How to Use TikTok to Grow Your Business

Getting attention on TikTok is already a challenge, but even after you break through that first wall, you're still faced with a harder one: translating that attention into actual business outcomes like leads, customers, and revenue. A video can pull in thousands of views and still have little to no impact on your bottom line.

This guide shows you how to use TikTok to grow your business, so every video supports a clear business objective instead of becoming another vanity metric.

Why TikTok Is Valuable for Businesses

TikTok has come a long way from dance challenges, lip-syncing, and funny cat videos. Today, millions of people use it to learn new skills, research products, and decide what to buy next, making it one of the world's largest discovery platforms.

Needless to say, it has fundamentally changed the customer buying journey, presenting opportunities for businesses of all sizes to reach potential customers long before they're ready to buy.

To put that into perspective, using TikTok as part of your marketing strategy can help your business:

• Reach new audiences beyond your existing followers. TikTok's recommendation algorithm introduces your content to people based on their interests rather than whether they already follow your business.

• Influence customers earlier in the buying journey. Educational content, product demonstrations, and customer stories allow you to shape perceptions before someone starts actively comparing businesses.

• Increase your visibility through TikTok Search. Optimizing your content for search gives your business another opportunity to appear front and center when users look for products, services, or answers related to your industry.

• Strengthen your broader marketing strategy. Rather than operating in isolation, TikTok can introduce new audiences to your brand before guiding them toward your website, email list, booking page, or other marketing channels.

• Compete with bigger brands. TikTok's recommendation system prioritizes viewer interest over follower count. This levels the playing field and gives smaller businesses opportunities to outperform much larger competitors on specific topics.

How to Use TikTok to Grow Your Business

Educate potential customers

One approach that consistently warms up potential customers, regardless of platform or niche, is educational content. When you help people solve an urgent problem or make sense of a confusing topic, you're doing two things at once: providing value before asking for anything in return and earning trust over time.

As such, it's no surprise to see this type of content attract strong engagement in TikTok, whether it's financial advisors breaking down compound interest in plain English or skincare brands explaining why sunscreen pills and how to prevent it.

Depending on your industry, educational content can take many forms:

• Addressing frequently asked questions

• Highlighting common mistakes customers make

• Busting misconceptions and myths

• Creating buyer’s guides and tutorial series

• Comparing different solutions or options

• Sharing tips and hacks

• “Before you buy…” advice

Demonstrate your products or services

By demonstrating your product or service in realistic scenarios, you can show how easy it is to use, how it fits into everyday workflows, and what makes it different from the alternatives. Seeing those benefits in action also makes your unique features far easier to remember than simply listing them on a landing page.

Simply put, product or service demonstrations help answer many of the final questions or objections standing between a prospect and a purchase. Common formats include live demos, before-and-after transformations, and product comparisons.

Ecommerce brands have long found success with product showcases and unboxings. SaaS companies have also embraced the same approach through feature walkthroughs, dashboard tours, and quick tutorials that show exactly how their software solves a specific problem.

Humanize your brand

Showing the human side of your business helps build familiarity, credibility, and trust, making it easier for people to feel confident buying from you. That can be as simple as:

• Introducing your team

• Sharing behind-the-scenes moments

• Telling your founder's story

• Giving an office tour or documenting a typical day at work

Of course, not every business wants to appear on camera, and that's perfectly okay. Faceless videos can still perform exceptionally well, and plenty of brands have amassed large audiences and loyal customer bases without ever showing a face.

That's to say humanizing your brand doesn't always mean putting someone in front of the camera. It can also come through your storytelling, the language you use, and the personality woven into every video.

Showcase customer experiences and success stories

If you want to address doubt and move people closer to a decision, nothing works quite like letting your customers do the talking. Customer experiences and success stories give prospective buyers something every business wants but can't simply claim for itself: independent proof that its product or service delivers on its promises.

Ways to bring those stories to life include:

• User-generated content

• Customer testimonials

• Interviews

• Before-and-after transformations

Generally, this approach works best for businesses that already have an established customer base, even if it's still relatively small.

Amplify your other marketing channels

The impact of short-form video shouldn't end with views, likes, and shares. TikTok's greatest strength lies in discovery but attention alone doesn't build a business. At some point, you need to turn viewers into subscribers, leads, or customers through channels you own and control.

That being the case, you can use TikTok to push them into the funnel further. Brands and businesses do this in all sorts of ways to create an always-on pipeline for qualified leads and sales by promoting:

• Email newsletters

• Free guides and webinars

• Product pages

• Booking or consultation pages

• Paid communities

• YouTube channels or podcasts

Support product launches and marketing campaigns

While TikTok excels at educating potential customers and building long-term brand awareness, it's equally capable of supporting time-sensitive initiatives such as product launches, seasonal promotions, and limited-time campaigns.

TikTok Ads can provide additional reach and targeting for these kinds of campaigns, which can put your promotion in front of more of the right people while the opportunity is still there.

Organic content still earns its place, though. It builds familiarity and trust before someone encounters your promotion, making your campaign feel less like a cold pitch and more like a legitimate recommendation from a brand they already know.

