If you struggle to promote your small local business on TikTok, look no further than this guide. We'll walk you through the actionable TikTok marketing advice for a local business.
TikTok is often considered a marketing tool primarily used by big brands with huge budgets. Partly, it is true. But it doesn't mean that small local businesses cannot leverage TikTok to their advantage. You don't have to possess substantial marketing budgets to reach clients on TikTok. Sometimes even organic promotion is enough without investing much into TikTok ads. You should only know some hints.
4 Best Strategies to Promote Local Business on TikTok
Location Tagging
This is a relatively new thing; TikTok has just recently added this feature.
Creators and brands have been awaiting the feature to be implemented. And now, finally, this is no longer idle talk. Currently, TikTok covers the continental USA, Hawaii, and some parts of Alaska. Given this, we can assume that other countries and regions will be covered as well.
Like on Instagram, when you tag a location in a video, you increase the media's chances of being discovered by the users who live in that specific area or nearby.
TikTok generally prioritises users' location and language when showing them content on the For You page. You have probably noticed that watching videos from other countries is quite complicated unless they are super viral.
So now, a business that serves a certain area, such as cafes, restaurants, bars, salons, beauty shops, and others will attract more followers through TikTok.
Partnerships with Local Influencers
TikTok is growing intensely day by day, and more and more influencers from other platforms join it. TikTok influencers, or creators, are as versatile as the TikTok audience: make no mistake, there are not only kids around. And surely, among those creators, you will find ones who live in your county, city or even street!
All you need to do is to find them and collaborate. You can search for these creators on Google or using special tools designed for influencer marketing, such as Grin, Upfluence, or CreatorIQ.
But before partnering with them, look at their content and stats: sometimes, if an influencer even lives in the same city you do, their audience can be from different countries because they make content targeted at those people. Make sure the influencer tries to attract the same target audience as you, and only then make a business proposal.
Local Ads with a Small Budget
You don't have to spend too much of your marketing budget to tout your company on TikTok locally.
On TikTok, just like on other platforms' ads managers, you can specify the location as narrow as you need to catch up with the customers that live nearby. TikTok ads settings are not an exception, so you can easily find local clients, combining multiple targeting criteria. If you're not ready to spend time crafting the secrets of TikTok paid ads, you can always find a professional on LinkedIn, Fiverr, or Upwork.
Posting at the Right Time
To get discovered by your target audience, you should know really well when they are active on TikTok. Do they browse the TikTok feed when commuting to work? Or are they typically active on weekends? Are they more active on evenings, mornings or middays? Until you know it for sure, you'll be posting in vain, even if the content is appealing and with trending sounds.
It goes without saying that you should be consistent on TikTok and experiment with content to find formats interesting to your audience.
To figure out the best posting time, you need to look through your profile stats, and those insights are available for business and creator accounts.
To get a Pro TikTok account:
- Click Manage Account and scroll down until you see Switch to Pro Account.
- Choose between two options — creator or business account.
- Choose either of these, and you'll get access to analytics and other business features.
Takeaways
- Use location tagging in your videos as soon as it's available for your region or account.
- Team up with local influencers, but only after you ensure your target audience is your target buying personas and their content corresponds with your expectations.
- Try TikTok with a small budget and super targeted settings.
- Post when your audience is most active (you can find it out in your profile analytics) and do it consistently.