How to leverage TikTok to drive sales

If you want to connect with your customers, meet your customers where they are, they say. It’s true. Take a step back and think about the last time one of your favorite brands presented you with an advertisement or a piece of memorable content. Perhaps it was a billboard located near your home, introducing a new service at the bank you use. Or a snazzy ad popped up on your Tuesday night true crime podcast, reminding you to buy tickets to the holiday music festival.

Branding involves understanding your audience and figuring out where your audience is most likely to consume content. Audiences will evolve and change over time, as new content platforms emerge, lose popularity or some other freak reason that even top data scientists and marketers cannot solve, your audience’s behavior will change no doubt.

TikTok is a social platform that is exploding in popularity, especially among savvy brand marketers. What this means is that small business owners can also run branded content on TikTok to drive traffic and sales. Silly dancing in unexpected places were made popular on TikTok (dance challenge anyone?), and such silly antics is what attracted people to the social app initially, okay, but today as the platform has matured, entrepreneurs to big brands are running campaigns on TikTok. And it’s working.

So how do you get started? Consider the following tips to using TikTok to drive sales for your small business.

Write a short bio

For your TikTok bio, it’s best to keep it simple. Write a few sentence in clear language so people can quickly understand what you do. For instance, say, I am a doctor that treats breast cancer. Or, I am a dentist keeping Baltimore’s teeth clean. Include your website in the bio for people to learn more about your business.

Post regularly

The key to gaining traction is to post consistently and to stick to a schedule. Don’t be afraid, just go ahead and publish your content. Not sure what to do? For ideas, look at what other people in your industry are saying online or not sharing, and then go ahead and join the conversation. Say, you sell cat food. Do a post describing how to take care of a cat with diabetes through diet.

Give value and don’t expect anything in return

This is the most effective way to grow an audience is by giving them content that informs, entertains and/or inspires. Good content comes down to these three characteristics. Put on your teaching cap, dear teacher, and let’s begin to draft up your content plans.

Plan and execute

Content planning will save you time and get you organized. Producing content at scale works best when there are frameworks in place. In the publishing industry, editors use calendars and project management tools to plan the weeks and sometimes entire year ahead. What’s so excellent about using such tools is it allows room for creativity and spontaneity. When your content is lined up, as you begin producing at higher volumes, planning will help you execute more precisely and faster. The ideal outcome is generating really good content.

Influencer marketing and paid ads

Tap a TikTok influencer who you love and your audience loves. This move can open your brand to a new audience or help retain your existing audience by getting social endorsement from a prominent creator voice on TikTok. This can take time to research which creator has the right audience you’d like to target, so with that in mind, realize you’re planning the long game and this approach is a process that may have some wins and fails as you iterate through it. Paid ads are another outstanding way to boost your appeal on TikTok and drive traffic and sales to your small business. Be sure to get clear on your audience insights so you can properly target them and offer valuable content. The better you get at aligning relevant content at the right time to your audience, the more your content will convert to leads, new customers and sales.

Consider the aforementioned tips to gain the most out of the world’s most popular social app.