Cultivate an engaged community around your brand

We explored earlier how humanizing your brand makes you more relatable and memorable. Those qualities create a ripple effect. They start leaving comments, asking questions, and sharing their own thoughts, and before long, you've gone from building an audience to building a community.

The next step is to make your presence known by joining those conversations. Some of the ways brands do this include:

• Replying to comments with follow-up videos

• Hosting community live Q&As based on real audience questions

• Posting polls or asking direct questions to invite opinions

TikTok Marketing Tactics That Support Business Growth

Leverage short-form content intelligence

Short-form videos may only last a few seconds, but creating them is anything but quick or easy. The most frustrating part? You won't know whether all that time spent brainstorming, scripting, filming, and editing was worth it until after you hit publish. The video might take off, or it might barely make a ripple.

Enter short-form content intelligence. These platforms analyze what's already working across your niche before you burn time and budget creating a single piece of content.

Virlo's TikTok Analytics, for instance, tracks emerging trends, benchmarks competitors, and surfaces high-performing content patterns across your market. That means you can quickly identify the hooks and formats your audience already responds to before creating your next video.

Switch to a TikTok Business Account

A TikTok Business Account is a profile type designed to provide access to analytics and advertising tools that aren't fully available on personal or creator accounts. These include:

• Free analytics dashboard

• Video performance metrics (views, watch time and completion rate)

• Audience demographics (age, gender and location)

• Commercial Music Library for licensed business use

• Advertising access through TikTok Ads Manager

• Business profile features such as contact buttons and a clickable website link

Together, these tools give you the data to make more informed marketing decisions and the features to reach, convert, and communicate with potential customers more effectively.

Below are the steps to switch to a TikTok Business Account:

1. Open your TikTok profile.

2. Tap the menu (three lines in the top right).

3. Go to "Settings and privacy".

4. Select "Account".

5. Tap "Switch to Business Account".

6. Choose the category that best describes your business.

7. Complete your profile (bio, website, contact details).

Optimize your videos for TikTok SEO

TikTok SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing your videos so they appear higher in TikTok search results for specific topics, questions or products.

We cover this in more detail in our TikTok SEO guide, but in a nutshell, the goal is to give TikTok's algorithm clear signals about what your video (and account) is all about. Doing so makes it easier for the platform to surface your content to people actively searching for those topics.

This typically involves:

• Saying your target keyword or topic naturally in the video (spoken dialogue)

• Including keywords in on-screen text

• Writing captions that reinforce the topic and provide context

• Using relevant, specific hashtags tied to the search intent (rather than broad trending hashtags)

• Keeping your content focused on a single topic to build topical authority over time

• Creating videos that directly answer common questions or search queries your audience has

TikTok SEO is a long game. Unlike paid ads, your videos can continue attracting relevant viewers long after they're published, creating a steady stream of organic traffic without ongoing ad spend.

Hook viewers within the first few seconds

If there's one part of your TikTok video that deserves the most attention, it's the hook. You could have excellent production quality, polished editing, and genuinely valuable information, but none of it matters if viewers scroll away within the first few seconds.

So, what makes a good hook? There's no single formula. Depending on your message and audience, you might lead with a common misconception, take a contrarian angle, or jump straight into a product demonstration.

If you're unsure where to start, our Hook Generator can help you brainstorm different opening angles for your videos. Better yet, use Virlo's short-form content intelligence to see which hooks are already capturing attention within your niche.

Post when your audience is most active

There's no universal "best time to post." Audience behavior differs by niche, location, and even the type of content you publish.

Say you're targeting millennial stay-at-home parents. It makes far more sense to publish just after school drop-off, when many are finally getting a moment to themselves, than late at night when they're getting the kids ready for bed.

Apart from a little common sense, you can use  TikTok's native analytics (available with a Business Account) to validate your assumptions. Pay attention to when your audience is most active, then experiment with different posting times and look for patterns across multiple videos rather than relying on a single post.

Partner with influencers and content creators

Partnering with influencers and content creators lets you tap into an audience that's already built and engaged. As trust has already been earned by the creator, your product or service is received with much less resistance than if you were promoting it yourself.

Common arrangements include:

• Paid collaborations

• Affiliate or commission-based partnerships

• Product seeding

• Retainer partnerships

• Whitelisting

Now, this doesn't mean chasing celebrities or mega influencers. Depending on the objective, smaller creators such as micro influencers, subject matter experts, and UGC creators often outperform mega influencers in metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Use TikTok Ads to scale what's already working

Once you've established what kind of content works, whether through consistent testing and analysis or by using a short-form content intelligence platform like Virlo, TikTok Ads gives you greater control over who sees it.

You can amplify high-performing content to targeted audiences, retarget previous viewers, or optimize campaigns around specific business goals, whether that be website visits, lead generation, or conversions.

There's a lot more to TikTok Ads than we can cover here. If you'd like to learn how it can help grow your brand and how to use it effectively, check out our comprehensive guide to TikTok Ads.

Virlo: Short-Form Content Intelligence for Business Growth

Virlo helps marketing teams, social media managers and brand strategists understand what's working on TikTok before they spend resources and budget creating content. Identify winning content opportunities sooner, so you can scale what works and accelerate business growth. Get started with Virlo today!