TikTok, one of the fastest growing social media platforms since its inception, attracts attention by having a very large user base. With 656 million downloads, the platform became the most downloaded app of 2021, reaching one billion monthly active users in the summer of 2021, and is also the only non-meta app to reach the three billion install mark.
Today, TikTok, which includes users who challenge with dance and come up with interesting jokes, is among the first choices of businesses that aim to be a strong brand and want to protect their position.
Brands can easily leverage the platform to build their online reputation, attract wider audiences and increase customer conversions. For businesses, however, using TikTok can be a bit confusing because, as with platforms like Facebook or Instagram, it may not be immediately clear how the system should be used for the benefit of brands. For this reason, TikTok has created a marketing tool for businesses called TikTok For Business to make it easier for brands. With this tool, brands have the opportunity to create perfect TikTok ads that deliver successful commercial results.
What is TikTok For Business?
The tool known as TikTok For Business is very advantageous to use. The highly recommended system won “B2B Brand of the Year” at The Drum Awards for B2B in 2021, thanks to rebranding efforts and brilliant recommendations from brands of all sizes.
Before moving on to the marketing strategies you can do for your business, it would be right to know the answer to the question of what is TikTok For Business. TikTok For Business, formerly called TikTok Ads, is a marketing tool created to help businesses unleash their creative side and create great campaigns that can go viral.
This marketing tool makes it easy for brands to advertise on TikTok. It enables flawless marketing with the numerous solutions it offers. In particular;
- Introduction to TikTok For Business
- Best Creative Practices
- Creative Change
- It enables you to take advantage of tools like the TikTok Store and shares detailed guides on how to use them.
In addition, he shares a wide range of inspiring success stories and provides detailed answers to questions such as how to upload a blog post and how to make a video.
Why Use TikTok for Business?
TikTok For Business, which comes across as a tremendous marketing tool, sounds great, but one wonders if it is suitable for everyone. At this point, you should know that almost every business has a lot to gain thanks to TikTok.
Because this platform is a leading app for consumer spending. TikTok users spent 1.3 billion dollars in the app in 2020 and 2.3 billion dollars in 2021. For this reason, it manages to be a very ideal platform for marketing activities.
It also offers brands three key advantages. These are as follows:
Tremendous Interaction Potential
Consumers love to watch videos. For example, it is known that online video content is watched for an average of 1.5 hours a day in 2018 and 2.5 hours a day in 2022. This study also shows that video content is twice as likely to be shared among friends.
At this point, TikTok is an ideal platform for watching videos. As one of the leading video-based social networks, TikTok provides a fertile ground for brands to reach millions of potential views. Because TikTok has an enormous number of users in more than 140 countries. In addition, a large proportion of these users are frequently engaged.
According to data published by TikTok, a user opens the app on average 19 times a day and actively uses the app for about an hour and a half a day.
In addition, anyone can create a viral TikTok video on the platform where interaction is so intense. The nature of the platform’s algorithm means that even users with small audiences can post posts that can become hits.
Making Brands Look More Authentic
If the ads published on social media are unpleasant, it both negatively affects brands and causes consumers to dislike the brand. No one wants to watch nonsensical ads.
Consumers today want a much more intimate and emotional connection with brands. Therefore, when they support brands, they first pay attention to authenticity.
TikTok For Business application offers effective solutions at this point and makes the brand look unique. It’s also very easy to create content on the platform. You can effortlessly get the quality that experienced creators offer.
It’s easy to go too far in sharing and jump on all the current TikTok trends. But while it’s important to be creative and original, you need to be careful to stay true to your brand’s identity. If the trends are not in line with your brand image, it is not necessary to take steps at this point.
Access to Countless Influencers
The power of influencer marketing is well known today. This is why three out of four marketers use influencers as a marketing tool. Moreover, 90 percent of them believe that such marketing activities are highly effective.
From this perspective, TikTok takes influencer marketing to a whole new level. Even content from users with very few interactions can go viral on TikTok. This also increases brands’ access to influencers.
TikTok also makes it extremely easy to connect with influencers through its Creator Marketplace. In this way, you can reach influencers with the demographic characteristics you are looking for.
Who Should Use TikTok for Business?
In fact, it doesn’t really matter who the people who will use TikTok for business are or what kind of work they are doing. Whether small or large businesses or agencies, there are numerous advantages for anyone who wants to use the platform.
Nowadays, especially giant brands have rapidly turned the platform into their own domain as they have large marketing budgets. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Google and Sony have started collaborating with popular TikTok users to increase brand awareness and thus conversions.
