The Ultimate Guide to TikTok Advertising

Brands and Users Working Together in Spark Ads

One of the best things that separate TikTok from other apps is the community of users who all interact with each other and with brands through challenges - a content form that is typical and unique to TikTok. When the challenges become viral, brands that know how to steer that attention towards their goals, such as increasing sales numbers or introducing a new service to the audience, can turn in a huge profit.

Sometimes, the original brand content works great in and by itself. Other times, a user-generated response might actually perform even better. Enter Spark Ads, which allow the brands to boost select user-generated content through paid campaigns, showing it to audiences around the world.

The only condition is that the original creator and the brands reach an agreement, where the user explicitly consents to their content being used for promotional services. It can be a match made in heaven, as the user gets to show their content to a wider audience and gain more exposure and followers, while the brands will receive a chance to reap the rewards of their effort.

How to Create Spark Ads

Now that we’ve seen all the potential benefits of using TikTok Spark ads, let’s see how to create them.

• Decide which post you want to use for your Spark ad. It can be your own post, but in most cases it will be a creator’s organic post that is already trending.
• If it’s a creator’s post, you need to get in touch with them and, once they agree to work with you on this, they need to do the following:
• Below the Comment button there are three dots that they need to click and go to Ad Settings.
• Switch the Ad Authorization toggle to On
• Select the preferred authorization period (7, 30, 60 or 365 days) and click the button that says Authorize.
• Copy the code and paste it in the chat they have with you as a brand.

Using TikTok
Pulse for Advertising

The main goal of TikTok advertising is to reach the target audience that has the need for your product or service. TikTok being a platform based around community and culture, it’s obvious that, for successful advertising, brands need to get inside the culture, get a front-and center spot and become its organic part.

Enter TikTok Pulse.

Pulse allows brands to embrace the relevant communities like never before and bring their content to those who will appreciate it. In this section, we’re taking a closer look at this feature and explain why it can be a game-changer for your brand, allowing you to supercharge your ad performance. Here’s where you can start.

What is TikTok Pulse and Why You Need to Pay Attention to This Feature?

TikTok spoiled its users with a custom “For You Feed”. This page displays content based on the user’s desires and interests, making it an endless source of interesting and engaging content.

Up until recently, this section was off-limits to most businesses, but with TikTok Pulse, brands have a chance to display their carefully crafted ads right next to the platform’s 4% of the most popular videos. The reach, as you can imagine, is incredible.

Pulse has turned out to be highly beneficial both brand favorability and brand recognition. It also has a positive impact on purchase intent among viewers. Just by showing your content to users who are open-minded and even actively searching for ways to entertain themselves, you have a much better chance to establish a stronger presence, compared to regular ads.

What Kind of Results Can You Expect?

It’s the first time that brands have potential to create virality on such a scale. Best branded challenges inspire millions of TikTok users to interact with your brand. Average engagement rate achieved through branded hashtag challenges is 8.5% through likes, comments and shares.

Subway’s campaign with their #bitemechallenge broke all records, drawing in more than 956 million video views, 167,000 entries and an impressive 14.55% engagement rate.

Hire a Team of Influencers to Get the Ball Rolling

Perhaps the biggest issue that most brands face is how to gain any traction in the first place. Your job is simple, yet not so easy to do: to get people to react to your idea, you first have to make it cool. That’s easier said than done. But, on TikTok, the shortcut to a viral hashtag usually includes a team of trusted influencers. Why is it so important?

Your Product Needs to Be the Focal Point

Your TikTok content needs to be centered around what you’re selling. If you fail to meet this goal, as your hashtag challenge gains popularity, and as more and more people start to join in, the whole idea can quickly drift away in a different direction, and out of your control. Pretty soon, people can ditch your product entirely or forget to even mention your brand, and that’s the last thing you want to happen.

To avoid this, the challenge needs to be structured in a way which promotes a single or several important qualities of your products or services. By doing that, you will still leave some room for creative freedom, but steer the conversation in the direction towards your business bottom line.

Not All Ideas Are Created Equal

We all have our personal preferences, and sometimes, it’s not bad to stick to our guns and insist on things we find to be true. Still, when it comes to social media, the rules are never set in stone, and you have to retain at least some flexibility in order to adapt to the market demands.

