TikTok Ads: The ‘ins and outs’ of TikTok
Drew Meyers, Paid Social Manager, shares more on what’s new, what you need to know, and why you really need to incorporate TikTok Ads into your marketing strategy.
What is TikTok?
The app exclusively hosts short-form video content, you can run both paid and organic ads. Currently, TikTok has more monthly app installs than Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
Leading short-form video app with a USP of authentic content that creates trends. An app where brands of all sizes and industries can be seen, grow their following, foster global connections, and achieve big results. (TikTok for Business)
In the UK, 66% of Millennial social/video platform users indicated that qualities related to creators’/influencers’ authenticity had motivated them to buy a product/brand (Business Insights).
TikTok is currently one of the most popular social media platforms worldwide with over 1.7 billion users as of 2023. (What’s the Big Data?)
Event TikTok Ad Example – World Art Dubai:
Who uses TikTok?
Although the most popular age demographic on TikTok is 16-24-year-olds, 30% of the audience is over the age of 24 (that’s 300,000,000 users).
Best Practices for TikTok Paid Advertising:
- Create your videos in the TikTok app.
- The recommended aspect ratios are 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9.
- Create shorter videos, and keep your ad between 9 and 15 seconds.
- Make sure all key aspects of the video are within the center of the screen – TikTok has other elements that will appear automatically.
- Communicate with your audience with a clear Call To Action (CTA) – TikTok suggests a 43.5% uplift with clear branding (event name, date, location).
- TikTok is a “sound on” app – make sure all videos contain sound or background music.
Also, ads in the United States with logo presence lead to a 28% increase in brand recall. (Business Insights)
The ad manager is similar to Facebook or LinkedIn, a platform to oversee all campaigns running and trends with overall spend.
Advertising Platform Objectives on TikTok:
- Reach
- Traffic
- Community Interaction
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Lead Generation
- Conversions
Targeting on TikTok
There are 3 different targeting options for TikTok paid ads – demographics, interests and behaviours, and device types.
Using hashtags, creator interactions allow you to target interactions, interests, consumer level, and B2B level (events/live shows).
Additionally, you can also target the users’ established interests and behaviour on the platform. Targeting is split into interests, purchase intent, behaviours, and hashtags.
Interests can be targeted by presenting ads to users based on their higher interaction with certain Interests. e.g. “Gaming”.
Purchase Intent targeting puts content on audiences for you page that are ‘in-market’ who are users actively researching or purchasing one specific category of product or service.
Behaviour targeting works by showing your content to those watching, liking, commenting, and sharing videos in a category.
Lastly, hashtags deliver ads to people who have engaged with hashtags over the past 7 days.
Users can be targeted depending on their connection type, wifi, 2G, 3G, and 4G. The benefits of this would be being able to target competitor events.
Additionally, you can create audience segmentations by the market value of the device the target audience is using, and segment by the carrier.
Similar to Instagram, TikTok creates a “fake” for you page for you to preview your ads.
Event TikTok Ad Examples:
Benefits to TikTok Advertising:
- Established audience and user base (1 billion+ users globally).
- Excellent choice for mobile-friendly site conversions.
- TikTok is now available in more than 200 countries. (Oberlo)
- 55% of TikTok users use the platform to research brands or products. (TikTok)
- TikTok has an ad reach of roughly 885 million people. (DataReportal)
Why Should You Use TikTok to Market Your Event?
- Driven by trends – we would recommend trialing different hashtags across your ads.
- Adding TikTok to your event strategy will allow you to trial a new style of video content and generate new data.
- Reach an audience that may differ from your existing social platform audiences.
From our experience, Tag Digital would recommend running campaigns for a longer period of time with a gradual spend increase over time.
Through experience working on +100,000 event marketing campaigns, Tag Digital has found that the intent to register comes towards the end of the campaign.
What content works on TikTok?
We would always recommend testing a variety of different video types to see what resonates with your audience the most.
At Tag Digital, event highlight videos often perform well on TikTok. We would also recommend trialing testimonials, as well as videos that look organic and are following the TikTok trends.
Don’t make ads – make TikToks! The same video on other paid channels won’t work on TikTok, make the videos interesting and trend-driven.
Here’s an example TikTok from one of our clients, Messe Frankfurt, for their event ‘Beautyworld’ 2023.
This style video and sound was trending on TikTok before their event, this is a great example of following trends that match your event and brand.
If you are interested in learning more about how you can use TikTok ads for your next event, the Tag Digital team are here to guide you through the best options based on your objectives.