Why TikTok Could Be an Incredible ATTRACT Strategy

Over the last couple of months, I have audited dozens of marketing strategies for incredible women business owners, and the number one mistake that most of them are making, they assume that social media is attracting brand new people to their business. This is just not true. Most social media is nurturing your existing audience.

It used to be an Attract strategy if you happened to join and become one of the leading content creators on that social media platform right at the very beginning before Facebook and Instagram started moving to a pay-to-play model. But these days, fewer and fewer people are seeing your content on social media so what are you to do? Well, today I'm going to share with you a six-month experiment I have been doing on TikTok to share with you what I'm looking for when I am leveraging online "social media" to attract brand new people to my business. Let's get into it.

Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook. I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there CEO. I am so fired up to share today's conversation with you because if you have been listening to the podcast, you may have heard me mention I was recording some podcasts while also live streaming on TikTok. You might have heard me mention that I've been doing a TikTok experiment and you may have been scratching your head thinking, "Rach is usually the last person to jump on the latest trend bandwagon, what is going on? Did she get abducted by aliens?"

I'm here to share with you, no, I did not. However, I made a calculated move and decided to do a six-month experiment posting on TikTok. I want to set you up for this conversation by sharing something that I have seen over and over and over again. Because I have been running my business since 2008, I have seen the massive rise and fall and changes and evolution of how social media can be used and how it continues to change in our businesses.

When I started my business, Facebook was around but there were no business pages, there was no ads. Twitter was around, there was no Instagram. YouTube was around but very few people were starting to use it and social media was at the very beginning. It was the very beginning of social media, so if you jumped onto it early during the first couple of years of that particular social media platform, you found yourself in this situation where there were a lot more people who were on social media as content consumers than people who are on social media as content creators.

This is like the magic space that you want to find if you're going to leverage any new platform. You want to join it when there is this inverse relationship between the number of people on it just purely to consume content versus to people who are on it to create content. There have been a few times over the last 15 years I've been in business where I have seen people who were able to jump onto something during that window and they were able to ride the wave because they were creating content when not many people were. This can pay off big time.

Gary Vee's whole story, the reason he became so well known and launched his career into talking about social media as an amazing opportunity was because he was one of the very first people to turn YouTube into an education platform when he created Wine Library TV. If you didn't know this whole part about his backstory, he was one of the first people to say, "Hey, this is a channel I can create content on, I can deliver value on, I can find an audience on." Because he was one of the first people and he jumped on it and he went all in, he actually created content for probably a year or so before it really started to pay off.

He has seen that early investment by being an early adopter, obviously, reap benefits for over a decade. But often I see a lot of entrepreneurs who wait until they see more and more and more and more people jump on the bandwagon and they miss this window of opportunity. When you miss this window of opportunity, what happens is you join and start trying to use strategies that are being taught by the people who were on that first wave but they're not working as well anymore.

We saw this with Instagram, so popular in the mid 2010s, people who were on it who were creating a lot of great content on it really were the ones who led the way with this visual storytelling on Instagram. But then Instagram got bought by Facebook. Facebook and Instagram shifted to an advertising focus and it's just continuously become more and more challenging to win on those platforms. That's why we're seeing so many people who are getting frustrated with social media in general as a part of your overall marketing strategy.

When I talk marketing strategy, I'm not talking about a specific platform. I am never ever, ever talking about a specific platform, I am talking about using the core marketing framework that I teach. Join me on July 19th, by the way, because we are doing a marketing strategy intensive to make sure you have this clear strategy and framework in place in your business to attract, engage, nurture, invite, and delight people all the way from becoming brand new to your business, hearing about you the first time potential clients to becoming happily paying clients.

We have to have a tactic, a strategy in place for each one of those five areas. The biggest mistake I see so many entrepreneurs make is they decide they need to market their business, they're thinking, "I need visibility for my business. I need to get in front of more people. Well, Facebook has a billion users. I'm just going to post on Facebook." But you're competing against a platform where there are more content creators than ever before. It is incredibly saturated. Trying to show up and compete in a saturated platform is so-so-so difficult.

