Five Misconceptions about TikTok’s Overseas Marketing

In recent years, Douyin has become a well-known phenomenal APP, and the overseas version of Douyin, TikTok, has also performed well, especially in the field of online marketing. Although many domestic cross-border sellers want to use TikTok for overseas marketing, they still have only a limited understanding of how to operate and use it, and have encountered many difficulties and setbacks in their attempts.

In this issue, the Little Fisherman Think Tank shares with you the five common misconceptions in TikTok's overseas marketing, helping foreign trade people to easily avoid pitfalls, maximize TikTok 's marketing potential, and help you successfully go overseas to make money.

Although some foreign trade companies operate their own TikTok accounts, they do not get involved in influencer marketing. This is more common among small and medium-sized companies going overseas. They think that they do not need to and cannot do influencer marketing. This is actually wrong, especially for TikTok. If you give up influencer marketing, you are actually wasting the platform's biggest advantage.

You should know that it is difficult to build a connection between a cold brand and consumers, but it will be much easier if you humanize your brand - find an influential spokesperson to endorse the product , especially when facing overseas markets with language and cultural differences.

Among the current influencer marketing models, short videos are the most powerful and effective form of marketing, and are very popular among young people. TikTok has unique media advantages in all these aspects. Currently, there are two main ways for companies to cooperate with foreign influencers: one is to connect and manage influencer resources through third-party platforms, and the other is to directly contact and sign contracts with bloggers through popular social media or Google searches .

It is recommended that you do not limit your search for resources to TikTok. You can search for topic keywords on other social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube), such as #ad, #sponsor, #KOL, etc., and add industry names as filtering conditions. I believe you will definitely find influencer resources that meet your promotion needs.

80% of TikTok operators still don't know how to use TikTok-Analytics to evaluate marketing results. In fact, the platform has already opened the official data analysis function for Pro accounts. Long-term observation and analysis of account data can timely discover some strategic problems, making it easier for marketers to trace the causes and make timely adjustments. Only by finding the right direction can the hard work not be in vain.

Switching to a Pro account is not complicated. First, open the personal profile settings (Privacy and settings), then click "Manage my account", select "Switch to Pro Account", and fill in your personal information as required.

After setting up a Pro account, go back to "Privacy and settings " and you will see an additional "Analytics " option . When you enable the function for the first time, you will need to wait 7 days to generate enough data to generate charts.

TikTok- Analytics will provide multiple dimensions for users to evaluate account performance, including: video views, profile views, number of fans, fan population portrait, etc.

Since TikTok’s predecessor is Douyin, many foreign trade people want to imitate and copy the successful domestic marketing experience, or even directly copy the popular domestic content to take advantage of the popularity, hoping to gain more fans and attention for their accounts overseas.

This approach may bring you some new traffic in the short term, but it is not a long-term solution. Blindly copying popular domestic videos will make it difficult to continuously output works with a unified style and fail to truly retain fans; on the other hand, it may be marked as low-quality content by TikTok, affecting brand reputation.

In fact, there are huge cultural differences between different platforms and regions. Direct copying will often cause the content to not adapt to the local environment. For cross-border sellers who want to expand their marketing channels through overseas social media, the only way to gain overseas customers is to concentrate on studying the platform characteristics and output original content that matches their own brand tone.

Statistics show that 73% of young consumers believe that product value is more important than the product itself . Simply put, products exist to solve certain problems. If you only promote the product’s selling points in your video and ignore the problems it actually solves for consumers, it will be difficult to build trust with users.

Especially as a cross-border seller, there are differences in language and culture between you and your buyers. When you promote products on TikTok, each video is only a few seconds long. Don't just promote the selling points of the product. Try to change your mindset, think about the original intention of developing the product, and emphasize the experience and value that the product brings to users from the user's perspective, which will often gain more favor and trust.

Compared with other social media platforms, TikTok has its own unique subculture characteristics : it emphasizes authenticity, fast pace, and user creativity. Although product sales and brand promotion are your ultimate goals, if the style is too serious, it will be difficult to attract user attention and spread, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises that have just started to build their brand image overseas. Attracting the audience's attention and enhancing brand awareness are the top priorities of overseas marketing.

So how do you create interesting content?

Here are some common methods that are popular on TikTok:

Exaggeration : exaggerate the product application scenarios/pain points/satisfaction points to increase the comedic effect or reversal.

Association method : Associating content that users are familiar with with your product will make it easier to resonate with them.

Challenge method : Challenge users to encourage interaction and guide content to spread virally.

By getting rid of the above five misconceptions, I believe that foreign trade people will be able to use TikTok more easily and truly make it a powerful assistant to help overseas companies ride the wind and waves.

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