Small businesses are using TikTok and Instagram to drive sales

Chioma Ngwudo created the African-inspired accessories, clothing, and lifestyle brand Cee Cee's Closetto fill a void in what they saw was lacking while shopping for headwraps: bold, colorful, and feminine accessories. But it wasn't until one fateful and viral Instagram post that the company really blew up. Ngwudo posted a tutorial with an influencer on her businesses' Instagram, and within hours it had tens of thousands of views.

"That was our first time being like, 'Oh, Instagram marketing, this influencer thing, could really be cool,'" Ngwudo told Mashable. Since then, she's had tutorials and other videos go viral on Instagram and TikTok. More people found out about her brand, bought from Cee Cee's Closet, and became return customers. Now, social media advertising is just a part of her life as a business owner.

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Kyle Hinds, the owner of Noble Leather Co.who creates handmade leather goods, had a similar experience. He told Mashable that he remembers uploading the first video that went viral on TikTok and seeing the views climbing. 

"I said, 'Holy moly,' and then I went to bed and woke up and it was over a million," Hinds said. "I said, 'OK, this is just crazy.' I'm getting all excited. Then I continued on with my day and an hour later, it was at 5 million, and it just kept going up and up and up. I said, 'Holy smokes.'"

Dasha Derkach, the teenaged owner of the hair scrunchie business Enchanted Scrunch, posted a video in December 2021 showing her organizing scrunchies on a display wall. It went wild online.

For some small businesses, the key to success can be landing on the For You Pages of viewers on TikTok, or the explore page on Instagram. Creating that type of viral content is propelling some small businesses to success, but it can be a lofty and unreliable goal — so while entrepreneurs are prioritizing social media, they also have to be careful not to depend on it completely.

Does viral content = viral sales?

For Derkach, Hinds, Ngwudo, and dozens of other entrepreneurs, viral content is one of the driving forces behind why their businesses are doing so well. The first viral video for Hinds gave him a massive increase in sales. Derkach and Ngwudo saw increases too, first slowly after the viral video but, after more videos continued to do well, their sales began to skyrocket.

"You get a viral video, you can see your 'foot traffic' through your website go through the roof," Hinds told Mashable. "And the video doesn't have to go viral. I could post a video or even a social media post, and it always seems to generate a little bit of foot traffic to the store, which then helps increase the sales."

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According to marketing experts, going viral isn't a perfect tactic for increasing sales long-term. For instance, if you post one video that goes viral and simply stop posting, your sales will stall as well. The key to using viral content to continue to propel success is staying consistent.

Derkach said she made around $400 to $600 after the success of her first video, "which was not a lot for the amount of views." But, after posting more often afterwards, she "generated between $5,000 to $7,000 just from the follow-up videos."

It's no surprise that digital marketing works. Data from Retail Touch Pointsshows that companies in the U.S. are expected to spend $4.6 billion on influencer marketing in 2023, double the amount just five years ago. Nielsen’s Consumer Trust Indexreports that 92 percent of consumers trust influencer marketing over traditional advertising.

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But going viral once isn't enough, as Derkach pointed out. Staying consistent will also stave away the fear that comes with viral content. Derkach, Hinds, and Ngwudo all said they had to continue posting and, at times, see some videos flop in order to reach virality a second or third time — and that can be tough.

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"The biggest downside is knowing that your video won’t be viral forever and having the effects only lasting one to two weeks," Derkach said. "After a viral video, creating more and better content gets even harder as well."

No control over virality

"It's very hard to know what is going to go viral," Ngwudo said of the struggles of viral content as a marketing tool. "That's the Russian roulette of it all, right? Because you can put a lot of effort into a piece of content and then you get 3,000 views and that's all it does across every platform you put it on. And then there can be something that you put together in like five minutes and it goes completely like gangbusters out of nowhere."

Ngwudo is pointing towards a frustration felt by many: There is not one winning formula for making content go viral. One study by Nieman Labfound that only 1 percent of videos on Facebook ever go viral. That's another reason why consistency is so important. For Hinds, he found that the more he put into social media, the more he got out — be that viral content specifically, or just content that resonated with the few people who did view the content.

"Consistency is key," Hinds said. "I'm trying to get into the swing of social media. And I've found that the key is consistency, consistency, consistency."