How To Promote Your Business On TikTok

Over the last couple of years, TikTok has become one of the most popular and fastest-growing social media platforms. With over a billion monthly users, this app is now popularly used by big and small brands to promote their businesses and reach an even wider audience. Best of all, according to statistical research, TikTok continues to rapidly increase its revenue, generating USD$4.6 billion in 2021. Now, experts expect TikTok to reach 1.8 billion users by the end of 2022.

With this information, you’re probably a step closer to using TikTok to promote your business. Even with a billion users, promoting your business and reaching a broad audience will be challenging without a proper strategy. Thus, this article will reveal how you can utilize TikTok to help reach your business’s target audience.

Why Should Your Business Consider Using TikTok?

From an outsider’s perspective, you might think TikTok is all about dance trends, makeup tutorials, pranks and challenges. Although that is partially true, TikTok offers plenty of features and opportunities in the entertainment content to help you connect to your target audience on a more personal level. Besides providing entertainment, another goal of TikTok is to influence its users’ buying decisions and desires through its content.

If your brand’s target audience is Gen Z customers, TikTok is definitely the perfect gold mine for you. But even if your brand is not mainly targeting Gen Z users, you can still use TikTok to build your social media presence. After all, sooner or later, these Gen Z users will grow up, gain spending money, and eventually become one of your target customers. Plus, some experts also discovered that almost 50% of TikTok users are between the ages of 18–34, meaning there’s still an untapped audience out there that you can reach for your business.

That said, here are a few reasons why you should consider using TikTok to promote your business:

Promote Your Brand

You’ve probably tried many ways and strategies to promote your brand (e.g., newspaper advertising, TV/radio commercials, magazine articles). But with the dynamic environment of the advertising industry, those marketing methods may soon lose their appeal. Eventually, some of your targets might find those promotions too pushy.

Thankfully, TikTok marketing is anything but assertive marketing. You can create videos and relatable content to promote your brand without being too forceful. When your viewers find your TikTok videos helpful and entertaining, you’ll also influence them to buy from your brand. If you’re new to TikTok, you can also get expert help from a TikTok advertising agency. They can help you create unique content, marketing campaigns and strategies to successfully promote your business.

Boost Brand Awareness

Aside from its entertainment content, TikTok offers multiple ways to boost brand awareness and spread the word about your business. For instance, you can collaborate with famous TikTok influencers, run ads or utilize popular TikTok hashtags to put your brand in the spotlight. When using all these options, your brand will likely have a chance to go viral.

Widen Your Audience Reach

As mentioned, TikTok has over a billion users and will continue to rise by the end of this year. Using TikTok to promote your business means you get to broaden your audience reach and potentially grow your customer base. Moreover, using TikTok will help you reach some of your target audience who might only be available exclusively on TikTok and not on other social media platforms.

Entice New Customers

Creating unique and engaging content on TikTok will help you build better relationships with your target audience and eventually increase the chance of them becoming your new customers.

Overall, you can reap plenty of benefits from using TikTok to promote your business. The next thing you need to learn now is how to promote your brand or business on TikTok and maximize this popular social media platform to its full potential.

8 Steps To Promoting Your Business On TikTok

Are you ready to start gaining more customers and possibly boost your sales? Here are eight steps you can follow to use TikTok to promote your business.

1. Create A TikTok Business Account

Of course, you need to start by launching your TikTok business account. Your brand will look more authentic and professional when presented as a business account rather than mixing your business and personal content into one account. If you already have a pre-existing account for your business, you can use that to create your TikTok business account.

2. Optimizing Your Profile

Promoting your business doesn’t end after launching your TikTok account. You also need to ensure your TikTok profile can keep curious viewers engaged, which would encourage them to follow your brand on TikTok. Remember, your TikTok account serves as your brand’s digital storefront. Take the time to optimize it properly and ensure it represents your business/brand authentically.

Here are a few tips on how to optimize your TikTok business profile:

Choose a profile picture that portrays your brand

If you’re using TikTok for personal reasons, you can choose any photo for your profile picture. But if you’re trying to promote and sell your brand to your audience, you need to select a profile picture that will represent your brand well. Preferably, you can use your brand logo as your profile photo so viewers can easily recognize and link your TikTok account to your brand.

Describe your business well in a short bio

You’re only allowed to type 80 characters for your TikTok bio. So you need to think of a short but witty description for your brand that holds meaning or connection to the product or service you’re selling. Perhaps you have a slogan or catchphrase that you often use or display together with your products. Or you may also come up with a short quote with a meaning that relates well to your brand personality.

Choose your URL wisely

Like Instagram, TikTok only allows one clickable URL in your profile. So choose wisely which URL you’d like to feature in your profile. If you have a business website, you can use its homepage as your TikTok’s clickable URL. If you’re trying to gain more buyers, you can link your TikTok profile to your online shop.

Suppose your goal is to earn more readers and viewers. If that’s your goal, you can link them to your blog post. Lastly, ensure your chosen URL is clean and recognizable so people will trust it enough to click your link.

