How To Promote TikTok Shop in 2026

TikTok is a popular social media platform in 2025. Chances are, you’ve seen those unboxing videos with a link to buy it. Once clicked, this link typically redirects to TikTok Shop, a huge eCommerce ecosystem, rivaling Amazon, AliExpress, Walmart, etc.

Starting a TikTok Shop can feel exciting but also a bit overwhelming – between setting everything up, creating content, and actually getting seen, where do one even begin?

Worry not, we’ll guide you through the most important stages, like how to open your shop, break down the most innovative ways to promote it using TikTok’s own features (e.g., Lives and collaborations), and even explore how tools from HilltopAds can give your products a powerful boost by bringing in outside traffic.

To better tackle the question of promotion, we have invited an expert. Helena has been with HilltopAds for over 11 years, and she’s not only seen the industry evolve but helped shape it along the way. Find some of her commentaries throughout the article.

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TikTok is no longer a platform for pure entertainment. Now, with over 1.6 billion active users, nearly 928 million (58%) of whom shop directly on the app, the platform serves as a built-in marketplace. Basically, creators and brands can now tag products in their videos or live streams, and users can tap to buy that instant find without ever closing the TikTok app.

One important factor to consider is that you need to promote your TikTok Shop vigorously since the nature of TikTok is based on content. As such, if you do not create content in order to promote your business, your products will not appear before your clients in search results, since this platform is not exactly an online store such as Amazon. 

The reality is that if you do not promote your store, your store will be invisible since it will not have any brand awareness or traffic. Seeing a product in action, understanding its value from a creator they like, or having questions answered live in a stream transforms a passive viewer into an active customer.

Read our latest article on how to calculate CPM correctly:

CPM Calculator: How to Calculate CPM

There are several ways to promote TikTok Shop out there. Some of them rely solely on your pure dedication, and some might require extra dollars to kick off. Let’s see some of the options. 

Organic Growth

Organic growth refers to building your audience and driving sales without paying for promotion, relying solely on the content you create and the community you engage with. It is the underlying, long-term strategy for building brand authenticity and a loyal customer base on TikTok (or any other social platform, for that matter).

Recommendations & Best Practices:

• Consistent posting. Aim for 1–3 posts per day. TikTok’s algorithm favors consistent, active accounts. Consistency signals to the algorithm that you are a reliable content source, increasing the likelihood that your brand will appear on the “For You” page.
• Master the hook. The first 3–5 seconds are the most important part of your video. TikTok for Business states that 63% of videos with the highest click-through rate hook their audience within the first 3 seconds. So, a 3-second window is all you have to immediately capture attention with a compelling visual, a provocative question, a clear promise of value, or a relatable problem.
• Strategic hashtagging. Use a mix of broad and niche hashtags that align with your brand. Include relevant TikTok Shop categories (e.g., #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, #TikTokFashion), product-specific tags (#OrganicSkincare), and trending challenges. Research what your successful competitors and target customers are using.
• Audience engagement. Use the comment section to engage with your audience. Respond to questions, create video replies to comments, and use comments to spark new content ideas. This shows people that you care, and that is what’s going to build trust – the ultimate metric for the TikTok users.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising involves investing money to boost your reach, target specific audiences, and accelerate the growth of your business. It provides predictable traffic and is essential for scaling beyond your organic reach, retargeting interested users, and driving immediate sales.

Recommendations & Best Practices:

• TikTok Shop ads. The platform has its own native ad system explicitly designed for sellers. Key formats include:
  – Video shopping ads. Your organic videos can be boosted as ads to a targeted audience.
  – Live shopping ads. Promote your upcoming or ongoing live shopping sessions to drive viewers.
  – Catalog sales ad. Automatically generate ads from your product catalog to dynamically showcase items to users likely to be interested.
• Precise targeting. Go beyond basic demographics. Use retargeting to re-engage users who have viewed your product, watched your video, or added an item to their cart but didn’t purchase. This is your highest-converting audience.
• External advertising platforms. Networks like HilltopAds can drive initial traffic and awareness, especially if you are launching a new shop or product line. External platforms can help you generate clicks and interest, which you can then retarget within TikTok.

Ad Networks

Ad networks are an effective channel for scaling TikTok Shop campaigns beyond the limits of native platform traffic. Using an external advertising network like HilltopAds allows sellers to access large volumes of global traffic at a significantly lower cost compared to social platforms such as Facebook. This makes ad networks especially valuable for product discovery, market testing, and driving top-of-funnel awareness for TikTok Shop offers.

