Explore TikTok's Potential for Your Business

In this podcast episode, Steve Miller and David Mayo Loomis discuss the potential of TikTok as a B2B marketing platform. David shares his experience with TikTok and explains how the platform has evolved to cater to micro-interests. They discuss the algorithm that curates personalized feeds based on user interactions and highlight the value of TikTok for reaching target audiences. They also discuss the demographics of TikTok users and give examples of B2B brands utilizing the platform. The speakers suggest strategies for B2B companies to explore TikTok and emphasize the importance of taking the first step in understanding the platform's potential for marketing.

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Follow Dave:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidloomis/

Get Dave's book: Marketing Is Everything We Do

Interested in learning how Voice of the Customer can grow your business? Contact Dave: dave@loomismarketing.com

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Follow Steve:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveamiller/

Get Steve's bestselling book: Uncopyable: How to Create an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition

Want to learn how to generate more business without spending a ton of moolah, and separate yourself from the competition? Steve's online presentations and consulting will make you UNCOPYABLE! Contact him: stevem@beuncopyable.com

Transcript

(Transcribed by AI)

Steve: Hey everybody, Steve Miller, better known as Kelly's Dad, Marketing Gunslinger. Welcome to the B2B Marketing and Sales Podcast with my close, personal, smarter than hell author of Marketing Is Everything We Do, Mr. David Mayo Loomis, right there, David Mayo Loomis. 

Dave: Welcome, sir. Good to see you. That's my name.

Don't wear it out or do 

Steve: wear it out. Do wear it out. That's right. And I say it's good to see you. Of course, it's because you and I are on, we're looking at each other on video. And for those of you that are just listening. Nice to hear you. It's nice to hear you. Nice to hear you too.

You made it, you made a comment to me recently. about something that I know nothing about. A marketing 

Dave: tool that I don't know, I know nothing about. That's pretty hard to do. 

Steve: I just act like it's, 

Dave: that I know all these things. Steve pretends to know the most, for the most part, it's just, but in the, in this one, he's admitting he doesn't.

I 

Steve: know nothing about this. Okay. And what, he made a comment about how he was he was watching these amazing video, B2B videos on TikTok. Correct. 

Dave: Is that correct? Yeah that's correct. And I also have heard I do a lot of customer, voice of customer interviewing, as in the B2B space.

And recently I've been talking to people that I interview about all sorts of different types of products and services that they're buying. And I'm always asking them, Hey, what kind of media do you consume? Where do you get information about X, Y, and Z? And people have started mentioning, Oh, I watch Tik TOK videos about this.

And I'm like, Oh, you watch Tik TOK videos about dancing moves or people jumping off, falling off a roof or, ski jumping. No. I watch Tik TOK videos about construction sites and how to optimize fuel consumption and how to maintain my auto lift in my service bay. Stuff like that.

that you would just never think people are watching YouTube for. 

Steve: I pride myself for being very open minded and and I always say every marketing tool works for somebody. Okay. They might not. They might not all work for everybody, but they work for somebody. And I have really never looked at TikTok for for business.

Now, for the, there, there are all of the TikTok videos just short. 

Dave: No. In fact, there there's some very long ones that originally, so it came out in 2016 and originally they were all very short and they had to be very short, but now. You can string together as an editor, you can string together a whole bunch of stuff and make longer videos.

I had no idea. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, definitely. It's not all, it's not all shorts at all. 

Steve: So can you give us a background about Tik Tok and what it's all about? How did it. And how did you hear about it? It just came through those voice of customer conversations.

Dave: No. I I have I have two daughters that are now they're 26 and 28. What was that? That was eight four, five, six, seven years ago. TikTok came out. So this is 2023 and came out in 2016. And I don't think I got on it for a couple years, but they did. And then I started taking a look at it.

And honestly, at first it was You know, people doing, dances and then there would be, it's a meme plus 

Steve: I think of TikTok and I think of, okay, 

Dave: cat videos. You think of that? Or maybe you think of remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? Oh, yeah, the Ice Bucket Challenge which was basically a viral video Motif type thing that happened.

