Making good sales have always been the desire and challenge of every marketer no matter the industry.
B2B marketing has evolved from depending on a vast database and endless hours of cold calling to showing your true self online and developing genuine rapport with other brands.
Studies reveal that 75% of senior B2B buyers use social media during the purchasing process. And 77% of B2B purchasers said that they would not even speak to a salesperson until they had done their research.
This means that, since customers will only purchase from B2B companies they are already familiar with, having more platforms than just your website to communicate with prospects is crucial.
And that is where the lookout for platforms with massive traffic comes in and that is where TikTok walks into the room.
I guess your next question is: Can B2B brands secure long-lasting and beneficial partnerships via TikTok?
The common reasoning goes thus: people mostly spend their time on TikTok to engage with their friends, show dance videos, and not do business.
TikTok also prioritizes posts from your friends and family over the ones by companies trying to market stuff.
This is why TikTok ads might seem like forbidden fruit for many B2B brands.
More often than not, however, this is a complete misconception. B2B TikTok ad campaigns can be quite profitable.
TikTok ads can deliver key website traffic, leads, and sales both to B2C and B2B companies. I will show you how in a second just walk with me.
But first, let’s get another question answered and put out of the way: Should you advertise your business-B2B brand on TikTok?
Then you are welcome to read further as this article is written with your sort of questions in mind.
What is B2B marketing?
Business-to-business marketing, is what is shortened into B2B marketing, is meant for businesses that sell their products and services to other brands and businesses rather than individual consumers.
This marketing approach is different from B2C marketing, which normally targets customers for your products or services.
Instead, buyers and sellers are businesses in a B2B advertising situation.
Practical Examples:
#1. A brand creating customer relationship management (CRM) software or team collaboration tools will market its software to other companies that need to improve their communication and customer management using their applications.
#2. Similarly, if a producer manufactures products and wants to sell them to wholesalers, it will also engage with B2B marketing.
It will run B2B marketing campaigns to attract wholesalers who can purchase from them in bulk and then sell those to potential customers.
An effective B2B marketing plan targets an entire company`s needs rather than end customers. An appropriate business-to-business marketing strategy will always be tailored for a certain audience.
B2B marketing teams can help businesses find efficient and successful ways to grow in the best possible way.
Should your B2B Brand Advertise on Tiktok?
B2B brands are learning quite fast that TikTok can offer more than just great pet videos and dance challenges.
TikTok is, indeed, a potent tool for business promotion, if you have not come to the light about this, then you are lucky to be reading this piece.
You can reach a lot of prospective customers by posting videos on TikTok frequently and you can also encourage and offer them good reasons to engage with your brand.
TikTok has taken extra care to appeal to start-ups by leveraging various features including hashtags, an easy-to-use TikTok Ads Manager, or Shopify integration.
TikTok’s platform via TikTok for Business will assist you in connecting and interacting with your audience.
Users engaging with your content is the most crucial part of TikTok marketing.
And with TikTok’s business-dedicated characteristic, it’s easy to utilize the platform to develop your brand, share your message, and boost your business.
TikTok for Business will walk you through every step of the way from picking a goal, choosing your target, designing your ad, setting a budget, and measuring your performance which sets it apart from the creator-focused platform.
You can create TopView ads, in-feed Ads, brand takeover ads, branded effects, and branded hashtag challenges using the TikTok for Business feature.
B2B TikTok Ads and the Conversion Funnel
To drive profitable user acquisition for its new game Dragon City, mobile gaming brand Socialpoint incorporated TikTok’s Value-Based Optimization solution into its arsenal.
This game-changing optimization strategy drives greater return-on-ad spend (ROAS) by finding users who are most likely to spend more money on a product.
Taking the learnings from various audience tests, different creatives were continuously tested so that Socialpoint could pinpoint the best-performing videos, all of which leaned into TikTok trends and sounds to ensure that the ads were fully native to the platform.
And it worked excellently, driving a +1068% increase in first-time app buyers.
Like any other social media marketing platform, successful TikTok marketing requires that you understand your target audience and conversion funnel.
Otherwise, you won’t be able to shoot the right offer at the right time to the right audience.
B2B TikTok marketing is similar to B2C marketing in that you can’t keep trumpeting the same message to every target audience and hope they will convert.
There’s a decision-maker behind every large B2B enterprise but they are still people like you and me.
They are the ones that need to be directed toward the purchase with micro-conversion.
You should aim to tailor all your marketing content around a particular conversion stage.
Don’t limit your TikTok ads to a single offer.
Rather, build a flow of lead generation and remarketing ads that will guide your potential customers toward the final deal without scaring them away by screaming BUY ME on the first encounter.
