Post Shift Shot #120 - Drink Brands and Tik Tok in 2021

TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it only became available worldwide after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on August 2, 2018. The platform allows users to post a 1-minute video along with a music pairing, stickers, audio, filters and layover text. With the popularity of Musical.ly, the app was used by creatives predominantly and is known by most as that “dancing to music” app. But the platform has diversified dramatically and now hosts comedy, tutorials and much more.

Firstly, I understand there are concerns about the age demographic on the platform, but it has aged up quickly over the last 8 months here are some stats from Omnicore.

- TikTok is available in 150 markets, in 75 languages.

- 56% of TikTok users are male and 44% are female.

- Roughly 50% of TikTok’s global audience is under the age of 34 with 26% between 18 and 24.

- TikTok users spend an average of 52 minutes per day on the app.

- 26.5 million monthly active users are from the USA

- In less than 18 months, the number of US adult TikTok users grew 5.5 times.

- TikTok’s average engagement rate is 29%.

- 68 percent of TikTok users watch someone else’s video and 55 percent upload their own videos.

With all these stats in mind, especially the growth in the adult market along with users and time spent on the app; here are my pointers for 2021.

I don’t believe that drink brands are 100% ready to have standalone profiles on this platform quite yet. However, I do believe that the backing of drinks influencers on the platform is a huge opportunity. When the drink influencers use your brands, it gets noticed especially if they say or write it by name; this is a chance to build subliminal messaging, it is your bourbon used in an Old Fashioned, your vodka in a Cosmopolitan and so forth. This is a huge macro market hungry for drink recipes or #drinktok.

#1 — Identify the Drinks Influencer

Does this bartender (home or professional) make drinks that your brand fits with. Are you a fun-loving brand that is geared to young adults that go out or are you a more serious brand that is looking for alignment in the cocktail culture? Finding the right influencer is paramount to success, not just with one video but with multiple and building a relationship with that individual.

#2 — Research their profile

This is a big one, “buying” followers is a problem on every platform, it gives the profile a bigger following that it should be. Check the videos for viewers, comments and likes, does those figures align with their follower count. If they are low, then chances are there followers are bots or accounts that were bought.

#3 — Engage

Cold calling and reaching out to influencers are a relatively new thing for the drinks business especially on this platform. Just get the conversation rolling and open dialogue, don’t pitch prices or requests and vice versa; if they pitch a price straight away, walk away. Building a relationship is paramount on both sides. A drinks influencer on TikTok, once engaged will give you a far better ROI on investment along with trackable and tangible data than a bus, billboard or TV ad. The spend will be much less for a much bigger spread of viewership.

#4 — Observe

Watch carefully the impact that the videos make, the videos should be geared towards classic, approachable cocktails or very outlandish ones that the consumer is drawn to. While most brands are overly strict about “on brand”, the creativity of the influencer is what draws the consumer to them, in this case not your brand. The use of your brand is the biproduct of the influencer’s popularity.

#5 Review

This is the final step and a circle back on the Research step in the process. Calculating the purchase behavior after using an influencer is very broad, but no less broad than measuring the return of a highway billboard or TV commercial. From personal experience, my Old-Fashioned video using Knob Creek Bourbon has nearly 500K views, 15K likes, 1000 comments and 1500 shares. These figures alone for a 1-minute video is astonishing and I am not an influencer.

TikTok is where the attention is right now, which in turn needs to be where the drinks industry needs to focus on. The platform is aging up and quickly, the attention needed for the videos in full is 1 minute, but the impact is significant and will only build over the next year. Where will your brand sit in this new market?

Share a dram with the hospitality industry’s top global talents: bartenders, venue owners, distillers and industry aficionados. Shawn Soole has lived, breathed, and imbibed hospitality for decades. Now, he delves into the advice, opinions, and provocative stories that are helping to define the creative, culturally-necessary space of ‘modern hospitality’—covering topics from front-of-house service, to back-end business operations, and every inch between.

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POST SHIFT PODCAST, HospitalityShawn SooleJanuary 12, 2021Comment