The objection we hear in almost every boardroom is the same sentence: our customers are not on TikTok, that is for teenagers dancing. It was a reasonable thing to believe in 2019. It stopped being true somewhere during the lockdowns, when the app picked up an enormous wave of adult users who arrived out of boredom and stayed out of habit.
TikTok for brands: who is actually on the app now
Look at the content rather than the stereotype. Recipe accounts, personal finance explainers, car reviews, home renovation, medical myth busting, small business owners showing how they pack orders. The dancing is still there, and it is now a small share of what the feed serves. In our own client accounts, the audience delivering the most conversions has consistently been between 25 and 40, not under 20.
The other thing that changed is intent. People now search inside the app the way they search on Google, especially for recommendations and how to content. That is a discovery channel, not a novelty.
What worked in our first campaigns
Three formats carried almost all the results. A person explaining something useful straight to camera, with no set and no script. A behind the scenes look at how the product is actually made or delivered. And a direct answer to the question customers ask most often, filmed in under thirty seconds.
What failed was equally consistent: anything repurposed from a television advert, anything with a corporate voiceover, and anything where the first second was a logo. The platform is unusually honest about this. If the content is boring, the reach simply does not arrive.
How to start without embarrassing yourself
Do not hire a dancer. Find the most naturally watchable person in your business and give them fifteen minutes a week. Post four times a week for eight weeks before judging anything, because the algorithm needs a body of work to understand who to show you to. Watch completion rate above everything else.
Eight weeks and thirty two videos is a small bet against being early on a channel that is quite obviously going to matter. If you want a considered view on whether it is the right bet for your specific audience, that is the sort of question our digital marketing solutions team works through before a single video gets shot.