B2B TikTok Ad messaging
With its focus on short-form videos and its distinctive take on social media, TikTok offers a way for B2B brands to breathe new life into their social media marketing strategy.
It serves as the perfect platform to engage and connect with your audience with a fun, creative, and relatable ad message.
When crafting your message on TikTok, it’s important to stop thinking about “who” your audience is and start thinking about “what” interests them.
Connecting to groups with common beliefs and ideas allows you to transcend categories like age, gender, and location.
These present-day tribes have exploded across TikTok, drawn to the platform to celebrate their idiosyncrasies, share their passions with similar-minded users, openly express themselves and discover new ways to stoke their enthusiasm.
Brands that can tap into the power of a band, tap into a level of brand affinity and purchasing behavior that can catapult them to cult status.
Our top B2B TikTok Ad Campaign Examples
#1. Duolingo
What do you do if your corporate mascot comes up with a reputation for pure evil?
Most brands would quietly discard it. Like how McDonald’s dumped off Ronald after a spate of creepy clown stagings in 2016. Duolingo took a different path.
The language learning platform’s avian mascot, Duo the Owl, became a meme as a result of his somewhat persistent approach. The concept was mainly: this owl will murder you if you fail to keep up with your lessons.
While that might not sound like a solution for marketing success, Duolingo decided to lean heavily into it and TikTok was the perfect platform.
TikTok users love funny, derisive content, and videos of a giant green owl who twerks to Adele, chases people who use Google Translate, and calls Dua Lipa “mommy”.
Duo’s TikTok identity definitely isn’t a bloodthirsty killer hellbent on forcing you to learn Spanish; he might chase people around, but he never wields a knife or physically harms anyone.
He’s just fun and funny.
Clearly, the new approach is working for the brand. The hashtag #duolingo is speedingly approaching 280 million views on TikTok, while #duolingobird has six million.
#2. Gymshark
Doing marketing for anything fitness-related is a task.
While it is clear that everyone knows that they should exercise regularly, no one wants to be guilted into working out or made to feel bad for choosing the couch over the treadmill machine.
Clearly, Fitness companies want to talk up the benefits of exercise regularly, but at the same time, they don’t want to shove that message down people’s throats.
Why would you follow an account that makes you feel like a terrible couch potato?
With its focus on funny, feel-good content, TikTok is the ideal marketing platform for health and fitness brands as demonstrated by the British fitness brand and accessories company Gymshark.
Humor is at the core of its content strategy, demonstrating that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
However, while the funny and fun stuff has helped the brand build a TikTok following of 3.4 million, it’s the regular challenges that have really catapulted it to viral success.
#3. Chipotle
TikTok marketing is a relatively new tactic for most brands on the platform.
However, some brands have been doing it since way before the app’s growth started to skyrocket. Chipotle is one such brand.
It became the first major restaurant chain to leverage TikTok as a marketing channel back in 2019, making its account positively octogenarian in TikTok marketing terms.
Much like Gymshark, it has seen a ton of success leveraging challenge-based content.
#4. The NBA
The world of sports can take itself a little serious at times.
We all like watching ballers kick or throw a ball around, but it’s hardly life or death.
However, if you have ever spent any time trawling Reddit or Twitter during a big game, you would think it was the most important thing that’s ever happened.
Fortunately, the NBA has realized sports can actually be fun. That’s a big focus of its TikTok marketing campaign, which is light on stats but heavy on exciting and often funny videos.
#5. Uffizi Gallery
To a larger or lesser extent, all the brands I have featured on this list are ones you’d expect to succeed on a platform catered to younger audiences.
However, that’s clearly not the case for Italy’s Uffizi Gallery.
According to the museum director Eike Schmidt, it was “pretty much in the stone age” from a digital angle.
The gallery launched on TikTok in April 2020; just a month earlier, it didn’t even have its own Facebook page, and it only debuted a website in 2015.
Its success on TikTok is firmly rooted in the bizarre, with videos often depicting Renaissance-era paintings “interacting” with the present world
At the time of writing, Uffizi’s TikTok account has just over 90,000 followers, so it’s a pretty small fraction by the standards of more digitally savvy brands like Duolingo and Chipotle.
But it’s still impressive to note that the gallery’s Twitter account, which debuted nearly four years earlier than the TikTok page, only has a sad 57,000 followers.
Conclusion
While it may seem like an untraditional match, combining your TikTok ads and B2B audiences can be a great opportunity to reach new customers.
Remember that B2B deals take longer to close than B2C, meaning you should put more effort into brand awareness and lead nurturing campaigns.
Here is one more tip I will like to take away with you on your TikTok B2B marketing campaign: your landing page is just as crucial as your TikTok ad campaign.
Your ads are worth nothing if you get them to a landing page that can’t continue selling what you did outside it.
