TikTok Marketing Guide for Small Businesses

If you’re new to TikTok marketing and want to use the platform to promote your brand, our TikTok marketing guide is a great place to start! TikTok has grown in popularity in recent years, and more businesses are now adopting it. In most cases, having a TikTok presence can result in a significant rise in business sales.

Let’s get started to see how you can use the platform to grow your business!

Why Advertise on TikTok

There are plenty of perks to advertising on TikTok.TikTok is one such platform you cannot afford to miss out on as a small business owner looking to make a mark in the industry. Let’s check out a few benefits. 

Reach Diversified Audiences

Tiktok has a massive range of audiences starting from Gen Z to the grannies. The opportunity to target users is limitless with TikTok. In the past 18 months, the US adult TikTok user count has grown about 5.5 times which is crazy!

There are plenty of unique ways you can engage your target audiences on TikTok through viral content creations and generate new sales for your business.

Affordable Campaigns

In most cases, small businesses can create content on TikTok to raise brand awareness for free. This allows a better allocation of the business’s resources and funds. As a small business owner, all you need to do is hire a good content creator, and your TikTok marketing is mostly sorted. However, even if you want to level up further, using TikTok ads can be an affordable venture, too, which can provide massive results to your endeavor!

Increase Brand Exposure

Small businesses struggle with s[reading the word of their brand and offering adequate exposure to their brand to the consumers. On TikTok, influencers and content can prove to be the game changers in increasing brand exposure for businesses.

Making video ads based on daily trends can keep your business in front of the consumers and relate to them well. The more users that view your videos, the more they know about your small business!

How Can Small Businesses Use TikTok

There are typically two primary ways to advertise your business on TikTok in 2022. Let’s keep it short and quickly go through them.

Personal Account

A personal account is simply an account primarily for the individual. Even though you may not have access to advanced functions and analytics, you can still use them to create content and spread the word about your small business to the audience. 

Pro Account

A pro account on TikTok is all about the advanced stuff. You get a variety of diverse analytics, insights, and other tools catered to businesses and content creators. These elements can take your content creation and advertising game to the next level. There are two common types of pro accounts on TikTok:

Tiktok for Creators: This account basically offers more freedom and allowance to the creators in creating engaging and creative content. It isn’t the best for businesses, but it is more about delivering existing content to the advertisers than advertising or promoting a brand. This is mostly suitable for TikTok influencers and creators who simply want to promote their original content and advertise other brands and products.

Tiktok for Business: This is another segment of TikTok that is solely dedicated to companies promoting and selling products and services. It allows business owners to promote their content and add TikTok ads to it. Here business owners can view the analytics and the insights of the ads to have a greater look at the ad’s performance. As a startup owner, if you are looking to make it big in TikTok, this is the way to go!

Steps to Get Started

We can go all day long talking about the benefits of using TikTok to advertise your small business, but the main goal of this TikTok marketing guide is how to achieve effective marketing on TikTok. There are certain ways you can market your small business the best way on TikTok, and we have spilled the tea today! Let’s check out the steps you can take to advertise your small business on TikTok in 2022.

Learn TikTok Basics

The first step towards making your TikTok marketing journey a success is to understand its basics. Without having a solid foundation, you cannot target the complicated tactics of TikTok advertising. 

Thus, start with downloading your TikTok app, register your business and browse through the different elements of the application. Look out for the trending hashtags and the type of content most people like to engage with. 

Explore the tools offered by TikTok and create videos for your audience. You can also find out the trending music tracks and effects that are popular on the platform right now and save them for your future content creation venture., 

All you need to do is analyze how you can utilize this application to advertise your brand by not making the users get bored of your content!

Research Competitors on TikTok

Once you know the type of content that works best with the audiences, you need to start with the competitor analysis. You need to look out for your competitors who are already making it big on TikTok. Look out for their tactics and strategies on how they create the buzz and engagement around their brand.

Explore the trends and challenges they step into and how they complement their brands. Look out for the type of videos that usually get ignored by the audiences and the ones that they perceive best. 

This will help you learn more about the best practices on TikTok and transform your expertise from a newbie to a pro in TikTok advertising!

Know Your Target Audience

The key to a successful TikTok marketing venture is to know your target audiences in and out on TikTok. After all, you want to create content that they are already interested in and not the ones they usually scroll past, right?

Here are some questions that can spark creativity in your mind with respect to knowing your target audiences:

• How can I advertise my products in a fun way on TikTok?
• How can I advertise my products on TikTok so that it hits the right emotions and feelings of my target audience?
• What is the demographics and psychographics ratio of my target audience?
• Do I have a unique selling proposition?
• What type of people can relate the most to my brand?

