Lenovo began our TikTok Jumpstart Program in January 2021, with a plan to feature up-and-coming TikTok content creators and build engaging content that was uniquely made for TikTok. Our objective was to aggressively build brand awareness and affinity with great TikToks built for our community there through a paid media campaign that boosted our content, promoted great creators, and built an engaged audience.
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. We focused less on branding, and more on creating engaging content and storylines, and boosting them to the right audiences. 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. As we watched followers grow to over 600,000 and video views surpass 90 million, the larger question became more pressing: “What value does this represent for Lenovo?”
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
