Lenovo joined TikTok in January 2021 working with both TikTok creators and employee creators. Our goal was to create entertaining TikTok-first content to authentically increase brand awareness for both the company and our various products.
We’ve all heard the phrase, “Don’t make ads, make TikToks,” and we took it to heart. With TikTok’s growing popularity, Lenovo’s Worldwide Social Media Team took the opportunity to establish Lenovo’s first brand presence on the platform. Our plan was to create and promote content that was made specifically for TikTok using a combination of TikTok creators and employee creators. In the videos, we focused less on branding, and more on creating engaging content and storylines. While these often featured Lenovo products, we steered away from being overly promotional. Shortly into our program, we began seeing comments like, “Wait, this was an ad?!” and knew were on the right path.
The combination of great TikTok creators, and a paid strategy that matched our aggressive content strategy, drove our followers to over 497,000 in just 1.5 months. While we learned a lot from those first few months, we weren’t done. We began focusing on storylines like “IT Help Desk” and the popular “In Flight” series that were entertaining to watch on their own, but also focused on core Lenovo messaging pillars in a fun and entertaining way. With these new content streams, we focused the rest of 2021 on driving engagement and brand awareness through boosting our best content and creators. We watched followers grow to over 600,000 and video views surpass 90 million.
We worked with TikTok to measure Brand Lift from our paid media campaigns. Our results were astonishing and earned a higher Ad Recall, Awareness, and Preference, than previous multi-channel campaigns with much larger budgets.
Brand Awareness: +4.3%
Brand Preference: +3%
Ad Recall: 5.9%
Impressions: 91 million
Engagements: 5 million
Some of our other milestones & accolades include:
Growing our account from 0 to 497k followers in the first 1.5 months, breaking campaign KPI by 5x.
Lenovo ranked #17 for new followers and #11 for the number of engagements across all brands on TikTok in 2021.
Lenovo presented during TikTok’s For You Summit in July of 2021 on how we worked with creators to grow our presence on the platform.
Lenovo was honored as a Culture Driver Award Winner in December 2021. Honoring the most innovative collaborations between marketers and creators.
