5 steps to advertise on TikTok

Advertising on TikTok has become a real springboard for brands. Here's how to launch your TikTok Ads campaign step-by-step.

Today, TikTok is one of the most popular social networks, whether in France or in the rest of the world.

The time when the application was limited to Lip syncing (singing back to a song) is over. The formats and niches have diversified enormously. So much so that we can safely say that, regardless of your B2C industry, the platform is an opportunity that your brand cannot miss.

With its three billion users, TikTok is also The most downloaded application in the world, in front of Facebook and WhatsApp. When we know that 56% of users feel more connected to the brands they see on TikTok than on any other platform, the pool of opportunities for brands that invest on the app is huge. 😱

In this article, you will discover how the TikTok Ads platform works in order to develop your first advertising videos.

Create a TikTok Ads account

First, to create your first TikTok advertising campaign, you need to open a TikTok for Business account.

To access the TikTok Ads platform from the Business Center, select your ad account and click “Open in TikTok Ads.”

⚠️ Attention, to create a TikTok for Business account, you must have a VAT number.

A TikTok Ads account is structured into three categories: : campaigns, ad groups, and ads.

• In the game” Campaigns ” you will find your different ad groups. And for each campaign, you will have to define a main objective (reputation, traffic or conversions for example) as well as an overall budget.
• In the game” Ad group ” you will be able to define advertising placements and your targets. Each group can have one or more ads. This allows you to choose different criteria within the same campaign in terms of budget, audiences, objectives, but also programming...
• Finally, the part” adverts ” corresponds to the content that you want to broadcast to the audiences you have defined.

Start a TikTok Ads campaign

For create your advertising format on the TikTok social network, click on the “Campaign” tab, then on the “Create” button.

Then, follow the next steps in order.

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1. Define your objective

You have to Define the objective of your campaign among one of the choices offered:

• Ported (or Reach): to boost the reputation of your company or one of your products by distributing your ad to as many users as possible.
• Traffic : this objective makes it possible to generate traffic to your website and to transform visitors into leads.
• Installing the application : your Ad will encourage TikTok users to download and install your application.
• Video display : this objective allows you to increase the reach of one of your TikTok videos to increase visibility and gain subscribers.
• Conversions to generate qualified traffic, whether to convert visitors into customers on your store or to increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter.

💡 When your goal is chosen, Name your TikTok Ads campaign to find it more easily.

Finally, you will have to choose between two ways to place your ads :

• Automatic investments : TikTok optimizes the distribution of your ads on the platform and its related applications (Vigo Video, TopBuzz, BuzzVideo and NewsRepublic)‍
• Personalized investments : it is up to you to choose on which applications your ads appear.

2. Target your audience

TikTok will then help you target the right audiences according to your goals. You can rely on various criteria, including:

• Demographics (location, gender, age, language),
• The areas of interest,
• Behaviors on the application,
• The device used (Android or iOS, type of connection...).

To reach a wider audience, feel free to leave some fields empty. TikTok will give you recommendations after a few days, based on who interacted with your creations.

Thanks to the option TikTok Pixel you can also create custom audiences in order to reach a specific target. In particular, it is very practical to reach an audience similar to your customers. But it is also a good way to retarget by showing your ads to visitors to your site who have not yet purchased or who have only visited a particular page.

For that,TikTok will analyze your data such as your customer files, activity on your application, or even your website data.

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3. Define your budget

You then have to Define your budget and how you want to spend it. You have two options:

• A global budget : you indicate the total budget of your campaign. It's perfect for reaching a large number of users quickly.‍
• A daily budget : you indicate how much you want to allocate to your campaign each day. This allows you to optimize your budget and to broadcast your ads regularly over a given period of time.

If you want to launch different TikTok ad formats, you can create an ad group to group them together. You will thus be able to define the budget you want to give to this group and choose the periodicity of the distribution of your TikTok video content.

4. Optimize your budget

To avoid exploding your advertising budget and obtain an attractive return on investment, it is up to you tooptimize your budget.

For this you can choose between two auction methods :

• Standard auctions that is to say for which you will define an average auction cost. With this strategy, no unpleasant surprises, your ads are only shown at a cost that is lower or very slightly higher than your average bid cost and will always be lower than your overall campaign budget. It's a good way to keep your costs under control.‍
• Optimized auctions that aim to maximize conversions, with no bid limits, but always within your campaign budget.

5. Create your TikTok Ads

It is It's time to let your creativity run wild and to create your advertising video.

Be impacting from the first seconds to capture the attention of users. Remember: for your TikTok marketing campaigns, the 9:16 vertical format is mandatory (at least if you don't want to get poor results).

When your advertising video is ready, use the preview tool to be sure that the rendering of your smartphone ad meets your expectations.

Once your ad has been validated, test several versions. You can use the integrated tool to do so. A/B testing offered by TikTok to help you optimize your ads.

If after reading this article, you still feel a bit lost, it might be because you realized that TikTok advertising campaigns are quite complex. And that to optimize your results, it is better to be accompanied by an agency.

That's good: Sleeq is helping brands gain traction and conversion on TikTok. Do not hesitate to contact us, we will be happy to support you in your strategic thinking!