Trying to compete on a saturated platform that now only shows like a small-small-small like two to five percent of your content to your followers, it's almost not even worth it anymore. In fact, as I've been looking at my own analytics for this, I'm just like, "You know what, what actually gets in front of the people that I am trying to reach?" The more I look at that, the more I look at the numbers, the more I'm like, "Okay, Facebook and Instagram have become less and less and less of a part of my overall strategy. I find it does not give me the visibility that it did five years ago, even two or three years ago." It's just so incredibly saturated. It's hard to stand out in that type of platform.

That all brings me to this experiment because I'm always looking at we have to, as CEOs, as entrepreneurs, we have to not just look at what works today but we have to keep an eye on how things are changing, how things are evolving because there will be these windows where if you can tap into an unsaturated platform, if you can tap into that window of time where there are fewer people creating content but a lot of people consuming content, you can potentially ride that wave just like Gary Vee did with YouTube and you could potentially get on the front of something and let the platform do some of the work for you instead of you having to work so hard to get in front of new potential clients for your business.

That was my hypothesis with TikTok. Let's get into how I decided to play around with TikTok. Like many of us, I am an elder millennial/gen x xenial, I don't know exactly where I fit in, I'm right on the cusp of the two, and when everybody started talking about TikTok, I brushed it off. I thought, "This is not the app for me. I don't see my community on here. I don't see my potential clients on here. This seems like it is just something that kids are into, that gen z is into. It does not make sense for me to waste my time and energy on this."

But then the pandemic happened and then I downloaded it. When I downloaded it, I started finding content creators that I had never heard of before. I started learning things I had never learned before. I was finding people who were sharing such incredible content about everything from social justice—of course, a massive topic in 2020—I found amazing makeup and hair tutorials, especially if you are looking for makeup for older skin, if you're in your 40s. I found so many great makeup artists who I had never seen before and I finally was like, "Oh my gosh, somebody I can actually follow, they look like me," and it just kept happening.

Then I started buying things off TikTok and I cannot tell you how many skin care products, makeup products, wellness products, non-alcoholic, sparkling water products, so many things I was finding on TikTok. When I start engaging with the platform and then buying off the platform, I'm thinking there is something here, and I started to see it shift from being the platform where it was all about trends, what dance is trending to becoming a serious platform for real content creators.

That's when my curiosity was peaked and I realized this was actually an opportunity for me. When I realized that it had outranked Google and YouTube as the number one trafficked website and platform, I was like, "Okay, this is really an opportunity because unlike so many other platforms that have come out, they never had the eyeballs on it that TikTok is now seeing."

For example, I remember in 2020 everybody started talking about Clubhouse. Personally, I just couldn't get into Clubhouse, I had such a hard time with Clubhouse. I was like, "This is so disorganized." It felt very rambly. Every time I tried to listen to something, I felt like they never got to the point, it just seemed like it wasn't getting my attention. Because of that, I just didn't take much interest in it personally. I didn't have that kind of time and energy to just spend on something that I was sitting here going like, "Get to the point already. Give me some value already."

But TikTok didn't have that. It delivered interesting content to me. The more I engage with it, the more interesting content it delivered to me. I was fascinated by this. I was fascinated by it. I was fascinated reading about it, looking at how many people were on it, seeing the change and the demographics of people engaging with it, seeing the change and all the different types of content I was getting, seeing how the algorithm worked and was delivering me content I was truly interested in.

I had this hypothesis and I decided this year I was going to go all in on it. What really got me to decide to go all in on it was one of my amazing clients, MegAnne Ford, who owns Be Kind Coaching, she's a parenting coach and she also happens to live here in Richmond, Virginia, we have worked together on and off for years. She first came to me in 2018 when she was launching her business Be Kind Coaching for the very first time and worked with us for a couple years.

Then she came back to go through The CEO Collective recently and she had started on TikTok sharing her content about positive parenting, being a parenting coach. There's obviously a huge audience of parents and moms on there. There's a huge conversation about parenting and positive parenting specifically. She saw that she was getting so much traction, so many followers. She's in the hundreds of thousands of followers within probably a year, under a year of her starting to go on to TikTok.

