4 Essential Steps for Advertising on TikTok

The success of TikTok has skyrocketed recently – fueled by a global pandemic that, for a while, left many of us without much to do besides stare at our phones. 

“As of January 2021, TikTok had been downloaded over 2.6 billion times worldwide. It experienced meteoric growth in 2020 when the global pandemic took over the world and many of us were forced to stay indoors due to lockdowns. In the first quarter of 2020, it was downloaded a whopping 315 million times across Apple and Android phones, making it the most downloaded app in the world.” – Digital Agency Network, 2021

The Potential of Advertising on TikTok

The advertising potential of TikTok is evident for brands whose target market falls into the Gen Z age range (born between 1997 and 2012). Gen Z is the poster child for TikTok users, with over half of that generation using the app, compared to 39% of Millennials. TikTok’s internal campaign for attracting advertisers says, “Don’t make ads. Make TikTok videos.” Successful posts on TikTok demonstrate authenticity, so the key to brand success on the app is to create a social post that isn’t overtly an ad. 

The platform provides brands with a way to humanize their services or products, and there is strong potential for an ad to “go viral.” For many brands, TikTok wasn’t a marketing channel incorporated into their strategy until their products were featured in a popular TikTok video. Take, for example, the online editing website Grammarly. In early 2020, a dancer from Irvine, California uploaded a video of him choreographing a dance set to music from one of Grammarly’s YouTube ads. 

In just three days, the dancer had over 50,000 new followers and had created a trend using the same audio. Grammarly’s followers increased by 481% after the original TikTok went viral and the company completely changed its perspective on the platform. Grammarly immediately incorporated TikTok advertising into its strategy. Senka Hadzimuratovic, Grammarly’s head of communications said of the change, “There was no time to deliberate. We knew we needed to show that we don’t take ourselves too seriously and that we can be part of this culture.”

How to Get Started with TikTok Advertising

TikTok’s internal advertising platform is set up to help businesses of all sizes find success. 

Choose your goal and KPIs

There are three options on TikTok for campaign goals: connecting with customers, getting website visits, and generating customer leads. Connecting with customers is intended to create meaningful engagements with potential buyers. The website visits goal is simple: get more people to your brand’s website. Generating customer leads collects contact information of potential customers by adding forms to advertisements. Once your goals are established, identify which KPIs, or key performance indicators, are most relevant to measure your goals.

Select your audience

Deciding who should see your ads is an important aspect of creating a successful campaign. TikTok has an automatic audience generator, which chooses an audience that the platform believes would be the most receptive to your ad. Or, brands can manually create an audience that matches their goals and demographics.

Set your budget

Brands are able to choose a daily spend budget and set the dates that they want their ads to run. There’s even an option to “start now with no end date” for brands that really want to dive into advertising on TikTok and test indefinitely.

Design your ad

This is the fun part! Upload the images or video content you want your prospective customers to see. Remember, authenticity is key. Keep an eye on what’s trending and aim for ads that could inspire new trends such as challenges or branded hashtags. For the ad to be accepted by TikTok and for better performance and user experience, video creative must have background music or sounds. Additionally, videos should be high-resolution and avoid blurry or distorted images caused by stretching or compressing dimensions. The platform makes it simple for businesses to resize videos of any aspect ratio to meet their guidelines with its Intelligent Optimization Tool. 

Schedule a consultation for advice on how your brand can incorporate TikTok into its digital marketing strategy, or plan a social media training workshop to boost your social media campaigns!

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