TikTok is now the seventh-most used social media platform, and it has taken the world by storm. The viral-video building platform is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese multinational internet technology company. The app has completely changed the social media game and given everyone a safe space to become an internet phenomenon overnight, as well as allowed companies and businesses to market their ideas in a unique and curated manner.

Secondly, the app prevails dominance against other look-alikes on the market due to its ongoing trends, dance challenges, and use of popular filters. The culture that envelops TikTok is the level of Youtube and Instagram edited videos combined in a bite-sized quality that keeps users transfixed to their phones over the content created in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

TikTok’s customer base spans several ages from young to old, from various professionals to even celebrities. The app is loved by many including businesses such as Amazon, Chipotle, The Washington Post, and even the NBA. Most companies that use TikTok explore the advertising option as one of the best ways to leverage their advertisements to reach a larger audience.

Advertising on TikTok helps companies reach a young, energetic audience that loves to share great content but there’s more to than meets the eye. TikTok presents an enormous opportunity for its users to advertise on its platform.

Let us break down the rules of advertising on TikTok to leverage it to your business’s best abilities.

1. Budget your Advertisement

TikTok is a good advertising solution for big brands like Nike, Disney, or Grubhub, but it can be challenging for small businesses. The app doesn’t publish ad prices but large campaigns range anywhere from $25,000 to $150,000 depending on the type of campaign your business chooses. For self-service ads, TikTok requires a minimum budget of $500 for overall campaigns, with a $20 minimum for ad groups. This minimum amount allows you to see results and ensure that your ads can reach your objectives.

So ask yourself if your business can suffice the budget TikTok requires to advertise your content. Don’t feel discouraged from the get-go if budgeting is tough as the platform has allowed small to midsize businesses to thrive immensely.

One such example is the company mangopeople, a beauty brand that sells cosmetics made from fruit and vegetable pigments. The company has garnered a lot of recent fame due to its TikTok advertisements and the official TikTok page being updated every week. TikTok ads have allowed companies like mangopeople to become more well-known among the thousands of already-established and/or upcoming small businesses.

2. Create a TikTok Ads Account

Now that you’ve decided to go ahead and advertise your business, the first step is to create a TikTok Ads Account. To see if your business qualifies, you can contact TikTok Ads directly. After you submit your information and submit the form, a representative from TikTok will get in touch with you to set up your TikTok Ads account. It can take up to 48 hours to receive your account. Once you do, the process for creating ads is relatively straightforward.

3. Select your Ad Choice

TikTok offers several options for advertisers to reach their target demographic and customer base. Browse through the ones mentioned below to select the best type of advertisement for your business.

• In-Feed Video: Ads appear in the news feed of TikTok on the For You page. These range from $25,000 minimum per campaign to $30,000 daily maximum.

• Brand Takeover: Ads appear when TikTok users open the app and completely take over the screen for a few seconds before turning into an In-Feed Video ad. Users have the option of skipping these ads as well. These cost $50,000 per day.

• Hashtag Challenge: Ads appear on the Discovery page which encourages users to participate in user content creation challenges. These cost $150,000 for six days.

• Branded AR Content: Ads appear as branded lenses, stickers, and other 2D/3D/AR content for TikTok users to use in their videos. These range from $80,000 – $120,000 based on the complexity of the lens design.

• Custom Influencer Package: Ads appear as part of sponsored content created by a TikTok user with influence in your market. An example is a popular influencer marketing a brand-name beauty product for his/her audience. The price for these depends on the influencer’s popularity as well as the campaign chosen to run, but most range between $600 – $1,000 per post.

4. Create a TikTok Ad Campaign

Once you’ve finished setting up your TikTok Ads account, on the dashboard click the Campaign tab at the top of the page and then click the Create button. This will allow you to begin creating your desired advertisement. Next, choose a campaign objective and you will be given three options: Campaigns, Ad Groups, and ads.

• The top tier is the campaign. You will define your campaigns with one main objective and budget.

