TikTok Marketing: An Ultimate Guide

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In our previous article dedicated to TikTok marketing, we’ve tackled reasons why your brand might want to leverage this platform for promotion, figured out how the TikTok algorithm works and touched on some relevant statistics for 2020 you should keep in mind when creating a brand TikTok account.

In this piece, we’ll talk more specifically about TikTok marketing facets, namely, content which works best on TikTok, TikTok ads, performance insights and influencer marketing on TikTok.

TikTok Marketing

TikTok is about to launch TikTok for Business, a proper platform for marketers. As TikTok claims, the platform is a ‘Home to all current and future marketing solutions for brands. TikTok For Business solutions are designed to give brands and marketers the tools to be creative storytellers and meaningfully engage with the TikTok community’.

The idea behind TikTok For Business is to help brands create and be discovered on the platform. It will be giving marketers the tools they need to be found on TikTok and easily connect with new potential customers.

Depending on their goals, marketers can tap into different parts that are fundamental to TikTok:

  • Scale & creativity: TikTok is a growing platform for marketers to leverage as a must-have destination. It’s an entertainment-based platform that offers users and brands the tools to tell their stories.
  • Sight, motion & sound: With TikTok, the industry can build for a mobile, sound-on environment. And, there are so many opportunities for sound: music, sound effects, voice-overs, reactions, and more.
  • Inclusive & participatory community: TikTok is all about “join.” This presents an original opportunity for marketers to create work that becomes a part of the community. On TikTok, people can become so engaged and inspired by a marketing campaign, that they’ll create their own version of it. Brands can actually experience the impact their campaigns have on people.
  • The place where culture is made: TikTok is an open platform where anyone and any brand can be discovered. The opportunity to learn about what is happening all over the world is limitless. Culture is created in an open and inclusive way on TikTok, every day.
  • Seamless & simple solutions: Products deliver across every marketing touchpoint and allow for rich and immersive storytelling. All are seamless, full-screen video and appear natively with the user experience. Among other things, TikTok is working on its measurement solutions as well. Finally, the company is announcing a new AR Branded Effect called Branded Scan, which lets users have an augmented reality experience with any brand.

And to help brands and creators team up, TikTok is about to launch the Creator Marketplace platform in some regions across the world.

Brands will utilise TikTok Creator Marketplace to find and cooperate with content creators on paid brand campaigns, help drive awareness and bring new customers.

So now let’s cut to the chase and dig deeper into TikTok marketing.

TikTok Marketing: Content

An appealing peculiarity of the TikTok algorithm is that even small accounts can garner millions of views on a video, even if the creator is not yet well-known on the platform and lacks massive followership. This is hardly happening on other platforms, such as Instagram and YouTube.

TikTok is changing fast and is full of viral yet ephemeral trends. Creative and one-of-a-kind content is surely welcome, but what works really well on Tiktok is videos any other user can easily make themselves, such as:

  • Viral (hashtags) challenges
  • Lip-syncing to popular songs
  • Funny sketches
  • Cute pet videos
  • Duets with other users
  • And, of course, dances!

To estimate if the video is nailing it, keep these metrics in mind: likes, comments, shares, total playtime, sources of traffic, and reach.

You can also cross-promote TikTok videos to Instagram or other social media platforms to garner maximum exposure and followership.

Tips and tricks on how to get discovered on TikTok will be covered in our next article dedicated to TikTok algorithm hacks.

TikTok Marketing: Ads

Like other social platforms, TikTok is not an exception when it comes to profound advertising options and performance insights. Like Facebook’s Ads Manager, TikTok enables brands to create targeted ad campaigns, track performance, edit and optimise ad creatives to reach as many users as possible.

You can set your ads budget on a daily or lifetime basis and optimise it anytime when your campaign is running.

Targeting capabilities of TikTok ads are also great. Like on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media, you can set up age, gender, location, interests and even create a Lookalike audience based on the audiences you have already created. This will help you reach many users similar to your initial target buyer personas.

TikTok In-Feed Ads

In-Feed Ads are the video ads which show up when users scroll through their For You pages. In-feed ads enable you to include multiple call-to-actions and make your video 9 to 15 seconds long. This type of ads is quite effective, but only if it can catch the attention of the target audience in just a couple of seconds. Users scroll their For You pages rather quickly, so your ad has to be really eye-catching.

To make it possible, In-Feed ads should be full-screen-wide, have engaging CTA, copy and the video itself, considering that users sometimes scroll their feeds muted or with low sounds.

You can create this ad on TikTok Ads platform.

TikTok Brand Takeover Ads

Brand Takeover ads on TikTok is the type of paid social that you see right after you open your TikTok app. If the first video or image you see on TikTok when launching the app is sponsored, this is a TikTok Brand Takeover ad.

As TikTok claims, the platform makes sure you won’t see more than one Brand Takeover per day. This means this ads type can get you large reach with little competition. But keep in mind though that TikTok Brand Takeover is rather expensive.