Recommendations & Best Practices:

• Build a two-step acquisition funnel. Approach TikTok Shop growth as a staged process rather than a one-click sale. Use HilltopAds to generate high volumes of affordable traffic directed to your TikTok Shop or pre-landing pages, focusing on awareness and initial engagement. Once users interact with your products or content, retarget them through TikTok’s native advertising formats, where intent is higher and conversions are more consistent.
• Optimize traffic for product discovery, not direct sales. Ad network traffic delivers the best results when used to introduce products rather than push immediate purchases. Focus on short-form video creatives, product previews, and teaser-style content that highlights key benefits and encourages users to explore your TikTok Shop organically.
• Test GEOs and products aggressively. HilltopAds allows you to explore multiple markets and product categories quickly and at a lower cost than traditional social platforms. Use this flexibility to identify GEOs and offers with strong engagement before committing larger budgets to in-platform TikTok campaigns.

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Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a strategy where you partner with creators who promote your products for a commission on each sale they generate. It uses the trust and authority of creators to access their established audiences.

Recommendations & Best Practices:

• Collaborate with influencers. Seek out and partner with creators whose audience aligns perfectly with your target customer. Micro-influencers (10k-100k followers) often have higher engagement rates and can be more cost-effective. Allow influencers creative freedom to present your brand in their authentic style. A genuine recommendation is far more effective than a scripted ad.
• Track relationships. Monitor which affiliates drive the most sales and highest-quality traffic, and make them brand ambassadors. This way, the audience gets to see previews of the product, which builds excitement and thrill for the launch.

Viral Content & Campaigns

TikTok is all about content, so it goes without saying that organic reach and brand awareness will always be hand in hand with the main purpose of the platform – entertainment. Through trends, challenges, and other high-engagement formats, you connect with the audience, build trust, and attract new users.

Recommendations & Best Practices:

• Create or jump on challenges. Develop a branded hashtag challenge that encourages users to showcase your product. Or participate in already existing relevant trends, seamlessly incorporating your business into the format.
• Host giveaways. These are powerful for rapid audience growth and engagement. Require participants to follow your account, like the video, tag friends in the comments, and most importantly, visit your TikTok Shop or add a specific product to their cart to enter. This directly drives shop traffic and product engagement.
• Develop interactive content. Use TikTok’s built-in features, such as Polls, Q&A, and Duets/Stitches. For instance, use a poll to let followers vote on your next product color, or host a Q&A live stream about your products. This content is prioritized by the algorithm and therefore boosts engagement metrics.

Helena

Senior Sales Manager HilltopAds

The best would be to start with all the available activity traffic levels to gain as many of your ad impressions as possible. You may also use targeting by language to match with your audience by GEO placement.

Next, you can also add mobile as your device type to be promoted with your TikTok page. If you have an option to do live shopping or use some kind of influencer collaboration, cross promos, etc. then don’t hesitate to be promoted by such.

And if you’re also capable of setting the postback then you may also add an automatic optimization or CPA goal type of campaign to make the system do the work for you by blacklisting the sources that don’t fit your requirements.

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Now, no one likes lengthy to-do lists, so we’ve prepared an easy 4-step guide on how to start promoting your business on TikTok Shop.

Helena

Senior Sales Manager HilltopAds

From our ad network perspective and based on the other currently active e-commerce offers, I’d advise starting with promoting TikTok Shop product by using Popunder mobile ad format. It might be counted quite similar to the mentioned guerrilla marketing. Here’s why:

– It delivers billions of ad impressions daily (depends on the required geo);
– The bidding is very friendly and affordable to begin with;
– There’s no need to add any type of creatives with the Pop ad format;

It performs well with many verticals, including the e-Commerce in common.

While working on internal promotion is important to get the TikTok audience on board, focusing your efforts on that solely means missing out on other quality traffic sources. But managing both the internal and external advertising is, of course, possible, yet quite demanding and unnecessary.

An advertising platform like HilltopAds, on the other hand, can handle external promotion with ease. This platform works by placing your ads on a wide network of other websites and apps, helping you reach potential customers who might not be scrolling through TikTok at that moment. The main idea is to attract people from elsewhere on the internet directly to your TikTok Shop listing.

