The death of Tiktok and resurgence of owned channel

How your brand can survive the fluctuations of acquisition channel performance!

I admit that the title of this article is somewhat misleading and certainly premature, but the death of the most popular social media app of 2020 is not entirely a thing of fiction.

Following the ban of Tiktok in India (its second-largest market) and the probable ban of the app in the USA, I started thinking about the increasing diversity and complexity of the digital marketing space. Mainly, about how the growth and extinction of customer acquisition channels impact brands, and what the death of Tiktok should mean for us marketers.

This article is a list of “habits” that we have adopted at our agency and that we have implemented for our clients to shield them for the potential obsolescence of customer acquisition channels; including Tiktok.

1/ Know what your goals are and stick to them

This may seem obvious to most of you reading this article, but the first step to safeguarding your company from the trepidations of the digital marketing ecosystem is to have well-defined marketing goals.

Determining marketing goals starts with the understanding that all marketing goals are business goals. That means that :

• Marketing goals should never be limited to one customer acquisition channel.
• Marketing goals should almost always have a dollar amount attached to them (Keep in mind that a business’s raison d’etre is to maximize profitability).
• Marketing goals should be in line with your business’s global strategy.

Unfortunately, most companies make the easy mistake of defining goals that are either specific to a single channel (e.g. the number of followers on Instagram) or that do not take into account the business utility of achieving them.

2/ Stop optimizing your campaigns for specific channels

Everyone who’s been in the digital marketing/growth space for a while knows that maximizing the results of your campaigns is 80% testing and 20% testing.

That means that, contrary to what the quick-hack peddlers want you to believe, when launching a campaign on any given channel, increasing the number of tests and accelerating their velocity is what will help you achieve your goals.

Technical optimizations that are specific to every single channel, will help you at a later stage of your campaign and will only allow you to obtain small incremental improvements.

Consequently, when trying to optimize your marketing campaigns, keep in mind the following:

• Optimize for your macro performance. Instead of just thinking about how you can maximize your results on one channel, constantly reevaluate your acquisition channel mix.
• Your attribution model should be aware of the multi-channel nature of customer acquisition. On the surface, a channel might be driving all of your results, but most people converting will potentially be influenced by ads that they saw on a totally different channel. (I will soon be publishing a detailed article about attribution in digital marketing).

3/ Own your audience, don’t rent it

Your TikTok and Instagram Followers, Facebook likes, Amazon and eBay sales, App Store downloads, Search Engine Ranking, etc. are all valuable metrics. They are however far less valuable than you might think.

Basing your long term marketing strategy on maximizing the size of your audience on a channel that you don’t control is akin to surrendering a lot of power over your marketing performance to another company.

Shielding your company from the fluctuations of the acquisition channel performance depends greatly on your ability to own your audience.

Owning your audience means being able to access it, directly, without having to go through a gatekeeper. That can take many forms: Having them subscribe to a newsletter, adding them to your SMSing List, getting to download your mobile app or register to your own website, etc.

Owning your audience does not mean not using a rented audience to drive marketing results. It just means that as a long-term insurance policy, you should try to move as many people from your rented audience to your own channels.

4/ Always be early.

Customer acquisition channels come and go. So the only way to ensure that your brand is present on the next big channel is to always be early whenever something new comes around.

This does not mean going all-in on every social media app that is launched, but instead trying out and familiarizing with most channels that are popping up and buzzing.

My recommendation is to keep an idea of product sharing communities (ProductHunt, BetaList, a couple of subreddits, etc.) and digital marketing groups and forums.

Also, never dismiss a new channel that is getting attention as just a toy for kids. If we are to learn anything from the short history of the internet, kids are usually the first adopters of most new apps and are the main driver for their growth.

5/ Work on your company’s fundamentals

As much as customer channels vary and differ, the basics of creating good copy and visuals are always the same regardless of the channel your choose to use.

Building a strong brand, knowing what makes customers tick, and mastering customer retention are all fundamental skills that are transferable across all channels.

That being said, it is paramount that as a marketer to appreciate the nuances of content that are specific to each channel; especially the tone of the content and its format.

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