It’s no secret that TikTok is a challenging platform for brands to break through. It’s rapidly growing, skews to a younger audience, and the community is constantly developing new sub-groups such as the infamous VSCO girls and eboys - two of the apps key players.
This year, the innovative lip balm brand, eos, bravely took on the TikTok challenge. In an effort to establish themselves on TikTok as a leader in flavor, fashion, and fun, eos teamed up with Collab to rock the Tok. They approached Collab with a clear mission: maximize impressions, generate engagement, and increase user-made content.
Keeping these goals in mind, the eos #AwesomeKiss TikTok campaign was born. Collab, the largest independent digital content studio and talent network, firmly believes success is found with the right blend of creators and creative. With years of short-form video experience and roots in Vine and Musical.ly, Collab developed an engaging program that works within the TikTok’s unique community.
#AwesomeKiss combines the magic of eos and a dash of holiday spirit. Working off the TikTok trend of quick-cut transformations, creators applied their favorite eos product, planted an #AwesomeKiss and ignited their holiday spirit.
With the campaign goals in mind, Collab approached this campaign with three key insights:
Creators & Community
Collab spent months identifying key creators based on their growth patterns and content style. From their research, Collab hand-selected a group of 22 diverse creators to inspire their audiences and welcome the holiday season with an #AwesomeKiss.
Key App Features
To truly reach an emerging network, you need to speak their language. Collab focused on two of TikTok’s unique features to be the foundation of the campaign in order to infiltrate the user’s organic experience
ForYou Page: This is where most TikTok users spend their time viewing new videos from creators they don’t follow. It’s an endless scroll of the trendiest content chosen for a user via an algorithm. To position eos as a key player in TikTok’s community, Collab selected trendsetting creators with TikTok roots. Therefore #AwesomeKiss content popped up on ForYou pages across the platform. In fact, 33% of the views on our activated creator assets came from the ForYou page, diversifying the views generated.
Duets: This feature is unique to the platform and allows users to digitally collaborate with their favorite creators. A user can select a creator’s video and film a new video that plays in unison with the original. Collab knew the duet feature is a special asset to TikTok and incorporated it into the campaign plan. Approximately 12,000 duets were made in the #AwesomeKiss campaign.
Music
On TikTok, your sound is always on. Collab knows that the audio component to a campaign is just as important as the visual creative. Collab licensed a red-hot holiday classic sung by the People’s Sexiest Man Alive and EGOT winner - John Legend. His upbeat version of What Christmas Means to Me was the perfect song choice for this campaign. Over 20,000 videos were made with this #AwesomeKiss song choice, making it the most used John Legend song on TikTok.
As the cherry on top of the #AwesomeKiss campaign, Collab used their expertise in TikTok’s media offerings to add the support of in-feed media. Through sponsored posts, users were directed to visit the @eos TikTok page and join the challenge. After seeing their favorite creators work with eos, users clicked and followed - more than doubling eos’s following.
One of the Collab’s selected creators, Charli D’Amelio, particularly proved the strategy’s success. When Charli was first considered for this campaign, she had just hit 400K followers. When she went live with her #AwesomeKiss content, Charli had 6.7M followers. Her two assets for the campaign reached 27M people and received 3.1M likes. Charli’s energetic dances and playful incorporation of an eos sphere proved to be a great mix, resulting in the highest performing content in the campaign.
The #AwesomeKiss Campaign shattered all expectations and exceeded the set goals. Based on the campaign’s success, eos immediately began planning their next TikTok program with Collab.
The #AwesomeKiss hashtag accumulated a whopping 50M views and resulted in over 19,000 user-generated video entries. Collab’s hand-selected creators proved to be victorious with an average engagement rate that is six times the industry standard.
Successful metrics aside, the campaign was filled with great sentiment. Of the thousands of videos posted under #AwesomeKiss, one fan’s emotional reaction was especially memorable. A young, devoted eos fan, Lilian, and her father filmed a TikTok showing Lilian’s pure excitement when her favorite TikToker, Charli D’Amelio, posted with an eos sphere. Charli caught wind of her young fan’s enthusiasm resulting in a Facetime call to remember.
Since the #AwesomeKiss debut, all creators have grown significantly on TikTok and beyond. Charli D'Amelio, in particular, gained momentum that hasn’t slowed down. She was recently featured in a SuperBowl commercial and countless other interviews and photoshoots. The eos #AwesomeKiss campaign was her first-ever brand deal.
