June 22, 2022
There’s no way anyone can ignore the fact that TikTok is booming. The hottest social media platform began as a lip-synching app that evolved into a highly engaging short-form video content hub. TikTok meshes Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram altogether, sucking people in - they can’t seem to stop scrolling! So if your business or a startup that isn’t on TikTok yet, sign up today to amp up your social media presence and take advantage of all the platform has to offer. To make it a lot easier for you, we give you straight talk on the TikTok small business tips you need right now!
The first thing you need to do is setting up a TikTok Business Account for your brand. TikTok business accounts have instantly become a home for brands like yours on the platform. The public profile of your business sets the tone and creates your unique voice: two things you need in your TikTok marketing strategy. Boosting your TikTok presence through engaging content and strategic collaborations can significantly amplify your brand's visibility and engagement. Having a TikTok business account also means you get access to audience insights, performance metrics, and fantastic creative tools that’ll make you both a creator and marketer.
To get your business set up, here are easy steps to follow:
Once you’ve done those, you’re all set! Start creating and posting content with TikTok’s creative tools to get discovered.
Entrepreneurs such as yourself ought to know that TikTok is more than a social fad. It’s the marketing funnel you need for your small business to thrive and innovate via unlimited creative opportunities. Here are five reasons why embracing TikTok small business marketing tactics is one of your best business decisions yet.
The Gen Z Generation (people between the ages of 16-24) is the largest demographic of TikTok users. If this is your business’s key demographic or target audience, then being on TikTok will help you attract more sales from these younger consumers. You could even look into getting some help from something like TokMatik TikTok followers when it comes to helping you grow your follower count, as a large following will indicate to this particular audience that your brand is popular, therefore they will be more inclined to interact with you.
Harvard Business Review provided helpful insight on how brands are reaching Gen Z today. On the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, younger audiences have been leaving many “public-facing social platforms'' and flocking to smaller, more intimate online destinations called “digital campfires.” Gen Zers preferred these smaller online communities because they wanted to send private messages together, participate in shared experiences, and connect to a micro-community that reflected their personal preferences and subcultures.
Interestingly, TikTok is among the five digital campfires. This only means that TikTok has rabid Gen Z followings that’ll help get your brand voice heard. The platform created a space where people are welcome and naturally encourages openness for brands to do the same for their key demographic.
Katie Riccio Puris, managing director and global head of business marketing at TikTok, says that “Gen Z dominates and drives trends on TikTok.”So if a brand spearheads hashtag challenges, for example, the outcome can increase your business’s site traffic because the community gets engaged with influencers and marketers quite naturally. TikTok is advertiser-friendly, so your brand gets the support it needs to get the word out on your product or service, especially Gen Z users.
If you want to reach this audience, make sure to partner with TikTok influencers who they already are familiar with and trust. This is the quickest way to gain customer loyalty with this generation!
Tiktok makes it incredibly easy to show off our business through how-to tutorials, behind the scenes, new product hauls, and employee introductions which humanise your brand.
If you have a product you want people to know about, creating how-to tutorials effectively engages your audiences. Even if they’re just 15 to 16 seconds long, you can create something impactful and entertaining like this TikTok video tutorial created by Romina Gafur, which has more than 7M likes and more than 21k shares.
You can also do a behind-the-scenes video for your brand’s creative workflows and processes. This one by Zach King is king! It got more than a million likes.
One great benchmark TikTok video on a product awareness campaign was what Simmons did. The 150-year-old mattress brand launched the hashtag challenge, “#snoozzzapalooza, where TikTok users were asked to reimagine their bed as a stage that they can “stage dive” onto it. At the end of that campaign, more than a million people created content with that hashtag that received more than 6 billion views. The best thing was Simmons saw a 104% increase in traffic to their website.
One other thing you can do to make your brand feel even more authentic is by creating employee introduction videos. There’s nothing like watching real people in action if you want to amp as an employer brand. This video by a Walmart employee, Cameron from Walmart, uses hashtags like #worklife and #dreamjob to talk about his job at Walmart and how it helps him earn and pursue his passion for dance.
If you ask any marketer out there, they’ll say that video content is the way to go when you need high engagement. TikTok users watch at least 52 videos a day on the platform. This means that your videos can be within those 52 of thousands of potential eyes that’ll find your video content exciting and related to their niche.
