How B2B Brands Can Embrace TikTok: Will Aitken

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: B2B marketers love new and shiny toys. We're constantly checking out services and products that sound interesting, even if our toy box is overflowing. You just never know when something different will emerge as a game changer. If you've been watching TikTok over the past couple of years, a few things have happened. One, the number of users has surpassed 1,000,000,000. It's now the sixth biggest social media platform behind Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and WeChat. Two, the demographics are quickly changing. It's no longer dominated by teenagers dancing to music, although there's still a lot of that. And three, many companies, including B2B brands, have launched channels to build brand awareness and attract and engage prospects. If you're a B2B marketer, you need to explore TikTok to understand how it works and whether it's time to at least experiment with it. And to better understand TikTok and how B2B companies should approach it, I'm excited to have Will Aitken, head sales evangelist with Sales Feed, which has established a dynamic presence on the platform. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Will Aitken: Thanks so much, Mark. I'm really pleased to be here.

Mark Evans: The first question is an obvious one. Why the growing interest in TikTok among B2B brands and B2B marketers? Is it a combination of LinkedIn slash Twitter slash Facebook fatigue and curiosity about TikTok and its 1,000,000,000 users? Loaded question. Softball question.

Will Aitken: We've had the same four channels now for quite some time. People want something new. We have shiny object syndrome where we see something exciting and new and that looks fun. We wanna try it. So I think that's why a lot of B2B brands are turning there. But the other flip side of it is the 1,000,000,000 users. They're realizing that there must be some of their demographic within that user base. And with the huge organic reach that TikTok generously gives out, you don't have to invest much to get in front of a lot of people there.

Mark Evans: The 1,000,000,000 number is very sexy, very compelling. You counter that with marketers and B2B brands saying, my audience isn't there. My audience is on LinkedIn. My audience is on Facebook and Twitter. And I shouldn't be operating on TikTok because the people that I wanna reach simply don't use TikTok. True or false?

Will Aitken: Ugh. Come on. It's gotta be false. Right? 1,000,000,000 users, you don't think your decision makers, your target audience, or at least an influencer in the organizations that you're trying to target is part of that user base, especially when you consider that the majority of those users are in the countries that we often try to target with marketing, North America, Europe. There is no doubt in my mind that there are tons of decision makers on that, especially because I've created content for them, and it's resonated and performed.

Mark Evans: Let me ask you this question in another way. Assuming that our target audience, potential prospects are on the platform, how are they using the platform? Are they using it for entertainment, or are they also using it to discover and find out information about business services and products?

Will Aitken: Yeah. That's a good question. And I think anyone who spent some time on TikTok will understand this more. There is a I don't think anyone goes on Facebook to look for new products really. Mhmm. Or Instagram, but yet we still use those channels heavily now in B2B. But the feeling on TikTok is either you're gonna get a very quick laugh or you're gonna feel, I say, like you learned something. So I feel like people are there for two reasons. One, the algorithm is very smart. It learns your interest very quickly, and then it gives you more of that stuff. So it's a place to find out more about your interest, maybe learn a thing or two. But also the content is in a very entertaining format, which is what keeps you scrolling so much. So I think they're there to learn, and I think they're there to be entertained. And I think there's a space in there for a B2B brand to put themselves in front of people.

Mark Evans: Okay. So the obvious question, given the number of users and the fact that there may be prospects on the platform who may have interest in learning about B2B products and services, how seriously should B2B brands be taking TikTok right now?

Will Aitken: I think right now is the most serious time to be taking TikTok into consideration. B2B generally has been so slow to adopt the trends of its counterpart B2C market. We're always lagging behind. Things like that we get are like years behind what B2C brands are doing. And it's partly because of the niche audience, yes, but also because I feel like we get too caught in our ways and there's so many you, 'we don't do that.' There's this attitude that you just described. Our audience isn't on TikTok, and it takes time to realize that. But right now, it's so important to focus on TikTok because it's still an opportunity to be early. Loads more and more people are creating on TikTok. And as that happens, there's less opportunity to get shown to people. Imagine back in, let's say, 2000 and 2010. I'm sure a lot of people were saying these things about Instagram and Facebook, but now those are the places to be. There is so much value to being early or relatively early to a platform and growing an audience sooner rather than waiting another three years and showing up when it's even more difficult to grow.

