TikTok and Reaching the Gen Z Audience

To TikTok or not to TikTok? For many brands, that’s an ongoing question in an ever-evolving social media landscape. TikTok can feel overwhelming and it can be challenging for a brand to formulate a successful TikTok strategy. But when our client, New England Dairy, approached us about reaching Gen Z to promote the importance of dairy, it was quickly agreed upon that TikTok was the place. In fact, TikTok is the perfect platform to reach the Gen Z audience, with 47% of its users falling into the Gen Z age range.

With the platform selected, we began to craft the perfect strategy to meet our clients’ goal: driving awareness of the benefits of dairy and building trust with Gen Z. Like with any social advertising, the strategy is really where we get to dissect the platform, its users, its value and how we can best leverage those findings with our content. For this client and objective, our strategy concluded the usage of influencers was the best means to deliver our message. For Gen Z, entertaining, quick and authentic video content is key on TikTok and there’s no way better way than through creator-generated content. Our 9R social team scoured the platform seeking out the best Gen Z influencers who checked all the boxes with relevant, feel-good content and solid engagement rates, but who were also in our clients’ target New England market.

With our influencers identified and strategy locked in, we set our plan in motion. With a thorough but flexible brief, our influencers curated videos to spread the message about local New England dairy farms, the awesome benefits of dairy and how easily dairy can fit into your day via a healthy snack like yogurt bark or smoothie bowls, a yummy dessert or a delicious coffee drink. We also utilized a nominal paid media spend to support the content over several months, that included the competitive holiday time period when it can be most challenging (and expensive) to reach your audience. And our work yielded some great results, netting over 1.4 million video views and a reach of nearly 375,000. Most impressive was our achievement of an overall 2.6% engagement rate, which is at the higher-end of the industry standard creator content benchmark of 1-3%.

Not only did we achieve remarkable results for our client’s campaign, but we had fun with this collaborative effort and were able to prove TikTok’s Gen Z targeting effectiveness. Given the chance to replicate similar campaigns in the future will continue to build on that trust and expand the messaging about the health benefits of dairy, which in turn will create the dairy consumers of tomorrow.