Intro
TikTok is not only for Generation Z or prank comedians. Even though it might not be as rigorous and reputable by comparison to other social media platforms, TikTok can be used for your business to get amazing success – all you need to do is learn how.
Once you set up your TikTok business strategy, you’ll stand out as a trendy and cool brand up to date. Fail it, and you might become the parent that your children would never want to introduce to their peers.
It hurts! Isn’t it?!
Luckily for you, taking up TikTok for your business isn’t as difficult and does not demand a diploma or certification in advanced social media. All you need to know to make a TikTok account and start using it to boost your business is explained in this guide.
Let’s start with a basic question: what is TikTok?
How to define TikTok?
One of the fastest-developing social media platforms for making, watching and posting short videos is TikTok. In contrast to Instagram, its users can only share videos. The difference between Tik Tok and Youtube consists in the fact that the videos on Tik Tok are generally very short (15-60 seconds).
On TikTok, you can find content on almost any subject, but the most popular videos tend to fall into a few trivial categories:
- Entertainment
- Dance
- Pranks
All of this is significantly distinct from the majority of popular content on LinkedIn, which is centered around innovation, management, human resources and digital marketing. Regardless of your brand voice or niche industry, there is still a good place for you on TikTok.
For the younger generation, TikTok has become a heaven-like place. If you analyse the users’ age categories, most grandparents haven’t jumped on it yet, leaving TikTok for younger generations to enjoy, at least for the moment.
The platform itself is not the place where users come to get the latest news or to do some shopping. Instead, the TikTokers simply come to the platform to smile, laugh and hang out for a short time before going back to reality.
The benefits of using TikTok for your business
You already have a lot of responsibilities and important tasks to do, and we know that you are an extremely busy person. Is TikTok worth the investment of your time?
Well, you decide!
For you, there are some benefits to consider:
Increase engagement: TikTok has an engagement rate like no other social media platform. While users spend an average of 11 minutes per session on TikTok, they spend just 5 minutes on Pinterest and less than 3 minutes on Instagram. For those looking to connect with their audience for more than a few seconds, TikTok is the perfect place to do this.
Drive sales: Visitors aren’t visiting TikTok to do shopping, but this ends up happening most of the time – enough to trigger the trending hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt. Globally, 67% of TikTokers confirmed that the app impacted them to make a buying decision.
Build connections: On this platform, TikTokers engage with trademarks to look at them in a different way and usually end up building stronger connections. In fact, 73% of TikTok users feel closer ties with the brands they follow on the platform.
Boosting brand awareness, engagement, and sales – sounds like great reasons to consider joining TikTok, right? Still, the above are things you can do on almost every social media platform.
By using TikTok, you are targeting a particular demographic, and that demographic is not represented by baby boomers. Over 25% of active TikTok users are aged between 10 and 19, while almost 70% are 39 or younger. If your brand’s key target market is teens and young adults, TikTok is definitely the place to reach them.
Learn how to make a TikTok business account
Get ready to join the trendy and cool crowds on TikTok! Get your dancing shoes on, improve your lip synchronisation and be ready for a savage journey – here’s some unexplored territories.
For starters, let’s set up your TikTok business account.
- Download TikTok: Browse the Apple App Store or Google Play on Android to find and download TikTok.
- Sign up: Create an account. Use your phone number, email address, Facebook, Apple, Google or Twitter. Just follow the instructions.
- Switch to Business Account: By default, a personal account will now be created. You must convert it to a business account to unlock performance analytics, audience information and tools for making content Follow these steps to do so:
- Click “Profile” in the bottom menu bar
- Click the hamburger menu in the top right corner
- Select “Manage account”
- Choose “Switch to Business Account”
- Follow the setup instructions.
There you go. Now you have a TikTok business account. Moving forward, you’ll probably want to add a profile picture, bio and links. Once that’s done, you can start engaging on the platform and building an audience.
5 ideas for Using TikTok for your business
The TikTok business account is already created. The next step is to start creating content, getting involved in the community and building your audience. As soon as you have a basis, you can start making money with TikTok Shopping, influencer marketing, ads and more.
These are some possible ways you can use TikTok for your business.
Make Quality (Non-Salesy) Content
Keep in mind that TikTok users never come to the platform to buy – instead they seek entertainment. By jumping in with a commercial approach, you will be turned away from the very beginning.
Anyone that has ever tried to join Reddit and self-promote their content will understand what we mean.
The recipe for success on Instagram, Facebook or YouTube won’t work here. TikTok is a particular platform with its own unspoken rules, practices, algorithms, influencers and branding strategies.
Rather than trying to learn about it, just try it. In fact, this is the best way to figure out this platform. Begin by following the top creators to see what they’re currently doing: What types of videos do they publish? How do they engage with their community? How can your brand appear on the platform while remaining loyal?
Once you have some ideas about where to begin, start posting content and raising the number of followers. Track metrics to learn what actions have good results.
Figure out a posting rhythm and post while following a schedule. TikTok suggests posting 1-4 times per day, but it can be a little overwhelming in the beginning. Keep starting slow and building up instead.
