 There are multiple layers to the platform for different users to engage, curate, collaborate, even be inspired to talk as a place really for entertainment and for information in video spaces. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Beth Popnikolov. We have given Zach the day off, so I'm flying solo and very excited to bring back one of our most highly requested guests. We have in the house with us, Ashley Stevenson. She is our social media manager. We recently did an episode on the ROI of social media and building materials, and it is, I kid you not, the genuinely most commented on podcast we've done to date and there has been some serious conversations around our podcasts. And what we are gonna talk about today is the inevitable of TikTok. We're doing it, we're bringing TikTok to the table because it is such a hot topic. We have manufacturers ask us about it all of the time. Our internal team is talking about it regularly and frankly, the B2B space on TikTok is real, or is it? So Ashley's gonna talk to us about all things TikTok today and if you've got questions about TikTok, about what it is, why it is, and how to capitalize on it, you're going to wanna stay tuned. So Ashley, let me hand it over to you and just say thanks. Thanks for coming back. Have you had anybody reach out to you about the podcast that we did previously? I did and it's actually come up several times during client meetings too. They're like, I wanna dig in on that. Can you expand on this statement? I'm like, absolutely, sure, I'd love to expand on it. Anytime there's an opportunity for a social, media manager to talk more about social, would I ever turn that down? No. That's exactly, I'm interested. They're a literal sweet spot. But I was surprised how much feedback we got about it. I had more people mention it to me in the week that it was released than genuinely any podcast that we've ever done. And we've interviewed some really big people, but the question of ROI and social is so big. So I'm really glad that it was so well received and there's frankly we could do like a hundred more episodes than probably should. But I know that one of the things on the mind of manufacturers is TikTok because we've kind of getting to a place where social is pretty widely accepted as a thing that you have to do, how deeply you invest in it and believe in it is another conversation for another time. But if you have bought in, if you haven't established social presence or potentially if you have teenagers, you are hearing a lot about TikTok. So let's just start at the very beginning and not take for granted any level of knowledge. And can you just give us like an introduction? What's the origin story of TikTok and where is it today? Sure, absolutely. I think that's a great segue. So TikTok's been around since 2016. It has over a billion users currently globally. It is a video sharing app that you can do fun dances with. That's actually what it's probably really popular for, all of the different dance trends and audios that are there. But if you're really smart about it, you can really use it for an opportunity to showcase, celebrate, and even give information about products and services that are supplied by your company or from an individual perspective, focusing on niche really just matters the most for that platform and that space. So if someone's looking at Instagram or someone's looking at TikTok and they're trying to figure out what they should be on or what's the difference between, Instagram has feed posts, they have stories, they have reels, they have IGTV, they have guides. There are multiple layers to the platform for different users to engage, curate, collaborate, even be inspired. TikTok is a place really for entertainment and for information in video spaces and they're all less than a minute long or right at 60 seconds, but they can also be in 15 second intervals. So you're getting very specific information in video form only. You do have text overlay that's added to it. Some people may be a bit apprehensive about TikTok because they're just not sure if they have the video editing skills to really make a good jump into the platform, but that's really the difference between Instagram and TikTok as far as what's available and what happens there. I know we said the words dance videos and so I'm just imagining the amount of pauses that just happened. Yeah. But so let's just start like, let's just jump right in. Is there precedent for B2B on TikTok? As you're listening to this podcast, literally go on TikTok. If you don't wanna download it to your phone you can still go to tiktok.com on your desktop and you can search. I absolutely encourage you to search for specific hashtags in your category and you'll see examples of products, brand pages, users that are doing it, what hashtags are using. And you can see immediately the views that are there, all of the comments that are there. I mean, real time you can see how objective they are and then how they're doing from an engagement perspective. I've kind of pulled up some examples and we're gonna share those in the show notes as well but great examples of what to do from a B2B perspective. Focus on what your business actually does. If your business does not have a dance team, don't do a dance. So you can skip right over the dancing part, that's fine. There are loads of accounts that do. Yeah, there are. In my examples, there is a brand that's on TikTok who is B2B and they have great engagements. They jumped on one trend to try and do a dancing one and it had the least amount of engagement in comparison to their other ones. So what I'm saying here is just because you see others dance doesn't mean that it's right for your account and your profile, don't jump on a trend if it doesn't fit the niche. Yeah, I think that's really good. And it's also knowing your audience, right? Like it underperformed because if you're in a B2B space that means you don't have teens or Gen Z following you who cares about the dance. One of my favorite creators on TikTok is a building inspector. And if he did a TikTok dance, it would be like weird and creepy and I'm not interested. But he gets, I mean, tens of thousands of views and engagement and interaction. That is B2B in real life. People are super interested in those things but it's about setting precedent and knowing your audience just like any other platform. Absolutely, 100%. What are the things that stop people immediately? It's, I don't know what to make a video about or I'm not a dancer or I don't know what to say. Someone doesn't wanna be the face of the video. And in the examples that we've pulled and I've looked at whether it is marble countertop company or roofing or they do custom furniture design, every single one of them uses the trending audio and adds their text onto it and no one is the voice, no one is the face. So you don't have to have this concern or worry that you're not camera ready or stage