The TikTok app was a social media disruptor when it debuted, homing in on the engagement of short-term videos. As of Q2 2025, there were over 1.8 billion users. As its popularity continues to rise, the platform has become a key part of business social media campaigns.
TikTok for business can help you reach your audience in unique ways, and many brands have made it central to their social media strategy. So, how can you?
In this post, Josh Rohr, Sr. Social Media Strategist, will cover:
- The Benefits of TikTok for Business
- Reasons to Try TikTok for Your Business
- Practical Pro-Tips on How to Use TikTok for Business
- FAQs About TikTok for Businesses
My Expert Insight on TikTok for Business
The TikTok app is one social media platform that’s thriving. Globally, it’s the second most downloaded app of 2025. It’s heavily favored by Gen Z, who comprise 82% of the audience.
TikTok gets eyes and ears tuned in consistently, with users spending 25.5 hours on the app each month. This kind of engagement shows just how effective TikTok can be in helping businesses build their brand visibility and loyalty. With the right strategy, companies can maximize exposure and conversions.
To get started with TikTok for business, I recommend starting by assessing your competitors. See what kind of content they create that resonates based on engagement metrics such as likes and shares. You can also look for popular influencers within your niche to give you something of a gateway to TikTok audiences, helping you take advantage of all the pros of TikTok for advertising.
Additionally, look for trending TikTok content types, audio, and challenges to give you some winning content ideas, which can further help you connect with target audiences.
There have been several interesting product updates in 2025. They launched Brand Fusion, which helps companies work with diverse creators in niche communities. They’ve added new AI tools to generate content and the ability to remix, which allows you to refresh older content. TikTok SEO is now a thing, which puts more emphasis on hashtags, keywords, and spoken cues.
The Benefits of TikTok for Business
There are several key advantages of using TikTok for business growth:
Increased Brand Visibility
One of the main benefits of TikTok is its ability to connect with massive and highly engaged audiences. Today, TikTok as a platform has a 2.65% engagement rate, the highest of any social media platform. It also has over 1.8 billion active monthly users, making it among the most popular platforms, especially among younger users.
This kind of overall reach and engagement makes it ideal for going viral online, especially if you create high-quality content that really connects with audiences. If you have a short-form video with the potential of reaching millions, you’ll likely get the results you want with TikTok for business.
The Ability to Engage Younger Audiences
Another one of the big advantages of TikTok for business is the chance to reach younger audiences, especially Gen Z and Millennials.
Today, one in four TikTok users are under 20, with the average creator’s age ranging from 18 to 24. The platform also has more Gen Z users than Instagram.
So, if you want to target younger audiences, you’ll benefit from knowing how to use TikTok for business along with other highly visual platforms for social media marketing.
The Potential for Wide Organic Reach
Many TikTok videos go viral and appear organically, thanks to the algorithm. If you can develop highly engaging videos that people are eager to watch and share, chances are your videos will go far on the platform. You’re also much more likely to drive engagement on this platform due to TikTok’s overall higher engagement rate compared to other top-performing platforms.
By maximizing organic reach with your videos, you’ll discover how to implement TikTok for business and how to maximize the impact of ads without exceeding your available budget.
A Great Chance to Build Your Brand Personality
People love TikTok in part because of many creators’ authenticity. TikTok’s guidelines promote the truthfulness and authenticity of content across all accounts, and there are plenty of ways to help you establish a genuine brand personality.
For example, you can humanize your brand with videos featuring:
- How-tos and other videos from specific members of your team, putting a face or multiple faces to your brand
- Behind-the-scenes footage of your employees at work
- Videos of staff attending live events
- Interviews with industry experts
- Videos telling your brand story
Affordability of Campaigns
You might wonder: How does TikTok help small businesses with smaller marketing budgets? One of the answers is the availability of more cost-effective advertising options than other channels.
The average cost-per-click (CPC) on TikTok is around $1, but you can start as low as $0.02. Meanwhile, TikTok recommends you either have a $20 daily budget in place for ad groups or a $50 campaign budget.