And so TikTok in a lot of parts of TikTok operate in the, in that way, in that somebody will do something and somebody will copy it. There's a skateboarder that, it films himself, to a Fleetwood Mac song drinking, cranberry juice. And it becomes very popular and then everybody copies it and tries to, do the same thing and that sort of thing.

There's the fun and entertaining side to TikTok, but it's incredibly nichey, which is why I think you would really love this because in a lot of ways, it's all about the moose. It's all about micro interest. content. So when you're on it when you sign up for TikTok, there's two things that you can basically take a look at on your screen.

And it would be that like the four, there's something called a for you page. Which is it's algorithm suggesting stuff and then there's others that are like the things that you have already expressed interest in and the things that you're following so you can follow certain things, okay, but like I said, it's the algorithm is.

scary good in that once you if you like something, if you like a video or if you actually comment in a video, it'll, it knows that. And then certainly if you follow it, those are all things that you that contribute to the algorithm. The other thing that contributes is how long you actually watch a video that comes up.

So a feed comes up and it's just in rotation. It just next thing comes up. And if you watch it it recognizes. Every second that you continue to watch it. And it like, Oh, he likes this. He likes this, or she likes this. If you just scroll and say, I don't want to watch this, and go on to the next one, it knows that too.

And it's I'm not going to show him much more of that. So I'm going to show him something else. And it just getting the more you use it, the better it gets. But let's say that I am a, auto mechanic, and I work on I don't know, I work on old Mustangs. If I go into TikTok and I search, Mustang engine repair, and a video comes up and I watch the thing and I like it and follow the person, lo and behold, I'm going to be shown.

Very off frequent, more frequently other ones that I had no idea it existed about, repairing, Mustangs and that's the way, honestly, it could be with almost any any B2B business and, more and more there's content in there about, about marketing, a lot of B2C marketing, but a lot of people getting on and there's like this, There's this whole work life balance thing.

A lot of people are consuming those types of videos, advice from, people about how to operate inside your business or work or your career, those sorts of things. And then just as a, as an aside, if you're not a user, like. They would, if you, let's say you're interested in you, you call you, you're a golfer and big news today about the, or yesterday about live and PGA, but we won't get into that, but please don't, but, so if you were, if you wanted to, if you watched a lot of golf videos on it, then you would be in the hashtag golf talk.

There's a whole, and so any kind of special interest that you could possibly dream up in your wildest imagination, there's a quote unquote side of TikTok has this and has its own hashtag and. There's people that are interested in that micro niche. So it's the moose. So 

Steve: the other but don't doesn't YouTube do that?

Dave: Oh yeah, absolutely. YouTube can do it, but it does a little bit differently. And it's also serving up ads all the time. and in a different way. The format is just different. It's just like a beginning and an end as opposed to like a constant feed type thing. But I looked up some stats that are interesting.

Adults Spend 62 minutes a day watching digital videos. 62 minutes a day watching digital videos? Yeah, so an hour a day. Wow. Average adult, okay? 90 percent of people 18 to 44 are watching YouTube. So that, obviously we know that YouTube is incredibly popular. But then there's tutorials. 30 percent of people say they're watching how to videos and tutorial videos on YouTube, and 23 percent said they're watching influencers.

So vlogs or, people that are talking about a certain subject that are, you know, experts in it. People's tastes in general they go back and forth. Now we work and we play and now people are working from home. And now even our video feeds are mixed between entertainment and education and helping me with my job, so that's what I'm seeing. So now TikTok. So there's a billion active users monthly, a billion. Yeah. And there's only 4. 5 billion people that use the internet at all, supposedly. So 20% of those internet users are active users of TikTok globally. There've been 3 billion downloads of the app though.

So a third of the downloads are active users. 

Steve: And this and, correct me if I'm wrong, and this is just on mobile, right? 

Dave: Yeah in fact, almost everybody watches TikTok on their phone, that size. I happen to have it on my iPad and I watched it on my iPad and my kids think I'm like, like weird but, and nobody watches it on a desktop.