I was like, "This is fascinating to me." I had this hypothesis as I started talking to a few more people that TikTok is different, it's not a social media platform in the way that we think of Instagram and Facebook because the way Instagram and Facebook have always worked is you have to go in there and friend people or they have to follow you in order to get your content.

Those people have to follow you. How do they know to follow you? It used to be that it started organically, you would follow them and they would follow you, and maybe over time, people would start sharing your content. But it was actually really challenging to get found on any of those platforms because they weren't really optimized for search. Instagram tried to do this with hashtags but their whole search functionality wasn't exactly what drove most of it as far as I could tell. As far as I could tell in my own experience, it was other people sharing my content on that platform.

The more people shared my content, then other people would come to me, so it wasn't necessarily the algorithm, it was the shareability, it was the people following me, sharing my stuff. But I started to realize that TikTok really is more like a YouTube or a Pinterest or a Google. It's about discovering content. Where YouTube and Pinterest and Google, you have to go in and type in specifically what you're looking for, TikTok is a discovery engine that shares what you're interested in without you specifically asking for it.

You start up your TikTok account, it asks you what are you interested in. You select a couple things and it instantly starts serving up to you on your For You page content it thinks you'll be interested in based on the topics you selected when you signed up. The more you do or don't engage on the first few things it serves up to you, the more it knows what else to send to you.

Unlike YouTube and Pinterest and Google, you don't actually have to type anything in to search for a specific keyword, it will start to determine the things you're interested in just based on how you're interacting with the platform. The default is that For You page, that is what people are scrolling, they are scrolling their For You page. I thought to myself, "This is really interesting and it seemed very different from what I had experienced on every other social media platform that's come out since the beginning of social media basically."

That was my hypothesis. This is a discovery engine which means this is a visibility strategy that would put me in front of brand new people who'd never heard of me, my business, my brand, and potentially get me in front of a whole new ecosystem of potential clients. That was my hypothesis. What I committed to for this experiment was six months; six months of posting on TikTok. I was going to post five times a week. That's my goal.

Now I've averaged five times a week. There were some weeks where I absolutely hit it on the nose, there were some weeks where I went a little over, there were some weeks where I missed a couple days, all okay. But my goal was to hit at least five times a week because like every other platform, volume up front is a key thing.

The challenge I had and the problem I had to figure out was, "Okay, I not only am a business owner who has a large company I'm running and a family I'm raising and parents I'm also caregiving for, but I have health challenges that prevent me from being somebody who could just create content on the fly." That's always been a challenge for me. I have to be able to have content in a way where I can create it when I'm feeling great, when I'm feeling good, and drip it out over time. That has honestly been my secret to staying consistent on any platform, whether it's the podcast or a newsletter or what have you, it's always when I feel good, I create, when I'm in a slower season of my physical challenges here, my personal health challenges, then I just can't do that.

Sometimes I just need to hang out and rest and take it easy. I knew I would have to batch record. I also knew that I wanted to make sure my content stood out and was aligned with my brand. This is probably the biggest thing that held me back from jumping into TikTok to begin with, was the fact that most of what I was hearing from people who were talking about TikTok as a strategy was to follow the trends: to do the dances, to use the trending songs, to follow the lip-syncing trends or whatever it was. I'm just not interested. That is not me. I am not an entertainer. I am not here to figure out what the trend is to point at or lip sync or what have you. That is just not my style.

But I am someone who can deliver valuable content and I know that's one of my unfair advantages. I've had this podcast. I've had a podcast in general for 10 years now. I'm really good at giving great information. I know that because people tell me. I love doing interviews and that is definitely an unfair advantage of mine, unfair probably because I have so much experience with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interviews. I knew that if I was going to do TikTok, I had to do it in a way that felt authentic to me which is deliver high value, not holding back, not worrying about what's trending but worrying about what is going to be the most useful to the audience finding me for the very first time on TikTok.

Because I had been consuming TikTok and playing around with it, I also knew there were people who are probably my "competitors", meaning they also offer business consulting and coaching, and things like that to women entrepreneurs. But I knew that my brand could stand apart from that if I showed up just as myself the same way I do with this podcast, not trying to pander to anybody saying I needed to do this or that but just saying this is how I want to show up.