Mark Evans: So on the flip side, what is the risk to a B2B brand if they dismiss TikTok, if their views of TikTok are cautious or they're not convinced about the platform's potential? A year from now, two years from now, what happens to those brands when they look at the TikTok platform?

Will Aitken: I think the risk is in that two years' time, it's gonna be harder to grow if they do make that decision to pull the lever. I think the risk right now is that those same four channels that you mentioned, the LinkedIn, the Instagram, the Facebook, the Twitter, those are really crowded right now. That people are prospects. Buyers are being bombarded. So the risk is really, I would say, the potential opportunity loss of not jumping on there right now and getting shown to a bunch of people who could potentially become your buyers in the future.

Mark Evans: Okay. So let's assume that TikTok is intriguing enough that a B2B brand and a B2B marketer accepts the fact that they need to be on TikTok or at least experiment. So from your experience with Sales Feed, explain to me how a brand should start to dip its toes in the TikTok waters and how a B2B marketer should do the same.

Will Aitken: To maybe take a few steps back. Before I start the Sales Feed account, which I now had before I jumped into Sales Feed and created a TikTok for them and then grew it to 40,000 followers, I had my own personal account, similar size, about 36,000 followers, and I was doing that from around April 2021. And then when I joined the Sales Feed team, I said, we've gotta be on TikTok. The team agreed, and then I applied all of the lessons I'd learned from my own personal account to Sales Feed, which gave us a really incredibly strong start. Our first ever video got 400,000 views. Wow. Because I had the ability to apply all the learnings, all the mistakes I've made on my own personal account, which I was just doing for fun, and apply that right away. So my recommendation would be to learn first because it really does help to have a strong start. Look at what others in your space are doing. I would say go to look for creators in your niche, maybe not brands yet because there's not that many of them. But let's say your niche is digital marketing. Search up the hashtag, see which videos have really performed and how those work. Really study those very closely because there's a formula almost to it with hooks, the length of the video, if they're using trends, if they're doing a silly dance, probably not in digital marketing. Right? But, like, right. If there's a nuance to it, and that comes from absorbing and observing. So consume a lot of content before you try and take a shot at creating.

Mark Evans: Okay. So that sounds like the right approach, and maybe I can relate it to my own experiences with TikTok. So I am hardcore on LinkedIn. For the last two years, I have posted almost every single day as a writer by training. It's a pretty natural form for me, and it's the ROI and the engagement has been tremendous. But at the same time, I also recognize that my clients are gonna be looking at TikTok, and I cannot be in a situation where I'm ignorant of the platform. So I have created, I don't know, about six videos. They're pretty short. They're pretty awful. So if I'm aside from just putting the phone in front of me and talking for thirty seconds, forty five seconds, sixty seconds, what are some of the things that I should be thinking about doing to start to make my TikTok videos a little bit better and a little bit better?

Will Aitken: You said it, that practice is one. It's not a natural process of pulling out a phone, speaking to it, or doing a trend or whatever the video may be. Practice definitely is a big one. Once again, consuming content, watching what others are doing, thinking about, hey, that was really good, but why was it good? Why did that video just get shown to me? Like, just have a little think to it. So my recommendation would be to do practice because my first few videos were awful as well. I'll probably say that about my videos today in two years' time as well, but, right. We're always hard on our past selves than what we did in the past, but it does take some practice in getting used to. And I think that becomes easier when you don't copy, but you get inspiration from elsewhere. You look at what's actually good and try and break down what parts made it good. What were they doing? When they were speaking, were they looking at the camera lens? Of course, they were because that's how you make a connection with someone. How long was the video? Was there lots of little cuts or was it all one long presentation? Those are the things that you can do, and there's plenty of resources out there now by young folk who are probably trying to teach other young folk, but we can benefit from that. Folks who are, you know, 20 years old trying to teach other people how to become influencers. Gotta look past your ego and you gotta watch a video like that because there are amazing tips. These folks who are younger than myself are doing an incredible job there, and there's a lot we can learn from them as long as we're willing to listen.