3. Know Your Target Audience

Now that you have your TikTok account and profile properly set up, it’s time to start knowing your target audience. As mentioned earlier, most of the TikTok users are Gen Z. Regardless, TikTok still has a diverse demographic of users, so you need to determine which resonates best with your brand.
You must also study your target viewers’ preferences, interests and behaviour. Doing this will make it easier to plan and craft an effective content strategy that will interest your target audience and relate best to them.

4. Study The TikTok Algorithm

TikTok is more centred on creating fun, entertaining and visually appealing content and is not the place for serious marketing or lengthy sales pitches. Thus, you need to find a way to connect to your target viewers creatively and, hopefully, improve your brand’s visibility.

This includes studying the available categories of content, checking the most popular hashtags, listening to popular TikTok sounds and finding the most suitable caption for your niche. Ultimately, the goal here is to create content that will not only promote your brand but will also make your content be featured on TikTok’s For You Page (FYP).

While you study how the TikTok algorithm works, you might also use this as an opportunity to understand your competition. Perhaps your competitors have their content videos featured on FYP. Look at the type of videos they’re posting and which strategies have/haven’t worked for them. Although they’re your competition, you can gain valuable insight and inspiration from their experience since they’re able to try the platform first.

5. Develop An Impactful Yet Creative Content Strategy

At this point, you may start outlining the details of your content strategy. Think about how you can promote your brand creatively through short videos that fits your niche. For example, if your brand is in the fashion industry, a dress-up video might be perfect for you. You or a model can try out different clothes from your brand while you use a popular song as the video’s music background.

Or if you’re selling makeup or beauty products, a quick, lighthearted skincare routine might be your brand’s most suitable type of content. Other content strategies you can try are life hack videos, advice, FAQs or how-to tutorials.

If a current viral meme seems to fit your product or service, try to recreate it using a meme maker tool. Many meme makers feature templates that you can choose from, so within a short period of time, you will have created memes that are unique and eye-catching to the readers.

Just ensure you don’t try too hard or recreate TikTok videos not aligned with your brand.

Educational TikTok videos are also an excellent way to keep your target audience invested in your content, as this can entice viewers to follow your brand for more information. For example, if your business sells kitchenware and cookware products, you can share cooking videos featuring new recipes. This is an opportunity for your viewers to see your cookware products and get to learn new recipes.

Lastly, you must also establish a content calendar. Just like how you’d do it on other platforms, posting content consistently is one key to maintaining your visibility on TikTok and keeping your viewers engaged. So develop a content calendar and note how often you should post videos in a day and the peak times your viewers are most active on TikTok.

6. Collaborate With Influential Users

Even if you think your current TikTok content strategy is going strong for you, there’s nothing wrong with getting extra help from famous TikTok influencers. These people are considered influencers as they built their accounts to massive popularity to the point that companies and brands pay them to feature their content.

TikTok influencers don’t necessarily have to be well-known celebrities. As long as that user has thousands of active followers and their niche and target audience fit your brand’s niche perfectly, you can work with them to help boost your brand’s visibility.

There are many ways these influencers can work for your brand. For instance, if you’re in the food industry (e.g., restaurant, café, bakery), they can create a video where they visit your establishment and promote your menu and business location. If you’re in the fashion industry, they can wear your clothes while they create TikTok videos and tag your profile to the said content. Or TikTok influencers can also organize a challenge or contest where your brand gets to sponsor the prizes.

Regardless how they promote your brand, TikTok influencers can help widen your reach. Just ensure that your chosen influencer’s audience aligns with your target audience.

7. Start A Hashtag Challenge

Another fun and innovative way to promote your brand on TikTok is hosting a hashtag challenge. You can start a trend related to your brand through a hashtag challenge. Additionally, hashtag challenges can encourage current viewers to create a video with your branded hashtag.

For example, suppose you’re in the lipstick industry. You can start a challenge with the hashtag called, say, #InMyBrandXLipstick. You can set the challenge’s mechanics to TikTok users to create a quick makeup tutorial featuring your lipstick. You can encourage them to be creative in their videos and go for whatever makeup routine they’re most comfortable with (e.g., everyday makeup routine, nightclub makeup, office day makeup, formal gala makeup). Of course, don’t forget to mention the price of the challenge.

Through this challenge, you can motivate your TikTok viewers to buy your lipstick as they try to participate in the challenge. Furthermore, while they use the hashtag #InMyBrandXLipstick, your brand and your product will likely go viral. Best of all, their friends and followers who see them participate might join the challenge as well. Overall, a fun and interactive hashtag challenge can promote your business and boost your account’s interaction and engagement.

8. Take Advantage Of TikTok Analytics

TikTok provides analytics tools to help you track your account’s performance on the platform. As much as possible, make the most of these tools to help you grow and optimize your content videos and your business account.

Through these tools, you get to see how many new followers/viewers you get every day, how many of your branded hashtags are going well or the peak time of your target audience. You can use all the data you can collect from the analytics tools used to improve your content strategy further and optimize your business promotion.

Start Promoting Your Business On TikTok Now

As you see, TikTok can be a compelling app to help you promote your business, widen your reach and potentially increase your sales. As long as you know how to optimize your profile, create an effective content strategy and stay consistent with your interaction and engagement rate, you’ll be a few steps away from seeing your business succeed and reap the benefits. Follow these tips and make the best of your TikTok promotion strategy.