Sam and Joel review strategies for promoting events on TikTok and speak on why they feel it's a great medium for doing this. The duo details organic, paid, and influencer approaches for spreading the word to promote festivals, concerts, webinars, and more.

Joel: Hello and welcome back to another episode of tick tock Marketing podcast. I’m your host Joel.

Sam: And I'm Sam, it's wonderful to have you back for another episode. Before we get started today, a little background on Joel and myself. Joel and I have been working in the digital marketing space for a combined twenty-plus years, and we were on TikTok before it was even cool. 

We grew a following there of over 1.2 million followers, and at that point, we took our digital marketing background and our TikTok know-how, we combined them to create the first agency devoted entirely to TikTok marketing, and it has been a storm ever since. As brands figure out how to navigate the TikTok landscape, brands are just running there right now and it is a very exciting time for TikTok. 

Today, we have a very exciting episode for you. Joel, tell them what we're talking about.

J: Yes, as the world is finally starting to open up a little bit more, we think that this is an incredibly relevant episode. Today, we are going to talk about how to use TikTok to promote events. Yes, that is right– TikTok can be used to promote any type of event that you might be hosting, big or small: it doesn't really matter. TikTok can be an excellent resource for this. 

When we talk about events, it can be anything from a digital webinar to a huge music festival, or maybe it's a conference related to your specific industry. TikTok is a great and underutilized platform to promote any type of event that you might be having. Today we're going to walk you through a couple different ways that you can utilize TikTok to promote that event that you're throwing. 

First things first, what we would recommend is to create an organic post to showcase the event. So what does that mean? If you've never been on TikTok, the first thing you should do is create a handle that is either related to you or your event, and then go out and make some content showcasing why people should come, what's exciting about the event, what you're going to have there. 

Make it personal. Make it fun. We talk a lot in other episodes about how to make creative, fun, and engaging TikTok videos. If you have any questions, go back and check out some of those episodes. Just go out there and start creating content that promotes your event, showcases it, and you never know what will happen. That video might go viral. Your events, your festival, and your conference may become the most popular event in the world and that's the glory and the beauty of TikTok. 

Now, if you're thinking to yourself, I don't really want to go and create my own video. That's okay because there are still other ways that you can utilize TikTok to promote that big event you're throwing. That is by utilizing different creators and influencers to go and make content for you that showcases your event. You can do this in a number of ways. You can go through the TikTok app, scroll through, and try to find creators that relate to what you're doing. Maybe it's a music festival, and you want an artist that's performing at your event to make content promoting it. Maybe it's a conference for lawyers. There's tons of different lawyers on TikTok and maybe they can create content that showcases your conference  and why other lawyers should go.

S: One good tip here is to find where an influencer's audience is located. Sometimes you'll have influencers that really have a big following in a specific location. If your event is going to be in that location you might get people coming out just because they're excited to potentially see that influencer there.

J: That’s a great idea, Sam. Utilizing local influencers for a localized event can really, really go far. Even if it's an influencer with a smaller following, if they've got a niche following, if you're throwing an event in Austin, Texas, and they have 90% of their following in Austin, then that could be a great person to work with. Now, once you have that content created either by yourself or working with an influencer, the last thing that we recommend you do to promote this event is to take that content and create ads with it. 

The great thing about running ad campaigns through TikTok is you can choose the actual location that you want to promote the event to. So, if you have an event that's taking place in Los Angeles, you can promote ads just to people in Los Angeles, and some of the other great things is that you can target that audience with more specifics. You can target them by age, by gender, by their interests. 

If you have an event that's going to be perfect for financial advice for people that are retiring, you can promote that event to people that are 50 and over. That's the beauty of the ad platform on TikTok, is you can create the content that you want and target a specific audience that's relevant for your specific event.

S: Joel are there features like countdown timers that might be helpful for this?

J: Yeah, that's a great question Sam. There's lots of different cool features that you can utilize with your TikTok ad. Like you said, a countdown timer; you can use a countdown timer to showcase when your event is going to take place and how long people have to sign up or register for the event. You can put discount codes that link to a specific landing page where people can get a special discount if they see your TikTok ad for it. 

There's lots of different tools that TikTok has incorporated to use with their ads to help you convert to help you get more attendees for your event and to reach the right audience. The best part about all of this is that people are not using it yet. You're gonna have such little competition compared to other mediums when you're wanting to promote your specific event.

S: I love it. TikTok is such a great medium to promote events, and because of COVID, a lot of people haven't been utilizing it for events so there really is a big opportunity here as events become more and more popular.

J: 100 percent,  and even if you have a digital event, TikTok is a great platform for that as well. So like we've been saying, it doesn't really matter what it is, but utilizing TikTok to promote events is a great way to go.

S: And that's going to wrap it up for this episode of The TikTalk Marketing podcast. But before we go, if you have feedback on today's episodes, questions about TikTok in general or potential topics for new episodes, we would love to hear from you. If you're interested in working with us and want to hear more about what we do at TikTalk Marketing Agency for our clients, please, please reach out to us. Joel, where can they reach us?

‍J: Yes, just come and visit our website that is going to be tiktalkmarketingagency.com. We'll also put all of that information in the show notes, but feel free to just drop us a line if you have any questions at all. If you want us to speak on a specific topic on the podcast, or you want to work with us, or just say hello, that's where you can reach us. Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode. We'll see you next time.