The TikTok Dance Is the Marketing Plan

Before Mejja’s hit song “Siaka” had an official music video, it already had a life on TikTok.

The song featuring Uganda’s Fik Fameica had gone viral through a cheeky, chest-led dance challenge that turned its hook into something people could instantly copy and recognize. Janice Wangari was one of four women whose TikToks helped push the song far beyond Kenya. One of her own videos, she says, reached about 5 million views, while a group clip including all four women climbed to roughly 11 or 12 million.

Then Mejja reached out.

“He said he had seen my challenge,” Wangari tells OkayAfrica. He was happy people were doing a dance challenge to his song and wanted her to appear in the upcoming music video.  By the time the official video arrived, the song already had an audience and a recognizable move. The music video went viral with just under 10 million views in three months.

“Not to brag,” Wangari says, “but I feel like we really took a very big part in making that song viral.”

The order matters. The challenge came first. The viral clips followed. By the time the official video arrived, audiences were already very familiar with it. 

In Kenya’s music industry, the old routes to a hit no longer carry songs the way they once did. TikTok has become one of the fastest ways for music to reach people, and dancers and creators are the ones making that reach happen. Through clips — mostly dance challenges — they make songs familiar before traditional rollout channels catch up. Artists and labels are recognizing this, treating TikTok as a central part of how a song is marketed and pushed toward a hit.

“[TikTok is] at the top…100%,” says Trevor Magak of Kodongklan, when asked where TikTok sits in the hierarchy of music marketing. A traditional media run still has value when promoting new music, but he is clear about the comparison. “You can do 100 interviews,” he says. “It will not ever be able to beat what TikTok can do.”

The Gap TikTok Filled

For ColloBlue, the artist, dancer, and founder of The Cluster Talent Africa, the shift was evident before the industry realized it. With The Cluster, he has built a creator-led music marketing machine around dancers and TikTok.

“I’m a scientist. I see things in patterns,” he tells OkayAfrica.

About five years ago, ColloBlue began noticing a mismatch. Artists were still relying on the usual marketing channels, but audiences were already moving differently online. On TikTok and Instagram, music was becoming the raw material for everyday posts.

“The main source of art is music, but these musicians do not know how to market their music,”  he remembers thinking. “So I just need to position myself as the person who takes this music and puts it out.”

That became the foundation of The Cluster: a company built around TikTok as a new marketing route, with creators and dancers helping songs move faster. ColloBlue’s specialty became music, where dancers could turn songs into clips people wanted to watch, copy, and share.

“Our core business is we scout, recruit, build, grow and sell talent,” he says. “In the process of selling talent, we are advertising, and we are doing music marketing.”

The Cluster has also helped turn its 20+ dancers and creators into recognizable names in Kenya’s music scene. Figures like Nasieku (4 million TikTok followers) and Klaus (2.6 million TikTok followers) now have reach that rivals that of some artists.

The dancers are no longer just extras,” ColloBlue says. “They are distribution. An artist has one page; The Cluster can put your song on fifty pages in a day, each with its own community.”

ColloBlue has also used the same system on himself. With 3.9 million TikTok followers, he started releasing his own music six months ago. His first song, “Up Burukanga” with Addeh Prince, has reached about 10 million views, while “Dance Samawaah” with Ndovu Kuu has passed 5 million views in two months. KBC, Kenya’s national broadcaster, also commissioned him to create its official World Cup song. The song had half a million views in less than two weeks.

What Artists and Labels Are Buying

From the artist and label side, the value of dancers is blunt: reach.

Magak says TikTok is not an absolute requirement for a hit, but it now sits above most other forms of promotion because of how widely it travels. “TikTok resonates even with the people who are in [the village],” he says.

That is where collectives like The Cluster and creators like Wangari come in. Labels and musicians are paying for repeated exposure. As ColloBlue puts it, “A radio plug might play your song once or twice. A dancer makes ten thousand people repeat the same eight seconds of your track every day for a week. That’s marketing.”

As artists and labels recognize this, the brief has changed. ColloBlue says many artists now come to The Cluster with the same request: “They come and say, ‘I want my song to go viral, tell me what to do.’”

The Cluster’s answer is to start working with them as early as possible before release day. Sometimes they even join in with studio sessions to give feedback on whether the song has the makings of a hit. “We don’t post randomly,” ColloBlue says. “We test sounds, moves, angles, [and] posting times. We watch what sticks.”

It may be a short snippet, or a dance challenge built around the catchiest part of the track.

“The idea of dance challenges is to make [the] masses dance,” ColloBlue says. “That’s where most people go wrong. Most people say that [The Cluster] are just TikTokers; they’re not dancers... but that is the whole point.”

What Dance Can and Cannot Do

Wangari believes virality is only as strong as the song. She cannot make just any song blow up.

“I think good dancers go hand in hand with a good artist,” Wangari says. “You have to have a good song first… We just amplify.”

Magak makes the same point from the label side. A TikTok campaign can increase the chances of a song doing well, but “it doesn’t always guarantee that the thing is going to move.”

But as that amplification by the creators and dancers creates real value, the industry is still debating what the work is worth. For Wangari, the point is that dancers are doing marketing that artists might otherwise pay for elsewhere–often with less visible results. When a challenge takes off, the artist benefits from the song’s reach, streams and recognition, while the dancer’s platform helps make that visibility possible. That, she argues, should come with credit and compensation. That became especially clear to her after the success of “Siaka.”

“Now we know we are not just dancers…we’re playing a really big role in making these songs go viral. So at the end of the day, we need credit for it.”