According to the New York Times, between August and December, at least 18 retail brands cited marketing efforts on TikTok in conversations with analysts and investors. However, the TikTok platform is making a lot of effort to be preferred especially by small businesses. For example, in 2021, the platform introduced the Small Gain initiative, demonstrating the benefits it can bring to small businesses around the world. This includes a bakery that turned 3,000 followers into 2 million and a candle maker that went viral.
Agencies are also eager to carry out marketing activities on TikTok. One of the key reasons for this is that the platform has created TikTok Marketing Partners that help marketers grow their business. A collection of companies, these partners offer a wide range of services, from creative design to campaign management. For this reason, agencies with a passion for TikTok can sign up for the system just to become a Marketing Partner.
As we mentioned above, almost every company can easily use TikTok to their advantage. But companies first need to make sure that their audience is present on the platform. You should keep in mind that just because you’ve had success on Instagram or Facebook doesn’t mean that TikTok is ideal for your business.
Although TikTok, which has surpassed Instagram in popularity, attracts attention especially by becoming the first choice of Generation Z consumers, it should not be forgotten that consumers between the ages of 30-49 use the application. While 22 percent of these adults actively use the platform, one in five US adults are TikTok users.
6 Strategies to Follow When Using TikTok for Business
When you will use TikTok to promote your business, taking steps according to 6 different strategies will allow you to get maximum efficiency from TikTok For Business. Let’s take a look at these strategies.
Get a TikTok Business Account
If you are going to run your brand’s activities on TikTok, you must first get a TikTok business account. The platform offers two types of Pro accounts: Business Accounts and Creator Accounts.
The account you open for your business should be oriented towards the former. TikTok business accounts are designed specifically for brands and companies. From in-depth metrics and campaign management advice to TikTok’s Web Business Suite and a commercial music library of over 500,000 royalty-free audios, the platform is the perfect social media network to help you engage your audience.
It is also very easy to create a business account. If you already have a TikTok account, you can instantly convert your existing account to a business account. Simply click on the menu items at the top right of the profile page, then go to Manage My Account and select Business Account under the Switch to Professional Account option.
However, if you don’t have a TikTok account yet, you can easily create a business account. This process is similar to creating an account on any social media platform. At this point you will need to enter an email and create a password. You can then create your business account.
In this process, you need to find a username that has not yet been taken. Your username should include your brand name. However, you may need to add a prefix or suffix to make it unique. Finally, you can start your marketing activities by determining what you want to achieve with your business account, who you want to reach, how you will use your account and what kind of videos you will share.
Use TikTok Ads Manager
TikTok is very effective. According to Hootsuite, these ads reach 17.9 percent of all internet users over the age of 18. Thus, when you advertise on the platform, you have the potential to reach 884.9 million people.
The interesting thing is that TikTok users really enjoy seeing ads. According to Kantar’s survey, almost three quarters of users, 72 percent, perceived the ads as inspiring. They also stated that they are 21 percent more trendsetting than ads on other platforms because they are very fun and optimistic.
One of the prominent advantages of running ads on TikTok is that they blend seamlessly with the organic content on the platform. Today, TikTok ad formats are quite diverse. The main ones are as follows:
- In Feeds Ads Conversion:
Such TikTok ads appear as videos in a user’s feed. Such standard in-feed ads can last up to 60 seconds each. It can also link to landing pages.
- Brand Takeover:
Such ads, which are shown when the user opens the app, can take the form of three-second photos or 3.5-second videos. It’s more expensive than in-feed ads and just as potentially more powerful.
- TopView Ads:
Known as the enhanced version of brand takeover ads, these types of ads last between five and 60 seconds.
- Sponsored Hashtag Challenges:
This type of ad, known as a sponsored hashtag challenge, is of great importance on TikTok. These hashtag ads are characterized by allowing brands to sponsor a hashtag challenge, complete with a special banner displayed on the Explore page.
It is quite easy to start using TikTok ad managers.
- First you need to set your goal. This could be connecting with your target audience, generating web traffic or generating leads.
- In TikTok For Business, it is important that you set a goal in TikTok Ads Manager content. Then you can choose your target audience. You can either let TikTok choose your audience or you can organize your audience yourself.
- Again, you need to set a target in TikTok Ads Manager. Then you need to set your daily budget and the dates you want your campaign to run.
- Once you set your budget for your business on TikTok, you can design and launch your ad. So you can track impressions, engagement and revenue streams.
While most of the ads on the platform are dominated by big brands, you don’t need to spend your annual marketing budget to be successful. In TikTok Ads Manager, the platform has a minimum campaign budget of $500 and an ad group budget of $50.
