TikTok Advertising: Is It for You?

TikTok is probably the most-used social media platform, mainly due to its easily digestible content and fast-paced trends. The entertainment experience on TikTok is primarily in creative communities, big and small. 

Rapidly increasing popularity has made it one of the best advertising platforms for brands to promote their businesses. There’s a community for every type of business, from #booktok to #cleantok to #beautytok. 

Embracing the creativity and blinding pace of TikTok has significantly heightened brands’ success, which is why it won’t hurt to try out TikTok advertising. Keep reading to determine whether this platform would benefit you in your next campaign. 

TikTok Advertising: The Keys to a Successful Campaign

Here’s the complete step-by-step guide to advertising on TikTok for your next successful campaign:

1. Define Your Target Audience

The first step to TikTok advertising is defining your target audience, as the app is full of specific niches and communities. Unfortunately, determining your demographic can be hard when there’s a playground of opportunities to choose from. 

Interest, purchase intention, and subculture is the main factors to consider while defining your target audience on TikTok. In this case, analyzing your audience before your TikTok campaign and conducting client surveys is best. 

Then, it’s time to study the industry trends of TikTok, asking, “What do TikTok users like to see?” Take a step further by analyzing your competitors on TikTok and defining who your target audience isn’t. 

In this case, Google Analytics helps you determine your target audience by reporting what type of customers visited your website and other social media pages. 

2. Identify Your Campaign Objective

Once you know who your TikTok campaign is targeted toward, it’s time to identify your campaign objective. Knowing your optimization goals before creating a TikTok ad is essential because the campaign objective is what you want people to do after seeing your ad. 

For example, it’s best to opt for a traffic-centric campaign if your goal is to gain more website visitors. On the other hand, if your objective is to convert those visitors into customers, the campaign should focus more on how to sell your product or service. 

TikTok offers three options for campaign objectives to choose from awareness, consideration, and conversion. The Awareness Campaign Objective aims to familiarize your audience with your company. At the same time, the Consideration Campaign objective has several goals, including Traffic, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation, and Community Interaction.

Lastly, the Conversions Campaign Objective encourages visitors to take certain actions on your website, such as Get a Quote, Buy Now, Register Here, Download, etc. 

3. Determine the Type of Ad

Finally, it’s time to determine what type of ad you want to upload. TikTok offers options for various kinds of ads, such as In-Feed Ads, Video Ads, User-Generated Content, Branded Hashtags, and Branded Effects. 

In-Feed Ads

TikTok In-Feed Ads are displayed on the For You feed, blending seamlessly within non-advertising TikTok. While these aren’t video ads, they show up as ad breaks between non-advertising TikTok videos.

Most users scroll by these ads without a second glance, which is why your marketing team must put their very best into this ad. In addition, TikTok allows you to add actionable automation in these ads, which leads to the right landing page on your website.

Video Ads

Video ads on TikTok work just like any other TikTok video, except that their only purpose is to advertise a product or service. This type of ad allows customers to interact with it through likes, shares, and comments. You can publish these ads on the company’s TikTok sound or in the form of sponsorship. 

This allows advertisers to collaborate with famous TikTok influencers to advertise their products or service within their content. Since an in-feed ad takes up the customer’s whole page, companies can take this chance to create an eye-catching ad that’ll be hard to scroll away from. 

For example, they can use the latest trending sound to capture the user’s attention when they hear just one second of their favorite TikTok sound. In the case of collaboration or sponsorship, it’s the TikTok influencer’s responsibility to use strategies and product placement that gain views. 

User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is the best advertisement strategy you can opt for on TikTok, as users are much more likely to watch a video that originally lands on their For You page. In addition, the sponsored tag may drive viewers away, which is why UGC has a much better chance of helping you reach the campaign objective. The logic behind UGC’s success is that people trust real people more than brand personas. 

Branded Hashtag

The Branded Hashtag is another type of ad offered by TikTok. This ad is more interactive than any other option, allowing TikTok users to take part and post videos with content relating to the hashtag. 

When TikTok content creators use these hashtags, their videos have a much better chance of appearing at the top of the For You page with the Sponsored tag. As a result, both the company and the user can benefit from this type of advertisement.

When users click on the hashtag, they’re led to other TikTok videos under the same hashtag, with the original TikTok from the company listed first. This type of TikTok ad boosts brand awareness and social media engagement.

Branded Effects

The Branded Effects ad on TikTok is another interactive advertisement type of social media platform. Companies can use this creative asset to customize their own filter, advertising their company with the design. 

These ads allow brands to improve engagement and awareness by being fun and interactive. However, it’s worth noting that TikTok only runs branded effect ads for only ten days at a time.

Set a Daily Budget

After deciding the type of TikTok ad you need to use, the next step is to set a daily budget. The pricing starts at $10 for every 1000 views, and a TikTok campaign costs no cheaper than $500. For example, Lion Wild used TikTok video ads at $0.13 CPC and $0.17 CPM and derived a 19.35% conversion rate.