Yes, all mobile. The average session time on TikTok is 11 minutes. Wow. And if you compare that with other platforms, It's two or three or four times in some cases the average is higher. So there's a hundred million us users. Half are below the age of 29, so half are 30 half of them are age 30 and above, but it does skew younger, but if you think about it, there's people now, obviously, that are 18, 20, 21, 22 years old that are getting into the workforce, and then that, then we're talking about nine, nine whole years, age 21 to 30, that are active users and they're in the workforce.

And a lot of them are working at B2B companies. They're listening to us right now. And the growth, but the growth of the adults, over the 30 it's growing. It's grown five and a half times over the last 18 months. So it's definitely catching up. So let's see. I just, there's, there are companies that are, have their own TikTok and then there's.

There's people that talk about brands, B2B brands on TikTok, using the hash, using a hashtag that has the brand name in it. There are some, as you can expect, some of the company brands are technology related, because It's a tech platform. So you've got Adobe on there with, half a million followers, you've got Shopify on there, people that are, and those are people that are starting their own businesses, or maybe they're looking at Adobe and they're getting tips on how to do it for themselves or for business or whatever.

But let's take a heart of the line B2B brand, like Caterpillar. Okay. If you search Caterpillar on TikTok, there's a bunch of weird stuff that has to do with, Caterpillars. But really the Caterpillar brand comes up. Yeah. To you, but to you, but there's people that love caterpillars.

Exactly. Caterpillar talk. So I've got this this feed up that, that, so it'll, it, it gave me caterpillar equipment and I'm holding this up for Steve to see, but I can look at top videos, regular, just regular vid, all the videos, users, in other words. companies that might have Caterpillar in their name.

And actually Caterpillar the corporation doesn't seem to have like a blue check mark type thing that at least that's near the top. But there's a ton of and you can also search by the hashtags, but there's just a ton of videos. These are all hardcore videos about people using their Caterpillar tractors.

Yeah. 

Steve: What, give me an example of like, how many, it has, does it say how many views they've had or anything 

Dave: like that? Oh let's see. Yeah, this one has this particular one that I just looked at has 1, 700 views. Here's one with 95, 000 views. That's just, it's a caterpillar tractor going along and it's the guy talking about his tractor.

I've got 

Steve: let's take a one minute 

Dave: dive into its history back in 1995, Syncrude Canada and O& K collaborated. So this is just, this is about the O& K RH 400. So this is. Who's interested in this? 28, 000 people have liked this video, which is about a big piece of cat equipment that's in the middle of Canada, working on some crude oil stuff.

It goes on and on. There's hundreds and hundreds of these videos. And you can look here. It says others searched for caterpillar equipment hacks, caterpillar equipment expo 2023. Caterpillar Equipment Damage, Caterpillar Equipment 777, which is a particular model. And it just goes on.

Caterpillar Equipment Mechanic. Okay, 

Steve: so it's giving you examples of what other people are searching for. What 

Dave: they searched for, yep. If I just look at hacks, these are people, these are machine operators. telling you what their hacks are for working with their caterpillar equipment. You just don't expect when you say TikTok to hear that.

No, 

Steve: I, no, I certainly didn't and shame on me. But okay, now help me understand how I get awareness. All right. Which to me is. Is a very fuzzy thing. How do you see how somebody, how a company, for example, can do this, do TikTok and get people to reach out 

Dave: to them? Yeah, I think that it's going to be, it would be great.

It's great for current users of a product to inform them and to give them. Tips and tricks and to make them feel maybe it in part of the club that you want to belong to. And you 

Steve: know, we, that's actually a very good point. That, that is, that's a very good point is that people who are current customers, who have.

Some kind of equipment, from Caterpillar that, they can go in and know, and there's like this hack, you say, hashtags 

Dave: Or, yeah maybe they can create a special hashtag for, for their current customers that has to do with certain incentives or certain type of special content not just hacks from the community, but hacks from that, That Caterpillar, the corporation knows about.

And, uncopyable experience, like this is what you talk about, which is so what, they can talk about some of those things. And it's hard to copy those. Let's see. The other would be, comparison videos of certain types of equipment versus other types of equipment, which would be informative and subtly salesy.

Well, 

Steve: that'd be, they'd be totally salesy, there's nothing subtle about it and nothing wrong with that. 