Collaborate with Content Creators
Collaborating with content creators is very important on TikTok. The interest in creating such advertising campaigns is high and growing every day. The number of marketers looking to capitalize on this type of advertising finds 68 percent, showing an increase of 325 percent in 2021.
For all these reasons, the platform created the Creator Marketplace, or TCM, in 2019 to make it easier for brands and creators to collaborate. Brands can then use it to search for registered creators, manage their campaigns, pay creators, and create reports and analytics.
With Creator Marketplace, brands can manage multiple impactful ad campaigns in one place at the same time. It is easy to keep track of everything on a single dashboard.
If you want to take advantage of this market to create content while using TikTok For Business, you first need to know how to use the system.
Ideal for transparency, Creator Marketplace makes it easy to work with influencers. Brands therefore use this system to decide which influencers can help them achieve their goals and which cannot. Thus, it can act by finding the right answer at a glance.
The system also gives you the information you need to create seamless campaigns with influencers. Finding the right influencers is the notoriously difficult part of working with influencers. The Creator Marketplace gives you practicality by allowing you to filter influencers according to various criteria. The main criteria are as follows:
- Country
- Title
- Access
- Average imaging
- Gender
- Age
- Tracker device
- E-commerce anchor feature
Once you’ve found the perfect influencer, you can use TCM to send them a message, manage your joint campaign and pay them. You can get started by signing up for Creator Marketplace now.
Use TikTok Creator Exchange
The Creator Marketplace is not the only way to find and work with creators on TikTok. The platform has also launched Creative Exchange to help brands and creators build successful partnerships.
This makes it easier for brands to find influencers, which is the hardest part of the job. Thanks to the TikTok Business package, the platform that produces an effective solution to this problem is very popular.
According to the 2021 influencer Benchmark Report survey, 22 percent of respondents found the process of finding influencers difficult and 56 percent rated it as medium difficulty.
That’s why Creative Exchange comes to you by changing the scenario of influencer marketing. Instead of searching for the right influencer, brands create a campaign plan and let creators respond with suggestions.
When you sign up for Creative Exchange, the platform walks you through the process of creating your project and offers a variety of campaign ideas. These include, in particular, “Story” and “Product Promotion”.
You can then fill out a questionnaire about your brand and product to get a more detailed profile of the content creators you need.
Creators registered with the Exchange are notified whenever such needs match their interests. Thus, if they are interested, they can apply for relevant projects by communicating their ideas to the brands or chatting with the brand.
TikTok Creator Exchange is the fastest and most efficient way to work with influencers on TikTok. However, it is important to have a clear idea of the type of campaign you want to create. It is important to remember that the more information you can provide to influencers, the better responses you will get.
Find a TikTok Marketing Partner
Campaign Management Partners
TikTok Ads helps you get the most out of the platform.
Measurement Partners
It allows you to get as much performance out of your campaigns as possible.
Creative Partners
It has the visual and audio skills to help you create compelling ads that match the nature of the platform.
Effects Partners
It offers augmented reality effects to help your ads really stand out.
Voice Partners
Helps brands leverage TikTok’s voice environment.
Allowing you to create great ads is just one of the advantages of working with a TikTok Marketing Partner. It also allows you to access new features, get expert advice, and know what happens next, among many other benefits.
When you work with a TikTok Marketing Partner, you get early access to alpha and beta versions of the platform. TikTok Partners have a strong understanding of the platform, so you have the ability to put these new features to work for your brand immediately.
They have achieved success on the platform many times, so they know exactly the strategies you need to implement to achieve your goals. TikTok also closely vets each partner to make sure they can do everything they promise.
At the same time, a TikTok Marketing Partner has a deep knowledge of the platform’s product roadmap. This way, they can immediately notify you of any developments that may occur in the application so that your brand can benefit faster.
Create a TikTok Store
More and more businesses are stepping into social commerce. In 2021, a survey found that eight out of ten businesses plan to sell on social media platforms in the next three years.
If you want to engage in social commerce, TikTok can be your starting point. According to the platform’s own research, 67 percent of consumers say they are inspired to shop thanks to TikTok, even if they don’t plan to.
You can take advantage of TikTok’s new shopping program to get started in this process. This program makes the start-up process much easier. The social media platform recently partnered with Shopify to enable businesses and creators to promote and sell products directly on the platform.
There are three different ways brands can promote their products on TikTok. These can be listed as follows:
Vendor-led LIVEs and In-Feed Videos:
Merchants can promote products directly in the app through LIVEs or standard in-feed videos.
Brands can partner with creators to leverage their communities.
Brands can participate in TikTok Shop’s monthly campaigns and follow TikTok Store deals at the same time.
