Everyone is on TikTok—your peers, parents, and even grandparents. The video-sharing app took the world by storm during the pandemic. Since then, it has been successfully engaging audiences and aiding businesses to grow. If you own a small company and haven’t taken advantage of TikTok’s massive potential, now is the time to do so.
Leveraging TikTok marketing for small businesses gives you a chance to reach target audiences quicker, promote your products or services, and grow brand awareness.
Today, we’ll take you on a journey to the business potential of TikTok, especially for small companies that are just starting out and working on a tight budget.
Let the journey begin!
Understanding TikTok’s Always-Engaged Approach
The always-engaged approach that Tiktok promotes includes a mixture of organic and paid content combined with creators’ partnerships. This method ensures producing dynamic content that helps you to always stay connected to a community of engaged users.
What’s more, TikTok’s worldwide user base is 1.7 billion people, so there’s a great chance your customers are already there. In the United States alone, there are 117 million users of the platform, making it the country with the largest TikTok audience.
Organic Content Creation
Winner of the gold medal in short-form videos, TikTok provides you with unlimited opportunities to craft, test, and tweak your organic content to match your audience preferences. The special thing about TikTok users is that they value creativity and authenticity. So, to spark their attention, you need to meet this expectation with original content.
With TikTok’s free business account, you can access video posts' performance analytics and pinpoint which ones are most relevant and liked. You can use these insights as a base for your paid campaigns later.
It is important to not overlook the message you are communicating. Customer experience should be a top priority in all aspects of your business, including interactions on TikTok. A favorable customer experience can set your business apart from competitors and foster a devoted customer following.
Paid Campaigns and Performance Metrics
TikTok’s paid ads give you the chance to expand your customer reach even more and promote to new audiences all over the world. Having in mind that 55% of TikTok users find new brands/products on the platform, you’ll have plenty of interested people to advertise to. You may need to run some tests to adjust your value proposition for your targeted audience. But the platform’s ad success measuring tools will assist you in maximizing your efforts.
Utilizing TikTok video marketing for small businesses doesn’t require an enormous budget. You can start with free organic videos and move up from there when you get comfortable with the platform.
Partnerships with Creators
You can discover amazing brand advocates among TikTok’s creators. There’s practically a creator’s match for any company budget and niche. You can search for the best representative of your brand to collaborate with in TikTok’s Creator Marketplace. You can filter them by region, audience, views, or reach to make sure they meet your criteria.
TikTok is full of creative people eager to tell your brand story in the best way possible. You just have to be there to find them.
Harnessing the Power of TikTok SEO
Statistics show that TikTok was the most downloaded app worldwide last year, leading with 672 million downloads. Small businesses can harness the steam of people flowing to the app each year. You don’t even have to look for them. They are already there waiting for your special offer served in a creative way.
To enhance your business presence on the platform and experience its full potential, you have to develop a powerful TikTok SEO strategy. Optimizing TikTok to generate traffic to your website is an opportunity you just can’t miss. It is a channel that converts and can boost your revenue. Moreover, 68% of its users search for brand or product reviews on the platform.
So, to make your business discoverable on TikTok search, you must optimize your content accordingly.
Here’s how it’s done:
Understanding TikTok SEO Ranking Factors
If your small business is new to the platform, you must understand how the TikTok algorithm works. It is a unique system that determines what content to display to users based on several factors, such as location, language, user interest or disinterest, etc.
User Interactions
All activity on TikTok is detected by its algorithms so that the platform can ensure the best user experience. Each time you interact with a video with a like, hide, favorites ad, or simply watch it to the end, TikTok is keeping a record. All this information goes into a database that decides what to show on the For You page (FYP)—the main page you land on upon opening the app.
Keeping people constantly engaged on TikTok is what makes them return for more. That’s also beneficial for businesses of any size since they have an audience to showcase their products to.
Video Components
Since the TikTok app is based on displaying short videos, it tracks any information on them, including hashtags, sounds, cations, and audio. Video titles and descriptions are also used by the algorithm to match users' interests.
The For You page also shows trending videos. Since TikTok is built on trends, it recommends viral videos on the FYP. So basically, any business can show up there as long as its video starts trending, even with zero budget. All you need is a unique idea to begin circulating in people’s feeds.
Account and Device Settings
TikTok’s algorithm tracks your country and knows what device you’re using. It needs that information to optimize the app's performance. The language you use on the device and the languages you watch videos on are also part of the content ranking race. The interests you’ve chosen as a new account are taken into consideration as well.
However, TikTok gives more weight to the other two ranking factors—video components and user interactions.
An interesting fact about the TikTok SEO algorithm: It doesn’t consider the number of followers when recommending content. That’s good news for small businesses because they can end up on the For You page along with the big TikTok guns. Everyone gets an equal chance of winning the top spots and being noticed. That’s a cool concept.
TikTok Marketing Best Practices for Small Businesses
The #1 reason to direct your marketing efforts to TikTok is that you don’t need thousands of followers to make yourself be seen. You can do it with no budget and a creative video idea at hand to go viral.
Additionally, the TikTok algorithm actually helps small businesses by recommending them to users based on their interests. The videos you make don’t even have to be professional. Just grab your phone and make videos about the usefulness of your service or the production and packaging processes. People on TikTok value authenticity and want to feel a connection to the businesses they buy from.
Capitalize on TikTok Trends
Trends on TikTok are the video content that influences the platform users the most. They interact with it by commenting and recreating it in their own unique way.
Small businesses can follow a trend by adapting a vital video to match their own concepts and target audience preferences. Trending content draws large audiences of highly engaged people, and that’s exactly what a small company needs.
Embrace Creativity
Creativity is the backbone of TikTok, and small businesses must embrace it in full force. That’s how you go viral and get the exposure that later on leads to revenue.
Once you start testing the platform's capabilities, monitor what your competitors are doing and try to be better. You are competing for the same audience, after all.
TikTok is the place to spread your creative wings and captivate with originality.
Leverage Influencer Marketing
TikTok is an influencer hub that doesn’t go unnoticed by marketers. A small business can use the power of nano (under 10k followers) or micro (between 10k and 100k followers) influencers on the platform to spread the word about their brand or product. And the message can be served with creativity, humor, a spark of irony, or the exact amount of seriousness your business needs.
Although some think that TikTok is just for fun, it actually has a serious business potential you don’t want to miss out on. (Be sure to check out our guide to TikTok influencer marketing for more.)
Engage with the TikTok Community
The ultimate goal you want to achieve on TikTok is to earn engaged followers. They are the ones who convert into customers afterward. Connect with your community by asking questions, encouraging them to share their opinions, and answering their comments.
Being consistent with video posting is rewarded as you start showing up in people’s feeds more based on their interests. And these are engaged users that are actually interested in your content.
Conclusion
It is possible to grow your small business with TikTok. The best advice is to just start using the platform to get familiar with it and see for yourself the concepts it’s built on. Once you get the hang of it and are confident enough with your video content, you can start leveraging the paid options.
TikTok marketing for small businesses should be part of your content strategy just because your target audience is already there waiting for you to find it. So why wait? Take the first step today.
Author
Velislava Georgieva is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Inbound Blogging, specializing in Content Marketing and Outreach Strategies. Besides her passion for digital marketing, she likes yoga, fitness, and hiking. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.