Here are some general rules you need to follow:

• Hashtags need to be catchy and easy to remember
• If possible, use your brand or product name
• Create challenges that are fun and include people across all demographics
• Everything becomes a lot easier with the right influencers by your side
• Every product is different and specific, and the hashtag challenge built around it should be created in order to highlight its features in the brightest light.

Using Dynamic Product Ads to Boost e-Commerce Sales

As we saw and reiterated numerous times in this guide, very soon after its inception TikTok managed to turn itself into a very potent and fertile advertising ground. With the big audience packed mainly with Gen Zers and Millennials, the app allowed brands to create brand love and awareness in a new way. But, TikTok now decided to capitalize on another thing that blossomed over the last few years (mainly due to the pandemic): e-commerce.

After the introduction of a self-serve advertising platform that put small businesses in the game, partnership with Shopify, the launch of new formats like Instant Form, TikTok introduced a range of new, in-stream shopping tools with the goal of enabling brands to drive users to shop on the platform and create an increase in their revenues.

One of the recent additions that really pops out is the Dynamic Product Ad, a format that should definitely be on your radar from now on. In this section of our guide, we will discover how this new ad format can help you maximize your e-commerce potential and follow the steps of the leading businesses advertising on the platform.

Exactly What Are Dynamic Product Ads on TikTok?

This is the right question to start exploring this fantastic new format. Dynamic Product Ads, or as the developers call it - ”Catalog Sales“, is a format that enables the most relevant product to be automatically shown to the people that expressed interest according to their online activities. In other, simpler words, the functionality automatically retargets users with relevant products based on their activity in the brands’ app or/and websites.

Why Use Dynamic Product Ads?

TikTok pointed out 3 main reasons why this format is such a great asset, and we must agree.

• Dynamic Product Ads are completely personalized

Instead of dropping bucks on a large-scale campaign, personalized marketing allows you to communicate with your potential customers completely based on their online behavior. And when you show them what they want to see, they get a much better shopping experience.

• Dynamic Product Ads will improve your ROI

Based on the previous one, it is expected to see transactions and improvement of ROI thanks to the fact you know what your customers want and have a tool to do it. Dynamic Product Ads allow you exactly that.

• Dynamic Product Ads save your time and money

These ads use retargeting instead of targeting. It is an automated process that helps you skip creating separate ads for each promotional item, therefore saving you time, labor costs and costs of your promotional activities.

TikTok Dynamic Product Ads - Final Verdict

In its pursuit to broaden the base of advertisers on its platform, TikTok is integrating shopping into the app in various ways, including Dynamic Product Ads. Previous upgrades in these terms surely brought results, as TikTok claims, US ad business have grown more than 500% in the past year. The new ad formats are just a small step in the transition of TikTok becoming an e-commerce giant. And with the majority of TikTok’s users being relatively young, as they age up, the true expansion and growth are only at the beginning.

Using Dynamic Product Ads to Boost e-Commerce Sales

We saw that TikTok can do wonders for driving e-commerce sales. But how about app downloads? With the ever-increasing number of businesses with apps as the main product, it’s only natural that the TikTok platform has excellent ad and targeting possibilities for this niche too.

What Makes TikTok Ideal for Driving Your App Downloads?

Video content is now the driving force that has become a vital component of all social media apps. Just like Twitter, that made a massive hit worldwide by forcing the users to express their thoughts in the shortest form possible. TikTok is doing that right now by focusing on mobile-friendly videos that last no more than 60 seconds. This is the reason why video ads in vertical format have up to 9 times better completion rate compared to the ones in horizontal format.

This is a blessing in disguise to all of those trying to use the platform for marketing. It basically forces the creative teams to come up with short, but highly effective and mobile-first campaigns that resonate with the audiences. With mobile apps, there is usually just a short window of time during which the idea is considered trendy and current. Because of that, TikTok, with its fast-resulting marketing plans, is the ideal tool to drive your app downloads in a hurry.

Reach Your Target Audience Easily Through TikTok

Reaching a huge number of people is important, but reaching your ideal target app user is even better. TikTok allows you to target potential users of your app by age, gender and interest categories. That is a truly important asset and a shortcut that allows brands to establish successful campaigns in the shortest time possible.

