Last month TikTok held its first Apps Summit, a major Mobile App industry event, in Istanbul, Turkey. The Summit was attended by more than 120 attendees, ranging from founders of leading app publishing houses, senior marketing leads, app analytics experts and representatives of the VC+PE ecosystem, in addition to, to TikTok’s own subject-matter experts and market-leading partners. Over the course of two days of the event, subject matter experts from TikTok gave inspiring and impactful updates about the company’s products and creative solutions, as well as gave a comprehensive introduction of Symphony, its latest suite of generative AI marketing tools. These updates, coupled with TikTok’s strategic observations, unlocked a path of growth avenues for App Publishers through global expansions and community integration.
“The global Mobile App industry has been experiencing exponential growth, with the number of Apps covering all sorts of consumer needs expanding by the day. As the competition in this space grows, we held the first ever TikTok Apps Summit, bringing together pioneering figures from the industry, shedding light on global growth opportunities, and providing a space for them to collaborate, share expertise and learn about some the best examples of successful growth strategies.” – commented Shadi Kandil, General Manager, Global Business Solutions, Middle East, Turkey, Africa, Central and South Asia, TikTok.
Apps’ user behavior is changing
An insightful deep dive into industry intelligence with Sensor Tower, an enterprise focusing on insights and analytics for Mobile Apps globally, showed:
- Users are becoming more selective and are close to finding sweet spots of apps that are worth their time and money. Data shows that over the last 5 years, there’s been a deceleration in app installs (only 5% CAGR), while spending on apps keeps growing year on year by 27% CAGR.
- Apps need to diversify their monetization strategy across subscriptions and one-time purchases: getting a download or a conversion is not the end of the road. Apps can maximize ARPU (Average revenue per user) by retargeting their users with add-ons and enriching their in-app experience.
- Adding AI features to an app leads to an immediate spike of 12% increase in revenue.
Community performance
On TikTok, content is curated based on what communities find entertaining. TikTok community has a diverse range of interests and a high level of engagement, which encourages them to contribute and join conversations – and brands can use this perfect blend for their benefit.
Communities play a significant role in driving stronger adoption, by adapting to the authentic behaviors of people living in a highly-informed and interconnected digital world. They seamlessly tackle the phases of the decision journey, but more importantly, the in-between phases.
- Firstly, between awareness and consideration, communities provide social proof: an app is only worth my time and money if it’s worth other people’s time and money. Doubling social proof leads to double the downloads [3].
- As users learn about the app’s selling proposition, and before they actually convert, communities help them understand how the app fits their lifestyle and needs: an app earns its slot on my home screen if it earns its slot in my daily life. Data shows that creator collaborations lead to an increase in purchases by 3.5 times [3].
- Finally, what TikTok has shown time and again, is the ability of its communities to turn apps into sensations through orchestrated virality: an app deserves my advocacy only if it’s part of a larger conversation. Leveraging content engagement and virality can lead to a 2.5x increase in revenue [3].
Community performance, that TikTok uniquely offers, significantly impacts results across the conversion funnel. TikTok shared cases of brands who unlocked the influence of communities and how they were able to increase conversion rate by 41%, decrease customer acquisition cost by 18% and boost overall quality lead-generation by +22% [3]. The more brands deploy and leverage the communities, the bigger their addressable audience and the more cost effective and efficient their strategy is.
Symphony: TikTok’s AI-powered creative solutions
During the event TikTok gave an update on its recently introduced range of creative product suite called Symphony, which helps businesses of all sizes, creators and agencies blend human imagination with AI-powered efficiency to scale content development, creativity, and productivity on TikTok. Now apps companies can maximize their return on creative: with ideation, script generation, avatar video generation and dubbing to 10+ languages and dialects, Symphony Studio drives efficiencies across the entire production process, while ensuring videos are TikTok-optimized.
Apps going global: geographical expansion on TikTok
TikTok works closely with app businesses to find opportunities and create strategies not only to capitalise their initial markets, but to expand globally. The platform helps businesses understand which markets show the best potential for them, learn consumers’ needs and preferences to better inform the strategy, localise their app creatives to resonate with consumers and, finally, apply best practices in order to drive tangible results. The approach to a successful geographical expansion strategy on TikTok consists of 4 steps:
- Identifying the markets that work best for the brand,
- Understanding everything about the relevant TikTok communities in the targeted countries: from digital shopping habits ,
- Localising creative assets,
- Optimising performance by testing new audiences, refreshing creatives and adapting offerings.
Success story
One of the great examples of capitalising on the platform’s opportunities is the campaign by Careem Quick, a widely popular superapp from the MENA region. The brand used TikTok to boost its grocery segment discovery and conversion, measure the effectiveness of its performance campaign and increase cross-selling with current user base. They utilised a TikTok Measurement Marketing Partner to build customized user lists, as well as used audience split tests to measure lift in discovery and first orders. As a result, the app discoveries increased by almost 6% on iOS and by 25% on Android, whilst first orders on iOS increased by 15%.
TikTok Marketing Science References
- TikTok Marketing Science Global Entertaining Ads Study (KSA Readings) 2022 conducted by Marketcast
- TikTok Marketing Science Global, GWI Q1-Q4 2023, TT Users who expect brands to help them organize/ simplify life OR are confident using new technology
- TikTok Marketing Science Global, TikTok Internal GBS Data 2024