Dave: Now, right now ads will appear very infrequently in your in your, Like a real ad, like mine appear in your feed, but a lot of it is like sponsored content. So you could do sponsored content and pay for it to appear in people's feeds that are interested in.

So 

Steve: like you mentioned the 777, all right. Which, for me, that's an airplane. But but for people who are customers of Caterpillar that's a product. So they could have hashtag, cat 777 or something like that. And so anybody who 

Dave: either, it's a dump truck, it's a big dump truck.

It's a hundred ton haul truck. Okay. I've been in one of those. And 

Steve: so they, they can they can create information for the people who do have who have the 777, and they can also, they can create information for people who might be looking at it. And then they could, and so they could have videos that were the, showing the comparison of the 777 with whoever, or some other truck and some other dump truck.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Lots of, I think it's early days in a lot of ways. And just being creative, knowing that people are out there watching these. It's all about eyeballs and, and you say being there and being top of mind when they need you. So it's staying in front of them. Do you have 

Steve: a sense of comparing this with.

YouTube. If you're a company, let's say you're a small B2B company. Yeah. You can only, you can't spread yourself too thin, right? You got to, if you're going to do marketing and this is something I'm sure, I know I hear this a lot. Okay. And I'm sure you have over the years too, is you're working with a small B2B company.

They might be a 20 million company or even a 50 million company, but they might only have one person running the 

Dave: marketing. Exactly. Exactly. So here's what I would do if I was that company. I would I would actually, and if I really wanted to get into video, because video is obviously more and more consumed by the day.

More than any other kind of content. If you don't mind, 

Steve: if you don't mind me, plussing that a little, or just sidebar on this is to say, if you're not using video, what's wrong? 

Dave: Exactly. Because it doesn't have to be all that professionally produced anymore. Nobody cares. And that might, 

Steve: and I think that's actually another episode for us to talk about the truth 

Dave: of using video.

Okay. Exactly. 

Steve: But I'm fascinated by this TikTok thing. Because it's okay why would people go from using YouTube 

Dave: to go to you? I don't think you would. I don't think. Okay. Okay. But I know that people are spread thin and they don't have time for things.

So the thing about YouTube is it's very searchable and it's very discreet. So if you're, if you want to create a video about a very specific topic, you can do that and label it. And it's very buttoned down, almost like a dictionary of videos. And, and that's the way people use it when they are searching for something and they can find it and read a list and that sort of thing.

I would say TikTok is searchable. It's a little bit more random and it's a little bit more, I would say, still entertainment based. Yeah, I've got a little spare time and I'm going to watch these videos about the 777 haul truck. because I love it and it's cool and I'm gonna watch a few of these, or I'm gonna, oh, this one catches my interest.

Rather than, Hey, I want to find out how to fix the, the something nozzle on, this particular piece of equipment. So if I was that small B two B company, I would have my marketing person continue or up their game on YouTube and just making sure whether it's instructional videos.

about our equipment promotional video, whatever it is, just keep doing that. If you're, if you only have so much bandwidth. And then I would send out a video, I would send out an email to the company and I would say, Hey, company we're we'd love to have a TikTok presence who in our company uses TikTok.

and wants to help us, on the side, start producing some, interesting informative TikTok videos about our pro about the usage of our products or whatever the thing is. And somebody's going to step up. I work for a non profit and that's exactly how it worked. The person just started making some things on her own.

On the side, at home. And and it was very, it was complimentary to, the work of the nonprofit and that sort of thing. And whether you compensate this person, maybe they're an operator, maybe they're a machinist, maybe they're a scientist or a chemist and they're making, but, who, see who raises their hand.

You know what I mean? Just like force multiplier a forest of multipliers? No, a forest. Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump. No. I'm sorry to say that, but no. The police, so the police, like that, in those neighborhood watch signs that you see in windows that, so the police force is multiplied by.

The whole neighborhood who considers themselves sort of watchers and part of the force. So that's what I mean by force multiplier. Force multiplier. 

Steve: Yes. And 

Dave: nothing Star Wars. May the force multiplier be with you. May the force 

Steve: multiplier be with you. Okay. All right. So what do you, what would you recommend?

