When we talk about TikTok, most people believe that it is all about entertainment. But the beauty of the TikTok business is it’s far more than just entertainment. I discussed business strategies with Elliot Padfield, a genius with TikTok ads. He’s 18 years old. He runs Padfield Media, and he’s got a host of various accomplishments. Here are some points that we discussed. Are TikTok business ads paid or organic? TikTok is so frosty, especially on the organic side. When is the right time to start thinking about paid versus pure organic? So it’s very much a two-pronged strategy. There’s no right or wrong answer. If we talk about paid ads, it’s scalable and much more reliable. But at the same, if we talk about organic ads and when you do it correctly. For an early brand with a low marketing budget, you can push $40,000 to $50,000 of sales and a couple of videos without much input.  When you’re working with direct-to-consumer brands and our community is a lot of professionals. Many real estate agents, chiropractors, doctors, home service folks, and maybe people selling more services than products, both with paid ads and organic ads, are a great fit. TikTok is pushing into a space where people are going for recommendations on restaurants and for information to learn. Anything that would work on YouTube works on TikTok. So as a professional, you can educate and build trust and authority. as you would on any other social media platform with the added benefit of organic ad reach. So whatever it is that you do to produce content that educates while entertaining and being in a native format. Elliot runs an agency, “Padfield Media” where he specializes in TikTok ads for brands who want to spend at least 50 K and meet some criteria. How to know if it will work or not? It’s just about finding the right angle that works. There are few brands, products, and services that are unmarketable on TikTok. It’s just about finding an angle. That’s both shareable enough and fun enough for the platform. That is the real thing with social media. It’s about producing content marketing angles that are native to the forum. It’s more about figuring out how to adapt what you’re doing to work with the audience and fit in on the platform. Creative versus the mechanics of running ads Creative ads are 90% of the process and the initial element where we need them. Find the angle that works for the brand. But after that, it’s nearly entirely creative.  The TikTok platform right now is super easy to run ads. It’s just about being able to iterate, produce content that feels native, and produce it on a large scale. It often takes far more touch points on TikTok to convert than on Facebook, but with the price, that still makes sense. So when launching an initial set of ads and looking at these benchmarks, are there specific stats? Like CPM cost per view, video completion rate, and cost per click OS. Creating content with TikTok business TikTok is not just a content distribution platform, like many social media platforms. Brands need to have personalities. And so, a lot of Fortune 500 brands are producing content. Like they would on any other social media platform and getting a reasonable amount of reach. One is producing content that is incredibly platform native. That isn’t just about branded content but about creating content for the community. Will TikTok business grab YouTube’s market Short-form content is very much the future, and TikTok will continue to eat into YouTube’s market share more and more. Cooking tutorials, short form financial advice. The content we see on YouTube will migrate short-form documentaries, especially with TikTok now, allowing 10-minute uploads more potential. TikTok often likes to throw out features to an audience without much guidance and let creators figure out what to do with them. Marketers can dive right in and mold the way the platform develops. That’s incredibly powerful for brands. The paid side of the growth in TikTok, it’s from almost every source imaginable. Paid is going to become more competitive and more challenging. We’ve been in a phase where paid ads have been easy, purely because there is so much traffic to the site. I hope these business strategies will help your business to grow. I Look forward to your feedback.