I decided I was going to hire a video team and basically treat TikTok the same way I treat showing up for interviews because interviews have been my best visibility strategy, my best Attract strategy for my business. I average four to five podcast interviews a month and that's one reason I'm really good at them. There's all this practice going into it. I said to myself, "You know what, I don't have time to create these on the fly. If I can hire a video team, we can basically look at it as a series of mini interviews," and that's what I did.

We batch recorded, I hired Keep It Reel Creative, Meredith and Sue here in Richmond, Virginia, they are fantastic by the way, amazing, amazing husband-wife film team. We decided we were going to sit down, batch record content, and I was going to drip it out one video a week, five days a week over the next six months.

What has happened since we started this experiment? I started officially posting right at the beginning of April, last week of March, first week of April. As I'm recording this, I'm only about two and a half months into this whole experiment. It honestly hasn't been that long. I have had people who came to me when they saw that I was starting to do this and they're like, "Well, have you gotten any results?" They were basically asking me in like week two or week three and I was like, "I can't honestly answer that very well yet because I don't have enough data. I don't have enough data if I will get results quite yet."

I think this is really important to talk about. This is why I decided to commit to six months because I wanted to give this experiment enough time for me to learn what I need to learn and I knew it would take me a couple months just to learn what works for me on TikTok. I needed time to integrate what I'm learning; so actually using that information to make my content better, to make my strategy better, to improve upon what I'm doing, I needed to have time to master what I am doing here and get better and better at it and then I could come and optimize it further.

I went in thinking if I get any results in the first few months, that's like cherry on top. This is just about the learning for me. But in the first two and a half months, I can tell you a couple things that are really interesting: one, in two and a half months on TikTok, I have more followers than I have on Instagram or on Facebook. I have been on both of those platforms since they started on Facebook and on Instagram. It has taken me years to get to over 7,000 followers on each of those platforms. Right now I'm at about 7,500 on TikTok in two and a half months.

Most of those follows actually came from early on in me jumping into TikTok because I did have a video that took off within the first few weeks. I have a video that has just under 50,000 views and the reason it did so well is because it's a little bit controversial. The hook that I came out with was what would you do if you were getting paid a thousand dollars an hour, and that gets people's attention. That video started taking off on TikTok really quickly and it started gaining me quite a few followers very, very quickly.

Since I've started, I have gained over 7,500 followers in two and a half months. I'm still wrapping my head around it because I did not see this on either of the other two platforms I have been on since they started. That has been years and years and years. Obviously, getting in front of a lot of people is something you can do on TikTok. I think that that goes along with my hypothesis that TikTok is a discovery engine.

The other thing that was really interesting to me is that not only was I able to get a lot of followers very quickly—and I probably could have gotten them quicker, I'll talk about that in a minute, things that I'm learning—but I've had over 200,000 video views in the last two and a half months, 200,000 video views. To me, that is, again, bananas. I am trying to wrap my head around that because I have played around with so many different platforms and I have not seen that instant response as far as getting that many views, that many followers so quickly. It blew my mind.

It threw me back to when I did a year-long experiment on Facebook Live, probably I want to say 2017, 2018 where I did a Facebook Live show every week for a full year. I did not see near the results, and that was right when Facebook lives was first coming out, I didn't see anywhere near the results that I'm seeing right now on my analytics on TikTok. That's blowing my mind.

The other big thing that people always want to know results wise, "Well, have you gotten clients from it?" This is probably the biggest thing I'm hearing from people is they believe you can't get clients from TikTok if you have a coaching, consulting, service, creative business and I just am like, "Yes, you absolutely can. Those clients are on TikTok. Yes, there are a lot of e-commerce clients on TikTok. Yes, there are a lot of product based businesses."

As I said, I've purchased everything from the little weight bracelets you wear when you're out on a walk, to different types of skin care, to so many different physical products. But I've also met these incredible service providers and I started getting feedback really quickly. I started getting comments, messages, emails, and DMs, not just on TikTok, but over on Instagram. From people saying they found me on TikTok and do I take private clients, how can they work with me, etc.