I think what we're saying, what you're saying, and I am very, I'm very much going to be stepping in and starting to look at this. Yeah. Because. It's a tool. And if it's a tool that, that if the moose are there, Oh, then, 

Dave: then yeah, they are. And reels is good to zone by Facebook and Facebook slash Instagram.

AKA meta, a word that is a metaverse is probably going away now that Apple has Facebook slash 

Steve: Instagram slash meta, which is going to go away. 

Dave: So Reels is Reels is good, but its algorithm is not as good as TikToks. And I don't think that the creators I would say better video creators are on TikTok right now.

And I'm 

Steve: about, what about what about YouTube shorts? 

Dave: I, it hasn't really taken ground. It hasn't taken they're trying, Google tried to create a social network to remember that was a Google plus. Oh boy, that was a, 

Steve: remember that? That was 

Dave: bad. Remember that? And they also tried to create glasses called Google Glasses.

Yeah, 

Steve: Apple's brought their own out 

Dave: now. They used to call those people glassholes. Yeah. If they wore those glasses.

Steve: And Apple comes out with their for those of you that are I don't know when you're listening to this. Oh boy, yes. But this week was the week when they announced they're gonna have these quasi glasses that mix virtual with reality. And and they're 

Dave: 3, 400.

Exactly. 

Steve: And look and LinkedIn these guys have all, both LinkedIn and Facebook came up with this, have moved forward with these reels and shorts, something like that as a response to TikTok. What is. You mentioned this earlier, before we got on what is the potential 

Dave: negative of TikTok?

Oh, I would say there's a technical negative that the U. S. government is worried about, which is the that China is somehow able to get a hold of your personal data and interests, and then use that against, You in some way or whatever. So it's owned by ByteDance and which is China, Chinese company.

And now it's U. S. subsidiary has supposedly built a wall around that. And they claim that it that data isn't shared. So we'll see. I think that'll be in litigation for a long time. So hopefully it will not be shut off down here, but, or in the U. S. But the, what was the other part of the question?

It was 

Steve: Yeah, it was like what 

Dave: are the, what are the negatives? The other negative is that it's addictive. It's, it actually is addictive. And if you. You can be on it and lose track of an hour or two of time and then if someone were to interview you afterwards and say, can you tell me about the videos that you just watched, you might be able to remember one or two out of the three, 200 that you just watched, something like that.

And so it's very, you were entertained and you loved it and it becomes habitual and that's what they want. And they want it to be addictive, right? So I just went into, this is why you should use this, Steve, because I can't wait to hear this because I just searched AI prompts. Oh, in Tik Tok.

Oh, there are thousands of videos and they all have things like this prompt will save you over 100 hours this year and secret chat GPT prompt library or chat GPT cheat sheet. Chat GPT super hack. What are these? 

Steve: I gotta get in, but you know what? But I'm going to be like... This says 

Dave: 600, 000 views.

Wow. This one has 800, 000 views. This one has 16, 000. 170, 000 views. Yeah, these are... There's a lot here. There's a lot. These are people. They're all people talking about chat. GBT in the video. That's very people oriented. And then they're talking about their hacks and their, the, how they write their prompts and all that kind of thing.

One person, the chat engineer prompt engineering. Yeah. Prompt engineering, which we talked about. Yes, exactly. Which we talked about. 

Steve: So 

Dave: it's extremely important. So check that out. All 

Steve: So now I'm going to put you on the spot. All right. Before we cut out of here. Okay. There was no reason for us to go into any other topic today.

This is, this has been fascinating for me now. If you are somebody who is listening to this or is watching this who is a B2B, Marketing person, owner of a small marketing small B2B company or something like that. What is the first step that they need to take? And how to determine whether TikTok is somewhere where they should be.

Dave: I would add, I would say I think it's easier to watch it on a tablet. So if you have a tablet or you're thinking about buying one, just go buy it. And that, so that you can do that. But if you don't, either that or on your phone, download the TikTok app if you don't have it and sign up.

