TikTok Marketing: What Every Business Needs to Know

TikTok spent 2018 merging with Musical.ly and 2019 turning into something brands couldn’t ignore. By mid-2019 it had climbed past a billion downloads worldwide, and the app’s For You algorithm was doing something Instagram and Facebook never quite managed: handing brand-new accounts real reach without a media budget behind them. That combination, a huge and fast-growing audience plus an algorithm that rewarded good content over follower count, is why the question landed on so many business owners’ desks in 2019: should we be here, and if so, how?

Who this fit in 2019

TikTok’s user base in 2019 skewed young, heavily Gen Z and younger millennials, with a real center of gravity in the under-24 crowd. That made it an obvious fit for brands selling to teens and young adults: apparel, beauty, food and beverage, entertainment, mobile games. It made much less sense for a B2B software company or a law firm, whose buyers simply weren’t spending meaningful time in the app yet.

The other filter worth applying was creative capacity. TikTok in 2019 rewarded fast, rough, personality-driven video far more than the polished spots that worked on Instagram. A brand that could produce that kind of content quickly, or partner with creators who already could, had a real shot. A brand that could only produce quarterly polished campaigns was better off waiting or putting its energy into a platform that suited its production pace.

What running TikTok required

Early movers in 2019, e.l.f. Cosmetics and Chipotle among the most visible, built hashtag challenges that asked users to remix a sound or format rather than just watch an ad. That structure mattered: TikTok in 2019 was still primarily an organic, participation-driven platform. The formal ads platform was only beginning to open up to advertisers in the US that year, so most of the value came from earning attention, not buying it.

Practically, that meant committing to posting consistently, several times a week at minimum, and being willing to follow trending sounds and formats rather than dictate them. It also meant accepting a level of unpolish that would have felt wrong on other channels. The businesses that struggled were usually the ones that treated TikTok as another distribution channel for content built for Instagram, rather than building for the platform’s native format.

When it made sense to wait

Not every business needed to be on TikTok in 2019, and forcing it rarely worked. If your customers were mostly over 35, if your sales cycle was long and considered or if you had no capacity to produce native short video, jumping in early bought you little. The audience simply wasn’t there yet for a lot of categories, and a poorly executed presence could do more harm to brand credibility than staying off the platform entirely.

A simple way to decide

Three questions were enough to sort most businesses in 2019: does a meaningful share of your target customer spend time on TikTok, can you produce short, native, somewhat rough video on a weekly cadence and is there a genuine reason someone would want to follow your account rather than just see one ad. A yes to all three meant the upside was real. A no to any of them meant the smarter move was to keep watching the platform mature before committing real resources to it.

The businesses that got it right in 2019 didn’t necessarily have the biggest budgets. They had a fit between their audience and the platform, and the willingness to make content that looked like it belonged there instead of content that looked like an ad.