How To Use TikTok for Business: A Comprehensive Guide
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With over 3 billion global downloads and millions of monthly users, TikTok is a major player in the social media scene and a powerful platform for content marketing. The app specializes in short-form video content which allows brands to showcase their products and connect with their audience on a personal level.
From clothing brands to sports organizations, businesses of all industries have found success on TikTok, and by following this comprehensive guide, you can too. Learn how to use TikTok for your business, set up and optimize your profile, and read our top tips on crafting a successful content strategy.
How Businesses Are Leveraging TikTok Today
Businesses make use of a variety of strategies in order to access the millions of worldwide TikTok users. By participating in the trends that the app spawns, brands can reach a wide audience that they can engage with through entertaining videos, ads, giveaways, and challenges.
If you don’t have experience with the app yet, you might not be aware of just how many industries are finding success on the platform. It’s not just clothing and makeup brands, but also names such as Chipotle, Fortnite, The Washington Post, NFL, San Diego Zoo, WWE, and Reese’s.
To succeed on TikTok, these companies create relevant, creative, and engaging content based on the current trends. This means posting their own versions of popular video templates and challenges which draw attention to their product in an entertaining or relatable way.
The Benefits of Using TikTok in Your Business
A strong content strategy on TikTok can benefit your business in a number of ways.
Appeals to a Broader Target Audience
While TikTok has a reputation of being an app for young people, its user base is actually a lot more diverse than you might think. TikTok users aged between 20-50 make up 64.4% of the app’s audience in the U.S. and an additional 11% goes to the over 50s.
Though the app is undoubtedly popular with children and teenagers, businesses can also reach many other demographics using the TikTok platform.
Diversifies Your Content Marketing Strategy
It can be easy to think that if you already have a blog, a YouTube channel, and an Instagram account, then you have covered all the content types available. However, the short-form video content that fuels TikTok is its own kind of media and encourages new kinds of creativity when compared to YouTube videos.
If you fear that producing both long-form and short-form video content would be overkill, it couldn’t be further from the truth. TikTok content can help you diversify your marketing strategy and bring new viewers to your other content streams, thanks to its short and easy-to-consume nature.
Establishes or Extends Your Brand's Unique Voice
As with other social media platforms, successful content marketing strategies on TikTok require consistent and frequent posts, which means you will create a lot of videos. This will help you to establish or build on your brand’s voice and connect with your audience on a personal level.
Through sound, facial expressions, body language, and audience interactions, you can develop a lasting relationship and an ongoing conversation with your followers that can shape the way your business is viewed.
Creates Opportunities for Partnerships
The best partnerships are formed when a brand and an influencer come together to promote a product that’s truly relevant and exciting to the target demographic. With TikTok, businesses can turn high-profile customers into lucrative partnerships by making joint content, posting duets, or using shout-outs, reviews, or product placement.
Such partnerships can be taken beyond TikTok and turned into full advertisement campaigns and collaborations, or remain exclusively on the platform in the form of fun interactions.
How To Get Started Using TikTok for Your Business
Getting started with a business account is simple and straightforward, but here are some extra guidelines on how to use TikTok for business. 2022 has seen continuous growth for this platform, so now is a great time to get involved and use it to diversify your content strategy.
Define Your Audience
This research stage is essential for a successful TikTok content strategy, because you need to know what kind of content your target audience is interested in. A good place to start is by defining your existing audience and finding out what kinds of influencers they follow and what kinds of videos, trends, challenges, and giveaways they like to participate in.
You can then repeat this process with other demographics that you want to expand into and make note of any overlapping trends. Prioritizing content that is liked by as many of your target demographics as possible is a great way to reach out to large numbers of active users simultaneously.
However, you should also make sure to create tailored content for each of these audiences so you can connect with them on a more personal level and deepen their relationship with your brand.
Research What Your Competition Is Doing
To understand how to use TikTok for business, one of the best places to start is to research the competition. By following other brands, you can discover both what you need to do and what you need to avoid. If you’re new to TikTok, it will show you exactly what a content marketing strategy should look like and the many kinds of content you can choose from, as well give you pointers on post frequency, audience engagement, and collaborations.
This research will also help you maintain originality, as brands within the same industry can easily come up with similar content in isolation. By keeping up to date with your competitors’ posts, you can prevent your brand from posting content that’s been done before, or even check how well an idea performed somewhere else before trying it yourself.
Ensure Your Profile Is Fully Optimized
TikTok profiles begin as personal profiles, but you can change over to a business account at any time by accessing the menu under “Manage Account” and selecting “Switch to Business Account.” After selecting the category that best fits your business, your account will be ready and you can access new features like post analytics and an exclusive sounds library.
Update Your Bio
The bio on your TikTok profile can be a maximum of 80 characters long, so you have no choice but to make it short and sweet. If your product or service is clearly defined by your brand name or logo, you can use this space to showcase your tagline, slogan, or your company ideals. Otherwise, the bio can be a good place to explain what you do.
A lot of successful bios lean into the short and simple style, using a few keywords that convey the brand’s personality, the name of their signature product, or their location. Personal profiles often attempt to squeeze as much information into this bio as possible, so the minimalist approach gives a more professional impression.
Create a Unique URL
You can include one link in your TikTok profile, and the best place to link to will depend on your industry and your goals. You can link to the landing page of your website, a specific product, an account creation page, a blog post, or even another social media such as a YouTube channel. In essence, wherever you most want potential customers to go is where you should link to.