Which takes about two minutes and then start using it and don't worry just familiarize yourself with it. So watch what comes up. Something's going to come up immediately, literally, and you're either going to scroll past it. Because it's not of interest to you, or you might watch it, and if you ever see something you like, heart it, so that the algorithm knows that you like that.

Then go into search, which is in the upper right, a little magnifying glass search. And start putting in some of your interests, some of your interests, they might be personal interests, sports or or hobbies or something like that, because, you want to be entertained and want to learn about your hobbies also, but then also put in your business and see, are your competitors on there?

Are there users of your business? Are you there customers of yours? Are there, what is the landscape around? Your business on TikTok and you don't just ask somebody, Oh, go find this out for me and tell me in a meeting, do it yourself because you don't understand it until you do it and then you'll see and then just take it from there.

But those are the first steps, 

Steve: first steps, and I, and that's really what I think is we got to do that first, take the first step then you take the second step. Then you take don't. Go into this and go, Oh boy this 

Dave: could be, Oh yeah, I don't have time for that. It's another thing.

I don't, it's just too much inch by inch. It's a cinch yard by 

Steve: yard. It's hard. And my, my, my philosophy always has been about the moose. As you well know, is that, if my moose are there, I need to be there. And if you don't mind me sharing you an example of what I'm talking about, which is just a strange example.

Dave: Sure, yeah, what's a strange example? Many 

Steve: years martial arts,

Company. They had a string of studios across the U. S. Okay. In martial arts. Because I had been in martial arts and so I had a real interest in it and stuff like that. But then in my business of consulting and marketing, I thought let me, and I got connected with this company and I wanted to know okay, who, they did, we figured out who their target market was, right?

And their moose. And then we went, and then I wanted to find out, okay where are the moose hanging out? And we started, and so we started researching these guys. We started surveying these guys. And we came up with an absolutely mind blowing result. Okay. We found out that Something like 45 percent of the people who we surveyed who were martial art, they were active martial artists, okay?

Studying this and stuff like that. 45 percent of them also read cat magazines.

That's different. Who saw that coming? Wow. 45%, that's a lot, that's a lot. 

Dave: I've heard of Kung Fu Panda, but not Kung Fu 

Steve: Kitty. Yeah go figure, right? Go figure. And so we started to, we went to these cat magazines and we said, Hey, we want to promote our martial arts studios. They thought we were nuts and but we did and it was actually pretty, it went pretty well.

We're always, we were giving away, okay come and try, have a free lesson, or, three free lessons. Things like that, and we were the only, they were, I say we, they were the only martial arts

Advertiser in the magazine. 

Dave: Yeah just to make you happy. There are thousands of martial arts cats videos on TikTok. Telling you, I am telling you. And it's really mostly cats doing martial arts. Yeah they're doing martial arts, right? Yeah, because they are they're agile and they fight in an interesting way.

Anyway, it was 

Steve: one of the most interesting the, one of the strangest things I ever... Encountered and but it was a perfect, it was a perfect example because I said, you know what we, you have to advertise in these magazines because that's where your moose are. They are there and they couldn't 

Dave: believe it.

They were there. What did the martial arts guy say when he got karate chopped by the other one? What's that? What did the martial arts guy say when he got karate chopped? I give up. What? Me ow! Me

ow! On that note, I'm taking us out of here. Because we can't say anything else. 

Steve: No, I'm done. I got nothing. I got nothing else. Thank you for all of that. That was fantastic. All right. Tutorial on 

Dave: That was fun. I appreciate it. That was fun. It's just the tip of the iceberg. We're going to, we're going to talk more about all sorts of related things.

So thank you all for joining us on the B2B marketing and sales podcast with none other than Steve Miller, author of Uncopyable. Author of Stealing Genius, author of a whole bunch of other books. The guy's unbelievable, really, let's just face it. This guy. Legend in his own mind. Yep. That too. And myself, Dave Loomis The Voice, the Dave Loomis, David McAllister.

The Voice! Yeah, remember that? Oh 

Steve: my gosh! Remember The Voice? Hello. Oh my gosh. Yes. You are The Voice. You gotta say something, 

Dave: Voice. Okay, I'm going to say goodbye, and I'm going to say my normal goodbye.