Promoting your TikTok Shop with HilltopAds is a strategic choice for advertisers seeking to increase their store’s visibility and drive external traffic directly to their product listings. HilltopAds offers access to an immense global advertising network, delivering over 273+ billion monthly ad impressions across more than 250 countries, which provides the sheer scale necessary to generate awareness and clicks quickly. 

Getting started is easy – register as an advertiser on the HilltopAds website and deposit funds into your account. Then, create a new campaign – select the ad format you want, choose your target audience with the available filters, and set the campaign link to direct users to your specific TikTok Shop product page or your main shopfront.

Finally, after launching, you must actively monitor the campaign’s performance using HilltopAds’ real-time analytics, which track clicks, conversions, and costs, allowing you to pause underperforming segments, adjust bids, and optimize your targeting to improve your return on investment and steadily scale your customer acquisition.

Promote your TikTok shop with HilltopAds and get:

• Advanced targeting options
• Direct traffic sources
• Self-serve platform
• Fully-managed service
• Postback tracking

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TikTok’s algorithm is set to push creators to the “For You” page only when they are active and consistent. Therefore, having an irregular posting schedule or random content will simply make your content invisible.

Inconsistency breaks any momentum you might gain from a successful video, prevents you from building a recognizable brand presence, and ultimately shows your existing followers not to expect or look for your content, severely limiting your organic reach and discovery.

This problem is frequently symptomatic of a deeper issue – having no plan or strategy ahead. Sure, there is a chance that a random video of yours gets millions of views; TikTok is no stranger to those occasions. However, with no defined objectives, the momentum dies on that one hyped video.

The audience simply won’t see the point in staying when coming to your page and seeing a mix of prompts to sell, brand storytelling, and entertaining skits. You end up creating content that fails to resonate with a specific buyer, doesn’t guide viewers toward a purchase, and makes it impossible to measure what is genuinely working, leading to wasted time and advertising budget.

Even with a strategy in place, a critical pitfall is ignoring the data and analytics provided by TikTok. The platform offers real-time metrics in both the Shop Seller Center and Creator tools.

Failing to regularly review key performance indicators like average watch time, click-through rate on your product links, traffic sources, and audience demographics means you are making decisions blindly. You might continue investing budget into a content style that attracts views but not sales, or completely miss that your most valuable customers come from an unexpected demographic.

Finally, perhaps the most counterproductive mistake on TikTok as an entertainment-first platform is focusing solely on sales with overly promotional content. Truth be told, that approach works nowhere.

TikTok audience, though, has a zero-tolerance policy for inauthentic, humanless content, aimed at sales only. People use TikTok primarily for the joy and sense of community, and those who lack that are likely to be stonewalled. Demonstrating value and solving problems is what ultimately convinces people to purchase.

Helena

Senior Sales Manager HilltopAds

You need to be sure that your offer page is relevant to the traffic type you’re choosing via setting up campaigns. As well as making a clear statement: showing the benefits of your product, prices and any attractive goals for users to buy it.

Don’t skip up on the A/B tests because it will help to check which of the ads are the best ones to be focused on.

Use a tracker solution platform to track the info about your orders, their costs, impressions, clicks, etc.

Read our recent case study on monetizing X traffic using Direct Link:

$50K+ with X-Traffic and HilltopAds DirectLink | Publisher Case Study

TikTok is always an authentic first platform. And it is not that the TikTok audience despises marketing in particular; rather, the intense sales-only approach turns that fun and excitement they came for into another ad-driven place they fought so hard to escape.

So your strategy needs to accommodate that atmosphere. Keep a strict balance – give enough information, so that TikTok users could actually get to know your brand, but not too much information, in order not to be perceived as spammy or insincere.

TikTok asks you to be a creator first and a seller second. Yes, it requires consistent effort – making content, going live, understanding what your audience loves – but the payoff is a direct, authentic connection with customers that few other platforms offer.

A strong TikTok Shop promotion strategy doesn’t rely on just a one-and-done method. The best results come from combining multiple approaches.

Organic content helps establish trust and consistency, paid ads allow you to scale and retarget audiences more effectively, and affiliate partnerships let you tap into existing credibility while reaching new communities. On top of that, occasional viral content can give your brand a major visibility boost and bring in bursts of traffic and sales.

To be ahead of your competitors on TikTok from the very beginning, consider joining HilltopAds. Reaching an external platform gives you an opportunity to speed up the tedious process of managing your settings – leave all the boring work to HilltopAds while you can focus on the creative part.

Here, we prepared a special segment that answers commonly asked questions about how to start your business on TikTok.