Mark Evans: Walk me through the Sales Feed journey on TikTok. So one, did they hire you to get them onto TikTok? Was that sort of part of your package? And then once you convince them that TikTok was a platform that they should definitely leverage, what are the next steps in terms of saying, okay. The first thing we have to do is this, and we're gonna talk about these things. We're gonna make these type of videos. We're gonna do it so often. Can you go back and sort of recount that journey that you took Sales Feed on?

Will Aitken: Of course. So to answer your first question, I was brought to the team that my TikToks were definitely part of it. Like, my boss, Tyler Lessard, VP of marketing at Vidyard, recognized that I was posting a lot of TikTok content, had grown a following on there, understood the platform quite well for someone in the B2B space. And I've been reposting a lot of that content onto LinkedIn and growing a following relatively quickly on that platform as well. He said, okay. We'll get to kind of understand where content's going from here. It's not getting longer. It's getting shorter. Right. That was part of it. Yeah. So then we always knew that TikTok was gonna be part of our strategy, but we didn't realize that it would be our biggest channel by far. And I wasn't ready for it to blow up as well. It took me nine months to grow a following of, I think at the time, had 20,000 followers. But with Sales Feed, it took less than a month. It was really, I said, okay. What is Sales Feed in a unique position to do versus myself? And a lot of that didn't just come down to, I can't just make Will Aitken sales my personal channel Mark 2. It needs to be something different. So what benefit do we have there? Well, we can up the production value slightly. We can involve more than one person, so there can be multiple faces on that. And then from there, we didn't and still haven't really looked at a long form strategy. We really just go with whatever we feel like doing every week, and it really works because of that. Because a lot of it is trends, a lot of it is timely, and a lot of it does just come to you when you're feeling creative.

Mark Evans: Can you provide some more details into the type of topics that you video and frequency? How do you produce your videos? Is it on the fly? Do you have a script? Is it structured, unstructured? I think that'll give people some guidance in terms of how they should approach videos. Because I think a lot of people probably think that these things have to be overly produced, and it seems like that's not the case at all.

Will Aitken: No. I wouldn't say so at all. I don't think I've ever spent more than thirty minutes on a TikTok. So just that puts into perspective for you. I will rewind a little bit just the previous question you asked, what our process is. We do have one person who owns it, which I think is really important. The person who owns the channel. If you look at successful B2C brands, even those like the one that everyone talks about Duolingo. That's one person who is a social media manager who works at Duolingo. She's awesome. But having her own it, it means that you've gotta give them the keys and say go for it. Now back to the question that you did just ask, my process of making videos generally comes from ideas, and those ideas come from prompts. Those things that I have expertise talking to, I've been an account executive. I've been in B2B sales for around six years. I have some experience that I can share, tips, strategies. I can repurpose those in a fun format. For example, one that we did was the sales help desk, which is like me doing a skit where someone calls up a help desk and asks a sales related question, and then I give them the answer and pretend that I'm working in a call center. But I'm still giving a tip. So we do a mix of humor and tips on our Sales Feed channel. On my own personal channel, I mainly focused on careers because that's obviously the demographics there for that. I was teaching people how to get into tech sales. On Sales Feed, we specifically do relatable B2B content, like, oh, isn't it the worst when you lose a contract at the end of the month? And then also sales tips, which come from myself, come from the team, and other people who are willing to collaborate with us as well. We bring in a lot of influencers, I should call them, in the sales space onto the channel as well.

