Using TikTok To Market Your Games

Every time a new social media platform comes along, it doesn’t take long for people to start asking how to use it to market.

It makes perfect sense. When you’ve got millions of people paying attention to a single app, you want some of them to look your way. Making it happen – that’s the trick.

And it goes without saying: most the people who make it big on any brand of social media, TikTok included, do so completely by accident. Trying to go viral is like walking a marathon and expecting to win – it fundamentally ignores the whole point.

TikTok marketing has to accept that you’re not going to just upload a video and be a sensation tomorrow. You have to work on it, and you have to understand the ecosystem that you’re getting into. Without those, you’ll stand no better chance than if you didn’t try at all.

What the social media app can do is allow you to increase awareness of your brand, build a community, sell your product, get feedback and provide customer service. All by just downloading the app.

That can be such a vital thing for your business.

TikTok: How To Get Started

The most obvious thing to do if you want to start a TikTok channel is to just jump in. It might sound scary, but don’t worry – you won’t be alone. Everybody on the platform has had to make this leap, and they’ve done it with varying degrees of success.

Spend some time getting used to some of the other videos on the platform. See how other people, and game makers, have utilised it to their advantage. Some will do personal slice-of-life videos, while others will do something more involved, like challenges. Whatever suits your business and personality, learn from the things that other people have done.

This may get more people interested in your brand straight off the bat. Or it might be you want to start paying for advertising. That is too complicated a topic for the scope of this article, but you can look into it online. Because paid advertising is a completely different beast to trying to build your own community dynamically, you will find it comes with its own set of challenges and pitfalls. And you’ll still have to make the content, so it’s best to have a go at creating before you pay anyway.

Meeting Influencers

For gamer makers, influencers are a key way of getting your game out there. If you can get people with bigger followings than you to play your game, you can grow word-of-mouth quite easily. Don’t fall into the trap of writing to the biggest and best streamers – they probably won’t even see your message. Unless you have something completely unique or already have a decent following, you’ll have to rely on small outlets and individuals. And that’s okay – the more people you reach out to, the more likely it is you’ll get some coverage.

This is where you have to hope your game is as good as you think it is. As with print and online content about games in the past, the people on TikTok don’t have to be kind about your game. And, as we’ve all seen, sometimes it’s only the worst games that go viral.

But as you grow your following, you’ll see that will start to translate to sales. You can never guarantee anything, but the effort will hopefully begin to pay off.