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Wednesday 25th November 2020

Why Wickes launched the home improvement industry’s first campaign on TikTok

By Mary Keane-Dawson, Group CEO of TAKUMI.

This month, home improvement retailer Wickes launched the industry’s first ever influencer marketing campaign on TikTok. The #MyWickesMyWay campaign involved seven content creators each producing a video on the social media platform.

The TikTok creators showcased content including DIY tips and transformation hacks to create cultural moments and increase product usage. Working with TAKUMI, the creators delivered on their brief to drive awareness of Wickes’ product range and reach new audiences delivering over 600,000 views and 120,000 likes with an engagement rate of 17.9%.

The #MyWickesMyWay campaign comes at a time of growth for the home improvement sector.

The British Home Enhancement Trade Association estimates £4.94bn will be spent on improving homes and gardens before Christmas, approximately £550m more than in 2019, with more than a third of consumers planning jobs.

However, Wickes’s campaign isn’t just the result of sector growth, but the latest example in a developing trend. Our recent whitepaper research – Into the Mainstream: Influencer Marketing in Society – revealed that almost three quarters of marketers (73%) are now allocating a greater proportion of their resources to influencer marketing than they were a year ago. This was consistent across almost all sectors, including those less traditionally associated with influencers, for example architecture, engineering & building (73%).

Additionally, it seems growing budgets are increasingly being channelled towards newer platforms as well, including TikTok. Over the next 12 months, more than a third (35%) of marketers will consider working with influencers on the platform.

This comes as little surprise with consumers continuing to download the app at an impressive rate, increasing its appeal for marketers. TikTok was yet again the most downloaded non-gaming app worldwide for August 2020, demonstrating that the phenomenal growth it saw at the start of the pandemic shows no sign of waning. But beyond the huge user base the platform has built up internationally, there are a host of reasons brands might consider incorporating it into their marketing plans.

TikTok users are highly engaged. On average in 2019, TikTok users spent 52 minutes per day on the app, just shy of the 53 minutes per day Instagram users spent on the platform despite having been around almost a decade longer. And 90% of TikTok users return to the app multiple times a day.

These high levels of engagement are driven by the entertaining short-form video content that populates users’ feeds and makes it difficult to put down. It also offers marketers the chance to encourage user-generated content, spark trends and create viral content quickly.

Although TikTok is a particularly effective way for brands to reach younger audiences, it’s misguided to think there aren’t opportunities beyond this core user base. In the US alone, TikTok’s adult audience is growing by 357% annually.

As TikTok’s user base continues to grow and as marketers become more familiar with influencer marketing and TikTok, we expect brands from a wide variety of sectors to follow Wickes’s lead and launch their industry’s first campaign on the platform.