Is your B2B brand on TikTok? If the answer is no, you might’ve read that question and thought “No, our target audience is not using TikTok so why would we be”, or,  “Isn’t TikTok mainly used by Gen-zs or Millennials”. If any of these thoughts crossed your mind, keep reading, because it may surprise you how Tuff partners use TikTok for B2B marketing.

Oftentimes, when we’re working with B2B brands, they think the best social ads channel for their business is either LinkedIn or Facebook. Historically, yes, these have been two of the top-performing social channels for B2B advertising, but the times are changing and the way B2B brands are advertising on social media is too. Within the past year, TikTok ads have become a large portion of Tuff partners’ paid social budgets across all different types of industries, and many of our B2B partners are now joining in on the buzz. 

It’s not just Gen-z on TikTok

Did you know that only half of the users on TikTok are below the age of 30? According to Statista’s 2022 TikTok demographic stats, 41% of all TikTok users are between the ages of 30-49 and 11% of users are 50+.  

TikTok has become a popular platform where people go to unwind for the day or get a laugh during their lunch break which makes it the perfect place to connect with your audience in a creative way. 

Think about it, how often do you log into LinkedIn on the weekends or when you’re unplugged from work? 

TikTok is a different experience. A lot of our B2B partners at Tuff are discovering that TikTok is where their audience is spending a majority of their free time when they’re not working, often times even more than Facebook. 

How we approach B2B TikTok campaigns at Tuff

As a growth marketing agency, before we launch ads on any new channel for our partners, the first thing we’ll do is a channel deep dive on the audience targeting options to make sure we’re able to reach their audience on that platform. 

On TikTok, you can target users by location, gender, age, languages, interests (including industry interests like ecomm, education, financial services, etc.), video interactions, creator interactions and hashtag interactions. 

Once we’ve built out the target audiences, we’ll look into how we can reach these users and convert them into a lead and/or customer. There are two approaches to lead generation through TikTok ads. 

1. Option one: You can set up a campaign using TikTok’s native lead gen objective which will populate a form within the platform with custom fields for the user to fill out once they click on the ad 
2. Option two: You can set up a conversion campaign and send the user to your website and optimize for users to submit a lead gen form on your site. 

Once we launch campaigns, we’ll monitor the lead quality to see how the MQLs and SQLs compare to the more traditional B2B social ads channels like Facebook and Instagram. 

How Teachable is using TikTok to acquire new leads

We recently launched a TikTok campaign for our partner Teachable –– a platform that allows individual creators with an array of skills and talents to create courses and sell them so that they can teach others to do what they do. So naturally, we wanted to go after an audience that aligned with Teachable’s product––people that are likely to have hobbies and talents that they’d want to teach courses on.  So we brainstormed different interests and hobbies that we see courses being created from across the web, and we matched those up to interests available in TikTok. After some hashtag research to find effective hashtags, we combined them all into one Interest and Hashtag campaign. 

After we settled on the audience, we researched which TikTok optimization event would help us best accomplish our goal. Looking at the standard events for TikTok we saw quite a few options that could help us target people at different stages of the user funnel, but ultimately our goal was to get users to sign up for a free trial though, so we settled on complete registration, which tracks when users create an account on the Teachable website. 

Even though this campaign was going to be for a B2B audience, we didn’t want the creative to be too corporate-y and abandon the fun nature of TikTok videos. We recognized that TikTok as a platform responds well to ads that look and feel native, and we know that even though we’re targeitng a B2B audience, it’s still people on the other end. So we just needed creative that would appeal to actual people who would want to use Teachable to sell courses.

The result was an array of creative options that ranged from motion graphics to UGC. After running them for a week, we quickly saw that we had made the right decision. Our CAC numbers outperformed Facebook, and our CTR was incredible. We had two separate campaigns and our contest campaign outperformed our evergreen campaign by a pretty significant margin–– likely because it leveraged better offers and incentives than the evergreen campaign did.

Now that we know TikTok ads work for our B2B partner Teachable, we’ve continued to experiment with new creative and audience targeting, but one thing is salient for us: Treat the people on TikTok like real people. Address their concerns, show them the benefits, grab their attention, and they’ll convert just like a B2C user would. It just might take a bit longer.

How Thnks is using TikTok to acquire new leads

For our partners Thnks we knew it wasn’t going to go be as easy to jump right in and drive quality conversions. Due to this, we took a two-pronged approach to work our way into a conversion-based campaign getting potential customers to sign up for a demo using TikTok for B2B marketing. 

Our first phase was prospecting to find out exactly what audiences and creative resonated best with potential customers. For this campaign we used the Traffic objective optimization toward a view content event that fires every time someone lands on the TikTok specific landing page. 

Replicating where we have seen success on other social platforms we structured our campaign to target three main interest based audiences:

Business Growth:

Sales:

HR:

Our second phase of this campaign will be to evaluate key metrics of our prospecting campaign and determine what audiences and creative will get carried over to a conversion-based campaign. With phase one of this test being a prospecting traffic campaign we looked specifically at metrics like clicks to the site, CPC, CTR and CPM. Compared to Facebook our initial findings are that CPC was 84% cheaper than Facebook and CPMs compared to Facebook were 1/4th of the cost.

Something that gets overlooked in the prospecting phase of campaigns is the data the pixel is collecting and how to leverage it. By running a traffic campaign to start, not only are you able to drive a large amount of traffic to your site, you are also able to collect valuable data through the pixel to further target those potential customers in the conversion phase of your campaign. In addition to carrying over the top performing interested based audiences. We will also be able to build out custom pixel based audiences based on users interactions with our ads and landing page. For this client we will be building out two custom pixel based audiences to retarget potential customers. One going after anyone who has visited our specific landing page in the last 90 days and has not taken any actions. The other being anyone who has watched 50% of our ad, and not taken any action to the site. These both are great ways to re-engage potential customers and get them to take action!

How B2B Brand Visory is using TikTok to acquire new leads

For our B2B partner Visory, we did some initial research on potential audiences on TikTok and found some interest targeting options that would allow us to reach their target audience. We kicked off our campaign by identifying two main interest based audiences that we have seen perform well on other social platforms, like Facebook and LinkedIn. 

Broad interests around money management and bookkeeping:

eCommerce specific interests:

One thing we’ve learned about targeting on TikTok is that broader is usually better (for prospecting or retargeting campaigns). The reason we separated these out was because they were roughly the same size + eCommerce (alone) has been a top performing audience for us in the past.

Prior to considering TikTok for Visory, we were able to test out some user-generated content on our other social platforms, which allowed us to determine what resonates most with Visory’s B2B audience and then repurpose the top performing creative for TikTok. Creative is SO crucial on any social platform but specifically on TikTok. If you want to dive deeper into the creative world, here is an additional resource: The 5 Main Components of Effective TikTok Ad Creative.

We knew that TikTok was going to be more of a top of funnel channel for Visory (similar to how we’ve viewed Facebook), so we’ve been optimzinig our campaigns for traffic to the site. To measure success, we are looking at clicks to the site, CTR, CPC and site engagement in Google Analytics. The result? Compared to Facebook, we have seen comparable CTRs but lower CPCs. Looking in GA, we’ve seen time on site as high as 00:06:25! While we have yet to see any last-click conversions from this site, we’ve learned that more traffic to the site historically results in more conversions over time. 

Conclusion

TikTok ads are becoming very popular among B2B brands and it’s an effective & cost-efficient way to reach your target audience in a creative way. If you’re ready to see how TikTok Ads can work for your business, give us a shout!

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.