Mark Evans: So walk me through a day in the life of Will Aitken, TikTok video producer. Do you have an idea that you're gonna run with? Is it a spur of the moment? Do you look at your sort of ideas list and go, okay. I'm gonna do that one today. How does that work?

Will Aitken: Yeah. So being a SME in sales means that I know what's relatable and what's not for salespeople. So a lot of it just comes down from scrolling through the feed myself and seeing what other people are doing, and then thinking, how could I try and make that really good idea into a sales thing? Or I might be looking, it comes a lot from other pieces of content. So I might think of a skit when I'm driving along the road. Now I normally just try and stop right there and write it down, find a place to pull over, and I have a notebook full of just ideas that I wanna do, and I tackle them when I can. And then there's the flip side, which are a bit more impromptu where I see a trend or a trending sound that I like, and I wanna just make that right away. So it's as easy as I have my phone right there. I'll think what do I need to do it. I'll get my tripod, my ring light. My setup down here is pretty ready for it, and then I'll just go ahead and make a video right there. And then as long as I don't have a slot in my calendar like I did today when I was late to this podcast recording. That's exactly what I was doing. I got distracted by making a video, and then I would walk away from my laptop and didn't hear the ding. Right? Because I wanted to make it right there and then because I had the idea of fresh in my mind. There's other things that I write down. So I'm always looking for inspiration from things on LinkedIn, other TikToks, other creators, not just B2B creators, but B2C creators. I think there's a lot of inspiration we can get from those folks.

Mark Evans: We live in a world of content repurposing, recycling, distribution. When you're doing TikTok videos, what do you do after that in terms of making sure that you're extracting as much ROI from each video that you make? And how do you adjust your videos for other platforms? Is the video on Instagram and Facebook different from what you might do on TikTok?

Will Aitken: Repurposing is one of the best parts about TikTok. It's why I really, really like it because you can have a video that goes on TikTok and gets 200 views. And then what do you do with it? You can put it on YouTube. You can put it on Instagram. You can put it on LinkedIn, which I've grown an entire following basically just doing that. Because on LinkedIn, it's still very new to everyone. They're like, oh, wow. A video. I didn't expect to see this in my feed. Right. The thing that you mentioned repurposing, and I thought we were gonna go down a different road there, is that what I see a lot of brands doing and a lot of creators as well are making the mistake of trying to repurpose content from other platforms onto TikTok. And I think that's where people are falling into a lot of traps because of traditional B2B marketing is, like, the content pyramid. I think it's good. I know I'm more of a salesperson than a marketer. But there's, like you build a big piece of content, and you cut it up, and you put it lots of different places. People don't come onto TikTok to watch a one-minute section of a webinar. That's not why they're on that platform. Mhmm. If they wanted that, they'd go on to YouTube and find it. So I see a lot of brands, a lot of people grabbing, like, a snippet from a webinar or a podcast recording and trying to make it work on that. One, it's normally landscape, so that's not gonna work. Because if you scroll a 100 times, you'll probably see one landscape video on TikTok. And the second piece is the content isn't, its time to value just isn't quick enough. You'll see almost every video you watch on TikTok has a hook. And the way that podcasts are recorded, it'd be really hard to just find a single piece of even this episode and make that work for TikTok. It really needs to be quick. It needs to be punchy. It almost needs to be value immediately. And I don't think those long form pieces of content have that.

Mark Evans: What are some of the other mistakes that B2B brands are making when they are using TikTok? Obviously, taking a snippet from a podcast or a webinar is not gonna work, or it's gonna be completely obvious that they're doing some straight recycling. Can you talk about some of the other mistakes that brands are making?

