How Your Small Business Can Win Big With TikTok

Is your small business using TikTok? With its popularity growing by the day, small businesses and startups should take advantage of TikTok if their customers use it.

There are many ways for small businesses to get value from being on TikTok, and it’s not just from social media marketing. For example, businesses can use TikTok to improve customer discovery and learn more about the content that interests them.

With a deeper understanding of topics, content type, and style, businesses can publish similar information on TikTok, social media, and other channels like blogs.

TikTok also has marketing and advertising options, much like other social media sites, that businesses use to grow their brand presence and ultimately pull customers to their site for inquiries and shopping.

This business blog article covers why TikTok is powerful as a marketing channel and how to get your marketing strategy underway while preparing to overcome or avoid some of the challenges of using TikTok for business.

Why TikTok?

TikTok is one of the most popular apps among young people. It’s an app that allows users to create short videos and share them on social media. It has grown in popularity among startups and small businesses because it is easy to use and fun to watch. Did you know TikTok has over 500 million downloads?

Business News Daily and Statista have some interesting statistics on TikTok that suggest that businesses ignoring this social platform are missing out in so many ways, from reaching more eyeballs to improving customer engagement with their brand.

Impressive TikTok Statistics

• 1 billion active users per month
• Users are from 141 countries
• The target audience is under 50
• Average time online 19.6 hours per user per month

If your business is in the UK and so is your customer base, you’ll be keen to know they spend a whopping 27 hours per month on TikTok. 🙂

High Engagement

TikTok is probably the one social platform where its users engage; they are not just observing but responding to the content. What business doesn’t want to learn what content interests their customers? Once a business is set up on TikTok, it can learn the type of content that will prompt a reaction through engagement.

Be Creative

TikTok is for letting your creative flow happen. Businesses can experiment with different types of content. SproutSocial has many ideas on how your business can create fun and engaging content, including:

• Fun tutorials
• Product demonstrations
• Reuse funny sound clips as lipsyncs
• Get involved in trending challenges

Trending challenges

It’s worth providing some detail on TikTok trending challenges. Video clips that go viral are trending, and you can find out which content is most popular via the ‘discover’ tab on the TikTok app. Clipchamp has a list of the trending TikToks, including:

• #ilikeitpicasso – show off your home office, artwork, workplace, etc
• #thatsnotmyname
• #celinedion – lipsyncing at its best

Use Influencers

Even if you’re an old hand at TikTok, using influencers can put a different spin on your promotion that energizes your marketing and drives sales.

Collaborate with other TikTok users

Joining up with other TikTok users on a short clip video will expand your reach. Make sure your business is represented as well as your collaborator. If the strategy works and your video trends, you’ll want to repeat it, so it’s important to give an equal share of view time to both your brands.

The Challenges Of TikTok For Businesses

While there are plenty of reasons to be excited about using TikTok to reach more customers, there are a few reasons to take a deep breath, step back,# and proceed with caution.

Users, not your customers

TikTok is not for everyone, nor is it for every business.

Who are your customers? If they are baby boomers and older people, then TikTok is unsuitable for your business. With most users under 50, you’d be wasting your time and resources on TikTok.

Instead, invest your social media marketing budget on other sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin. Avoid the trap of doing what other businesses are doing if they are not in your niche.

We have plenty of articles on social media marketing, so you can use a social media platform for your creative marketing content and be successful.

Expensive

If your business needs to use TikTok advertising like the In-line ads, Top-view, Brand takeover ads, or Branded Hashtags, expect to commit a sizeable budget. For example, the starting cost for branded hashtags is $150,000 for six days.

Plus, are you an expert in video production? Remember TikTok is for video clips, and your business content needs to be well articulated and the video professionally produced.

Expensive? Yes, it will cost you to use an advertising agency to create your video clips unless your business has in-house expertise, or you can hire a video production marketing expert.

Ads May Not Work

Your TikTok ads may not work. The content may not deliver on ROI, and it could get worse if the ad is off-putting and could damage your brand. However, all marketing is challenging and has risks, so don’t let a few challenges put you off.

You don’t want your head in the sand, but you don’t want to be too risk-averse. Therefore if your customer base is a match, you’ll want to get started on TikTok immediately. Let’s look at how you can get set up.

How To Get Started on TikTok

To set up TikTok for business, you must create your personal account and switch to a business account. If you’ve got the budget to hire a TikTok freelancer or ad agency, this will be the preferred way to fast-track your knowledge of TikTok for business, plus get them to set up your profile.

Business TikTok Strategy

You can also use your TikTok marketing expert to help create your business TikTok strategy. Plus, your in-house marketing team will be integral in defining your business marketing goals for TikTok. Putting the plan into action will require your TikTok experts. There is where your business can start as it means to carry on – with well-thought-out content that wows your intended audience – not once but every time!

Advertising

If you’ve come prepared with a healthy advertising budget, you can get started with the advertising and HubSpot explains the type of adverts you can use, including:

• Topview Ads – appear once a day with a user logs in. The ad can last 60 seconds!
• Infeed Ads – higher memory recall than TV Ads
• Branded Hashtags – for your healthy marketing budget 😉

Summing Up

TikTok is a social media platform ripe for the picking for businesses with customers under 50. There are many reasons why you’d invest time and resources in TikTok, including the 1 billion active users.

Plan to avoid errors with poor quality content that fails to deliver by understanding your intended audience and the content they like, then wow them with your fun tutorials, live demos, and creative clips.