TikTok Ads For Beginners: 5 tips to making TikTok Ads work for you ​

What is TikTok and what are TikTok Ads?

If you’ve never heard of TikTok, where have you been? TikTok is the 7th largest social media platform in the world, making it a key network for advertising and marketers.

TikTok provides several paid advertising options that fit seamlessly into a users’ news feed and are a great way to boost exposure and brand awareness, from creating your own Branded Effects such as stickers or filters, to Ad Takeovers and Hashtags.

Are TikTok Ads Right For Your Brand?

The number of brands advertising on TikTok is growing exponentially. That said, not every business may be suitable to advertise on TikTok. While the audience on TikTok is large, it doesn’t cover every demographic, with brands targeting the International 18-25 year old demographic likely to do the best.

If this sounds perfect for you, here are my 5 top tips to making high-quality TikTok Ads:

Research, research, research! – Before jumping into TikTok, research to see if your products or similar concepts are already on the platform. If they are, how are they doing and is the audience large enough to sustain your products as well? What are they doing well, and not so well? Also take a look into successful TikTok brand accounts – doing this research allows you to finetune a more successful campaign, but also evaluate how much time and money should be invested toTikTok Ads.

Keep your content short, sharp and interesting – TikTok is all about the content, from choosing the right song to jumping on the right trends, keep your content short and engaging. There are multiple TikTok ads formats, from 15-second in-feed ads, TopView Ads and brand effects – these complement each other well, but your content has to grab the attention of TikTok users. Use popular sounds, challenges or trends to help your ads and content reach more users and watch the engagement creep up!

Build your community – Don’t be afraid to ask people to follow you, the community aspect is a huge part of TikTok, with 50% of the best performing ads being emotive ones. Connecting with an audience is a great way to promote yourself, and TikTok makes it incredibly easy for users to engage directly with their community in their content.

Work with Influencers – If you have the budget try and work with Influencers to promote your products – it can be extremely fruitful as tapping into their audiences can be easier than building your own first. However, keep in mind that there’s a lot to consider when working with an influencer such as their relevance to your target demographic, their follower count, engagement metrics, and whether their appeal is local, national or worldwide.

Try something different, just be authentic – TikTok is always changing, so don’t be afraid to try new things, just make sure to evaluate what is and isn’t working and ensure you have an authentic voice. Although creativity should be consistent with your brand image, your ads should also resonate with your target audience; and you don’t do that by creating industry-standard, boring ads. TikTok is popular due to its uniqueness, so make sure your ads are the same.