Did you know that there are over 1 billion monthly active users on TikTok?
If you’re a small business owner, TikTok marketing can be a huge driver for your brand’s growth.
The best part? There is little to no competition unlike other leading social platforms like YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook. This blog will explore 5 powerful ways to market small businesses on TikTok for generating leads and sales.
Keep reading.
Why TikTok marketing?
Many businesses have yet to plan out the TikTok marketing strategy for their brand’s growth. The apparent reason might be the perception that TikTok is a musical app for teenagers to dance and lip-sync with their favorite tracks playing in the background.
Which is completely wrong.
In fact, about 38% of app users in the US are over 30 years old. Besides, on average, people spend 45 minutes on the platform every single day. The low competition provides a massive opportunity for small businesses to take advantage of the space and win big.
You can grow organically on TikTok with the right strategy. Or, you can buy TikTok followers to make quick wins.
The next section will quickly go through how the algorithm works so that your marketing campaigns can take off well-prepared.
How Does the TikTok Algorithm work?
Like any other social medium, you need to figure out how the TikTok algorithm works to drive great results for your marketing efforts.
When you log in to your TikTok account, you will see your account feed, a continuous stream of vertical videos between 15 and 60 seconds in duration. The app is loaded with a huge library of music tracks that users can use to create videos. Moreover, amazing editing tools and resources make it a fun activity to make videos interesting.
Engagement on TikTok is unbelievable. People can like, comment, and share their favorite videos via SMS, direct message (DM), and other apps across social media.
You need to create amazing content (we’ll discuss it in the next section) to drive user engagement and gain more TikTok followers.
The more people engage with your videos, the more boost you’ll get from the algorithm for your other content.
It goes without saying that users can’t help but engage with the content they get value from. Value can be anything from education, helpful insights into an industry, valuable pieces of news, or a creative joke that rejuvenates their mind and soul.
1. Create Valuable Content
As a small business owner, you have plenty of content ideas to create amazing content that gets likes and shares.
Free tips for DIY (do it yourself) stuff, discount sale announcements, community awareness workshops, buyer guides, safety precautions- anything that can help and improve your customers’ lives is a great pick.
2. Right Hashtags Strategy
Hashtags are a decisive factor when it comes to optimizing your videos for TikTok SEO.
Optimizing the content will make sure it is discoverable to the audience on TikTok who is searching for and consuming similar content on the platform.
If you’re brand new on TikTok, it is a good strategy to start with niche hashtags targeting a specific interest or search intent rather than a general hashtag with millions of views on TikTok. Once you get some TikTok followers, you may use broad hashtags in your niche.
Make sure to use 2 or 3 small hashtags with fewer characters since there is a 100 characters limit for the caption. Using fewer characters for your hashtag will leave some room to describe the video for viewers. To find your target keywords, just type in the search bar (inside the app) keyword and TikTok will autosuggest the relevant keywords that people are searching for on the app.
3. Collaborate With Others
If you are new to the platform and are looking to grow quickly, collaborating with other people in your industry with a more considerable following can be a great idea. Finding relevant content creators and influencers isn’t as hard as it sounds. You may start searching for niche-relevant content, pick accounts and go through their profiles.
After consuming their stuff, you’ll be in a much better place to pick the right people to partner with.
Just send them a direct message saying that you’re interested in partnering with them.
It is unlikely that everyone you send messages to gets on board. But you’ll get some to say yes. Once you get some traction from the algorithm and gain some TikTok followers, you may then look into other options to accelerate the growth further. As mentioned earlier, you may buy TikTok followers as well to speed up the growth.
4. Invest in TikTok Ads
TikTok is a great inorganic way to market your small business on TikTok and generate leads and sales. We all know that building an audience using organic marketing is a long process that may take several months, or years. What if you don’t have the patience or time to wait for your target audience to come to you?
You can run TikTok ads and get in front of them as soon as 24 hours. The good news is that there isn’t much competition on TikTok between businesses. This means you’ll get cheaper leads and more conversions for your small business.
TikTok offers five ad products; in-feed ads, branded hashtags, top-view ads, branded effects, and brand takeover. Most small businesses get great results with in-feed ads. So you should better start with in-feed ads.
Other ad creatives are more favorable to big-sized businesses that have a considerable size of marketing budget at hand.
5. Influencer Marketing
About 86% of marketers have used Influencer marketing to generate leads or for other goals. TikTok Creator Marketplace is a handy tool to pick the right influencers for your campaigns avoiding the guesswork that’s exhausting.
It provides you with the metrics around each influencer’s content. This data helps you pick the right candidate whose audience intersects with your target audience.
This increases the chances of achieving or exceeding your marketing goals and growing your small business at a rapid pace.
Influencer marketing is kind of borrowing the audience and paying them for that. As your business and following grow, small accounts with fewer followers than yours will reach out to you with the same goal.
Final Words
We truly believe that TikTok marketing can be a life-changer for your brand and small business if executed the right way. While you may figure out a marketing strategy that aligns with your brand, we strongly recommend using strategies from this blog to grow faster and sustain the growth for the long term.
We have covered organic as well as inorganic strategies to fuel your TikTok marketing success. You pick the ones that align with your marketing budget, of course.
It’s time to hear from you. Which of the above strategies are you already using for marketing your business on Instagram? Or is there any strategy that worked for your business that we’ve not included in the list?