Of course, knowing precisely how to use TikTok for business and how to maximize the impact of ads will ensure your campaigns go far and wide to make the most of your allotted budget.
Local to Global Reach
Using TikTok ads, you can reach the right audiences in certain areas or across the globe with the platform’s geotargeting capabilities.
With a TikTok For Business account, you can reach people of all demographics, with the ability to add specific locations to your campaigns.
Reasons to Try TikTok For Your Business
1. Businesses Can Use TikTok Shop
If you plan on selling products, the TikTok Shop ecommerce platform allows for a more seamless buying experience that benefits shoppers. Customers can complete the checkout process from within the app, keeping the shopping journey smooth and painless.
TikTok Shop for business works based on its unique discovery engine, making shopping socially simple.
You can showcase and sell your products directly on TikTok with an array of in-app shopping touchpoints, including live shopping, shoppable videos, a shop page, and shop tab.
How popular is TikTok Shop? Wired reported it’s now the size of eBay.
The growth of TikTok Shop proves that social shopping is mainstream, not an intrusion, as consumers see most ads.
You can use TikTok Shop’s various promotional tools and campaigns to promote all types of products.
Another benefit is the ability to collaborate with many creators on the platform. This enables you to develop relationships with influencers and the greater TikTok community who can help you sell products.
TikTok Shop is also reasonably popular among users, with 30% of TikTok users in one survey stating that they’ve used it in the past.
Another benefit of TikTok Shop is the ability to collaborate with many creators on the platform, enabling you to develop relationships with influencers and the greater TikTok community who can help you sell products.
Pro tips:
- Create unique content for your TikTok shop that’s different from your other content.
- Be sure to add all the details of products: images, pricing, shipping, and availability.
- Try a live session demonstrating products and including instant purchase links.
2. Brands Can Get Creative
What is TikTok used for most? The majority of TikTok’s content is light, whimsical, and entertaining.
It’s real people expressing themselves in creative – and often silly – ways. Even if you’re a serious B2B or SaaS company selling serious products or services, using TikTok for business to showcase your brand has some serious benefits.
Social media users are hungry for human connection and authenticity. While there’s surely a place for educational value on TikTok, positioning your company as conversational and easy to connect with will make customers feel more comfortable entering into a long-term partnership with you.
Of course, there is a time and place for certain things, but every business can lean into creativity and design to create short-form videos to help drive brand awareness.
Pro tips:
- Hook users within the first 3 seconds, which is critical in watch time.
- Ensure content is native and authentic, not salesy.
- Add on-screen text and captions to drive engagement.
3. Reaching More People, Faster
TikTok downloads have hit 5.48 billion. It has much to do with it being a video-centric platform that users love.
Here are some other stats that illustrate just how crucial it is to use TikTok for businesses:
- 36% of direct purchases via social media happened on TikTok.
- The app has 1.58 billion monthly active users (MAUs).
- More Gen Zers favor TikTok over Instagram.
To help you reach your target audiences, apply TikTok’s hyper-targeting capabilities. With TikTok For Business ads, you can segment based on specific demographics and interests. Additionally, you can create custom audiences.
Pro tips:
- Include hashtags and keywords so users can discover you through search.
- Tag partners in your videos to expand reach.
- Post consistently to “feed” the algorithm so you don’t lose reach.
4. TikTok for Business: Endless Influencers
One of the most appealing aspects of TikTok is that anyone can go viral. It’s not entirely far-fetched that a person with 0 followers and 0 views can post a TikTok video one night with a million views the next morning.
This ability to provide anyone with a massive following means TikTok has a limitless pool of influencers to choose from. If your brand is looking to target a particular group of people in a specific location, there is likely a perfectly suited individual who meets the criteria and already has a big following.
According to recent data, 80% of marketers say influencer campaigns are effective.
However, sifting through influencers on TikTok can be overwhelming, and it’s unclear to determine whether a certain influencer is right for your product or service.
To address these concerns, TikTok created the TikTok Creator Marketplace, an analytics tool that helps brands find TikTokers to partner with. It lets you access the influencers’ engagement, reach, demographics, views, and much more.