One of the challenges I'm having right now, you may know, we did a huge rebrand, we moved pretty much everything under The CEO Collective umbrella right in the middle of like the first month of this experiment. I don't have perfect analytics on this but we have seen an uptick in sales of The CEO Planner, we have seen clients come into The CEO Collective, we have seen people come in and work with us from the work that I'm doing on TikTok. It's amazing. I'm just blown away by that.

Like I said, I'm only officially two and a half months into this experiment. I still have a long way to go. I still have a long way to go. The videos that have performed the best, the things I've learned about them, I said the one video that has done the best is the one that I opened saying, "If you were getting paid a thousand dollars an hour, how would you show up?" Another video that took off was why you need to fire yourself and get out of your own way as a CEO of your company. I had a video that took off talking about my 25-hour work week. That one has about 35,000 views on it right now.

It's really interesting for me to see that because I am not used to short form content. As a podcaster, I am used to long form content. I discovered that the content that seemed to hit really well in the TikTok universe was the content where I led with this big question or statement about something that probably people are like, "Huh? What is she talking about saying Hey, here's how I work only 25-hours a week, and then broke it down nitty gritty.” That was really interesting to people and got a lot of people to watch it. Same thing with the how to fire yourself video.

I'm still playing around with topics. In the second round of me creating more content for TikTok, I definitely went through and pulled a ton of topic ideas from the comments, looked at the videos that were performing the best to try to figure out where I want to go next, and what type of topics I thought would do the best. Here are some things I've learned as I've been going on TikTok.

One, I think my hypothesis about not following what's trending is right on. I think there's a lot of people who are starting to realize the opportunity in TikTok but they are so focused on doing the trendy stuff that they are missing the point, they are missing the opportunity. The trending stuff is there because everybody is doing it, everybody's doing it and it just makes you blend in more honestly. That's my opinion on that. I don't want to blend in on any platform I'm trying to create content for, I want to stand out.

For me, everything I've done for this platform to stand out has been showing up with just the highest value content I can, taking the time to think through my content instead of it just being the fly by the seat of my pants. I never do that on my podcast. I don't know why I would ever do it on any other platform. I'm always thinking strategically about what is the content I think my audience needs from me and my potential clients want from me, what do I think my dream clients want from me. I'm thinking through that and keeping a running list of ideas.

I'm also looking at what else is working well on TikTok. That means engaging in the platform itself. Like any other social media platform, if all you do is post on it and you're not actually engaging in the ecosystem, you're not engaging in the whole platform, you're missing out a lot of insights, a lot of things that could help you do better on that platform. As I'm going through this, of course, now TikTok is saying, "Okay, you're talking about business, you're talking about business strategy, it's going to send me more business related content as a user."

One of the things it sent me was Connie Google Queen, and I'm saying her TikTok handle @conniegooglequeen. She is an SEO expert and she has started sharing SEO content for TikTok. After the first few videos that kept showing up for me about her content, about how to rank for specific keywords on TikTok, I instantly went to her bio and clicked the link to book a strategy call with her. I was like, "Yes, this is brilliant. How can I be found even more easily on TikTok?" So I hired her.

We played with some keywords. I am now ranking number one on TikTok for business strategy as of the time that I'm recording this. I played around looking at a lot of different keywords that I could potentially be focused on. But I felt like it's one of the things I run up against coaching women entrepreneurs is sometimes it'll put me in front of businesses that I'm not trying to attract.

I'm not interested in working with MLMs. I'm not an expert on e-commerce. I'm not focused on retail-based businesses or manufacturing-based businesses. I specifically want to work with expert businesses, coaches, consultants, creatives, service providers. I had to narrow in there on business strategy. It seemed to be the one most aligned with the type of content, the type of people I wanted to get in front of. That was really amazing.

The other thing I started paying attention to is other people who were starting at about the same time I was but who were really taking off very quickly. One of the things I saw is you cannot discount the importance of engaging with people in your comments. This is something that, again, we have gotten away from with social media being social. It has become very much like "This is just another distribution channel." We see this with people who just set it and forget it, automate all their social media and they wonder why they're not getting clients off of it.

I understand because in a lot of ways, I got tired of Facebook and Instagram too. It's easy to schedule it and just not stress anymore. But when it comes to growing on a platform, you do need to answer your replies, you do need to go check out the people who are following you, and start engaging with them. I found the more that I replied to people, the more that I engage with them, the more that happened for me.

