How to Make Sure Your Business Crushes It on TikTok

Time when TikTok was only an entertaining platform has long gone. A lot of brands have already been using it for so many purposes: from creating brand awareness with the help of funny or educational content to driving cheap traffic to their websites using paid ads. There are already more than 1 BLN users on TikTok, and it keeps expanding!

Hottest TikTok trends are being used for inspiration by huge brands and small businesses for a reason. The commercial potential of Tiktok as a platform and especially of TiktTok Ads continues to grow. Users there are highly engaged and a huge part of them are, in fact, solvent purchases. Yes, there’re still a lot of kids on TikTok who use it just for fun, but with proper targeting settings and clear messaging, they won’t be spoiling your statistics and clicking through to your website just to window shop. To understand the purchasing power on this platform you need to know one fact: there’s a hashtag that says “TikTokMadeMeBuyIt”. It means people bought something they didn’t plan to just because they saw an ad (or a UGC video) on TikTok. And now there’re a lot of users who intentionally search for TikTok trends to buy.

Big brands use TikTok as a part of their omnichannel strategy and additional tool to raise brand awareness. Also, they share content shot in a specific to the platform entertaining style and attract a younger audience this way. Which means they look at it from the long-term perspective and start nurturing their future customers now.?

As for medium and small businesses, they also aim to grow their page’s following, but their key goal is to increase sales with the help of TikTok Ads. For most of them TikTok is just an opening channel that drives cheap traffic to their website, and then retargeting on Facebook and Google does all the rest. What’s especially great about TikTok for small businesses is that it doesn’t require sleek commercials with various sceneries and professional actors. A video recorded with the help of a smartphone, by an ordinary person, somewhere at their home can easily go viral. ?What’s more, TikTok has a lot of built-in features and effects. For example, one of the latest crazes is TikTok text trend where you can make your selfie video and record yourself texting at the same time. You don’t need to spend a ton of money to have something scalable. That’s one of the reasons why TikTok ads can get you the most bang for your buck.

But how can you know if you’ll get the most of your marketing dollars even before you launch a test campaign? If you’re in one of the following niches, I’ve got good news for you, they’re super successful on TikTok: beauty and skincare products, unique home tools and appliances, food and drinks, all kinds of apparel, toys. Most likely, the secret to their success is that you can easily demonstrate these goods, show their benefits, and create all sorts of videos with them. Also, they are quite often low-ticket which makes it cheaper to advertise them and easier to persuade users to buy.?

If you’re from a different niche, don’t rush to quit the idea of being on TikTok. There are still so many ways you can make your content go viral and your ads super profitable. But first of all, let’s find out how you can make TikTok work for you organically.

If your rivals or at least some of them have already become popular on this platform, check what they post on their profiles. Of course, do not copy their style and ideas, but analyze the key trends they lean toward and try to understand what’s made their subscribers press that “follow” button. Get inspired by their content and generate ideas that will share your brand’s vision as one of the key ideas is also to differentiate yourself from your rivals.?

Another source of inspiration and the best way to find out what’s trending on TikTok right now is TikTok Trends. There you can find the most popular videos, hashtags, sounds, or challenges. If you see something that may be interesting and relevant to your audience, do a similar thing but with your products and in your own brand’s style.

Whether you are getting inspired by someone else or having a unique approach, you should remember that it is crucially important to stay consistent on TikTok. You should post something every day to stay in touch with your following. Also, even when you think you’ve found the goldmine after one of your videos blew up, don’t stop testing. Try different types of content all the time to find at least 5 of them that do work, and then you can probably focus on those types but keep testing something new now and then anyway. Sometimes new background sound, video length and speed can make a difference. Try, and you’ll see yourself.

Encourage your following to make videos using your products, tag you or use specific hashtags. Give them discounts or accept them to your brand’s VIP club. Make them feel special. This way you not only turn your customers into die-hard fans but also have a lot of UGC (user-generated content) that you can use in your paid ads and on your website (of course, with the permission of those who’ve made those videos).

And now let’s move to a more interesting part - paid ads on TikTok. For most, one of the best-performing methods is to collaborate with influencers. Some say that TikTok has become influencers market hub now. But you should know that influencer marketing on TikTok is a little different than on FB or IG. TikTok is all about videos, fun and highly engaging content, so creators you plan to work with should be able to generate new videos on a permanent basis and have high engagement rate among their following. It’s good to work with several creators at the same time to have a lot of different content on hand. TikTok also offers a possibility to whitelist influencers’ content and run ads right from their accounts through Spark Ads with their permission. Influencers give your potential customers the needed social proof and raise your brand’s credibility. The great thing about influencer-generated content is that you can use it on the upper funnel stages for prospecting and on the middle funnel stages to give users a social proof and another reason to buy.?

Another way to generate awesome results on TikTok is to run paid ads. There are several types of them: brand takeover, top view,? and in-feed ads (that include collection ads and Spark Ads). Brand takeover is either a brand video that lasts for 3-5 seconds or an image that is shown for 3 seconds. This type works amazing for brand awareness as it is shown when a user opens the app. TopView is also used to raise brand recognition, but this video is shown as the first one in a user’s feed. It can last longer than a Brand Takeover video - for up to 60 seconds. Both of these features can be enabled on Reach&Frequency campaigns.

In-feed ads are displayed when a user is scrolling their feed. These ads are sound-on by default. One of the key goals is to make your in-feed video ads look organic so that users wouldn’t want to skip them. It’s not that easy to create a well-scalable campaign on TikTok, but it for sure can become your stable source of traffic. For your campaigns to be really scalable and profitable you need to have a very clear understanding of who your ideal customer is. This will help you not only with accurate targeting settings but also with content and CTAs. Also, make sure your website’s conversion rate is high enough. If your website’s loading speed and CR are low, your ad budget will go down the drain no matter how good your creatives and ad settings are.??

To sum all the above said up, TikTok is the platform that is growing day by day and TikTok ads are just gaining momentum. Now is the perfect time to try yourself on it as the traffic is cheaper than on Facebook in most niches. TikTok ads can help your business acquire new audiences and generally move to the next level. If you feel you are ready for it, you can have your video content, work with influencers, targeting settings, analytics, and copywriting covered by one team of professionals.?

At our digital marketing agency AAMFunnel ( aamfunnel.com ), we’ve been running ads on social media for e-commerce businesses for more than 6 years already. We’ve been working with TikTok for a year now, and we’re also official TikTok partners. Book a free call with us and let’s discuss your growth prospects on TikTok. And if you just have a quick question, feel free to comment below or drop us a line at [email protected]