How To Utilise TikTok For Your Food & Drink Business

The food and drink industry is highly visual, and food brands have turned to TikTok to get users' taste buds tingling.

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TikTok has a huge audience, hitting over a billion monthly active users last year. The majority (60%) of that audience is Gen Z, and they’ve got their eye on the tastier things in life, with 23% of their earnings going on eating and drinking. This makes them the perfect target for food and drink businesses. 

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So, if your food brand is looking to tap into this powerful generation, you need to start showing off the goods, and what better place to do this than on TikTok! Here are 5 ways you can utilise TikTok for your food and drink business, and a few of the most successful ads, to take some inspiration from.  

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Utilise TikTok For Your Food & Drink Business by:

1. Filming behind the scenes
2. Using the popular food trends and sounds 
3. Leverage trending hashtags
4. Showing cooking ‘hacks’
5. Collaborating with food & drink influencers

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1. Film behind the scenes

People love to know the people and systems behind an account, especially when food is involved. This can be done through showing behind the scenes cooking footage, meeting the chefs, packaging your product and cooking bloopers, just to name a few!

2. Use The Popular Food Trends and Sounds 

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Luckily for you and your food & drinks business, TikTok is home to viral food trends, meaning you have the opportunity to reach a LOT of people. Make sure that when posting videos, you use a sound that is popular to TikTok and gets a lot of views. If you use it as your main audio or even in the background of your video, anyone who clicks on that sound may see your video pop up – even if they’re not following you. 

A good example of a popular TikTok food trend is the baked feta recipe - a delicious meal which uses just six ingredients - cherry tomatoes, feta cheese, garlic, chilis, basil and pasta - and is ready in just 25 minutes. Quick, easy and tasty… the perfect recipe for a trending TikTok! 

What About AMSR Sounds?

As mentioned above, sound is a principal driver of many trends on the platform, and particularly true when it comes to food. ASMR food videos have become hugely popular, especially among the younger generations, so using this in your food TikToks will give you a unique edge. 

3. Leverage Trending Hashtags

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As well as using trending sounds and food trends, take some time researching the best hashtags for your business and that specific video (such as #cakerecipe and #cookingtips), so that if someone searches those hashtags, your video may also pop up. Use of sounds and hashtags are both great tips if you do not have many followers to start with, as it can get your account out to a wider audience. 

4. Showing Cooking ‘Hacks’

Food TikTok is a space for innovation and creativity, which is why inventing interesting hacks for your audience will engage them and keep them coming back for more. This type of content is also likely to get shared across social media, with more and more users sharing useful content they’ve found with their followers. 

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Think about your food & drink products and how you can “hack” them as TikTok recipes to get users listening and sales converting. 

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Some good examples of TikTok food hacks include: folding tortillas into quadrants for better quesadillas and how to hull a strawberry with a straw. 

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5. Collaborating With Food & Drink Influencers

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Last but certainly not least, you can collaborate with food influencers. These are online content creators with a large and/or loyal social following who specialise in food-based content. Interestingly, 70% of teens trust influencers more than traditional celebrities, therefore spending time and money working with influencers to promote your business/products  will bring better brand awareness, higher ROI and can also significantly increase your following. 

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3 Of The Best Food & Drink Ads On TikTok

Chipotle’s #Boorito Halloween Campaign

American fast-food chain Chipotle has been quick to jump on the “hashtag challenge” bandwagon, and set a new standard for how brands can successfully use TikTok to engage with their customers.

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A large driver of their success comes from consistency, which when combined with their #boorito campaign has generated over 4 billion views on the platform.  The TikTok Transformation contest asks Chipotle fans to post videos showing “before and after” shots of getting into costume and awarding free burritos for a year to five TikTok users whose videos receive the most likes on the video-sharing app. Videos must have the #Boorito hashtag and be posted during the contest period, which runs Oct. 26-31.

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Chipotle enlisted influencers including Zach King and Brittany Broski to promote the challenge with their own branded posts.

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Red Bull’s #RedBullDanceYourStyle Challenge 

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Energy drink brand Red Bull has also done a fantastic job on TikTok. In 2020, Red Bull wanted to raise awareness and entries into its annual Red Bull Dance Your Style competition, which that year was hosted solely on TikTok.

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To do this, Red Bull ran a branded hashtag challenge titled #RedBullDanceYourStyle, asking users to show off their best dance moves. The campaign saw mindblowing success, driving over 7 billion video views globally and capturing the attention of over 1 million creators, all of whom submitted their own dance styles. Engagement was significantly high at 14.94%, a level only seen with viral campaigns.

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The Real Gushers Advertisements

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Sweets brand 'Gushers' does an incredible job with making creative and funny TikTok advertisements. Their TikTok videos typically get millions of views and a tonne of engagement. In fact, Gusher’s very first TikTok ad was viewed nearly 5 million times. 

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Even with these case studies, there isn’t currently a large volume of food and drink brands using TikTok to advertise – especially in the UK. This means you can be an early adopter, creating fun, engineering content that gets new audiences talking about your brand and products. 

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If you need help creating video content to bring your brand to life on TikTok then get in touch. We will work with you to utilise and optimise TikTok ad creative for the best results.

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We are Aura Ads, a unique performance creative agency designed for D2C eCommerce brands. We help clients sell more online and grow at scale with our bespoke video and static creative delivered on a monthly basis. For more tips and tricks from our experts, head over to our blog page.

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Written by Kate, for Aura Ads.

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