Why is this important? It’s really incredibly simple: if you bring your products and services right to the person who is already in the need for it, the chances of driving an app download and install grow substantially.

How to Create a Fail-Safe Strategy?

Because there are so many factors that come into play when it comes to successful targeting, including age, demographics, and language, as well as their interests and desires, it is necessary to create an all-capturing plan which will cover most of these points.

Adopting a phased approach is something that is highly recommended if you want to successfully launch and scale your app installs.

Phase 1: Setting Up

Make sure to set up events most relevant to you and ensure that you’re tracking Lifetime Value (LTV). Use custom audiences, an option that allows you to create an audience of users who have completed certain events within your app. Available events are: Install, Activate, Register, Purchase, Day 2 Retention, Checkout, Add to Cart, and View Content.

Phase 2: Creating Campaigns

Choose the right bidding strategies, creatives, and targeting for your goals. The App Installs objective is designed to drive more people to install your app by taking them directly to your app store page.

Make sure to have quality content for your ads and to refresh creatives regularly. The better the videos, the better they will perform.

Phase 3: Analyzing and Optimizing

Many businesses invest huge amounts of money in the marketing department, but they are not quite sure about the results they are getting from it. Collecting the results is not only vital because of the financial side of things. It will allow you to focus on customers that are driving the most value for your business. By determining precisely what works and what doesn’t, you’ll be able to change and adapt your marketing plan at any given time.

Tips and Tricks for a Successful Campaign for Your App

• Do not narrow down your target audience too much

The TikTok people are proud of the algorithms they have created, and for a good reason. This app truly feels more intuitive than most others. Therefore, there is no need to narrow down the target audience for p>your campaign too much, the platform will do it for you.

By narrowing down your focus audience more than you have to, you risk losing a ton of potential app downloads. So, put your trust in the developers’ hands, and they will make sure that your content reaches those who need to see it.

• Build specific campaigns for clicks or conversions

While increasing your app downloads through TikTok needs to remain the primary focus, you may also want to create a clear separation between the things that you are trying to achieve. On one hand, you can use TikTok campaigns to increase the app awareness by scoring as many clicks as possible. Similarly, if you aim to create as many conversions as possible, you can do that instead, while still sticking to your original budget.

• Create at least 5 unique videos for each campaign

After just one hour of using TikTok, you will quickly find out that creativity is the driving force that sets this entire thing in motion. That is what you’ll always have to work on if you want your business to stand out from the rest.

According to guidelines from TikTok, the best results can be expected if every campaign relies on at least 5 different videos. If you are struggling to find a way to express yourself, don’t be afraid to reach out to a few content creators, as they always have plenty of fresh ideas and tricks up their sleeve.

• Be careful about the number of changes you make to your campaigns.

A lot of people tend to fiddle to much when it comes to their campaign management. It’s not that they don’t trust the creativity, it’s just that they somehow always seem to find a detail or two that requires editing.

Because of that, they tend to change their approach way too often, without letting the campaign to truly develop. We aren’t saying that you shouldn’t try to stay on top of things whenever you can, but know that it takes time before you can look at the data and determine whether your videos have boosted the overall app downloads or not.

Allow yourself some space every week to make the necessary changes, but don’t push it longer or more frequently than that. If you are satisfied with the way your campaign has been performing, don’t be afraid to leave it as is, as there’s no need to fix something that is not broken.

Reach Fresh Audiences and Interest Them in Your Product

Before you can even hope to improve your sales numbers through the use of social media, there are some important steps you have to take into consideration. First of all, one of the best ways in which you can use Instant pages is to reach new audiences and inform them about your products and services in more detail. You can also use an Instant Page optimized for improved reach in order to showcase your brand values, thus establishing a deeper connection that you can later use to turn them into loyal customers.

If you are trying to establish trust between yourself and the users, try to be upfront about these things, but always do your best to wrap it up in a fun package that will increase interaction and engagement as much as possible.

Reach Fresh Audiences and Interest Them in Your Product

We often see examples of brands that are very hesitant and almost afraid of using a clear and concise call to action in their campaigns. Although this is somewhat understandable, as most companies are afraid of scaring away their potential customers by asking a question too soon, this step is absolutely vital when it comes to making the final sale.

