In the era of short videos, TikTok is a playground for young people and a powerful marketing tool for businesses. Looking to optimize your advertising spend, increase sales, or simply build stronger brand awareness? This article will help you understand how TikTok for Business works and come up with an effective implementation strategy for businesses of all sizes. Let’s find out with Ecomobi now!
What is TikTok for Business?
TikTok for Business is the official advertising platform developed by TikTok, helping businesses create, manage, analytics, and optimize advertising campaigns on the TikTok platform. Unlike a personal TikTok account, it provides advanced tools like TikTok Ads Manager, TikTok Pixel, and Business Center to target the right audience, track performance, and scale marketing efforts.
TikTok for Business is perfect for businesses of all sizes, from large brands to small shops or online businesses that want to increase reach and sales through short videos.
With TikTok’s algorithm favoring creative and authentic content, businesses can achieve viral reach even with modest budgets.
What is the difference between TikTok and TikTok for business?
Caption: In short, a Business Account gives you access to strategic marketing tools, making it a must-have for serious growth.
Types of advertising on TikTok for Business
TikTok for Business offers a variety of ad formats, giving businesses the flexibility to choose based on their campaign goals and budget. Here are the five most popular ad formats:
In-feed ads
In-Feed Ads are video ads that appear in between your “For You” feed. These ads can be pulled up, interacted with, liked, commented on, shared, and linked to just like regular videos. In-Feed Ads easily integrate into the user’s natural content flow while allowing for links to landing pages, apps, or stores.
Best for: product review, tutorials, storytelling
Top view ads
This is a full-screen ad format that appears as soon as a user opens the TikTok app. Ads can be up to 60 seconds long and don’t slide past in the first few seconds. Top-view ads have several advantages, such as:
- Priority display first
- High brand recall rate
- Large display area, no distractions
Best for: New product launches, major promotions or when businesses want to quickly expand brand coverage.
Branded Hashtag Challenge
The brand created a unique hashtag challenge, calling on users to create content to participate. This format helps increase strong engagement, naturally goes viral and especially encouraging user-generated content (UGC). This type of advertising is fit for:
- Young brands with products that are easy to “trend”
- Businesses that want to build communities and promote interaction
Branded Effects
Brands create their own signature AR effects (filters, stickers, animations, etc.) and allow users to use them in videos. Branded Effects help:
- Increase brand awareness in a fun, natural way
- Encourage users to create videos
- Engage your brand in the user’s creative experience.
Spark Ads (New in 2025)
Spark Ads allow businesses to boost existing organic TikTok posts (yours or a creator’s) as ads, leveraging authentic content for higher engagement.
- Best for: Amplifying user-generated content or influencer partnerships.
- Tip: Partner with TikTok creators to create relatable content for Spark Ads.
Read More: How to Create TikTok Shop
How to get started with TikTok for Business
How to create a TikTok Business account
- Go to TikTok for Business Center and click “Sign Up”.
- Enter your email, password, country, and business category.
- After email confirmation, you’ll enter TikTok Ads Manager and can switch to a Business account for advanced tools.
Connect with TikTok Business Center
- Go to the TikTok for Business Center
- Click “Create Business Center”, name it, and select the account you want to link.
- Business Center helps you:
- Manage multiple ad accounts in one place.
- Assign member permissions by role (admin, staff, supplier…).
- Connect with agencies or partners to run campaigns together.
How to advertise effectively on TikTok
Clearly define advertising goals
TikTok Ads Manager allows you to choose objectives such as:
- Brand Awareness
- Increase Traffic
- Conversions
- App Installs
Create engaging short video content
TikTok prioritizes short, natural videos that are entertaining or provide useful information. To attract viewers and increase advertising effectiveness, businesses should focus on content types such as authentic product reviews, or humorous, trending videos.
In addition, don’t forget to include a strong CTA such as “Watch Now”, “Buy Now” or “Visit Website” to encourage viewers to take the desired action.
Choose the correct target audience
- Use filters: age, gender, region, interests, behavior.
- Leverage Lookalike Audience to reach a group similar to your current potential customers.
- Combine Retargeting to retarget people who have interacted or visited your website.
Set up your budget and schedule
- You can choose a daily budget or a lifetime budget.
- TikTok allows you to set a specific run time or run continuously.
Tip: For beginners, start with a small budget and monitor the response before expanding.
Monitor – measure – optimize performance
To ensure that your TikTok ads campaign is as effective as possible, businesses need to monitor, measure, and optimize performance regularly.
Through TikTok Ads Manager, you can track important metrics such as impressions, click-through rates (CTR), cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on investment (ROI) for each ad group.
Based on this data, you can optimize your campaign by adjusting video content if click-through rates are low, changing your target audience if conversion rates are not meeting expectations, or increasing budgets for campaigns that are performing well to maximize effectiveness.
Advantages & Disadvantages of TikTok for Business
Advantages
TikTok for Business has many outstanding strengths, especially suitable for modern marketing trends:
- Reach a young, dynamic audience quickly.
- Powerful content distribution algorithms help videos go viral, even with small budgets.
- Diverse ad formats: In-Feed Ads, Top View Ads, Branded Hashtag Challenge, Branded Effects.
- Increase organic engagement with entertaining, relatable content.
- Detailed measurement tools easily optimize campaigns based on real data.
Disadvantages
However, this platform also has some limitations that businesses need to be aware of:
- Content requires high creativity, needs to catch trends quickly or it will easily drift out of the display stream.
- Difficult to accurately measure conversions without setting up the right TikTok Pixel.
- Not suitable for all industries, especially luxury brands or B2B products that may have difficulty positioning on a platform that mainly serves entertainment.
- Huge content competition, need to constantly innovate to retain viewers.
Read More: How to make money on TikTok without followers
Conclusion
TikTok for Business is a powerful tool for businesses to expand their brand reach, reach a younger generation of customers, and increase sales through creative short-form video content. With its fast-spreading capabilities, diverse ad formats, and effective measurement systems, it is an ideal platform for modern marketing campaigns.
For businesses just starting out, start with a small budget, choose a specific goal, and persistently test different content. Building a reasonable posting schedule – for example, 3–5 videos/week – and staying up to date with hot trends on TikTok will help your channel grow more steadily and quickly.
Get started with Ecomobi today to optimize your TikTok for Business campaigns and grow your revenue exponentially!