TikTok has the most influencer marketing campaigns across social media, with over 100,000 creators. In fact, 61% of companies participate in it. TikTok notes that after watching creator ads, 64% of TikTokers said they would buy the product.
If you want to get the most from influencer marketing when using TikTok for business, there are different types of influencers to consider and the benefits they offer for businesses:
Mega Influencers
These influencers have over one million followers and tend to be celebrities. Generally, if marketers want to get a celebrity endorsement, they would pay for these influencers.
However, it’s important to remember that these influencers are more famous than they are influential, and they don’t tend to have the same trusted expertise in niche areas as smaller influencers.
Macro Influencers
These are also big influencers, but many haven’t quite reached celebrity status, with these profiles tending to attract around 100,000 to one million followers. Typically, these TikTok influencers will have developed a name for themselves via social media more than any other channel.
If you’re working with a large budget to use TikTok for businesses, you may opt to maximize your reach with these influencers.
Micro-Influencers
These smaller influencers generate about 1,000 to 100,000 followers and are often in a niche category. They focus on a particular topic that interests a highly specific audience. If you want to connect with audiences who are within your target niche, micro-influencers can be the right partners.
People tend to trust endorsements and reviews that come from them over larger and less focused influencers.
Nano Influencers
A nano influencer may have less than 1,000 followers, but that following is especially loyal in many cases. These influencers are often influential within a specific community, such as a town or neighborhood.
If you want to use influencers to boost local marketing efforts, nano influencers might just be your go-to.
Pro tips:
- Collaborate with influencers who understand your industry and audience.
- View influencer content to see if it aligns with your brand’s voice.
- Measure the impact of influencer content and use what you learn to build the next campaign.
5. Opportunity for Repurposing Content
TikTok video length limits vary. Uploaded content can be as long as 60 minutes, but the content you record in the app has a maximum length of 10 minutes.
They’re generally short, customizable, and can be repurposed across all of your social media channels.
Here are some use cases for repurposing TikToks:
- Adding one of your TikTok videos to an email would spruce things up for your customers and amplify their curiosity about your future emails.
- Sending TikTok videos directly to your Instagram Stories
- Publishing it on your website or using it in presentations or onboarding videos
The more creative you get, the more brownie points you’ll earn with users. However, you want to convey the same message on each channel. While TikTok may be ideal for lighthearted content, having images and messaging that differ completely may be confusing when someone encounters you on another platform or visits your company website.
In any case, try to keep your videos short and to the point. In learning how to use TikTok for business, you’ll find that short-form video tends to be best for connecting with people on TikTok and other social media platforms.
Pro tips:
- Focus on short-term videos that are 1 minute or shorter.
- Give product demos, describe services, or give people a behind-the-scenes glimpse of your company.
- Slice up longer videos into 15-second bites.
6. Great User Engagement
When it comes to using TikTok for business, you simply cannot overlook the engagement rate. The average TikTok user is increasing the time they spend on the app per day. This increased screen time means that there’s ample opportunity for advertisers to reach their consumers.
With the sheer variety of content on TikTok, this isn’t unexpected. Whether you’re a clothing brand, restaurant, or transportation company, there’s space for anyone to increase visibility for their products or services.
And due to TikTok’s unique delivery algorithms, you’re able to get higher engagement on your videos with much less effort.
Pro tips:
- Monitor engagement rates, especially watch time, and adjust accordingly.
- Go with in-feed ads, as they are the best for driving engagement and traffic.
- Consider using UGC with branded hashtags to increase the chance of viral engagement.
7. TikTok for Business: Budget-Friendly
One of the most attractive parts of TikTok for business is that it can garner success within any-sized budget.
Plus, compared to more established platforms, it’s still relatively easy for lesser-known brands to achieve organic reach without breaking the bank.
TikTok ad costs start at $10 per CPM, or cost per 1,000 views. Over time, you can grow this budget as you scale your campaigns.
In the video below, Chase Chappell breaks down an excellent low budget TikTok ads strategy. This shows how achievable and budget friendly TikTok ads are for businesses.
Pro tips:
- Start with a $500 per campaign budget as a good baseline.