Creating a merchant account is actually quite easy. First you need to open the TikTok Shop app and click Become a Seller if you already have an account. You can also create an account from scratch. So you can fill in your personal data and create the TikTok Store Seller Center profile. Finally, click Continue to start selling.
Many big brands like Kylie Cosmetics and Manly Brands sell on TikTok. Even smaller brands have the opportunity to realize successful sales on the platform. British perfume retailer PerfumeBoss created its first live shoppable event just two days after signing up. It now hosts five live events each week and has seen a 438 percent increase in net revenue and a 369 percent increase in order volume.
TikTok For Business Success Stories
Before you start working with TikTok For Business, you can take a look at the success stories offered by the platform to hear inspiring stories. TikTok has numerous case studies showing how successful brands can be on the platform. Here are three of the most impressive ones:
SLATE TELL
If you want to use TikTok to drive online sales for your business, it’s worth learning how SLATE TELL used the platform for their spring promotions.
The personalized jewelry company used the Smart Video Creator tool in the TikTok For Business app to achieve 2x return on ad spend over six months. They have thus launched a series of in-stream advertisements that seem to be a natural part of consumers’ For You broadcasts. By the end of the campaign, the brand reached four million people on TikTok. It also reached its target of 2x return on ad spend.
If you want to achieve the success of the SLATE TELL brand, you should first use TikTok’s Smart Video Creator tool. You should make ads look like a natural part of a consumer’s For You flow. Thus, you can get maximum efficiency from the platform at the peak time of the season.
Momentary Ink
TikTok For Business is a very advantageous option for businesses that want to increase brand awareness, and the Momentary Ink brand is a company that manages to take advantage of these advantages.
The company, which specializes in custom temporary tattoos, partnered with TikTok’s influencers to use in-feed ads featuring influencers trying the product to show how good their work looks.
The brand has even taken things further. It scaled the campaign using TikTok’s auction feature and used the Conversion Goal feature in TikTok’s Ads Manager to track the effectiveness of the campaign. It also followed each purchase with a survey asking customers how they discovered the brand. This demonstrated how the platform has enormous power for product discovery.
At the end of the campaign, the brand reached 14 million video views and determined that 60 percent of buyers discovered themselves on TikTok.
You can work with a TikTok partner agency to develop great creative for a similar experience to Momentary Ink. You can collaborate with influencers to showcase your products. You can also use the conversion tracking tool to prove the effectiveness of TikTok ads.
Princess Polly
When your brand’s values match the values of TikTok users, the results can be incredible. Priding itself on ethical and sustainable fashion and a no photoshop policy, Princess Polly is known as a Gen Z-oriented fashion retailer.
The brand has been a huge success on the platform, providing easy access to TikTok’s young audience, who are keen to make real connections between groups.
In this process, the brand used a unique discount code and utilized auction ads focused on driving traffic. It promoted the discount code through these ads. By the end of the campaign, the brand’s ads had garnered 9 million impressions and the company earned 15 times more than it spent on advertising.
Here’s what you need to do to achieve a process similar to Princess Polly’s success:
- Link your brand values to TikTok’s target audience.
- Promote your brand values.
- Focus on conversions with discount codes.
Frequently Asked Questions for TikTok For Business
Is TikTok For Business free?
Yes, there is no fee to sign up for TikTok For Business. However, you have to pay to use content creators or run ads on the platform.
Can TikTok help small businesses?
The TikTok platform is particularly advantageous for small businesses. If you use it correctly, you can work wonders. The platform also features several small business success stories. There was even a Small Profits campaign to highlight the platform’s impact on small businesses.
Should I switch to TikTok For Business?
If you will only share personal posts on TikTok, it would not be right to switch, but if you will use the platform for a business and work to make money, it is useful to switch to TikTok For Business account to get additional tools and data.
Why should I use TikTok For Business over other social media platforms?
2020’s fastest growing social media platform, TikTok is also the most downloaded app. The nature of the platform also allows brands to better engage with their target audience. It allows you to develop unique and effective links.
Conclusion Is TikTok For Business Right For You?
Contrary to popular belief, TikTok is not just an application used by Generation Z to pass the time. Platform used by a wide audience;
- Increases brand awareness of businesses.
- It enables it to build relationships with its target audience.
- It drives purchases.
- It enables companies of all sizes to collaborate with content creators.
- It allows advertising on the platform by creating a TikTok store.
With all these advantages in mind, you can create an account for your business and then start working by learning how to edit your own TikTok videos. Or you can get other users to create videos for your brand, freeing yourself from all the hard work and maximizing your use of the platform.