• Under a campaign, you will find one or more ad groups. You will define ad groups with ad placements, target audiences, budget, and schedule.

• Under an ad group, you will find one or more ads. You will create video content ads to reach your target audience for your ad group.

5. Select your TikTok Ad Placement, details, and Target

The next step is to create an ad group for your campaign and choose your placements and targeting. This refers to the placement of your ad and TikTok makes it very user-friendly by giving an option for automatic placements, where TikTok determines where your ad would perform best thus choosing the perfect placement. Another useful feature of the TikTok Ads dashboard is the selection of the platforms your business would like to run its ads on. These include not only TikTok but also other apps such BuzzVideo, News Republic, and others.

Once you’ve selected your preferred placements, follow the prompts to enter all of the details necessary to start running your ad, including any relevant URLs, display names, images, and categories. You can also select up to 20 keywords to describe your website or app in its best proximity, which will then help determine how to place your products with the right audience.

The Targeting section lets you define the target audience for your ads. You can set parameters for location, age, gender, language selection, interests, devices, and more to attract the right audience for your ads.

6. Set Your Schedule and Budget

Now that you’ve created a campaign, you are ready to select your budget and scheduling options for your ad. We touched on this briefly before but remember that you can choose either a daily budget, the amount you’re willing to spend each day, or a total budget, the total amount you’re willing to spend for the duration of the schedule of your ad. You can also pace your budget to better fit the results you want to achieve by determining the speed at which your budget will be spent.

You also get to schedule the duration for your ads, how long do you want them to run. There is an option called Dayparting which allows you to select specific times of the day or week on which to run your ad. It’s similar in the way Twitter and Tumblr work with their queue of tweets and posts to be posted.

7. Select your Metrics

This is the golden key, it’s time now for you to choose the right optimization goal to reap the results of your TikTok ads. You can choose to optimize your ad group for Conversion, Click, or Impression and your bidding will be optimized based on the goal you select. One of the more popular options is Conversion and if chosen, your ad will be displayed to people who are most likely to convert to your product or service, leading to revenue gain for your business. TikTok Ads automatically adjusts bids based on your bid settings, helping the cost of your campaign equalize closely to your target price.

8. Optimizing Your TikTok Ad

There are several ways to optimize your TikTok Ads and TikTok does a great job in providing a guide here. In summary, TikTok provides levers such as paying key attention to Target Audience, Account Structure, Optimization events, Bid & Budget, and a few more, but here are some other ideas to help you optimize your TikTok Ad.

• Focus on one main call to action so customers are aware of the action you want them to take. For example, if you ask users to download your app as well as unlock a subscription feature by punching in their email, you might confuse some viewers by redirecting them to your app’s download screen and the slot to enter their email might not pop up.

• When you want to use in-app display ads, ensure you are using high-resolution images so the visuals can fit the user’s entire screen and be highly visible at the same time.

• TikTok ads are not big on lengthy descriptions and they are limited to 80 English characters, so if you’re selling a more complex product or service, incorporate the right keywords using the Video Creation Kit.

• Take big advantage of the built-in ad tools at your disposal. Alongside the Video Creation Kit, there are several others such as the Automated Creative Optimization tool which allows the user to upload up to 10 images or 5 videos, 5 ad texts, and 1 CTA. It then produces your creativity into multiple ads. It tests a variety of sample ads throughout your campaign and ultimately presents the best possible combination to your target audience.

The conclusion is that TikTok is on the rise, has become a great tool for go-to marketing for most businesses and companies, and gives a comprehensive offering of design and automation tools to create wonderfully creative ads. There doesn’t seem to be a decline in the usage of TikTok amongst audiences of all ages, and it provides a great advertising tool to help leverage businesses to their best abilities.

To gain a larger understanding of how TikTok has become the leading social platform for advertisement as well as entertainment, our team at SDI specializes in website and mobile app development. With our help, you too can create the next powerful social media platform such as Tiktok, just give us a call at 408.621.8481 or email us at team@sdi.la