they’re dedicating all of their project time to it. 

If you choose to take on the platform’s marketing options yourself, make sure you stay up to date on the latest hot tips released every month by tech experts, since TikTok continually changes its offerings. 

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Social Tables asked PureTuber CMO and digital marketing expert Rameez Usmani to share thoughts on how to make TikTok work for businesses. Here’s what Usmani had to say.

I believe TikTok is well-known for being a hotbed for popular trends or challenges that frequently go viral, said Usmani. The most popular TikTok challenges involve participants lip-syncing or dancing to a certain song, such as Mariah Carey’s Fantasy. Participate in the challenge if it is relevant to your event in order to capitalize on the viral publicity!

Usmani pointed out that Jimmy Fallon’s #TumbleweedChallenge is an example of a successful challenge idea. Fallon challenged TikTok fans to roll around on the ground like tumbleweeds and include the hashtag #TumbleweedChallenge in their videos, with his favorites subsequently being featured on The Tonight Show. How’s that for a strong return on your TikTok event marketing investment? 

3. Start your own challenge.

For some events, especially B2B ones, there might not be trends out there that you can hook into. If that’s the case, Usmani says to make your own and encourage your followers to participate for a chance to be featured on your page. 

New Reach Marketing Founder Nicholas Rubright agrees. In an interview with Social Tables, Rubright said, While much of TikTok revolves around following trends and seeking inspiration on the For You Page, it can also be about attempting new things and coming up with unique ideas.

Include a hashtag, make challenges accessible to people in any location, and don’t be afraid to post your trend idea multiple times. Even if you don’t want to create an entire dance routine or activity, start small by making a sound that you use over your event footage that many other people would also enjoy using. 

All out of original ideas? You don’t have to start from the beginning every time, says Rubright. Putting your own touch on a popular trend might be just as beneficial. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If you’re not sure where to begin, you can take any current trend and add something unique to it. 

5. Collaborate with influencers.

Social Tables also spoke to Co-Founder & Developer of ContentBASE, Jay Bats, about how business owners can attract and engage followers on TikTok, something his company does every day. 

It’s no coincidence that certain people become TikTok influencers. They usually gain a reputation for the high quality of the content they provide. As a result, most businesses benefit from establishing positive working relationships with those who can influence their potential customers, says Bats. 

For events, this can mean bringing on a speaker with a substantial TikTok following to cross-promote the gathering. For event businesses, you can aim to find other influencers that have a symbiotic relationship with your company. TikTok famous event florists and caterers are great examples of this. 

6. Be organic.

Tristan Olson is the head of Venture, a video marketing and virtual event company, and has been focused on helping businesses promote themselves and their events on TikTok. We asked Olson which TikTok tips he has seen work for clients recently.

The main thing that separates TikTok from other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest, is that TikTok users expect organic, user-generated, and produced content, shares Olson. The content that performs the best are videos that aren’t polished or staged, but rather act as if they were filmed hand-held and from the POV of someone experiencing the event firsthand. This is great news for small businesses or teams short on time. 

Besides producing authentic, front-facing camera content, event marketers and event business owners can use their attendees’ natural enthusiasm to advertise on TikTok. Olson goes on to say, Have an event goer put together some clips of them going through the event and then add native text and graphics. Something like that will gain a lot more impressions than a professionally produced video that is uploaded to the platform. 

Great ways to incentivize audience event participation is by running giveaways, featuring users on your other social media accounts, and through engaging social media challenges. 

7. Use the live stream feature.

Julie Meredith, VP of Marketing at Dash Hudson, shared the power of this often forgotten-about feature.

Customers love how interactive live video is, and it has already grown into a significant market in China. Last year, creator Austin Li Jiaqi, known as ˜Lipstick King,’ sold $1.7 billion worth of goods in a single 12-hour live stream event with Alibaba, where customers were able to interact, comment, and purchase the products shown on screen in real-time.

Even if you’re an event business or doing an event for a company that offers services but not goods, live streaming can be a lucrative way to sell tickets, event merchandise, and more. 

8. Get discovered by your target audience.

From the user side of the platform, the TikTok algorithm often feels a bit random. But there are, in fact, many ways to train the app to better understand who your intended audience is so it can push your content to their feeds. 

One of the fastest ways to get discovered on potential event clients and attendees’ TikTok is to find applicable subcultures through hashtags. By finding these through the search bar, you can learn about the content that fits with your brand’s beliefs while also training the algorithm to associate your account with these words. Besides that, creating a compelling content strategy around these keywords is essential to both reaching out to and cultivating a truly authentic connection with your audience. 

Don’t forget to type in related keywords into search too. By manually searching for these, you can see what topics are being talked about using those terms and get a better understanding of how many views they’re getting. From there you can tailor your content to reach the event goers and throwers you need to reach. 

Also, having the right type of content is critical to cultivating a truly immersive experience. When looking for your audience on TikTok, think about what interests them instead of focusing on their age, gender, or location. This strategy helps you connect to groups and subcultures that are both unique and compelling. And given the uniqueness of TikTok, you may even unlock a creative new target audience segment that you wouldn’t find anywhere else online. 

Event marketing on TikTok is simple (and worth it)!

Even if you’re a small event business, investing in event marketing on TikTok is always worth a try.

For even more on how to sell out events through social media, check out our guides to event promotion on Facebook and Twitter.