TikTok is a powerful marketing channel, and with its growing popularity, it’s not hard to see why. TikTok videos are fun and engaging, and they reach a broad audience. With the right TikTok marketing strategy in place, it’s easy to leverage the platform to build your brand, share your message, and grow your business.
However, it’s worth noting that the social media platform is known for being a tool particularly effective for those in the B2C community, with many still trying to figure out just how useful it is for those in B2B. After all, the platform is best known for hosting short videos and silly memes—not the most professional of platforms, right? Not exactly. There are a multitude of opportunities and the biggest determining factor of your own success is to ensure you are actually pushing content your target audience cares about.
So, before jumping onto the TikTok bandwagon, it’s important to decipher whether this platform is right for your business.
Social media marketing in 2022
The past few years have been a wild ride. Social media has disrupted entire industries, turned the world upside down, and given us a chance to connect with people from all around the globe.
It’s common knowledge now that for a brand to succeed in today’s saturated market, it not only needs to be actively involved in the conversations happening online, but participate in conversations across platforms.
It’s no longer acceptable for a brand to simply set up a website and pump out regular content via their blog. Sure, while 79% of B2b marketers had a content marketing strategy in 2021, and 87% use social media as a method of distributing their content, many B2B brands are still hesitant to use it to its full advantage. Research shows that approximately 68% of B2B organizations do not have an established online community.
That’s because many B2B brands are still hyper-focusing on what used to work and prioritizing the creation of blog posts and SEO. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s crucial to understand that today’s decision-makers are of younger generations, and they aren’t turning to the same resources the older generations did for their information.
According to Hootsuite, today’s users are turning their attention to social media when researching brands, with 53.2% of users using social media to explore brands and products, compared to only 51.3% who turn to search engines.
B2B brands then face the problem of deciding where they should be investing their time and resources. Within the last 12 months, B2B brands focused their social media use across the following platforms:
- LinkedIn (96%)
- Twitter (82%)
- Facebook (82%)
- YouTube (62%)
- Instagram (49%)
Content Marketing Institute pointed out that while the more text-based platforms had taken priority in 2021, the use of YouTube increased from 53% to 62%. Why – because marketing teams finally understand just how valuable video marketing is.
Video Marketing is taking the lead in B2B content marketing strategies
In 2022, research shows that B2B content marketing budgets will increase, with 46% of teams expecting to increase their budgets between 1% and 9%, with another 20% saying their increases will be higher than 9%. And where are those budgets going? Into video marketing.
While investment in social media management/community building is expected to make up 39% of B2B marketing budgets in 2022, approximately 69% of budgets are expected to go into video marketing.
So, where should you be distributing your video content? While YouTube and Facebook still lead the pack, the popular platform TikTok is coming in at a close third, according to HubSpot:
- YouTube: 35%
- Facebook: 25%
- TikTok: 19%
- Instagram: 8%
- Other: 13%
Should your brand be on TikTok?
The big question on everyone’s mind as B2B brands start to invest more resources in video marketing is whether you should try and capitalize on the wild success from the TikTok craze.
While the B2C community often utilizes this platform to host short, attention-grabbing videos, it’s starting to gain traction in the B2B community as well.
What does TikTok offer B2B businesses?
First of all, TikTok is an excellent way to build brand awareness. The platform ended 2021 with an average of 1 billion annual users, with approximately 53% of their users between the ages of 19-39. This puts to rest the idea that only kids and teenagers are using the platform. In fact, only 28% of users are under 18. The other 19% of users are 40 and above.
That makes it an excellent tool for generating leads. By posting a video on TikTok, you’re not only reaching a large group of potential customers, but you’re also giving them a reason to engage with your brand.
Secondly, it’s one of the best platforms on the market to host videos. With so many users, it’s a great place to build your brand’s video library. The platform also offers plenty of analytics, so you can track which videos are performing best and share the best ones across your other platforms and even embed them in your written content.
B2B brands currently rocking their TikTok strategy
TikTok is a platform that is growing by leaps and bounds, and brands are starting to realize the potential of this platform. TikTok’s massive user base and the fast-paced, short-form videos allow brands to display their products and services in a fun and engaging manner. Some top names in the B2B stratosphere have jumped on board and are making the most of this platform, including:
- Adobe Creative Software: The world’s leading brand of design software is using TikTok to demonstrate its capabilities and generate excitement around its brand. They’re using the platform as an opportunity to showcase their brand personality and their products.
- Shopify: On the other hand, Shopify primarily utilizes the platform to share tips and tricks from their customers and reshare videos that other users made as part of their hashtag campaigns.
- Grammarly: Grammarly’s approach combines techniques used by both Shopify and Adobe – meaning they use the platform to not only showcase their products and interact with their community, but they also feature videos created by their userbase as part of their hashtag campaigns. This allows them to build a relationship with their customers by showcasing their best work, personality, and demonstrating their expertise.