The link will be displayed as is on your bio, so it’s important to keep it as short and as clean as possible. If you want users to feel comfortable clicking it, you need to make it clear where the link will take them and avoid any suspicious tracking codes.
Choose a Profile Photo That Aligns With Your Brand
Brand consistency is essential if your business is active on multiple social platforms. TikTokkers will use your profile photo to identify you across the different platforms, and it can even cause confusion if they don’t align.
However, this doesn’t mean you have to use the exact same photo for every account. Many companies will make variations on their logo for different platforms, and also make changes throughout the year to reflect events and holidays like Christmas or Halloween.
Another well-used technique to keep your branding clear and visible across your profile is to employ a color scheme that appears in both your profile photo and your posts. This might be done through the emoji, stickers, or font colors you pick.
Tips for Crafting a Successful TikTok Content Strategy
Once your profile is up and running, you need to start posting content. Here are some tips on how to use TikTok for small business needs and create a successful content strategy.
Understand TikTok's Algorithm
To get the most out of your posts on TikTok, they need to be seen by the right people. The first step to achieving this is by telling TikTok who your video is for by including captions, hashtags, and sounds. These are all searchable keywords on the platform, so when a user searches a hashtag, they’ll be able to see all of the videos that use it.
Trends on TikTok often take the form of a video template set to a specific song or sound, and thousands of users will create and post their own renditions. Making use of a popular sound and tagging it is another way to get your content included in popular searches and increase your visibility.
Frequency is also an important factor in how the algorithm determines priority. If a user watches one of your posts, you will have a chance to appear on their “For You” page with your next post, or a popular related post. However, your chances are increased if you’re categorized as an active contributor, because the algorithm wants to recommend the channels that can maximize the user’s screen time.
Establish the Type of Content You Want To Post and Goals
You might think of TikTok as all entertainment and dance videos, but there is a much wider variety of content out there, including informational and even educational videos. While you don’t need to stick to the same types of content indefinitely, it is good to have a primary style that you can use to attract and sustain an audience.
The right kind of content for you depends on your goals. You can create informational content about your product, how to use it, and positive impacts it can have. Other options include entertainment and lifestyle videos that touch on your product more indirectly, or news, tips, and hacks videos related to your industry.
Creating engaging content that users can interact with and take part in is also an effective way to attract attention. With giveaways, you can provide users with a reason to engage with your posts, and with TikTok’s duet feature you can showcase your giveaway and user content from the winner at the same time.
Starting a branded hashtag challenge is also a highly successful way to drive engagement by encouraging users to post their own content in response to a challenge you set. This challenge could be anything from a dance move to a tongue twister, or something more creative like creating a themed make-up look or using your product in an unexpected way.
Create an Upload Schedule
If you’re interested in learning how to use TikTok for business marketing, you’ll also need to learn how to use a content scheduling tool. Unlike with a personal profile, businesses can’t just post on a whim or when they feel like it, as too many or too few posts can have a negative effect on your growth marketing strategy.
To create a content calendar, it’s best to look again at what your competitors are doing and how well their strategies work. The most vital thing is to find a good balance between frequent and high quality content. Posting frequently won’t help you if the content is lazy and unengaging, and unfortunately, amazing content won’t perform as well as it should if you can’t post often enough.
Select and Incorporate the Right Music, Graphics, and Special Effects
Keeping your native content in line with current TikTok trends will help you to increase your follower count and keep your existing followers coming back for more. Users on TikTok love to see how businesses will participate in latest challenges as it often means they get to see a silly or fun side to your brand. However, users can spot low-effort content easily, and posts that don’t correctly use trending music or graphics according to the meta won’t perform very well.
Such trends are not difficult to understand, it simply means you need to do your research before participating. If this is your first time using TikTok, you can also follow tutorials to make sure you’re posting high quality versions of your videos with the right frame speed. When done correctly, the right music and special effects can drastically improve post engagement and earn your brand respect within the community.
Utilize Video Ads, User-Generated Content, and Influencers
To draw attention to your brand and products, engaging with your target audience is essential. TikTok users are used to interacting with the businesses and influencers they follow, with challenges and competitions as high profile as Fortnite’s #EmoteRoyaleContest that invited users to create dances that could be turned into Fortnite emotes.
Interacting, collaborating, and partnering with influencers can also lead to increased sales and more followers for your TikTok account. Reaching out to influencers with relevant interests and target audiences that overlap with your own can result in a fruitful partnership, and you don’t need to aim for the high-profile influencers to see results. Working with multiple smaller influencers can help you reach out to a number of different audiences simultaneously, and it’s a more achievable strategy for smaller businesses.
Another option is launching a paid TikTok ad campaign, which will show your video ads to users across the platform according to their interests and content consumption. According to TikTok, 61% of their users view TikTok advertising differently to other social media advertisements, seeing ads as another form of content rather than an annoyance.
Track Your Analytics Diligently
Just as you track your ecommerce analytics to improve engagement with your website, TikTok analytics can help you get better results from your content. When you want to experiment with different content forms and tones of voice, the platform’s analytics can tell you which ideas performed better and who engaged with them the most, so you can make informed decisions about what to do next.
The Role of TikTok in a More Complete Growth Marketing Strategy
If you have aspirations of creating a full-scale growth marketing strategy for your business, TikTok is just one part of the bigger picture. With Market.com, you can benefit from custom, data-driven, and audience-centric content marketing across all of the major platforms as part of an end-to-end ecommerce solution. Click here to contact the team and explore your opportunities.