Will Aitken: Yeah. I can. One of the most frustrating ones for me, I can resonate with this because I made the same mistake when I launched my personal account, like I mentioned. But this is exactly why I think Sales Feed were so successful so quickly because it was good content, but good content isn't enough on TikTok. Because as you mentioned, a lot of those 1,000,000,000 users are very young people who have no interest or business watching B2B content. So if you just put up a video of, I don't know, a sales tip or even a relatable funny video about how losing deals at the final hour, and then you put it on TikTok and it gets shown to a 14 year old, they probably won't get the joke or won't find value in the tip. Mhmm. So that scrolling and they're not gonna engage. And what does that mean? Your video stops getting shown to people. So how do you stop that from happening? Use the right hashtags. Hashtags on LinkedIn and Instagram and even Twitter, they're almost like an afterthought these days, but on TikTok, it's still really important to tell TikTok who to show your content to. You have to be, 'Hey, this is B2B marketing content.' This is B2B sales content. And if you tell TikTok that, then it will show you your videos. If you say put hashtag B2B sales, it will show your video to people who have engaged with videos that have a hashtag in the past. And it can fall into a trap because people go on there. They post their first video. Oh, they put hashtag sales. Well, what was your video actually? It was a hashtag B2B sales demo tip, let's say. But now you put hashtag sales, it's gonna get shown to realtors. It's gonna get shown to insurance salespeople. It's gonna get shown to car salespeople. So it's really important to research those hashtags as well because they're also counterintuitive sometimes. Hashtag sales isn't enough. You've gotta get specific. This is a B2B sales tip. I want to be shown to B2B salespeople. And therefore, it gets shown to the right people. They will engage, and your video will get shown to more people. If you do that too many times in a row, if you post 10 posts that get low engagement, you fall out of trust a little bit of TikTok, and it stops showing your video to as many people. You'll see this on a lot of accounts. If you go on their accounts, you just see a 100 views, a 100 views. They're not getting any views. That's because they've consistently posted low performing content. It might not be because the content was bad. It just got shown to the wrong people, so it got no engagement. So it's really important to find out hashtags, and the best way to do that is find once again creators in your space, in your niche, who are already doing well, and look what hashtags they're using. And that's probably a five hour exercise before you do anything or post anything you need to make sure you understand that part.

Mark Evans: So speaking of number of views and hashtags, when your boss looks at what you're doing on TikTok, how does he quantify your performance and the performance of the channel? Obviously, views are great, but in some sense, they're a vanity metric. It's great that you're getting lots of coverage. And I guess, arguably, it'll lead somewhere. But where do you get the ROI? How do you tell whether this thing is actually generating what it needs to do for Sales Feed?

Will Aitken: Great question. And one that I was asking myself a lot at the start of all this, like, do I justify my job and all this great work I'm doing? I'm building a following, but what does it matter? TikTok's actually quite easy to... well, I wouldn't say easy. It's quite a good platform to convert people further into your funnel. Our average video on Sales Feed at least gets around between five to 10,000 views. There are ones that get a lot more than that. Last week, we had two videos go over 200,000 views, and we've had videos go over a million views. Now on the page, we have a link that links directly to our site. We can track how many people convert through that link. And the idea that we want them to subscribe to our newsletter, which is one step further down to our funnel. Sales Feed is a business model. We're a media brand that sits under Vidyard. We think TikTok is right at the top of our funnel, which is great because it's where we have the most followers. We wanna convert them further into more engaged stages in our funnel, which is newsletter, YouTube subscribers, LinkedIn followers. And then eventually, that funnel leads into Vidyard, which is the whole purpose of what we're building here.

Mark Evans: So Sales Feed has become on LinkedIn, let me back up here. When I was looking at B2B brands that are doing well on TikTok, two companies keep emerging, PandaDoc and Chili Piper. And in the comments, someone said, you gotta look at what Will Aitken is doing with Sales Feed. So when you look at the B2B SaaS landscape on TikTok, what are the brands that are doing a really good job of leveraging the platform properly? Because I imagine there's a lot of brands who are doing it badly, and there's an awful lot of brands that are not doing it at all. And those are the ones that need to be inspired. They're the ones that need to see on the platform that there are companies just like them that are getting benefits from using TikTok.