- Work with a nano-influencer; costs per post are typically $15.
- Allocate budget funds to specific ad groups to have more control over spending by audience.
8. Versatile Ad Formats
If you want to learn how to use TikTok for business, the good news is that there are a variety of ad formats to choose from, including:
- Top View Ads: These are ads that appear in users’ For You feeds immediately after opening the app, and they can last for up to 60 seconds. Good use cases for this format include repurposing commercials and those companies that are mature in their TikTok ad strategies.
- Search Ads: This is a new ad type delivered when a user hits the search button on FYP. They look like in-feed ads. What people search determines what pops up. Use these when you want to build awareness, increase engagement, and boost visibility.
- In-Feed Ads: Users will see these ads in their feeds in the form of either carousel or video ads, with video ads lasting for up to 60 seconds. The sweet spot is 9 to 15 seconds. They are a great option when you want to blend with native content, sell a physical product, or are just starting with TikTok advertising.
- Carousel Ads: These are in-feed ads that can contain up to 35 product shots. They can be video shopping ads or standard ads. Select this format when promoting a variety of services or products, want longer-form narratives, or are testing out ads with different audiences.
- Brand-Takeovers: You can also launch Brand Takeover Ads that are short, full-screen and 3 to 5 seconds. They first appear when users open their app, exposing them to your brand as their first in-app experience. There’s less competition for these ads, but they are more expensive. They are ideal for building buzz around events, product launches, and companies with bigger budgets.
- Branded Hashtag Ads: Another option is using a TikTok challenge to attract customers in the form of branded hashtags. These hashtags encourage other creators to upload videos related to your hashtag and spread it. Use these when you want to promote more UGC, have established brand hashtags, or build awareness.
- Branded Effects Ads: Imbue your ads with some creativity through branded effects, including certain video effects, stickers, or filters featuring your brand. They’re great for accompanying Branded Hashtag challenges to maximize your brand exposure and recognition. I recommend using those when you want to establish a TikTok aesthetic and have creative talent to deliver this content.
- Video Shopping Ads: Shopping Ads can highlight specific products or collections while making it easy for TikTok users to buy your products instantly. Opt for this ad type to showcase products that are visual (e.g., clothing and jewelry), use highly granular targeting, or increase conversion.
- Spark Ads: To repurpose organic content into ads, try Spark Ads that can use either your existing TikTok content or other creators’ content (with their approval) in your ad campaigns, which will attribute all engagement to your boosted organic videos. They are best for using organic content that performed well, selling physical products, and engagement boost goals.
The app’s algorithm promotes high levels of engagement, helping capture audience attention. It’s a chance for brands to reach new fans in a way that’s really authentic and engaging.
9. Use TikTok Challenges to Attract Customers
TikTok challenges lead to more brand exposure, offer a great way to help you expose your brand, and there are a couple of primary ways to go about them.
First, you can join an existing TikTok challenge to become a part of a “conversation” on the platform, incorporating trending hashtag challenges and filming members of your team or your company as a whole taking part in them.
You can also come up with a Branded Hashtag challenge, developing a hashtag unique to your company and encouraging people to film content to get that hashtag out there.
The #suspectchallenge is one of the more recent challenges, involving one person running while another “roasts” them in the tone of a police broadcast.
Pro tips:
- Make sure the challenge aligns with your brand and audiences.
- Don’t encourage any challenge that may have risks.
- Go with humor over ridicule.
10. Continually Optimizing Campaigns With In-Depth Analytics
Once you know how to use TikTok for business marketing, you need to measure the results of your efforts and continue to optimize your campaigns based on the data you gather.
The TikTok Ads Manager offers a suite of tools to help you measure performance and meet your business goals.
Ad Assistant is one of those that integrates AI and automation into your ad configuration, so there’s less guesswork on your part.
It’s an intuitive platform that doesn’t require endless time to get started. Its streamlined workflows are ideal for scaling up, too.
You can set up ads to achieve a variety of goals: boosting conversions, increasing views, expanding reach, generating leads, promoting your app, or getting more sales.
