5 Ways You Can Successfully Market Your Small Business on TikTok
TikTok is the ultimate marketing tool for small businesses to increase their organic reach (Part 2 of the TikTok marketing series)
This is part of a series on TikTok marketing. Click here if you want to learn more about the reasons why you should market your small business on TikTok
Businesses from different sectors around the world are quickly realizing the importance of TikTok as a marketing platform for their brand. It’s changing the way businesses produce, consume, and engage with content.
For small businesses, in particular, this is an important and easy platform to market in since you can create content without any design team, technical skills, or a lot of time. All you need is one dedicated person who understands how to create and edit videos on TikTok.
Instagram democratized photography for everyone, TikTok will democratize video creation for everyone.
If you’re looking to create a TikTok account for your small business, here are some tips that could help you get started:
1. Create content based on your brand
The content you create should be based on what you want your business to be known for. Identify the niche area that you are an expert in and create content based on that.
If you’re a fashion brand, you can create content based on current fashion trends. If you’re an interior design brand, showcase some design inspirations and hacks for decorating a living space. If you’re a restaurant, you can highlight recipes and cooking do’s and don’ts. No matter what type of business you have, create content based around that because the people searching for this content are potentially your customers.
You could also create behind-the-scenes videos about how you package orders, your design inspirations, or anything else that you would like to highlight for your customers. These kinds of behind the scenes insights show your customers the efforts you put into your business which increases trust in your business and helps you grow a community.
For instance, you can see here how the small business Rose Renewal designs and sells small jewelry created a video on product photoshoot ideas. Scrolling through TikTok can also give you ideas on how to take your business to the next level.
Especially considering the global pandemic that’s (still!!) going on, you can use these videos to highlight the measures you’re taking to ensure health and safety when creating or packaging your products.
You could also create videos highlighting your company culture, behind-the-scenes shots of your company, your thinking process, and many more. Ideas for content will flow once you decide the type of content you want the brand to be associated with.
2. Create native and unpolished content
No matter how premium your brand is, the content you create for TikTok should have the taken-on-your phone, unfiltered feel. Even popular brands killing it on TikTok such as Sephora, Guess, and Gymshark are recording videos from their bedrooms or backyards, and it’s working!
Get different members from your team to create content for your TikTok account or do it all yourself. Either way, this is not something you can push towards a marketing agency to do for you. TikTok videos need to show the people behind the brand.
This quick video by H&M is a great example. A member of their team put together a video of her different outfits from H&M, clearly taken on her phone within the comforts of her living room.
3. Consistency leads to discoverability.
Unlike other social media platforms such as Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, or Twitter, getting discovered on TikTok is still relatively easy. One big factor that leads to discoverability, is consistent posting.
You need to post at least 2 or 3 times a day to gain popularity on TikTok quickly.
This may seem like a lot but just remember that these are really short videos of ideally 15 seconds max. This is a platform where 60-seconds videos are considered long-form videos, so creating 3–4 videos at a time won’t be as difficult as you think it is.
Just have an idea of what you want the video to be about, take out ALL the unessential bits (only 15 seconds!), and use text and captions to explain the necessary details.
Storyboarding an idea before you create a video will also help you shoot a video quicker. This could just be something as simple as creating a template or mapping out your ideas before you start recording the video!
4. Join in on the trends
TikTok has a huge trend culture and participating or putting your own spin on these trends is a great way to get discovered on TikTok.
One of the great things about TikTok is that there’s no pressure for you to always be creating original content. If you can constantly create original content, that’s amazing obviously- but there’s also always trends that are created to be imitated.
#TellMeWithoutTellingMe and #OneColourChallenge are some of the newer trends on TikTok. You can keep yourself in the loop about the latest trends and challenges by checking your ‘Discover’ page within the app.
Keeping an eye out for the latest trends makes sure that you never run out of content ideas and that you’re posting consistently!
You could also create your own trends and give them a hashtag and the right push for it to go viral within your community at least. The best example of this is the branded hashtag campaign by Guess called #InMyDenim. For this campaign, Guess created this hashtag, got TikTok influencers involved and within 6 days there were 5,550 user-generated videos, 10.5 million video views, 14.3% engagement rate, and over 12,000 additional followers on TikTok for Guess’ business account.
You can also see here the #footballquiz challenge created by SportMob, with a current following of 95.4 K, which went viral and garnered more than 37.9 million views.
Essentially, when you’re a small business starting out these trends and challenges could help give you ideas to create content. TikTok places a lot of importance on showing you local content so if you’re a small business selling just locally, even just creating content based on the trends could ensure that your brand is discovered by potential customers.
5. Creative TikTok Paid Ads
If you don’t have the time to grow your followers organically on TikTok, you could also make use of their advertising platform through paid ads.
In TikTok, there are multiple ways you can do paid advertising:
- In-feed: Ads that appear on the ‘For You’ page. This is the TikTok equivalent of the ‘Explore’ page on Instagram.
- Brand Takeover: In this case, the ad appears whenever anyone opens their TikTok app and takes over the full screen for a few seconds before playing the in-feed video ad
- Hashtag challenge: Think of the ‘Guess’ campaign. This appears on the ‘Discover’ page and encourages users to create content based on the hashtag.
- Branded AR Content: You can create augmented reality (AR) components such as branded lenses, glasses, or quizzes (think Sportmob campaign) that TikTokers can use in their videos.
- Custom Influencer package: Find an influencer within your industry and they create sponsored contents as ads.
You will first need to create an account here and wait for your account manager to contact you before you can start creating any ads though.
Just like with Facebook advertising, you can choose your ad campaign objective, decide placements, and even create ad groups. You will also need to download the TikTok pixel before launching your ad campaigns to ensure that you can monitor the success of the campaign effectively.
Considering this post is aimed at small businesses with a limited marketing budget though, it might be best to focus on organic growth initially within TikTok before you start looking at paid ads. Particularly because of how easy it is to get organic growth on TikTok right now.
TikTok is the next big thing and it’s definitely here to stay.
It’s given brands a new way to think about content and drive interest and more importantly, it’s incredibly easy to set up and maintain.
Yet, this platform is still severely underutilized by businesses in the Middle East. If you’re still not convinced of how addictive TikTok is, download the app today and start going through the content. You’ll understand why this platform is growing so quickly!
While scrolling through the content, try to understand how the timeline works, what types of content grabs your attention, and what filters are being used the most. All of this will help you create viral videos on TikTok when you do decide to create an account for your brand marketing.
