Social media video is crucial to market a KBB business, reports kitchen retailer The Wood Works which has recently gone viral on TikTok.

The company, with showrooms in Letchworth, Mill Hill and Ascot, has achieved 66.5million views on TikTok, with one video amassing 25.5million views, and has a 120,000 following on Instagram.

Director Joshua Delane joined the business eight years ago, which was then dependent on word-of-mouth recommendations, with plans for growth.

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He created a social media strategy for the business and built a dedicated team for marketing and advertising.

The Wood Works, whose average kitchen sale is around £45-50k, started posting photos on Instagram and now posts weekly videos on YouTube, and Instagram TV.

Its schedule also includes daily videos for TikTok, Instagram Reels, as well as Instagram posts and stories which are also shared to Facebook, plus it regularly updates Houzz.

Although Instagram is the best channel for the business, providing “14-15 qualified leads a week”, Joshua Delane believes TikTok is important for brand building and will grow in significance for KBB retail.

He commented: “We are investing in TikTok now, because I have a theory that in the next two to five years, the platform will age up, like every platform does. And at that point, we will have more of our potential customer on that platform and we will be a big name on that platform and people will come to us as a result.

“Facebook, when it started, was for college kids (18-20 years old) and now I think the average age of a Facebook user is 55+. My grandma is on Facebook and every grandma I know is on Facebook, and that’s where they spend the majority of their time.”

The Wood Works creates CAD to reality and project walkthroughs, inspired by a YouTube creator Enis Yilmazer, who showcases luxury home tours.

Delane explains the secret to his firm’s social media success: “Putting a face to the brand is something different and no other [kitchen] company I’ve seen does, and it just makes it a bit more relatable.

“Most kitchen companies, if not all kitchen companies will photograph kitchens…but with the videos we wanted to take that one step further.”

However, he also says it has been important to analyse the results, discover the level of engagement, whether people are commenting and what they want to see more of.

Delane advises retailers who want to turbocharge their social media presence to balance paid-for with ‘brand-building’ marketing and to calculate the customer acquisition cost for a flow of leads.

He adds: “It took me six years to get from zero to 50,000 followers on Instagram and it’s taken me six months to get from 50,000 to reach 110,000. It really does compound quickly.

You’ve just got to be doing more of the right things, consistently, over time and it will pay off.”