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, both in France and in the rest of the world.

The time when the application was limited to lip syncing (playback singing to a song) is over. 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 your brand can't afford to miss. 

With three billion users, TikTok is also the most downloaded app in the world, ahead of Facebook and WhatsApp. When you consider that 56% of users feel closer to the brands they see on TikTok than on any other platform, the opportunity pool for brands investing in the app is huge. 😱

In this article, you will discover how the TikTok Ads platform works in order to create your first video ads.

Create a TikTok Ads account

First of all, to create your first advertising campaign on TikTok, you must open a TikTok for Business account.

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

Please note that 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 " Campaigns " section you will find your different ad groups. And for each campaign, you will have to define a main objective (awareness, traffic or conversions for example) and a global budget.
• In the " Ad Group " section you can define the ad placements and your targets. Each group can contain one or more ads. This allows you to choose different criteria within the same campaign in terms of budget, audience, objectives, but also programming...
• Finally, the " Advertisements " section corresponds to the content you wish to distribute to the audiences you have defined.

Launch a TikTok Ads campaign

To create your ad format on the TikTok social network, click on the "Campaign" tab, then on the "Create" button.

Then follow the following steps in order.

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1. Define your objective

You must define the objective of your campaign from one of the choices offered:

• Reach: to boost awareness of your company or one of your products by broadcasting your ad to as many users as possible.
• Traffic: This objective allows you to generate traffic to your website and to transform visitors into leads.
• Application installation: your Ad will encourage TikTok users to download and install your application.
• Video Display: This goal allows you to increase the reach of one of your TikTok videos to grow in 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 make it easier to find.

Finally, you will have to choose between two placement methods for your advertisements:

• Automatic placements: TikTok optimizes the distribution of your ads on the platform and its related applications (Vigo Video, TopBuzz, BuzzVideo and NewsRepublic)
• Customised placements: you choose which applications your ads appear on.

2. Targeting your audience

TikTok will then help you target the right audiences according to your objectives. You will be able to rely on different criteria, including :

• Demographics (location, gender, age, language) 
• 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 blank. TikTok will make recommendations after a few days, based on the people who interacted with your creations.

Thanks to the TikTok Pixel you will also be able to create personalized audiences to reach a specific target. This is especially useful to reach an audience similar to your customers. But it's also a good way to do retargeting by showing your ads to visitors of your site who have not yet purchased or who have only visited a particular page.

To do this,TikTok will analyze your data such as your customer files, the activity on your application, or the data on your website.

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3. Define your budget

You then need 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. This is perfect for reaching a large number of users quickly.
• A daily budget: you indicate how much you want to spend on your campaign each day. This allows you to optimise your budget and run 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. This will allow you to define the budget you want to give to this group and choose the periodicity of the broadcast of your TikTok video content.

4. Optimising your budget

To avoid blowing your advertising budget and get a good return on investment, it is up to you tooptimize your budget.

For this you can choose between two auction modes:

• Standard bids, i.e. for which you will define an average bidding cost. With this strategy, there are no unpleasant surprises, your ads are only shown at a cost that is lower or slightly higher than your average bidding cost and will always be lower than your overall campaign budget. This is a good way to control your costs.
• Optimised bids which aim to maximise conversions, with no bidding cap, but always within your campaign budget.

5. Create your TikTok Ads

It's time to let your creativity flow and create your video ad. 

Make an impact in the first few seconds to grab users' attention. Remember: for your TikTok marketing campaigns, the 9:16 vertical format is mandatory (at least if you don't want to get mediocre results).

When your video ad is ready, use the preview tool to make sure that your ad looks as good as you expect it to on your smartphone.

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

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

It's a good thing: Sleeq helps brands gain traction and conversion on TikTok. Don' t hesitate to contact us, we will be delighted to help you with your strategic thinking!