How TikTok is leveling the advertising playing field for small businesses

Making the most of meager budgets is a daily reality for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), pushing them to seek affordable options whenever they can.

This is especially true when it comes to advertising. Traditional modes of marketing often come with high costs, so SMBs looking to get their names out there typically turn to digital strategies like social media marketing.

But this approach isn’t without its challenges. With the rapid rise of platforms across the world, social media marketing isn’t just a viable option for cash-strapped advertisers. It’s also an ideal channel for large corporations with 100x the ad budgets to reach global audiences.

Considering the way most social media platforms work and with marketing spend determining the reach of an ad, SMBs might find themselves at a disadvantage against bigger competitors.

However, short-video app TikTok could level the playing field for SMBs with the launch of its self-serve advertising solution, TikTok for Business.

Democratizing advertising

By giving marketers access to a number of creative tools, TikTok’s new service allows them to produce ads in a variety of highly engaging formats and helps them reach their ideal audience.

“Whether it’s raising brand awareness, driving app installs, or increasing online and offline sales, businesses can use different formats to reach their marketing objectives,” says Chew Wee Ng, head of business marketing at TikTok.

Marketers can leverage TikTok for Business’ creative tools to achieve their marketing objectives in engaging formats. (Disclaimer: Not all ad formats are available on self-serve.) / Image credit: TikTok

With the short-video app’s highly engaging nature, these formats work especially well, she adds. For instance, brands can entice TikTok users to participate in hashtag challenges or create content using effects sponsored by a brand.

“It’s not just about likes, comments, or shares; it’s about participation,” says Ng. “On TikTok, you can get consumers spending 20 to 30 minutes of their time creating content and building a relationship with your brand.”

By leveraging TikTok’s wide array of creative tools to incite active collaboration among the platform’s community, SMBs can get discovered by their target audience just as effectively as large corporations.

A small online retailer in Vietnam, for instance, used TikTok for Business to create a short marketing campaign, which went on to record 130 million views and helped the retailer achieve over 12,000 transactions on its online store.

Indeed, Ng says the platform’s focus “is delivering results for brands and advertisers, regardless of the budgets they have.”

How to make a good TikTok ad

The approach to making creative content and ads on TikTok is fairly similar to other platforms: Create “snackable” content that captivates users’ attention in the first three seconds, leverage authentic storytelling, and understand your target audience.

“The best-performing ads on TikTok are the ones that tell authentic stories,” Ng shares. “So we encourage advertisers to focus on knowing who their consumers are and what they enjoy, then designing content based on that.”

That said, there are some considerations that are unique to advertising on TikTok. One habit that’s common for users of the app is that they tend to browse content with their volume turned on.

“TikTok was designed for a sound-on experience, and music can help increase the effectiveness of an ad’s message,” she says. “We’ve done some research, and we see that for brands that use music, those that have 120 beats per minute and above have better recall.”

TikTok for Business also offers a wide range of tools to create interactive features such as call-to-action buttons, which the marketing executive highly recommends advertisers make full use of.

Moreover, the nature of TikTok’s content opens up opportunities for businesses to collaborate with popular creators.

“Collaborative participation is in our DNA,” Ng says. “Think about how you can get the community to collaborate with you.”

On top of making the ad experience less intrusive and more engaging for TikTok’s users, these unique features also put an even greater emphasis on the importance of crafting innovative content. With that, SMBs no longer have to worry about having limited ad budgets – all they need to do is get creative.

TikTok for Business enables companies of all sizes to reach their ideal audiences with a simple and easy-to-use advertising platform.

Register for Tech in Asia’s online webinar, “How SMBs can shine on TikTok,” where representatives from the company share the best practices businesses can leverage to effectively advertise and create content on the short-video platform. It is particularly geared towards SMBs in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Sign up on TikTok’s website to get free ad credits. Eligible SMBs can claim a one-time ad credit worth US$300 to be used by December 31, 2020. Additional spend will be matched one-to-one with ad credit worth up to US$2,000 per business.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.