Will Aitken: I think, yeah. Chili Piper is one that I love. I love the team there. I talk to them quite a lot. They do a really good job. And one of the most successful videos, you can see why it was very successful. And I think it was a recruitment video. So they really spoke to the right demographic and used the right hashtags on that. So Chili Piper comes to mind. PandaDoc, yes. But really in the B2B landscape, other than, I'd say, Chili Piper, PandaDoc maybe, Refined Labs are doing pretty well right now as well. Beyond that, not a whole lot come to mind. I don't wanna upset anyone because I might forget to mention someone. A lot of creators in the B2B space are now doing a really good job as well. I'm seeing some big people, rainmakers in the sales space jump on the platform, and I've spoken to a lot of them as well. Sam McKenna from Sam Sales Consulting, Will Aitken from Lavender, Morgan Ingram from JB Sales. Those folks will jump from the platform and growing followings relatively quickly. The brands, I think they're really lagging behind.

Mark Evans: The message is that there's a huge opportunity for brands. But you could argue, you know, you could even argue that on LinkedIn, many brands are not even leveraging their corporate profiles at all and relying instead on the VP of Sales or the VP of Marketing or evangelist, you know, somebody in customer success to actually do the heavy lifting for them. And that is very interesting. But I suspect that a year from now, the landscape will be radically different because you just look at the numbers, and you look at a number of B2B marketers, they're gonna drag their companies kicking and screaming onto TikTok, and it's gonna be different. Do you envision that?

Will Aitken: I think there's definitely a big opportunity there. I don't think people should be kicking and screaming. I think you can almost, like, if you look at, like, the Duolingo success story, they just had she's she's a very young digital marketer, social media manager, and they just said, hey. Have this. Do whatever you want with it, and look what it turned into. So I think it just comes down to maybe having the minerals to do that and just say to someone on your team, hey, are you interested in this? Find someone who's interested in it and say, go ahead and own it. Like, just let that be your thing. On my team, I manage two channels and create a lot of content for other channels as well. I manage our LinkedIn corporate page, which to your point, we've done a really good job of making sure there's engagement there. It's like a stark contrast to a lot of corporate pages on LinkedIn. And then I also manage the TikTok, and then we also have other team members who are managers over channels like Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. So I think just give someone the reins to own it. Say don't be offensive, but take risks, and then let that person. It's all about finding the right person and enabling your evangelist, essentially, to own the brand as well to a certain extent.

Mark Evans: If you're a B2B marketer and you're a B2B brand and you're watching this video or listening to the podcast, what is one piece of advice that you would tell them in terms of the next phase of their TikTok journey?

Will Aitken: Start. Like, you gotta. Okay. On that, like, I don't most people who are listening to this definitely don't have a TikTok account corporate yet. Again, take some of the steps we said. Start looking at the content. Go on to Sales Feed if you like. Take all this inspiration you want, try and think about what's good, and find other people who know what they're talking about and ask them questions as well. Conversations like the one you and I are having right now, Mark, some of the most valuable.

Mark Evans: One final question. Where can people learn about you? Where can they watch your videos on TikTok, and where can they learn about Sales Feed?

Will Aitken: TikTok is a great place to start. That's your homework. Go into Sales Feed's TikTok, I would say. But, yeah, mostly, if you wanna connect with me, you can go into LinkedIn. Will Aitken, A.I.T.K.E.N., and Sales Feed's on there as well if you wanna check them out.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks for the insight about TikTok. I think there's a lot of B2B marketers that are taking notes and hopefully creating TikTok accounts and doing some experimenting. And I am inspired to raise my game, although the level of quality is so low right now that I can only go one way but up. And thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a Fractional CMO, Strategic Adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@MarkEvans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn.