Tag Archives: promotion

How to Use TikTok for Marketing Your Business

How to Use TikTok for Marketing Your Business

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

If you think your business isn’t right for TikTok, you may want to think again. If you’re like most businesspeople, TikTok is not what you think. It’s not just 20- to 30-second videos of kids dancing, dogs doing tricks and influencers showing off the latest fashions. It’s become a serious contender for online/digital advertising dollars from all types of businesses, both B2C and B2B.

Most of you reading may still believe that the TikTok audience is made up of 20-somethings and younger. Again, it’s not what you think!

Dennis Yu is the CEO of BlitzMetrics and co-author of The Definitive Guide to TikTok Advertising. Yu’s company has placed more than a billion dollars’ worth of ads for its clients on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google and others, using ads and algorithms to drive sales. And now he’s focusing his efforts on TikTok.

I had the chance to interview Yu on Amazing Business Radio, where he said, “TikTok in 2022 is Facebook in 2007. It’s now the largest property on the Internet. It has more traffic than Google. It has a higher average watch time than Facebook or Netflix. People are spending more time watching short 15- to 30-second videos than two-hour-length feature films.”

Yes, TikTok has more traffic than Google! In 2021, TikTok was ranked No. 7 on social media platforms. In 2022, just one year later, it is now ranked No. 1. In Q1 2022, TikTok became the most downloaded app in the world.

According to the Search Engine Journal, TikTok is becoming a search engine. SEJ staffer, Matt Southern, posed the question, “What if people started using TikTok as a search engine?” In his research, he found people treating the app as a search provider, some even preferring it over Google. So, his question turned from “What if …?” to “What now …?”

The point is that as a business, you can’t ignore TikTok as a viable marketing and sales channel. TikTok does an amazing job of understanding what the user is watching and will quickly start serving up content that is exactly what the user is interested in. That means that as soon as a customer watches a company’s TikTok video, the platform will start serving up more of the company’s content for the user to enjoy.

I asked Yu how businesses can use TikTok. Knowing that the podcast focuses on customer service and experience, he related his first tip to digital customer care. Today’s customers turn to the Internet, specifically social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, to ask for help or complain to a company. And more and more, they are turning to TikTok. “Whether you are on TikTok or not, your customers are there talking about you on TikTok,” Yu said. “Remember the early days of Twitter when many brands said, ‘We’re not ready to be on Twitter?’ And then they think that somehow not being on Twitter means that people can’t talk about them.”

As more customers turn to TikTok for customer care, it’s imperative that you (your company or brand) be the one posting the answers, not other customers. Your company must control the narrative even if customers are sharing correct information. You must be visible on this extremely popular channel. And you don’t need to spend a lot of money doing so. Posting simple, non-professionally edited videos are just as effective as highly produced videos.

Going beyond customer service and experience, whatever your company does or sells, B2B or B2C, just create a short video with tips and ideas that would interest your customers. Shorter is better. Keep it under a minute—even 30 seconds. TikTok rewards you for videos that are watched in completion. The likelihood of someone watching a 30-second video to the end is much higher than a video that lasts four or five minutes. And while not necessary, if you can make it funny or entertaining, that’s always a bonus.

Yu’s advice is simple. Just create content. Then let TikTok’s algorithm do its job and find people (your customers and potential customers) interested in whatever you’re posting. Yu quoted the famous line by Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) from the movie Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” I’ll quote a famous shoe and apparel manufacturer, Nike: “Just do it!”

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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Where Does Value Come From?

Stikkee 50 Dollar T-shirt

Where does value come from?

What makes people willing to pay $50 for a t-shirt that’s just like the one that ten other people are wearing in the club?

What makes people pay a premium for Apple products with features introduced by other companies months or years before?

If you are truly trying to be innovative, instead of creative or inventive, you MUST understand how your prospective customers assign value for the new solution you are about to introduce. This may require lots of customer interviews, ethnography, forced choices, and other upfront research, but it’s worth it, because if you don’t build your potential innovation on a new, unique insight then it has no chance of succeeding in the marketplace. And as I’ve said before, to achieve innovation you have to focus not just on creating value in the product or service itself, but all three sources of value:

  • Value Creation
  • Value Translation
  • Value Access

So, let’s get back to the $50 t-shirt…

Here in Seattle we are proud of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, who became a chart topping rap music music act by choosing not to follow the traditional way of making it in the music business so they could not only maintain their creative freedom, but also to make more money. Their mega-hit “Thrift Shop” pokes fun at fashionistas and has helped to make thrift shopping cool instead of embarrassing. Thank you to their combination of skills, they’ve been able to do a lot of the hard work themselves to promote their music, including making this video:

By remaining independent, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are free to collaborate with whomever they want, when they want, and with sponsors who add value in specific ways consistent with the current project they are working on, instead of a record company extracting a rent from all the artist’s activities (whether they are adding value or not). Here is one such project they undertook with another local artist, Fences, and sponsorship from a company headquartered here locally – T-Mobile USA. It’s a great song and a pretty cool video if you haven’t heard or seen it before:

I for one am grateful that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis didn’t sign a record deal, and record executives have candidly admitted that they would have totally ruined the act by forcing them to change to be more “marketable.” The success of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis (and others) serve to highlight the disruption in the music industry value chain that continues to occur, creating discontinuities that artists like Macklemore and Ryan Lewis can take advantage of. This is of course as long as they have the digital and social skills to get the word out and help their music spread.

Is there disruption happening in your industry’s value chain?

How can you take advantage of the discontinuities?

Please note the following licensing terms for Stikkee Situations cartoons:

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Shocking People into Buying Your Product

It costs a lot of money to make a television commercial, and at its core what is a television advertisement? It’s a short piece of video designed to reinforce brand values and attachment, or possibly with any luck, to drive purchasing behavior. But there are other ways to distribute video now of course, other than buying time on the major networks or the hundreds of cable networks. And sometimes alternative methods of video distribution actually work better for some creative ideas than traditional media buys.

And what do you do when you have a product that isn’t necessarily that easy to advertise in the traditional ways, for example horror movies or ultra high-definition televisions?

Products that in your advertising that you might WANT to shock people, because they like that, in the case of horror movies. Or in the case of a tech product where people are reasonably happy with what they have, your might actually NEED to find a way to shock people in order them to perceive the incremental benefits of what you’re offering versus what they already have.

In the first case, the people behind the new Carrie movie set out to create a telekinetic café prank in New York City to promote the movie:

While in the case of ultra high-definition televisions, which let’s be honest, aren’t SOOOO much better than HDTV’s that people are camping out in front of the electronics retailers to get one. So, companies like LG are going to have to go to extreme lengths to highlight the incremental value delivered by an ultra high-definition television over an HDTV. LG decided to engage some of the public in shocking scenarios utilizing their product (and film the whole thing) to try and show not just the people involved in the pranks, but the rest of the world at the same time, the shocking visual clarity of their ultra high-definition televisions. A great creative strategy, and a smart value translation approach for their potential innovations.

Here is an LG elevator prank:

Here is an LG job interview prank from Latin America:

And finally here is another LG prank in the men’s restroom:

So, as you are thinking about advertising your own new products and services, think about whether or not buying media is the best way of distributing any video advertising you might want to create. And also think about whether or not you might need to shock people into buying your product or service because they believe their existing product or service is “good enough”?

And is your product or service better than the existing ones by a wide enough margin to make customers care?

Something to think about…


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