These self-reflective questions can help you create the right content with which your audience can relate and engage. Customer surveys and competitive analysis also contribute to knowing your audience well on this platform.

Find What Makes You Stand Out

There are plenty of businesses already advertising on TikTok before you even make your business account. Considering that there is plenty of fish in the sea, you need to focus more on the USP that makes your business really stand out from the other businesses. If you want your target audiences to focus more on your businesses, you need to outshine the others. 

Here are a few easy questions you can ask yourself to understand what makes your business stand out from the rest:

• What makes my products/services better than my competitors?
• How am I helping my target audiences with my products/services?
• Why should people buy the products I sell?
• Why should my audience choose my brand over my competitors?

Discover what makes your brand a star from the noise and promote the same in your content creation venture. 

Help Your Audience Find You

Apart from creating content consistently, you need to ensure that your audiences find you!

There are a plethora of different ways you can boost the visibility of your brand on TikTok, such as: 

Hashtags: A hashtag strategy is necessary if you want to succeed on TikTok. It is the fastest way to get your content seen. Look out for the famous hashtags and ensure to include them in the caption and the comments to make them visible on the top of the feeds of the users!

Trending Sounds: People often click on the music track and view the other videos on the same track. This is your opportunity to stand out. You need to follow the trends of TikTok by using the trending songs on the platform. But remember. You need to also focus on making your content catchy and attractive on these tracks. Else users may not engage with your content at all.s

Advertising: Tiktok allows businesses to advertise their products and services on the platform. You simply need to have a TikTok business account and an advertising budget to experiment with effective ads to improve the rhea of your TikTok business account. 

Post Video Content

Since TikTok is all about videos, you need to keep your video content ideas flowing consistently. If you do not post regular videos on TikTok, you cannot expect your audiences to find you and interact with your business.

A great tip to keep the content ideas flowing is to utilize user-generated content. If you host a hashtag challenger or a contest asking users to demonstrate or share their experience with your business, you can utilize it for your content marketing requirement. This will keep your content schedule occupied until you again find original content ideas for your TikTok account!

Partner with Relevant and Medium Influencers

Parenting with influencers is the best way you can improve the reach and visibility of your TikTok account. Simply look for the most relevant and popular influencers in your industry and approach them for a collaboration. 

You can either pay them for the collaboration or do a barter collaboration with them. Either way, they should be willing to promote your business on their page in a positive manner and ask their users to try out your business. Remember. The more people know about your brand, the better will be the reach of your TikTok business account! Thus, choose the influencers wisely!

Organic TikTok Engagement

As a new startup owner, you may not have a big budget to advertise on TikTok. This is when focusing on organic engagement does the job.

Organic engagement is all about interacting with your followers on your posts. Don’t leave any comments unanswered, and be as proactive as you can. Encourage users to share their interests, discuss trending topics, and you are here to contribute to the same. 

The more you interact with the brands, the better are your chances of improving the organic engagement of your TikTok business account.

TikTok Paid Campaigns

There are tons of TikTok ads you can try out this year to advertise your small business on TikTok. Let’s look at the common type of ads offered by TikTok for their business partners:

• Topview Ads: This type of ad is one of the best ways to advertise your brand as it is placed at an unmissable spot. It will show the first video to your user whenever they open their feed. If your top view ad is engaging enough, you have more chances of grabbing the users’ attention quickly!
• Brand Takeovers: Similar to the Topview ads, these are static or dynamic display ads that also strongly impact the audiences. These have a non-skippable format like the youtube ads. These ads are also viewed right when the user opens their feed and offer a great opportunity to grasp the users’ attention!
• Infeed Ads: In-feed ads are usually used when you are looking to narrate a story on your TikTok content. These ads offer the ability to users to like, comment, and share videos within the same TikTok sound.
• Branded Hashtag Challenge: Amp up your marketing game by using branded hashtags as it allows users to use your hashtags while creating video content. It is incredible to inspire a strong brand awareness and raise the engagement levels beyond a click! It keeps the user hooked to your brand as they participate in the challenges!

Conclusion

Tiktok offers a vast range of creative freedom to users. We have shared the most basic useful things on this TikTok marketing guide that are highly applicable. Don’t shy away from unleashing your creative side while advertising your small business on TikTok, as only the most creative one wins the battle here. Explore the unpredictable and fast-paced trends of the platform and participate in the most relevant ones. Try to make your TikTok content unique and different from others even when following the trend. Make your followers your ultimate priority and create content, keeping them in mind. With consistent efforts, you can slowly find your TikTok account exploding with the number of followers and your sales with the new leads from TikTok!