TikTok best practices for B2B brands
The great thing about TikTok is that the platform is all about celebrating the uniqueness of each individual. This means that the best way to use the platform as a B2B brand is to share the unique things that make you different from your competitors and to do that, you simply need to follow a few best practices:
Be authentic
First and foremost, you have to be authentic. It’s impossible to build a relationship with your audience if you’re not genuine. Your viewers want to get to know the people behind the company. More specifically, people buy from people.
Therefore, humanize your brand and connect with your audience on a more personal level. It also allows viewers to see that your brand isn’t just a faceless entity but a group of real people invested in their community.
Focus on your niche
While you want to be relatable and capitalize on the latest and most significant trends, it’s also crucial to remember that you can’t appeal to everyone all the time. Instead, focus your attention on your niche and its needs.
Embrace the laidback atmosphere
TikTok is all about being laidback. This means that you can be more relaxed and more conversational. You can be yourself and feel comfortable incorporating a bit of humor into your content. This is an excellent opportunity to get more conversational and share more of yourself with your viewers.
Interact with your community
Finally, you need to be interactive with your community. You want to build a community on TikTok, not just promote your brand. That means making sure that you’re engaging with your viewers by responding to their comments and questions. It also means that you should be taking advantage of your comments section to have conversations with your audience.
Your 8-step guide to establishing and executing a successful B2B TikTok marketing strategy
If your brand is ready to take the plunge and see all that TikTok has to offer, then you’ll want to check out this simple, eight-step guide to building a successful B2B TikTok marketing strategy:
1. Create your TikTok business account
The first thing you’ll want to do is create a TikTok business account. This will allow you to set up your brand and manage your account settings. It will also allow you to explore the TikTok Business Center, a full suite of tools to help you stay organized and manage your account.
2. Establish your niche
The second thing you’ll want to do is establish your niche. What’s important to remember is that you want to narrow down your niche enough to create content that addresses your audience’s needs yet, not narrow down your niche so much that you simply don’t belong on the platform.
For example, Shopify is a brand that sells eCommerce software. As such, Shopify’s niche on TikTok is eCommerce, and as such addresses a wide variety of entrepreneurs, small and large businesses, and those who are just looking to learn more about eCommerce. This allows Shopify to create and curate a wide variety of content while still focusing on the needs of its niche. If they just focused their attention on eCommerce software, they wouldn’t belong on this platform.
3. Identify your target audience
Now, your target audience will be a little different when you’re creating content for a platform such as TikTok. Yes, you’ll still want to be speaking to a B2B audience, but you’ll want to do it in a way that reaches those in charge of presenting information to the higher-ups.
For the B2B community, TikTok is very much about sharing ideas, thoughts, and experiences. Therefore, you want to speak directly to the people responsible for presenting information to their teams. This means that you’ll want to identify the key decision-makers in your industry and build your content strategy around them.
4. Develop a strong hashtag strategy
The next thing you’ll want to develop is a strong hashtag strategy. This is important because your hashtag strategy will help your brand identify the content it is creating and, more importantly, help your viewers find your content. You want to use hashtags relevant to your industry and hashtags used by your audience.
5. Collaborate with influencers
To create a successful B2B TikTok marketing strategy, you’re going to want to collaborate with other influencers within your industry. This will allow you to build relationships and get your brand in front of new audiences. It will also help you identify trends and use them to develop your content strategy further.
6. Consider investing in paid ads
TikTok is a platform that is built for organic discovery. That said, there are times when it makes sense to invest in paid ads. This allows you to reach your audience in a way that you might not be able to organically. It also allows you to experiment with different ad copy and creatives, giving you an idea of what works best for your brand.
7. Repurpose/reshare your videos across channels
One thing that makes TikTok different from other video platforms is just how easy it is to download and share your content via other channels. As such, it’s essential to consider repurposing and re-sharing your videos on other channels as well. This will help increase the reach of your videos while also helping to increase the impact that your videos have.
8. Have fun!
Above all else, it’s vital to remember that TikTok isn’t a platform that you can take too seriously. This is a platform that is built for having fun. You want to use it as a means of interacting with your audience, as a means of building your brand’s awareness, and as a means of growing and engaging your audience. So, make sure you’re taking the time to let your creative side shine!
Branch out and build your creative marketing strategy with fastmarkit
As you already know, I run a marketing agency, so if you’ve made it this far in reading this guide and want help with solidifying a video strategy that will produce tangible business results, then we should talk more.
Further, the key to successful B2B TikTok marketing is to build a strategy centered around your brand’s goals, and the team at Fastmarkit can help you get off on the right foot. It’s all about creating the right balance of being innovative as well as practical to engage with your target audience.