If you invest more time creating great videos, your brand will have a higher potential to go viral, which happens a lot easier on TikTok.Why? Because TikTok users aren’t passive. They’re committed to an immersive experience. For this reason, you can use online text to voice software to convert all your written text into realistic AI voices in different languages and accents.
Your business being on TikTok offers value to your audience. It also means that you’ll be more of a creator than a marketer because you’ll create videos that are fun, engaging, and entertaining. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll get the full attention of TikTok users and keep them glued to your business profile more.
Your TikTok small business strategies are further amplified through analytics tools and resources that TikTok for Business provides. You can grow your business, connect with your audience, and drive results guided by TikTok’s Small Business Resource Center.
Some of the free resources include a selection of smart Creative Tools to make it easy for you to create TikTok ready ads. You can add images to pre-made Video Templates for those immersive mobile videos or sync your videos with music from TikTok’s library of more than 900 licensed songs through Smart Video Soundtrack. You can also use Smart Video to transform your assets into a TikTok ready video with just one click.
Another helpful resource is TikTok’s Creative Center. It's like your brand’s idea bank for your next TikTok campaign. Here you get inspiration from top ads, popular trends, and best practices for TikTok ads. You also have great material on the latest tricks and tips for your ad creatives.
TikTok for Business optimises your business for success with analytics. You can add TikTok Pixel to your website to track performance, improve ad delivery, and create custom audiences. You also get TikTok Ads Manager, which comes with an optimisation guide to help you master it in no time.
Other resources you’ll find nifty to add to your TikTok small business strategies are TikTok’s business learning center, blog, business help center, The Creator Marketplace, events, and TikTok Marketing Partners.
Since it's still developing, it's relatively inexpensive to create TikTok than Facebook or Instagram ads. In a split test conducted, results show that TikTok ads performed better than Facebook and Instagram ads in three specified campaigns for CPM and CPC. TikTok garnered over 11 million impressions. Compared to Instagram and Facebook ads, the TikTok ads generated 235% more impressions while spending less than $11,000.
TikTok ads start at $10 per CPM (Cost per 1000 views). But you’ll have to spend a minimum of $500 on a campaign. There are different types of TikTok ads you can sign up for. We included a rough estimate of how much these TikTok ads will cost you.
A brand takeover ad that guarantees 5-minute impressions costs $50,000 a day. Brand takeover ads will play as soon as your targeted TikTok user opens their app. Those interested will click on the ad and will then redirect them to your website.
In-feed native ads are like Facebook and Google ads, where you have to bid for spots for your ads, so they get served to targeted YouTube users. An in-feed native ad that promises a minimum of 600 prepaid impressions will cost $10 per impression.
Finally, a hashtag challenge will cost about $150,000 a week. The best thing about hashtag challenges is that this type of ad generates a vast amount of user-generated content. This type of engagement is positive for your brand.
We recommend doing a TikTok account search to find other small businesses within your niche and see how they are mastering this new marketing platform. To help you out, here are five small businesses we found where you can gain inspiration from!
Vessi is growing in popularity as a footwear brand. They recently started on TikTok and are quickly approaching 200,00 followers. To date, they garnered 1.5M likes on TikTok. They’ve been growing this fast because of ads centered on giveaway campaigns.
The makeup brand has been doing incredibly well on TikTok. They even commissioned a song specifically for one of their TikTok campaigns. The song is called “Eyes Lips Face,” is named after the brand name’s acronym and took inspiration from Kash Doll’s 2018 hit, “Ice Me Out.” “Eyes Lips Face” is believed to be the first original song commissioned for a TikTok campaign. User-generated content related to the #eyeslipsface hashtag reached over 3.8 billion. Elf Cosmetics has been working with some influencers to kick it off.
GymShark posts a great combination of workout memes, workout videos, and inspiration. They’ve been consistently posting quality videos for now (like the one below) and have 3.2 M fans.
Sabra makes delicious hummus dip and creates unique and engaging content to make users see and feel that. The brand is all about creating fresh-tasting, better-for-you food with ingredients that exceed industry standards. They usually feature how-to tutorials for their recipes.
TikTok as an advertiser-friendly platform is excellent for growing your following and increasing brand awareness. With over 800 million active users worldwide, you get a ton of marketing potential, not to mention a lot of helpful tools and resources to expand your marketing channels. Once your platform becomes bigger it might be beneficial for you to look into a marketing agency to provide you with extra help regarding this crucial part of business. All you need is a clear vision of what you want and let TikTok work for your brand.