 In today's video, we're going to be talking about how you can use TikTok to be able to start scaling your business to the next level, not only that, but I'm also going to be giving you three different ways to be able to start advertising on TikTok so you can get in front of the eyes of a bunch of new people that could potentially be new customers. TikTok has been taking the social media world by storm by giving users the ability to create short-form video clips on their platform. TikTok has gone from a platform of people just dancing to a marketing goldmine. As of late, people have been using TikTok to be able to start advertising their e-commerce business specifically in the dropshipping niche. People have been using TikTok to be able to show off their products, see how they look around the house, see how they work, and a lot more. Now, when it comes to TikTok, there is a lot of competition on there, but that doesn't mean you can't stand out. Using the right marketing strategies can really help you stand out and potentially even go viral on the platform. So, if you're ready to start making some profitable 15-second videos, then stay tuned, let's run the intro and let's get to it. What's going on, everyone? Mario here with AdoDS, and if you like videos on the dropshipping business and how to be able to start growing and scaling yours, make sure to hit that subscribe button as well as leave a like so you don't miss out on any future videos. So, why should we advertise our dropshipping business on TikTok? What makes us stand out from the other platforms such as Instagram or Facebook? Well, for one, TikTok has over 1 billion active users around the entire world. That's a lot of eyes for your products to get in front of. Now, about 78 million of those are located in the US, and roughly about 37 million are Gen Z. Now, with that being said, we really do want to focus our marketing towards them. Now, how do we do that? I'll cover that a little bit later in this video. For now, though, let's focus a little bit on why we should be marketing on TikTok. For one, TikTok can help us with brand awareness. You're one viral video away from potentially becoming a household name. Now, there's a lot of different ways that we can do this, some of them being working with TikTok influencers, using the correct hashtags, using paid ads, and more. The most important thing to always remember is always make quality content. You want to make sure that the person that's viewing your videos enjoys it, so that way they have a higher likelihood of either sharing it, liking it, or leaving you a follow. With its ever-growing audience, TikTok can really help us promote and sell our products by putting it in front of the eyes of potentially millions, if not billions of people. A really good way to do this is make TikTok videos showing the product, showing how nice it is, how effective it is, without necessarily selling it. Show off the features of the product and how aesthetically pleasing it can look. That's a very subtle way to be able to market your products, which actually works very well with a lot of the Gen Zers. A lot of the times when somebody comes across a video that looks too much like an ad and they are outright trying to sell you a product, a lot of the times people are just going to scroll away and they're going to forget about it. People don't like being sold to, they like watching entertaining videos and finding something in that video that they really like. Now, as people start interacting more with your posts and you start getting a bit more attention, people are going to start commenting on those videos. It's very important that you reply back to those comments, so that way you can start connecting more with your customers. Creating a genuine connection with your audience by replying to their comments or any questions that they have is extremely important because that helps convert them into actual customers. Now, on top of that, they're also the ones that can potentially grab your video and share it with somebody else. Therefore, increasing your reach on TikTok and potentially making a few more sales. At the same time that you're answering all of these comments or questions, you're also providing customer service. Always make sure that you reply with real and well conscious answers, so that way people know that they're talking to somebody that actually cares about them and not just trying to get their money. When a user knows that we're real and responsive, they're going to feel a lot better putting their trust in our business. Now, one of the cool things about TikTok is the fact that their algorithm doesn't work the way that YouTube or Facebook does. Instead of showing people only the users that they follow, it also shows them content based on what they're already interested in. And because of that, it's a lot easier to be able to get in front of the eyes of potential new customers. Now that we know all of the reasons as to why we should start marketing on TikTok, let's actually start doing it. The first thing that we're going to need is to create a business account. Now, if you already have an account, whether it be a creator account or a personal account, it's really easy to be able to just convert it to a business. Now, on a side note, if you are just getting started, it's probably better to start off with a personal account. And then once you start getting a few sales, then convert to a business account. Now, with a personal account, it is possible to connect it to a TikTok ads manager account. But as always, it is more advisable to do it with a business account, so you have access to more in-depth analytics. But a little bit more on that later. Now let's start by converting our personal account to a business account. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to head on over to our profile page, right where it shows our username, our name and where all our posts would be. Now, if you don't have an account just yet, just go ahead and open the TikTok app and hit sign up. After we're on our profile page, we're going to go ahead and click over to the settings and privacy tab. The way you're going to do this is on the upper right hand corner of the screen, you're going to see these three little lines. That's your menu. Click on that, and then you're going to get a new window and look for the option settings and privacy. Once you're under the settings and privacy tab, you're going to get a few more options. Just go ahead and look for manage account. Now, once you're under the manage account tab, you're going to see a few more options, and then you're going to see account control right under account control. You're going to have the option to switch to a business account. Go ahead and click that. Now, the last step before changing a personal account to a business account is choosing the right category for your business. In this demonstration, we're actually just putting clothing and accessories, but make sure to choose what's relevant to yours. Now that your business account is fully set up, you can finally access your creator tools. These creator tools really help you measure the effectiveness of your content on TikTok. Now, we need to start building an effective marketing strategy for our dropshipping business. The first thing we need to do is find our target audience. Remember that the majority of TikTok users are Gen Z between the ages of 16 and 34, but that doesn't stop us from being able to target audiences beyond that bracket. At the same time, TikTok is widely used in over 150 different countries, so being able to target every single person is going to be pretty much impossible. Our posts are going to end up getting lost in all of the other thousands of posts that there are. That's why it's crucial to be able to target the correct audience and show them what they want to see. Now, the way that we're going to find our perfect TikTok audience is by continuously optimizing and testing the content that we're producing, as well as the audience that we're targeting. Now, the same way that we analyze the competition for our dropshipping store, we can do the same thing for our TikTok page. When you're checking out the competition's content, always make sure to check out their hashtags, how many views they've got in, and how many followers they have. Also check out all the other products that they're offering and see how they're interacting with their customers. After a bit of research and you get a good idea as to what's working, you can start to apply some of those same tactics to your videos. Now, regardless of how you decide to market your business on TikTok, there's one thing that's crucial and extremely important that you always need to be consistent with and that's posting. You want to be posting on a regular basis so that way you can stay relevant and stay on top of the competition. One of the best and easiest ways that you can do this is by using a content calendar. Now, if you don't have a content calendar or don't know where to get one, just go ahead and check out the links down below in the description. I'm going to have one there that we offer over at AutoDS that's extremely handy. This calendar is completely free and it lists all the major holidays. It also gives you a lot of handy information on the holiday itself and it has links to relevant blog articles with bestselling items to be able to offer for those particular holidays. Ultimately, what you want to end up doing on your TikTok is to just create a huge community of like-minded people that share similar interests. Those people are going to be the ones that are most likely to be converted into loyal customers. Now, we want to start tracking our progress to see what's working and what isn't. Whatever is working, we can start applying a higher marketing budget to that to start converting to more sales. Now, to do this, we can start using the creator tools. In the creator tools, you're going to find your in-depth analytics, your promotions, Q&As, your TikTok shop, and a few other things. Alternatively, we can use the TikTok pixel, which is fairly similar to the Facebook pixel in the sense that we can get some really in-depth details onto what's working for our ads. Ultimately, you want to keep testing different strategies on TikTok. You want to start jumping on different trends, trying different audios, and just find out what's working best for your business. You can even try starting your own trend. Ultimately, the more techniques that we're going to be applying onto our TikTok, the better that our content is going to start performing. Now, let's talk about the three ways that you're able to start advertising your dropshipping business on TikTok. Now, the first option that we have are paid TikTok ads. While it's similar to Facebook ads, it is a bit newer, and ultimately, it's catered a bit more to the newer generation, the Gen Zs. Now, to start creating our TikTok ads, the first thing we have to do is go over to the TikTok ads manager and then click the button that says create. Now, we're going to be prompted with a few different advertising objectives. The best one for our dropshipping business though will be conversions. This selection will help us optimize our ads to be able to convert our viewers into buyers. Now, we need to choose a campaign name and set a budget. For the budget, we can choose the campaign level or group level. After we choose our campaign, we're going to be prompted with five different types of