TikTok: Can the controversial app work for B2B brands?

I know everything there is to know about TikTok, it’s how I got into marketing and worked on brand deals in the first place. However, I thought to myself, how exactly does one create a TikTok strategy for a B2B company?

You probably wonder if it’s effective or better yet, can it even be done?

Firstly, to unpack this we have to dive into why TikTok works so well for B2C and if that can be applied to B2B.

For years, “our buyers aren’t on TikTok” was a reasonable thing for a B2B marketer to say. It isn’t anymore. HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing report found that 54.5% of brands now use TikTok as a marketing platform, and short-form video, TikTok’s native format, is the single highest-ROI content type going into 2026.

That’s not a niche experiment. That’s a channel earning its place in the media plan. So yes, it can be done. The question isn’t whether B2B belongs to TikTok. It’s how.

Why TikTok works for B2C and what that means for B2B

Initially TikTok users opened the app to discover, not to search. They scrolled for new products, new creators, and new ideas, and that discovery mindset is exactly why B2C brands with visually demonstrable products, think skincare, fitness, fashion, food, and home goods, outperform everywhere else.

The platform rewards raw, fast-paced, unpolished content over glossy production, which can actually read as inauthentic to a TikTok audience. TikTok itself said in 2021 that its highest-performing videos ran 21 to 34 seconds, a figure still widely repeated.

But the platform has since moved on: eMarketer’s analysis of over a million TikTok videos found that videos longer than 60 seconds now earn substantially more watch time and reach than shorter ones, even though the majority of videos posted are still under a minute.

TikTok has also evolved well beyond a pure entertainment feed. Back in 2022, Google’s own senior vice president for search, Prabhakar Raghavan, told an industry conference that in Google’s internal research, something like almost 40 percent of young US users looking for a place to eat skipped Google Search or Maps entirely and went straight to TikTok or Instagram instead, a comment reported by TechCrunch at the time.

That figure was specific to lunch searches and has been widely rounded up and misquoted since as a blanket “TikTok beats Google” statistic, so it’s worth treating with some care. But the underlying signal has held up: businesses that optimize for TikTok search are capturing intent-driven viewers who are actively looking for solutions, instead of scrolling for entertainment.

TikTok’s mechanics can work for B2B, but not by copying the format. B2C TikTok succeeds because the product is visual and the buyer decides fast, alone. B2B has neither: a capital equipment purchase isn’t sold in 25 seconds, and the buyer is a committee weighing risk over months.

What transfers is the behavioural shift. Technical buyers are now in discovery mode on short-form platforms too. So don’t mimic a skincare unboxing. Show the process: the plant floor, the engineering problem solved live. That’s the industrial buyer’s visually demonstrable product.

The numbers B2B marketers can’t ignore anymore

TikTok has moved from experiment to mainstream media plan. HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing report, based on a survey of over 1,500 global marketers, found that 54.5% of brands now use TikTok for marketing, and TikTok has overtaken X in both usage and perceived ROI, with 32% of marketers ranking it among their top three channels for return.

That same report found short-form video is the single highest-ROI content format for 2026, cited by 48.6 percent of marketers, ahead of long-form video, live-streaming, and blog posts. And this dominance holds true across B2C, B2B, and non-profit marketers alike, not just consumer brands.

That doesn’t mean every B2B company should move its LinkedIn budget over tomorrow. B2B marketers in HubSpot’s survey still rank Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube ahead of TikTok specifically for ROI. But the direction of travel is clear, and the old dismissal, “our buyers aren’t on TikTok”, increasingly needs evidence behind it rather than assumption.

The catch, is that TikTok can just as easily produce vanity metrics as qualified leads. A view count is not a pipeline. Treating TikTok as a measurable buying-journey asset, not a stream of casual videos, is what separates the brands generating real leads from the ones generating flattering screenshots.

That means matching content formats to funnel stages, testing creative in short cycles, and tracking assisted conversions rather than obsessing over last-click attribution.

What this looks like for B2B in practice

This is where the format has to change, even if the platform behaviour doesn’t. 5 principles worth building a strategy around:

1. Founder and expert-led content outperforms brand-voice content. People respond to faces, real opinions, and someone actually solving a problem on camera. People follow people, not brands. For a B2B brand, that means engineers, technical leads, and founders on camera, not just facts and a logo.
2. Show down the process. The plant floor, the fabrication process, the install, the fix. For an industrial buyer, watching how a problem gets solved is the demo. It builds the same trust a case study does, just faster and more human. Don’t tell them, show them why they should buy from you.
3. Separate content into three buckets: discovery, trust, and conversion intent. Discovery content answers the questions a prospect is Googling or, increasingly, TikTok-ing. Trust content shows expertise and process. Conversion content addresses the specific objections that show up late in a B2B sales cycle. Randomly posting without knowing which bucket a video serves is how brands end up with views and no pipeline.
4. Consistency matters more than production value. A rough, honest video posted regularly will outperform a single polished video posted once a quarter. TikTok’s algorithm rewards accounts that keep testing and publishing, which favours a steady drumbeat of content over occasional big swings.
5. Measure past the view count. Watch time, saves, shares, comments, profile visits, and qualified clicks tell you far more than raw reach. If a metric can’t change a decision about the next video or campaign, it’s just fluff, not data to consider.

The best example of B2B TikTok

You haven’t seen TikTok marketing if you haven’t seen LC SIGN. Is this account about business signage completely unhinged? Yes, but it brings in the numbers and it’s his entire business model. TikTok thrives on polarisation and controversy. LC SIGN isn’t fighting the algorithm, he’s using it to his advantage.

Tony Zhu, the face of the LC SIGN TikTok account is a Chinese marketing professional who gained international recognition for his engaging and humorous promotional videos for a LED and Neon signage business. LED signage manufacturing is about as unsexy a B2B niche as it gets, but he’s turned the person selling it into the content, not the product

Just take a look at the kind of thing he posts.

@karabo.mphahlele77

♬ son original – TROPIC ENTERTAINMENT™

So, can B2B actually win on TikTok?

Yes. Not by pretending to be a B2C brand, and not by chasing virality for its own sake. B2B wins on TikTok the same way it wins everywhere else: by being useful, specific, and consistent, and by understanding that the buyer scrolling past an industrial explainer at 9pm is doing exactly what a skincare shopper is doing at the same moment.

They’re in discovery mode. The brand that shows up there, honestly and often, is the one that gets remembered when the RFP goes out.

That’s the strategy I ended up building. Not a copy-paste of what works for a beauty brand, but a translation of the same underlying behaviour into a language our clients’ buyers actually trust.

This story was first published by ShiftONE B2B Marketing Agency in its Shift Happens newsletter on LinkedIn.