TikTok can be hugely influential in how people discover content, trends and brands. However, many marketers remain unsold on its commercial value, especially when demonstrating ROI.
TikTok doesn’t always translate neatly into clicks and conversions, but audiences are now discovering brands before they actively search for them. This makes TikTok more important than ever within the modern customer journey.
Our Paid Social Director, Sophie Somers, delves into TikTok scepticism, highlighting the platform’s true role across the wider discovery ecosystem.
Many brand marketers are sceptical when it comes to TikTok. It’s labelled as light touch, with the impact often harder to attribute to direct conversions, making it seem like a channel just for reach and engagement. TikTok is judged on last-click numbers that were built for search, not for a feed people are scrolling with no intent to buy at that moment. So, when the platform doesn’t convert the same way Paid Search does, brands assume it isn’t working.
However, this is a measurement problem, not a value problem. TikTok’s job in the customer journey is different. Instead of clicking straight through to purchase, users are building relevance and familiarity that lasts long term, and positively impacts other channels. Understanding the difference between immediate conversion and building future demand is key to unlocking the potential of TikTok as a key marketing channel.
For brands struggling to understand the value of the platform, who are seeing vanity metrics and low-intent scrollers, this is almost always a creative and targeting problem. Content for TikTok needs to be created consciously, bespoke for that specific platform. It needs to be built to earn attention there, not repurposed from somewhere else. For example, Kathryn Turner’s personal TikTok promoting Marks and Spencer’s content, and accumulating 50K followers in less than a month – the account following now sits at more than 200K with 3 million likes across content.
Creative effectively becomes part of the targeting system on TikTok: the hooks, the format, the creators you use, all of this tells the algorithm and the person watching it who the ad is actually for. Creative is a powerful performance lever across Paid Social, determining how brands find audiences. And in the discovery era, the content has to target both person and machine.
Get that wrong and yes, you’ll get views without meaning. Get it right, and TikTok will serve your content to exactly the right audiences – the people who’d never have found your brand when searching.
Search captures existing demand, but TikTok can help create it. One of the most valuable aspects of TikTok is that it reaches audiences before they know they’re looking for something – they’re consuming, not searching. This is the ‘presence’ constraint within the Discovery System: emotional priming, building relevance with an audience that doesn’t know you yet.
This is smarter than trying to convert on the spot. The early exposure builds familiarity and relevance, before the consumer enters an active consideration journey. So, it makes sure when audiences do eventually search, compare and ask for recommendations, your brand is already a part of the conversation.
Creative and Paid Media shouldn’t be treated as separate parts of the TikTok strategy. On TikTok, the algorithm learns who your brand is targeting from the asset itself: the hook, the format, the creators, the product cues, even the comments underneath it. To build on this, the Paid Media is what gets the asset in front of enough of the right people, at the right volume, for the platform to actually learn from it.
Weak creative in a well-targeted campaign gets penalised in the auction, CPMs climb and the reach falls, because the platform isn’t getting clear signals to work with. On the other hand, strong creative with no media behind it never gets the chance to be understood at all. That’s why the relationship between creative quality and auction performance is so important. You need both, working together, for a brand to be found, understood and chosen.
TikTok shouldn’t be judged as a standalone channel. It’s part of a much bigger Discovery System spanning search, social, recommendations, content and other touchpoints. Paid TikTok in particular is a key early-stage, demand channel. It plays a priming role: reaching audiences before they’ve formed intent, and building the kind of familiarity that emerges later as branded search, direct traffic or recommendations.
However, TikTok shouldn’t be expected to replace search or other performance channels, instead it can feed demand into them. Judging TikTok purely on its own platform-reported conversions will always undersell what it’s actually contributing to the wider system.
TikTok isn’t here to steal the last click. It’s here to create the next one.
TikTok doesn’t always translate neatly into clicks and conversions, but audiences are now discovering brands before they actively search for them. This makes TikTok more important than ever within the modern customer journey.