Getting targeting right matters for any ad. Within TikTok, you have choices for demographics, interests, behaviors, and the ability to upload custom audiences.
The TikTok Conversion API uses server-side tracking, which sends event data from your server directly to TikTok. Events include add to cart, page view, purchases, and sign-ups.
Make sure you measure campaigns using metrics that align with your goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, ad and post views and impressions will matter most, while a conversion goal will consider click-through rates and sales resulting from your campaigns. On the other hand, you might want to track engagement rates and view-through metrics if you want to increase overall engagement with your brand.
To maximize the impact of ads, you should also take certain steps to ensure they really resonate with your target audience.
Pro tips:
- Analyze campaign data to drive action. For example, you may find videos under 30 seconds do better, so try to keep within that timeframe.
- Use trending music to appeal to audiences.
- Keep your eye on trending hashtags and keywords and apply them when they make sense.
Practical Pro-Tips on How to Use TikTok for Business
So, how does TikTok help small businesses with the right approach? Let’s get into some of the ways you can use TikTok for business advertising most effectively:
1. Optimize Your Profile
One major step is to optimize your TikTok profile. Doing so will involve using a clear profile image and memorable username, including a good description and links in your bio, and pinning your most popular videos in your TikTok feed to maximize engagement.
When including links in your bio, you can use a link-in-bio tool like Linktree, which will direct your audiences to other social media profiles or specific pages on your website.
Also, try to keep your video thumbnails consistent with a recognizable theme, whether it’s a person people associate with your brand or certain colors or a logo.
2. Use Effective Content Strategies
Get creative and diverse with your TikTok videos. There are many types of videos you can post, such as:
- Tutorials, such as videos explaining how to use your products or perform a particular task related to your brand or industry
- Behind-the-scenes videos of your offices or your team at work or having fun
- Collaboration videos with influencers or other brands
- Duets and Stitch videos in which you expand on another creator’s existing content with a unique perspective or addition
- Inspirational videos that make people view your brand in a positive light
- Branded Hashtag challenge videos that encourage others to join the challenge
- User-generated content (UGC) from other users, such as videos wherein customers use your products in fun and unique ways
- Announcements about updates to your company or offerings
- Customer stories detailing how your offerings have helped them in a specific way.
3. Practice Good Consistency and Timing
Another way to succeed with TikTok marketing is to maintain sufficient consistency and good timing.
Regularly posting will keep your audiences anticipating your next release and prevent your followers from falling off, especially if your content is consistently engaging and interesting.
Additionally, figure out when your audience is most active on the platform to determine when to post. For instance, during the weekday, posting in the late afternoon or early evening might work best as people get off from work around that time, while the mornings and afternoons might generate plenty of engagement on the weekends.
4. Engage With Followers
To give your brand even more authenticity and personality, be sure to connect with followers regularly. Reply to their comments, whether positive or negative, and interact through your video content when appropriate.
An example could be asking a question of your audience at the end of a video about their thoughts on the subject. You could then respond to each commenter’s input and show that you value it.
Variant Testing: A Framework
Advertising is all a big experiment, so doing A/B tests should be in your TikTok marketing strategy. There are some reasons why the TikTok app is ideal for this. You’ll gain insights into what’s relevant because trends evolve fast on the platform. Since TikTok has such high engagement, what you learn from tests there can inform what you do on other social networks.
The best way to approach TikTok testing is to focus on either creative or offers.
TikTok has its own split testing tool. You can test these variables with it:
- Targeting
- Bidding and optimization
- Creative
- Custom (combining elements)
Using this feature, you can split an audience into two equal groups and then determine which variant had the best performance.
Here’s an example:
You’re promoting a specialty edition of a sneaker. If you want to test creative, shoot one video that shows the shoes in motion and another where they stay static. If you want the offer to be the variation, have one version with free shipping and another with a 10% off coupon.
Ads and Targeting
Earlier, I discussed all the TikTok ad formats available. Let’s go a little deeper.
