5 days, 250 influencers & 22,000 installs: Growth Hacking TikTok’s App Installs

Case Study

5 days, 250 influencers & 22,000 installs: Growth Hacking TikTok’s App Installs

A small team transforms the global strategy for an app nearing saturation with 1B+ downloads

By Jonathan Maxim,
Managing Director at K&J Growth Hackers

About TikTok

TikTok, also known as Douyin in China, is a media app for creating and sharing short videos.

It is a leading short video platform in Asia, United States, and other parts of the world. In 2018, the application gained popularity and became the most downloaded app in the U.S. in October 2018.

As of 2018, it is available in over 150 markets, and in 75 languages.

About K&J Growth Hackers

Two seasoned growth marketers unite in 2017 to found one of the top growth agencies today. Bringing a colorful background of writing for top publications like Forbes & Inc., combined with nitty-gritty marketing experience at a Fortune 500 serving 25M+ customers, as well as expertise in social media virality, press coverage & deep personal networks.

Today, they’ve served over 150 customers, and some of the largest companies, government agencies, and universities as well as the leanest startups and tech firms – united all by the pursuit of amazing results.

K&J is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA and is comprised of 25 specialists, from sales copywriters

Introduction

TikTok approached K&J for help to reach millions of new consumers and tens of thousands of new installs in a crowded and competitive market space: Social media apps.

The challenge is that TikTok already had 1B+ downloads, and nearly every marketing channel had been exhausted. TikTok hired 5 agencies for the project, and 4 refunded the client after failing to reach the target 22,500 installs.

TikTok chose K&J Growth Hackers as the one to stay, of those 5. K&J is a marketing boutique that has a home-grown technology for checking influencer’s click-through rate on “Link in Bio” before partnering with them. This allows the team to only select top-converting profiles.

TikTok needed a platform where they could test hundreds of audiences, on a small scale, and find the creative, offer and audience combination that worked best, without wasting time on influencers with fake followers, saturated audiences and low engagement users.

Actions Taken

K&J designed a marketing and media strategy that used several peer to peer sales techniques, leveraging nano influencers with less than 5,000 followers on Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, IGTV creators and Airdrop at conferences.

Then K&J designed & built software to scale this one-to-one, direct message marketing to over 60,000 app installs, and beyond.

The result of pioneering new techniques not only drove down their media costs nearly 50% and halved CPI versus the Tiktok historical install cost, but laid the groundwork for a scalable marketing methodology that could be deployed in two weeks to all geo markets, from Brazil to Japan and to Germany.

This brought their ROI up by 4X!

Results Delivered

After testing countless audiences, creative variations – even a contest format, K&J struck gold using a person-to-person referral strategy, encouraging users to share the app directly with their friends via Direct Message on Instagram, instead of posting stories and wall posts.

TikTok gained 23,500 installs in just 5 days. Their organic cost per install working with K&J was reduced by 51%, and click-to-install conversion rate rose from 0.5% to nearly 40%, and as high as 65% among some audiences. Click-through rate on impression rose to 33%, well above industry standard.

The results were so unexpected that TikTok’s internal teams began asking, and eventually, several other geographic regional teams engaged K&J for the same methodology, and started by expanding in UK, and is running tests in Russia, Italy, Germany, and Ireland. With plans to expand in Brazil, Southeast Asia and Japan.

TikTok’s Remarks

“We were impressed by the campaigns performance metrics, yes. But what stood out to us most was this. Out of the 5 agencies we hired, 3 refunded their deposits without cue, and gave up on the campaign. Most didn’t even try once their initial efforts didn’t bear fruit. But not K&J. Their team’s work ethic is what made us want to expand with them. They are the only firm that not only delivered the target installs, but actually seemed to genuinely care about the success of the campaign”

Roxy T.,
USA Regional Marketing Director at TikTok

Statistics

K&J has nearly 500 influencers under contract and access to 100M+ followers

There is a glut of content being created, and breaking through the noise is more difficult than ever

The precipitous decline of organic reach on Facebook (and now Instagram) makes social media promotion of content a trickier proposition

Ad blockers make amplification of content through display ads (even hyper-specific remarketing) less appealing

Americans trust recommendations from real people significantly more than we trust advertising and promotions from brands, in any guise

Influencer Marketing generates as much as 11X banner ad ROI

Conclusion

If the thought of interviewing, vetting and contracting 200 influencers for a campaign seems daunting, you’re not alone. If you’re running a business that feeds on recommendations from your customers, establishing relevance is more important than ever. Let K&J help you craft your story, develop a plan, and distribute it to millions. Then let’s all have tacos and margaritas, yeah?