Our Paid Social Director, Sophie Somers, delves into TikTok scepticism, highlighting the platform’s true role across the wider discovery ecosystem.
TikTok isn’t the problem – measurement might be
Many brand marketers are sceptical when it comes to TikTok. It’s labelled as light touch, with the impact often harder to attribute to direct conversions, making it seem like a channel just for reach and engagement. TikTok is judged on last-click numbers that were built for search, not for a feed people are scrolling with no intent to buy at that moment. So, when the platform doesn’t convert the same way Paid Search does, brands assume it isn’t working.
However, this is a measurement problem, not a value problem. TikTok’s job in the customer journey is different. Instead of clicking straight through to purchase, users are building relevance and familiarity that lasts long term, and positively impacts other channels. Understanding the difference between immediate conversion and building future demand is key to unlocking the potential of TikTok as a key marketing channel.
Performance starts with the right creative
For brands struggling to understand the value of the platform, who are seeing vanity metrics and low-intent scrollers, this is almost always a creative and targeting problem. Content for TikTok needs to be created consciously, bespoke for that specific platform. It needs to be built to earn attention there, not repurposed from somewhere else. For example, Kathryn Turner’s personal TikTok promoting Marks and Spencer’s content, and accumulating 50K followers in less than a month – the account following now sits at more than 200K with 3 million likes across content.
Creative effectively becomes part of the targeting system on TikTok: the hooks, the format, the creators you use, all of this tells the algorithm and the person watching it who the ad is actually for. Creative is a powerful performance lever across Paid Social, determining how brands find audiences. And in the discovery era, the content has to target both person and machine.
Get that wrong and yes, you’ll get views without meaning. Get it right, and TikTok will serve your content to exactly the right audiences – the people who’d never have found your brand when searching.
Your brand is visible before intent even exists
Search captures existing demand, but TikTok can help create it. One of the most valuable aspects of TikTok is that it reaches audiences before they know they’re looking for something – they’re consuming, not searching. This is the ‘presence’ constraint within the Discovery System: emotional priming, building relevance with an audience that doesn’t know you yet.
This is smarter than trying to convert on the spot. The early exposure builds familiarity and relevance, before the consumer enters an active consideration journey. So, it makes sure when audiences do eventually search, compare and ask for recommendations, your brand is already a part of the conversation.
Creative and media need to work as one
Creative and Paid Media shouldn’t be treated as separate parts of the TikTok strategy. On TikTok, the algorithm learns who your brand is targeting from the asset itself: the hook, the format, the creators, the product cues, even the comments underneath it. To build on this, the Paid Media is what gets the asset in front of enough of the right people, at the right volume, for the platform to actually learn from it.
Weak creative in a well-targeted campaign gets penalised in the auction, CPMs climb and the reach falls, because the platform isn’t getting clear signals to work with. On the other hand, strong creative with no media behind it never gets the chance to be understood at all. That’s why the relationship between creative quality and auction performance is so important. You need both, working together, for a brand to be found, understood and chosen.
TikTok’s role in the wider discovery ecosystem
TikTok shouldn’t be judged as a standalone channel. It’s part of a much bigger Discovery System spanning search, social, recommendations, content and other touchpoints. Paid TikTok in particular is a key early-stage, demand channel. It plays a priming role: reaching audiences before they’ve formed intent, and building the kind of familiarity that emerges later as branded search, direct traffic or recommendations.
However, TikTok shouldn’t be expected to replace search or other performance channels, instead it can feed demand into them. Judging TikTok purely on its own platform-reported conversions will always undersell what it’s actually contributing to the wider system.
TikTok isn’t here to steal the last click. It’s here to create the next one.
Written by
Related Insights
Your brand is visible in AI. But is it being recommended?
Is your brand showing up in ChatGPT? Here's why it matters
How to build a discovery strategy that works across every channel
Should you bank on finding new customers on social?
Creative is the new targeting in Paid Social