ready. Literally just showcasing what you do every single day in your business, in your products, if it's assembly line, if it's a roofing company and you're showing someone apply different types of roofing tiles or shingles or you're really zooming in and answering questions and showing them why you do things a certain way, you're giving an opportunity for someone to learn about your business, understand your brand and then be an advocate for your brand and then continue to share it. So it really is just a way of trying to give people a behind the scenes eye at what you're creating. Yeah, and I think the other thing to mention here is there is a lot of really sophisticated editing that happens on TikTok in those 15, 60 second videos. You don't have to do that. It's totally okay. Again, it's knowing your audience. One of the main hurdles that we help manufacturers overcome or have conversations about with manufacturers, just the worry like Ashley is mentioning about how do I do this thing that everybody else is doing and don't let the complexity of what you're seeing stop you from doing anything. If you think there's an opportunity like I'm imagining, if you're a power tool company there is basically an endless amount of content that you have to like show your power drill screwing a screw into a piece of wood or something like that. Or conversely, if you're a manufacturer you can show a power drill like installing your product or how this is installed. Like that behind the scenes content is so engaging and interesting in a way that just still product imagery simply isn't. And frankly, even finished project imagery can't compete with. So Ashley, tell us a bit more about some of the example profiles that you have found to be really successful in the industry on TikTok. Sure. So I love the idea anytime an account has a very specific niche that they try to either attract or associate it to something happening from a social perspective. So for example, the Met Gala something very popular it's covered on TV, on social media everybody watches it, everyone wants to look at the outfits there was a faucet and fixtures company that is based in California and they literally just have faucets and plumbing fixtures and they created an entire TikTok video comparing the faucets and fixtures to Met Gala outfits. So I mean, it's very unique. I know, right? Like this is the Kim Kardashian full black faucet basically in comparison. If we're gonna have something that looks really glamorous and then there's a comparison of that one next to that. So they made something that people were paying attention to that was trending and they made it fit for their business and their brand. They didn't say this is the Kim Kardashian faucet. They just said, hey, these are inspired by paint companies do a really great job with that as well. Anytime you can create an inspirational opportunity that and use images that everyone is seeing and consuming at that point and allow them to associate you to it in a positive way is 100% checking the box of what you should do. There's other examples of doing before and after transformations. A lot of times when we're in this B2B space or we're doing building projects and we're talking about products, the average person and end user doesn't know how they all work together. They see them as individual components and pieces and they become overwhelmed. So showing them the example of this is where we started and then this is where we're ending and we placed all of these together in this beautiful way. It's just taking your cell phone and walking through a door of a project that you did or taking your phone and recording the assembly line in the manufacturing facility. It's not something where you need an entire production company to come in and spend two, three days recording and shooting footage. You don't need to go that crazy. It's very, very doable. Yes. You actually shouldn't go that crazy, highly produced content, which kind of conflicts is what I just said. So there's this between like edits and like kind of cool, tricky video edits. But that's one thing that's on TikTok but highly produced content would actually probably perform very poorly. Agreed. And the reason for that is because the highly produced and edited content from like a really high end production company is going to look like an ad. And we don't want it to look like it could be an ad on a Superbowl. It needs to look like it's organically happening inside the platform and someone uploaded it for consumption versus promotion. I have this crazy person that I follow on TikTok. They're also on Instagram. They are a commercial painter. And I watched for an embarrassing amount of time. He was edging. So, and I just watched him edge like this entire huge multiple thousand square foot room. But it was fascinating to watch like the process and how quick he was. And obviously he has like a spray gun and things like that. And just thinking about that and it was very poorly lit, you know, like not well produced, definitely just held by the other person on the job and walked around a room. I mean, there wasn't text on the screen. There wasn't a cutaway. There wasn't a single fancy thing about it. And I watched that video no less than five times. There are videos that do well, literally of the audio of you just opening up the package of a product. There are very specific niche videos that do things for a certain reason. And you shouldn't be ashamed of watching the video of the painting. There was another account that's based in the UK and they do granite and quartz. And literally I watched from probably 30 minutes, videos of them just a machine that they use that cuts the stone in half. Fascinating. Yeah, so manufacturing is so such like an untapped resource for content. I feel like we talk about this all time and we maybe even talked about it when you were here previously, but like where do I start? Get into your manufacturing plant. Show how layers are applied to your product to build the strength and durability and quality that you talk about. Show how there's precision cut in your countertops or how the fibers are pulled apart and then put back together or whatever. I mean, it's so, so fascinating. So let me ask you another question then. Should all building materials manufacturers be on TikTok? I don't wanna say no and I don't wanna say yes. It depends on your resourcing. So if you have the time, if you have the resources, say for instance, if you are in manufacturing and you have multiple checkpoints in which a product goes through a process from beginning to end, before it actually gets delivered, you can create a video or a series of videos for the entire process, how it comes from ideation, like you're drawing it up, you have the idea and then it actually goes into production, how it then completes through production and then how it gets shipped out, how the unboxing happens. You can do the entire customer journey