I loved the old school Gary Vee approach, he called it the Dollar 80 approach. I'm going to mess this up trying to explain it but basically, it's like you need to go on Instagram is how he started this, where you go and reply to a certain number of people's videos or what have you in order to start building those relationships in a couple different verticals, in a couple different niches. I think that's still true.

I think that's still true on this platform as well. If you want to become known on TikTok, you need to start following up and connecting with people and having conversations with people not just posting and then closing the app, you have to engage and be a part of the app, part of the community.

The final thing that I saw was I was experimenting with the difference between posting my content and doing a live on TikTok. Posting my content, if I look at most of my analytics, that content, 90% to 95% of the people who watch a video are finding it on the FYP. They're finding it on their For You Page which means they're not my followers yet. Posting the content, the short video, is what's getting in front of new potential followers, new potential clients. But when I go live or share a story on TikTok, that gets in front of my current followers.

That gave me another insight into how I can start to optimize, which is not just to post content but also to do some lives, to do some stories, to really make sure that if people are starting to follow me, I continue to engage with them so that they can take the next step towards getting on my email list, getting into my podcast, etc.

I hope this is an interesting conversation for you to hear my mindset and thought process behind playing around with TikTok. I am not someone who jumps on the latest platform. I am not someone who jumps on the latest trend. I do not want to waste my time or energy because I don't have that much of it, I just don't. But I am keeping my finger on the pulse of what changes are happening in the world of social media, in the world of online marketing.

I can tell you without a doubt that Instagram and Facebook have shifted away from it being an organic channel to get in front of new potential clients. These are now pay-to-play channels. It is incredibly hard to stand out in those channels. With that in mind, I would rather divert my time and energy instead of trying to resuscitate something that is like literally not built to help amplify my message, I would rather put my message on a platform that is working with me to amplify my message.

Could you do an experiment in your business? I'm not saying it needs to be TikTok, but I am asking you to look at what is or isn't working in your business. If you have an Attract strategy, getting in front of new potential clients, is it working, or has something shifted and it's not working as well anymore? If you have a Nurture strategy and it's not working as well as it used to, maybe your Facebook used to do great and now no one's seeing it, maybe your email used to do great and now your open rates are tanking, maybe you used to get a ton of search traffic and now it's just not happening, we need to look at these things, be paying attention, keeping our finger on the pulse of what is working and not working in our business, and be looking around because these things are always changing.

The internet is not a set it and forget it world. Anybody who said that you can just do set it and forget it passive marketing online, I really disagree with that because it might work for a short period of time but over time, it's going to change, over time, these platforms are going to default to becoming profitable which means most of them are going to default to running ads in order to become profitable, which means the organic reach will decline over time.

The way that you get around that is show up, deliver incredible value, and if there is a window of opportunity to ride a wave on a platform, to become the first in a niche on that topic, to stand out in some way, it could be totally worth it to experiment with for six months, a year, whatever makes sense for you.

I hope this is helpful. I hope this is interesting. I would love-love-love to hear your feedback. If you're not following me over on TikTok, it's @rachealcookmba. I would love to have you pop over there as, again, I am not even in the optimization stage yet of this experiment, I am still in the integration and learning stages. I will share more insights as we continue to play with this but I do think this is a conversation worth having.

If you want to learn more about how to make sure you have a rock solid marketing strategy, again, one that is not dependent on a specific platform but that makes sure you can find people in that Attract area so you're actually getting in front of brand new potential clients, you can engage with them, you can nurture them, you can invite them to become paid clients, and then delight them so that they continue to come back, so that they give you rave reviews, so that they send you repeat business and referrals, then I'd love you to come check out the marketing strategy intensive I'm hosting on July 19th. The details are on the link in my show notes.

I would love-love-love to have you there. I have not hosted a workshop like this in years. Again, this is an experiment. I want to see if it'll be helpful, but I hosted this training recently for Heather Chauvin's business mastery program and it was so much fun. I was like, "I need to make this available to my podcast listeners," so come on over, join us on July 19th, get your marketing strategy dialed in so that you can see more clients in your business.