paid TikTok ads. From here, we have to choose one of them. The first one we have is the in-feed ads. This is our best selection for small to medium scaled businesses. Compared to the other ad choices, this is actually one of the more affordable options, and these ads appear on the For You page. They can include your website link or a call to action. Typically, these ads last between five to 15 seconds. Next up, we have the brand takeover ads. These typically last between three to five seconds because TikTok actually limits how many times they can be repeated. After the three to five seconds, it just becomes a regular in-feed ad. Now, if you've ever opened TikTok and the first thing you see is a promotion that's full screen and all you see is the ad, that's what this is. Another option that we have is the branded hashtag challenge. This is actually an exclusive ad type to TikTok, so you're not going to find this anywhere else. With this ad type, we can collaborate with other content creators to reach a wider audience. To do this, we would need to sponsor TikTok challenges. Afterwards, the hashtag challenge will be featured on the Discovery page for about six days. Next, we have the top view ads. The top view ads are actually very similar to the brand takeover ads, except they are more of an enhanced version. These actually last up to 60 seconds. A longer runtime on these ads can actually help our viewers by giving them more time to like, comment, and share. Now, the last option for the ad types is the branded effects ad. This is actually really cool because it allows you to be able to create your own filters on the app itself. You're able to use lenses or different stickers to create your filters so that way other users can use them and share them. The branded effects can really help maximize our ad engagements. Now, aside from paid TikTok ads, you can also choose to work with TikTok influencers. TikTok influencer marketing is fantastic because these people already have a set loyal audience. You do want to make sure that the influencers that you choose to work with that their brand values line up with yours. Also make sure that the products that you're going to be offering or giving to them are relevant to their content. Working with an influencer can be very helpful in helping grow your business because their audience already trusts what they say, and if they recommend the product, they'll be very comfortable going to that website and purchasing it. Now, our last option is to create organic content. Organic content is fantastic because it's free. We're going to be creating our own videos in this case. When you're doing this, you always want to make sure that you use the correct hashtags. A lot of the times, a good one is hashtag TikTok, make me buy it. You also want to make sure that you're keeping up with trends and you have a CTA or the call to action. Always try new things to try to drive the engagement on your posts, like creating a challenge, using trending music and filters, sharing other people's content, or even duetting and stitching it. Since TikTok is already jam packed with a bunch of different trending videos, audios, and a bunch of other things, we really need to step it up to be able to be seen on the platform. We want to stand out from the rest. Always aim for creating one of a kind and high quality content. Try to be unique with your videos and be creative. Another thing that's really helpful is try leveraging the publishing features on TikTok itself. What I mean by that is always try to put a good description, make it detailed, but not too long. Use the correct hashtags and relevant hashtags to what you're offering. Try to tag different brands, tag your friends, tag creators, as long as they're obviously relevant to what you're doing. And once again, always try to explore the duet and the stitch features. Those are very popular. You also want to try sharing user-generated content. Try sharing the posts that some of your friends or other creators have posted. A lot of times when you do this and you share other people's content and of course tag them, they're very appreciative of this and they like to comment on it and repost it as well. Another way to help bring in some organic traffic is to create a TikTok challenge. You can promote this challenge on TikTok or other social media platforms to redirect people to your TikTok and you can even make it into a contest to start getting more engagement. And then to really promote the challenge and try and get it to blow up, try working with different influencers so that way they can talk about it with their audience. Now the thing about challenges is that they can cost a few dollars, especially if you're going to be giving away free items or if you're going to be talking to influencers and having them promote it. Either way, if you don't want to go through that, another thing that you can do is just participate in challenges that are already trending yourself. Those are just a few of the ways that you're able to start advertising and scaling your business using TikTok. Now that you set up your TikTok account and have it as a business suite, before you start doing anything else, make sure you head on over to the AutoDS TikTok page over at auto underscore DS and leave us a follow. If you've used TikTok to market your dropshipping business in the past, make sure let me know down in the comments below. I'm very curious to know what marketing strategies used and how it went. Also, if you found the information in today's video helpful, please make sure to subscribe and leave a like. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS. I always wish you nothing but success in your dropshipping business and I'll catch you on the next video.