Zuru’s Mini Brands had already received viral fame on TikTok following their launch in the US. Fanbytes leveraged The Bytehouse, the first UK TikTok house and paid ads, to capitalise on this traction and spark the same virality on UK soil.

Fanbytes is known for creating the UK’s largest TikTok talent management company Bytesized talent, the first TikTok influencer beauty brand, Gloss Twins, and of course for establishing The Bytesquad, which, in the UK, is the first of its kind.

What’s more, after seeing the pay-off of their influencer marketing for toy brands on TikTok, Fanbytes have launched their toy vertical to hone in and further support toy brands on the opportunities that TikTok poses for them. Zuru’s Mini Brands was one of the first brands to utilise these resources.

Zuru is an “award-winning company that designs, manufactures and markets innovative toys and consumer products”. In collaboration with Playtime PR, they worked with Fanbytes to continue the thriving momentum that their Mini Brands products received in the US. The campaign utilised the UK’s first TikTok house to create compelling content with a Gen Z audience in mind.

The role of Fanbytes

By leveraging the UK’s first TikTok creator house that bolsters a following of a combined 25million+ amongst them, Mini Brands were able to organically insert themselves into the world of TikTok whilst simultaneously building positive brand connotations and accessing a community of fans it wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.

Key campaign objectives

Here are the key things that Zuru wanted to achieve:

  • Maximise the marketability of Mini Brands in the UK.
  • Encourage powerful engagement through compelling organic TikTok content,  measured by hearts, comments, and shares.
  • Drive brand awareness, measured by total views.
  • Encourage footfall and drive people to the stores where Mini Brands are sold.

Campaign execution

Zuru’s Mini Brands campaign was to be split into three separate parts:

Phase one:

The Bytesquad possesses a passionate and dedicated fan-base that enjoys watching content that gives them an exclusive glimpse into their real lives. The first Bytehouse tour raked in millions of views across the influencers’ channels on TikTok, and generated impressive results on YouTube too. Fanbytes took advantage of this insight and wanted to replicate something similar using Mini Brands to give users more of what they want.

So, they asked the Bytesquad to pretend to move into a new house whilst showing close up shots of their new rooms. At the end of the clip, viewers found out that the rooms were actually Mini Brands products in a big reveal. The Bytesquad were also responsible for creating content on their individual profiles where they show their fans how they decorated the mini Bytehouse as well as unboxing the Mini Brands products.

Moreover, this content was framed to look extremely realistic so that they could compel the viewer to re-watch the video following the reveal to identify how they were ‘pranked’. This concept resulted in more views and a higher watch time because it played to the algorithm and was seen by more people.

International marketing director at Zuru, Erika Sava has expressed: “Fanbytes has a proven record of deliverables alongside the algorithms to demonstrate how best to meet our business and communication objectives for growing our UK TikTok presence.”

Phase two:

Gen Z enjoy some form of interactivity when it comes to content, with 1 in 5 expressing that they would be willing to promote a brand if they felt involved or can take part in some way. Recognising that challenges are amongst some of the most viewed content on TikTok and are one the most popular means for users to get involved, Fanbytes set a challenge for The Bytesquad.

The squad was challenged to find the real brand products to match with the Mini Brands in Tesco’s and supporting supermarkets and whoever found the matching brands quickest, was crowned the winner. This content was filmed on the Bytesquad’s profile as well as their individual accounts and was distributed further by paid ads. The aim of this phase was to organically highlight that Mini Brands could be bought in Tesco and encourage user-participation with an innovative TikTok challenge.

Phase three:

Following the success of the Bytesquad activations, the third phase will focus on leveraging their community and selecting other influencers in their network to perform unboxings – a popular content trend on TikTok. This is yet to be completed.

The Results

Phase one:

The Bytesquad’s tour combined with their individual videos on their profile garnered a whopping 1.6m+ views and a 25% engagement rate.

Phase two:

The challenge proved successful and brought in 890k+ views and a 13.95% engagement rate.

Why it worked

The campaign’s success derives from the high engagement of the content created.  Such engagement was only possible because they had access to a large passionate and exclusive fan community; one that Bytesquad’s 25million+ fans combined provided.

The CEO of Fanbytes, Tim Armoo expressed that: “When we launched the ByteHouse at the start of lockdown we were ripping up the playbook by taking individual influencers and building a Gen Z brand. With over 27m fans just on TikTok and over 35m weekly views, that playbook is working; we’re currently the largest TikTok media owner in the UK. This Mini Bytehouse campaign is another great chapter in that innovation and I’m excited to start this with Zuru. It’s already shown it is ahead of many in its field with its success in the US. We’re excited to partner up with Zuru on this innovative campaign, which combines both the online and offline to help the company dominate the UK landscape.”

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