After picking your daily budget, determine the rate at which you want to spend your TikTok advertising budget. You may utilize the Standard Delivery option to spend your budget across the duration of your campaign as optimally as possible.

Consider Partnering With a Content Creator Relevant to Your Niche

TikTok is one of the most social media apps for content creators collaborating. You’ll find a popular content creator for the oddest niches, even cleaning supplies. This allows you to partner with content creators relevant to your niche to promote your product/service. 

Their audience trusts them to offer an expert opinion about their specific niche, which is why you’ll benefit from a higher conversion rate. As a result, both parties will benefit from the collaboration. Your partnership will open more doors for sponsorships for the creator while your business benefits from the promotion.

Create a Solid Bidding Strategy

TikTok advertising costs depend on the bidding method.

For example, the campaign level daily budget costs $50 while the ad group level daily budget is $20. Remember to set a No-Limit campaign-level budget if you opt for the Bid Cap or Cost Cap bidding strategy. 

If you opt for the Conversions campaign type, opt for the Lowest Cost bid strategy. In that case, you’ll need to set a minimum budget of $100 or 20 times your target CPA; take the pick according to whichever you hire.

Lastly, set your daily ad group budget to a minimum of 20 times your target CPA when choosing the Bid Cap or Cost Cap bidding strategy.

Track Campaign Performance

Now that you’ve created a campaign that caters to your custom audience and advertises your product/services as intended, it’s time to track your campaign’s performance. This way, you’ll be able to see what works and what doesn’t. 

You’ll find a dashboard on TikTok under the Ads Manager in the device options, allowing you to track your campaign performance. That includes the ads, ad spend, and the status of your ads. This dashboard also displays the status of your ad groups and campaigns. 

Performance metrics like gender, operating system, day-parting, etc., will allow you to regulate your campaigns. The social media platform also provides templates that help you track and create custom reports from scratch. 

Engagement Rate

It’s also important to calculate the engagement rate if you want to track campaign performance, detailing how much your target audience interacts with your account. You can calculate the engagement rate with this formula manually: ((Number of likes + number of comments + number of shares) / number of views) * 100%

However, it’s always best to use an engagement rate calculator to ensure accuracy and efficiency in your marketing practices.

Conversions

The Ads Manager dashboard also allows you to view CPM, CPC, CPA, CTR, and other conversion tracking options. If your conversion rate on TikTok is under 1%, it’s time to strategize and plan a more effective campaign.

Tips for the Ad Creation Process

Keep these social media advertising tips in mind while creating a TikTok advertising video.

1. Pay Attention to File Size

This may seem like a strange tip, but paying attention to file size when posting on TikTok is extra important. For example, while Android users can only upload only 72 MB at a time, Apple users can upload as much as 287.6 MB. 

In July 2021, TikTok increased its maximum video length from one minute to three minutes. However, research shows that the best TikTok video length is between seven and fifteen seconds for a quicker review. 

This time limit is enough to keep viewers interested and not swipe up to the next video. In addition, it adheres to the fast-paced environment of TikTok and allows business accounts to blend in with UGC. 

In addition, your marketing team will have an easier time creating simple, to-the-point content that explains the premise of your product in a few sentences. 

2. Align Organic Content With Your Marketing Campaign

Creating an organic content strategy is essential for TikTok because TikTok viewers don’t often trust the Sponsored tag on videos. In addition, it’s best to align organic content with your marketing campaign because no one likes a video full of forceful advertisements. 

On TikTok, the best way to do that is by embracing visual media and educating your current customers. Viewers are more likely to like a video that tells them something new rather than trying to sell them a product. 

3. Encourage User Participation

One of the main ways brands can increase user engagement on TikTok is by encouraging user participation in their content. For example, you may utilize the Q&A feature to answer customer, or potential customer queries about your product/service and create a more transparent brand persona. 

In addition, you can reply to comments with video content; this is one of the most popular engagement tactics used by brands on TikTok. You may also benefit from the Stitch and Duet features or use analytics to inform new content. 

Use TikTok as a Viable Platform for Advertising

Creators are the heart of TikTok, so you must be more than just a brand on TikTok to generate traffic. TikTok advertising allows you to explore a fast-paced marketing world that increases your brand’s transparency and turns visitors into customers. 

Look no further than GrowthHit if your marketing team needs assistance in their next TikTok campaign. GrowthHit focuses entirely on increasing your ROI by optimizing your marketing strategy to most affordably and effectively cater to your target audience with the help of its creative tools. 

The process includes:

• Performing a strategic growth assessment.
• Creating an ROI-focused hypothesis.
• Launching tests.
• Collecting insights.
• Meeting your conversion goals.

Get a free strategy call to start building your TikTok audience now!