TikTok Branded Hashtag Challenge

If hashtag challenges themselves are not exclusive to TikTok, these definitely what made TikTok so popular. No wonder that the platform offers Branded Hashtag Challenge advertising opportunities, which is exclusive to TikTok alone.

To find the examples of such ads, head to the Discover tab on TikTok. There, among regular hashtag challenges endorsed by TikTok or just those going viral accidentally, you will find Branded Hashtag challenges, sponsored by brands. This type of advertising is a great way to boost TikTokers to make user-generated content and naturally integrate your brand into the TikTok community.

Among the drawbacks of such an ad is this is quite pricey: you can pay up to $150,000 per day to let TikTok show your ad on the top banner on the Discover page. Moreover, if the Branded Hashtag Challenge can bring you massive reach, this reach is not always relevant since many aspiring TikTokers use your hashtag to promote their videos, knowing that the hashtag is popular.

Sounds ok, but their videos are often irrelevant to your campaign and cannot be taken seriously in terms of the campaign performance. Thus, real exposure will be different from that in insights.

For instance, this is the TikTok Branded Hashtag Challenge sponsored by Apple Inc. promoting new Beats headphones by Dr. Dre and Ashnikko. To take part in this challenge, users need to take up the colour challenge, shoot the video to the beat of Ashnikko’s new track Daisy, and post the video with the branded hashtag #BeatsDaisyChallenge.

When you click on the banner, you’ll find millions of videos with the official ones at the top. But as you scroll down, more irrelevant content shows up.

TikTok Branded Effects in Ads

Another creative TikTok advertising opportunity for brands is TikTok Branded Effects such as stickers, AR filters, and lenses. This is not entirely exclusive to TikTok since Instagram now allows brands to create AR masks and Snapchat enables brands to make lenses.

TikTok TopView Ads

TopView ads on TikTok are very similar to Brand Takeover. But unlike them, TopView is the first video you see when you open the app. You can scroll it like any other video in your feed. Brand Takeover, however, can’t be scrolled down, you can only skip it. TopView ads are in-feed posts you see after you open your TikTok For You page.

Note though that Branded Hashtag Challenges, Brand Takeovers, Branded Effects, and TopView ads need to be talked with TikTok’s Brand Partnership teams first.

How Much Do TikTok Ads Cost

TikTok Ads are relatively new, so understanding the average spend or return on investment is difficult. Besides, some of the ads require advanced reservations with the platform itself.

To make In-Feed ads, you need to create a free TikTok ads account and set up an ad with your own schedule and budget. The minimum budget you need to create a campaign is $500.

As you’ve learned from above, TikTok ads can be quite pricey — from $50,000 to $120,000, which largely depends on the ads type and running time.

If you want to reduce TikTok ads costs, we’d recommend you team up with TikTok creators and increase your brand awareness with them.

TikTok Marketing: Performance Insights

Like on Instagram, TikTok insights are available only for Pro accounts. To switch to a Pro account, open your profile page on TikTok, press three dots at the top right corner of your profile page, head over to Manage my account, then Switch to Pro account.

There you can choose either Creator or Business account. Then you just need to set it up choosing your category and edit your profile. Your profile analytics consists of three tabs — Overview, Content, and Followers.

Overview tab shows you total video views, followers, and profile visits you gained for the last 7 days.

Content tab showcases top 9 fastest-growing videos for the last 7 days and trending videos, i.e. those which appeared on the For You or Discover pages.

If you want to see insights of a particular video, click on its thumbnail, and the stats like total likes, comments, shares, total and average time watched, views, audience sources and views locations will show up.

Followers tab displays top-notched data on your followers’ gender, top locations, days and hours they’re the most active on TikTok, and even which videos they watch and sounds they listen to on TikTok!

TikTok Marketing: Influencers on TikTok

TikTok attracts advertisers with higher engagement rates than Instagram or Twitter. This makes it ideal for influencer marketing. TikTok influencer marketing has only been around for a short period of time, but brands are already jumping on the bandwagon of TikTok influencer. If you want to build an actionable TikTok influencer marketing strategy, start with following these steps:

Reach out to relevant influencers

In terms of influencer marketing, TikTok is not much different from any other social media platform. You can look for such influencers manually, use tools such as native Tiktok Creator Marketplace or influencer marketing agencies. Don’t forget to do proper research and find out if these influencers have a proven track record of delivering high-quality content and generating genuine engagement. Make sure that their audience aligns with yours.

Let TikTok influencers be themselves

Trust the creators who know the platform, who have already developed a reputation in their community and respect among their followership. Let them do their job; they know how to put things right to their audience without pushing your products and sound like friends to the followers. Let them be creative and tell about your products in a way they feel it.

Measure TikTok campaign insights

Now you have relevant stats in your TikTok profile, so don’t let them just vanish into thin air; track, measure and optimise those insights you find relevant for a particular campaign. Depending on your campaign objectives, pay attention to your video views, link clicks, comments, shares, total playtime, and traffic sources.

Full coverage of TikTok influencer marketing will be represented in our upcoming articles. And if you missed our latest webinar on TikTok influencer marketing, that’s the right time to watch it.

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