Instant Pages that are optimized towards conversions can help you with that. While the TikTok algorithm will bring warm traffic to your page, it’s still up to you to turn these views into customers. TikTok allows brands to choose a modern template that will help them to design a captivating experience for the users, which might impress them enough to become your loyal clientele.

So basically it all boils down to being fun, honest, cool, direct (but not blunt), modern and dynamic in your Instant Pages. If this sounds like an impossible mission for you, try spending more time on TikTok watching organic content as well as ads. You will soon get a grasp of what this content feels like, and you will have an easier time reproducing it for your brand.

Why Your TikTok Ads Keep Getting Rejected and How to Fix Them

Because of its vibrant, innovative nature, TikTok has brought a major shift in the advertising approach compared to traditional digital marketing. It may not offer a lot of formats, but a huge audience is right there, waiting for brands and businesses to catch their attention. All the marketers have to do is what the users do every day – create attractive, immersive and original content.

And while users have an almost complete freedom in these fields, for brands, the situation is a bit different when advertising on TikTok. Numerous guidelines must be respected. Otherwise, your TikTok ads will be rejected. We created a comprehensive overview of some of the most important guidelines that will help you create cool content for both users and TikTok’s Advertising regulators.

Ad Consistency

TikTok offers tons of ways to make an outstanding ad for your business. Templates, songs, fonts, filters, you name it! But your ad elements, such as captions, texts, images, videos, calls-to-action and other stuff must always be consistent with the product or service you are promoting. For example, you feature one product in your video, but it leads to a completely different product on your landing page. This results in your ads being rejected. Also the ad caption needs to be consistent with the corresponding ad image or video.

Ad Caption, Text, Image and Video Issues

Always watch your grammar! Ads must not contain any typos, spelling or grammatical mistakes. So, always double-check before submitting the ad.

Also, no matter how much it may look witty or creative, never use gimmicks with capitalization, spacing or symbols in your captions.

Keep the images clean, without any blurs, hidden spots or any watermarks on them. Videos and audio in the ad must be provided in high resolution, using standard dimensions we discussed earlier (9:16,16:9 or 1:1 ratio), otherwise your ad will never go live.

Misleading Claims Issue

Some of those TikTok filters may come in handy to emphasize the superiority of your product or service, but keep them away from your ads. Why? Ads should not feature any exaggerated performances or promises. Be careful in your statements and try not to use absolute claims for your brand without related proof for them. Don’t show yourself off by competing with rival brands in a malicious manner or claiming how much cheaper your product is. Remember that creatives and landing pages for some types of businesses that feature performance promises and time limit claims may be subject to restrictions, too.

Sensational and Shocking Content

Advertisers must avoid using any gruesome imagery or graphic images that may shock and scare users in any way or create an uncomfortable experience for them. Accidents, crime and horror scenes, human or animal waste, excessive violence or cruelty and any dangerous behaviors without safety protection are out of bounds. This is very important for brands and businesses in the beauty industry, anything that shows dirt coming out of pores or hair being pulled out is strictly forbidden.

Be careful with content containing alcohol, gambling and lottery, religion and culture, weight management. These topics are strictly forbidden.

Restricted Content

You might be surprised by the fact that some ad topics could be prohibited on your market, so it’s always a good idea to check, and double-check. For example ,ads for products or services that are specifically intended for children, such as toys, games, apps, clothing, etc. are not allowed in some TikTok regions. Advertisements marketed specifically toward children, even if the product may be for a general audience, are also prohibited in the United States.

To avoid making a mess, always make sure to check ad regulations for your country.

Wrapping It Up

As TikTok continues to grow in all terms, deciding to skip the platform and its potential for advertising is the biggest mistake you can make as a brand.

Marketing on TikTok may require a lot of patience and effort in creating a perfect strategy. It may also require consistent and frequent analyses of your performance.

Yet, testing new channels and learning what suits your audience is bound to bring results in the long-term.

Also, you may want to consider hiring a specialized Tik Tok marketing agency like GrowMojo and take your TikTok presence a step further instantly. Feel free to contact us and get the best out of your ads in no time!