Typical CPC/CPM Ranges
According to the Business of Apps analysis, these are current costs:
- Average TikTok Ads CPM: $3.20 to $10
- Average TikTok Ads CPC: $0.25 to $4
Recommended Daily Budgets
TikTok has two budget levels: campaign and ad group. Campaign is the top level, while the ad group allows you to specify the spend. You can also set a lifetime or daily budget. There are also three bidding strategy options: CPM, CPC, or CPA.
Minimal spend per campaign is $500, and it’s $20 per day. TikTok recommends a $30 daily budget. If you are investing more than $500, consider $50 a day.
The ad format you choose should influence your budgeting. Brand Takeovers are much more expensive than standard video ads. Also, the competition for ad space influences what you spend. You’ll need to up your daily budget in categories that have the most ads, like fashion, jewelry, and wellness.
Campaign Setup Checklist
When setting up your campaign, review this checklist:
- Install TikTok Pixel to track conversions.
- Decide which ad format to use.
- Determine your overall and daily budget.
- Assign a campaign objective: website conversions, website traffic, app installs, or lead generation.
- Name your campaign something that’s clear.
- Move to the ad group setup.
- Identify the optimization event for TikTok Pixel to track conversions.
- Opt for automatic or manual placement.
- Define the geographic areas to target.
- Pick the targeting criteria: demographics, interests, and behaviors.
- Apply device targeting if applicable.
- Set your budget (daily or lifetime).
- Schedule when ads will run (continuously or for a defined timeframe).
- Create the ad setup.
- Choose the ad format.
- Upload your creative.
- Enter display name and description.
- Select a CTA (e.g., Learn More, Shop Now)
- Click Publish.
FAQs About TikTok for Businesses
1. How does TikTok’s algorithm work for businesses?
How does TikTok help businesses through its algorithm, exactly? The algorithm on TikTok prioritizes four main factors to rank content: engagement, user interactions, video details, and device and account settings.
2. What role does UGC play on TikTok?
With the help of UGC, you can expand your reach and connect with people in fun and exciting ways. For example, you could create a contest with a giveaway or discount to users who post the best videos showing creative ways to use your products. These videos would get your brand out there while also providing you with content you can repurpose for other campaigns.
3. How effective are TikTok challenges in boosting brand visibility?
Challenges inspire interaction and engagement with your brand. They can maximize visibility and expand reach.
4. How do you navigate TikTok’s ecommerce features for business?
TikTok offers ecommerce businesses different features to help them grow. You can drive sales with product links, and connect people to products with video shopping ads. Promoted posts allow you to reach more customers, too.
5. How do you incorporate TikTok into a multi-channel marketing strategy?
You can make TikTok part of a multi-channel marketing strategy by adding a link to the footer of your website to your profile. Add links to products and service pages on your TikTok account. You can also convert longer videos into snippets for use on the platform.
6. What are TikTok for Business creative solutions, and how do you leverage them?
Using the Creative Center, you can produce videos based on the latest insights, trends, and more. The platform also enables you to connect with creators for influencer marketing campaigns based on which creators have the best match.
7. How can small businesses specifically achieve TikTok benefits?
It’s a cost-effective platform that doesn’t require large followers to get engagement. Plus, you can meet content creators to collaborate with who are relatively inexpensive.
8. How do you ensure your TikTok content aligns with your brand voice?
When using TikTok for business, ensure your content on the platform matches your brand voice. Do this by considering language, consistent messaging, and sticking with branding guidelines.
9. What steps can you take in developing a TikTok marketing strategy?
Start by looking at existing trends and what your competition is producing. Define your target audience and clear goals about how you’ll use the platform. Define the attributes of the content you’ll make and how it meets the needs of your customers. Measure performance and refine accordingly.
Take TikTok App for Business to a New Level
What does the future of TikTok and business hold? With the platform continuing to gain more traction, businesses big and small should be experimenting, optimizing, and showcasing their content in hopes of converting avid TikTokers into loyal customers.
Ignite Visibility has you covered, ensuring you get the most out of TikTok for your business. We’ll help you:
- Manage your social media
- Design eye-catching creative assets
- Create short-form video
- Run social media ads
- And more
Let us help you ignite your social media strategy today. Let’s chat about TikTok for your business.