and that is really great to do. However, if your manufacturing facility is not near you, if you don't have boots on the ground to take some of those images and that footage, then I'd say you might have an issue in actually being able to share those components and those pieces of your business. I think that you need to make a list of what do you have? What do you have immediately today that you could talk about? What is on your website that could be expanded on? What are your frequently asked questions? You could just do an entire series of frequently asked questions. I mean, there's an opportunity. I think the answer to that question is always, it depends on the resources. I think that you should always, before you jump into it, there needs to be strategy behind it and understanding the same way that we do with Instagram or Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, understanding the user profiles that are there, the audience who you're trying to speak to is the purpose for this TikTok channel to speak to someone who's gonna buy it? Are you trying to get more dealers? Are you trying to get more builder? What is the purpose? So if you can identify who you're speaking to, what you'd want to show them and then do a series of how frequently you'd like to share them, what they would consist of, then I think you've really got a good TikTok strategy plan, but it is really putting those all down on the paper and figuring out the timeline. Yeah, I completely agree. I think that's great. So let's say you have that issue of like, I don't have boots on the ground. Like our marketing department is not located near a manufacturing plant and things like that, right? So a great place to start would actually be with preferred customers, potentially even preferred contractors because that way you're going to get those installation pictures. But who's your preferred builder? Do you have an architect or an engineer that you know if a project where your product is a fit comes up, they are going to specify you, reaching out to them and then getting them engaged in the process to gather project photography or get that behind the scenes. Can you get your product pinned up on a wall like we know architects do now that they're back in offices again, pinned up on a wall with a bunch of other complimentary products and getting that inspiration of the whole design aspect. Can you get some feedback from them and your customers will absolutely love that. Do you have contractors that you know have installed your product a thousand times? You can be confident they're going to install it correctly because don't want to release a video of your product being installed improperly. But getting them involved, I mean, you probably have customers who are already active on social media. We're not talking about influencers. You might have contractors who are very proud of the work that they do, but they posted to their Instagram with 300 people. No shame, that's great. That's a great place to start of somebody who already cares and is really engaged and is interacting and getting their hands on your products on a daily basis just having either them or somebody else that's on their crew, taking a quick video while they're installing it, getting it off of the truck, matching it up next to other colors or selecting something about your product or how it looks next to other pieces that it's going to be seen next to, things like that. There's an endless possibility of content. It's just, it's always the resourcing. Yeah, it is always the resourcing. It's making the time, the connections and these are all positive things. While you're working and building towards the resources, you are strengthening your relationship with your customers who do use your products that you're asking for installation photos from. You're asking for completed project images. You're just strengthening that relationship and then they see you as you're talking to them, they become a resource, you become a resource for them more often. But literally it, I don't think we necessarily need to focus on only doing a video when you have a perfect project to show. Perfection I think is achieved by practice and your first video is never going to be your best one but not putting up a video because you're scared it's not perfect is something that you should not go for as a goal. Literally I've seen many different TikTok videos. Sometimes they're like, well, how frequently should I load them? I literally have seen multiple accounts that will drop probably 20 or 30 TikTok videos all in one day. There's no rhyme and there's no reason. It's very similar to Instagram in that reels have an opportunity to have re-engagement months after they've been shared. The same thing is true for TikTok. It has an opportunity to be seen and shared again and again, regardless of the timestamp being done one day, one time. And talking about sharing things that you don't think would really get a high engagement rate, there was a roofing company that literally showed how they get the actual asphalt shingles from the ground up to the roof. And literally it just looked like it was a Dunway or a conveyor belt attached to a ladder and it just loads it straight up. No one's carrying it over their shoulder. It just literally showed it going all the way up and one of the installers picking it up and carrying it to the roof. And that was it. It was, but there were multiples of those and they all have really great engagement. People like stuff like that, like those progressions and things that like loop really well. People love stuff like that. Okay, but before we let you go, tell us a non B2B TikTok that you love. Oh my God, okay. It could be like guilty pleasure TikTok. Okay, guilty pleasure TikTok. I don't know that there's one specific account, more so it's just a general theme. Any of the travel ones are amazing where they're traveling and they're on location to like these really far off destinations. You have volcanoes. You have people that are like skydiving off the sides of cliffs. Like things I would never do because I'm scared to death of heights. Like I'd need to be medicated and someone pushed me. But, and then I'd probably sue them after the fact. But like those are the videos that I look at because that's the adventurous part of me that I know I won't do that, but I love watching someone else do it and enjoy seeing them happy because they did that. And I'm happy they're happy, but I'm happy my feet are on the ground. Yes, I love that. Well, Ashley, thank you so much. As always, you bring the best information and a ton of good content for us to consume and things to chew on. If you like this content, I encourage you to head to benvio.com slash podcast and subscribe. Or if you're already subscribed, go ahead and leave us a review. It really does help others to find the podcast and we are always grateful for your time spent with us. Thanks everybody. Have a great day.