The first post is once a week. But if you feel even more ambitious, try it twice a week. If you are able to consistently produce high-quality videos on this schedule, try posting once a day. Are you still finding it easy? Upgrade it to twice a day.
Don’t forget, it’s all about consistency. Work out a frequency that you find manageable and funny at the same time.
2. Earn with TikTok Shopping
By August 2021, TikTok has inspired shopping in an organic way. Which means an influencer or brand used to refer to an item, and viewers would manually enter that site’s address on their desktop or phone to browse products.
All of that had changed last year when TikTok and Shopify introduced TikTok Shopping: an in-app e-commerce shopping experience allowing brands to sell products on the platform.
Brands can add their products to their Shopify catalogs to display them in a shopping tab on their profile. TikTokers can also tag products in their organic posts.
Take it easy with your Tik Tok shop until you have a decent number of followers and regular views of your content. The golden rule is to build first and to sell later. We advise you to follow this model to gain TikTok users’ confidence before you start trying to push products out in front of them.
Once you’ve built a solid audience, add products to your TikTok Store and integrate promotions into your organic content. Make it gentle, but especially at the beginning.
While some products perform well on TikTok, particularly the most eye-catching products like clothes and accessories. On the other hand, trying to convince a Tik Tok user to buy a toaster can be more difficult. This way you may find TikTok better at building a brand than generating revenue. And you may be right! But you’ll never know until you try.
3. Increase traffic by using ads
TikTok as an ad-friendly platform, gives you a lot of possibilities to drive traffic to your website, e-commerce store or landing page. Here it should be added that TikTok offers a couple of different ad types to help you easily connect with your audience with the most friendly call-to-action format:
Image ads: Image ads are listed on users’ feeds with an image, brand name and short text.
Video ads: 5-60 second full screen video clips shown to users’ feeds.
Spark Ads: Triggers organic content (yours or another brand’s) to be viewed by more users.
TikTok Promote: TikTok Promote is very similar to Spark Ads, but you can only promote your own content. It’s a streamlined version that makes it faster and easier to staCarousel Ads: Carousel ads show up in the TikTok News Feed, showing up to 10 images with short captions.
Carousel ads: Carousel ads are displayed in the TikTok news feed, showing up to 10 images with short captions.
Pangle Ads: Run ads as part of the TikTok Audience Network, which means your ads also appear on other apps outside of TikTok.
TopView Ads: Full-screen ads that play for 5-60 seconds when a user opens the TikTok app.
Brand Effects: Custom stickers, filters, and special effects to get users involved with your brand.
Branded Hashtag Challenge: Short campaign to collect user-generated content that features a trademarked hashtag challenge page.
As part of the TikTok ad manager, a campaign objective, budget, audience, bidding strategy, and creative optimizations can be defined. As well, it allows you to control every detail aspect of your ad campaigns to ensure the best performance.
If you don’t want to worry about choosing between all the different ad formats above, it is not a problem at all. TikTok provides an auto-placement option that will allow TikTok to automatically optimize the delivery of your ads to the best-performing types.
4. Collaborate with Influencers to make visible your brand
The influencers in the industry have huge follower audiences and the expertise to make content go viral. Establish partnerships with these professionals to take advantage of their followers and creative skills to increase brand awareness and reach.
Are you confused about where to start? Have a look at the TikTok Creator Marketplace. This will help you identify influencers and micro-influencers along with their engagement rates and follower demographics. This will help you to decide if an influencer is suitable or not for your brand.
Consider working with a micro-influencer if you can’t afford an influencer. These individuals often have smaller audiences but have closer relationships with their communities. Their reach isn’t as large, but their engagement and influence on followers is usually considerable.
5. Consolidate customer relationships through involvement
Although it would be cool for TikTok to be a source of money or a traffic generator for your business, it can also serve other goals. You can simply use TikTok as a brand community builder.
You can concentrate on posting awesome content and engaging with the community with no hidden selling agenda.
Therefore, what is the purpose?
Explore TikTok and use it to grow your audience and relationship with your followers. Once a user recognizes your trademark on Instagram or YouTube, chances are they’ll follow you there – and you can use these more retail-friendly platforms to advertise your products and services.
Remember: build first, sell later.
By changing the focus from marketing and sales it releases you to be more imaginative as you create your content. Do fun stuff, perform, smile, sing, dance, and laugh. It will help you feel good on the platform and make you more relevant to your audience.
Analyse, for example, Wendy’s Twitter account.
How does Wendy’s help sell hamburgers by having fun at the expense of other brands and even consumers? It makes people empathize with the brand – and that makes them more likely to buy from Wendy’s.
Upgrade your business skills
Entrepreneurs rarely have the privilege of being good at just one thing. This is for corporate careers.
As an entrepreneur, you should understand the fundamentals of copywriting, digital marketing, research, financing, product development, sales, hiring, and more. It’s a lot.
Hopefully, this is not all you need to master overnight – and you don’t have to learn it all on your own. Allow us to help you.
Reach out today to find out our Solutions that will help you grow your business!
