TikTok just launched a new program, TikTok Back to Business.
For eligible small and medium-sized businesses, TikTok offers up to $2300 in free ad credits.
Here are the offers:
A one-time free ad credit worth $300 USD to be used by December 31, 2020.
Additional spending matched 1-to-1 with free ad credit, up to $2,000 per business.
The amount and currency vary by the country, for instance, in the UK the total amount you can get in free ad credits is £1,830.
If you are considering to test TikTok as a new UA channel, now is the time to get free £1,830.
Eligibility:
SMB’s who sign up for a new TikTok Ads Manager account or who have an active account, and meet all of the requirements of the program are eligible.
Your company must be registered as a taxpayer business in the following countries:
The United States
The United Kingdom
Italy
France
Spain
India
Australia
Russia
South Korea
Saudi Arabia
the UAE
Egypt
Turkey
Thailand
Malaysia
Indonesia
Vietnam
and Japan.
Business Information Required for Verification:
In order to be eligible for the program, you have to prove your company is registered with your local jurisdiction. In the case of the UK, below are the documents you can provide:
Companies Registry Office number
VAT number
Company phone number
Name of the legal representative
More documents:
Business license
Registration certificate
Tax registration certificate
Still Need Help?
If you need help with claiming your free ad credits with TikTok and creating engaging TikTok ad creatives, and managing your campaigns, CONTACT US!
With more than two billion app downloads and over 800 million monthly active users, TikTok has seen a huge growth in 2020.
Since 69% of its users are ages between 13 – 24, and over 150 million users are from 1st tier countries, TikTok is a huge attraction for game advertisers. On top of that, TikTok is an entertainment app rather than a social media app, which makes it a natural fit for game advertising.
However, TikTok is a much different channel and game advertisers must be aware of the channel’s differences and potential challenges that lay ahead of them while running ads for casual games.
TikTok allows users to scroll away from an ad just like they could on an organic piece of content, which makes it imperative to make ads highly engaging. The best way to make a TikTok ad engaging is to make it look like a TikTok. TikTok confirms this strategy in their TikTok for Business launch slogan: “Don’t make ads, make TikToks”.
Another challenge for advertisers is the 9-second rule. TikTok ads display the copy and the call-to-action button at the 9th second mark of an ad. For this reason, TikTok advertisers must keep their audience engaged for at least 9 seconds.
Attention-Grabbing Intro
TikTok ads must start with a bang! Most TikTok users determine whether or not they want to watch a TikTok in the first three seconds of the video, and the same goes with TikTok ads. Here are a few tips to make the intro of a TikTok ad successful:
Use bright colours. Visually appealing bright colors and scenery are more likely to capture a user’s attention.
Give a reason to watch: The intro must give the user a reason to watch the rest of the ad. This could be achieved by story-telling with different elements, such as tension or surprise.
Use the human face: As a general rule of thumb, humans are instinctively programmed to view another human’s face. The visual appearance of a face increases engagement, especially when the face is in line with the target audience and also the game’s emotion.
Atmosphere
Components of a Video Ad
The success of any ad campaign depends on understanding who your target audience is. Define your target audience. Who is more likely to play your game? Young kids or older women (many casual games are played by women older than 30).
The cast, the scene and the story must be relevant to your target audience. Think of who would play your game and in what situation. Make a reference to common situations to be relevant to your audience. This is a great way of attracting sympathy from your target audience and getting them more engaged with your ad.
Another important component of an ad is the emotion or emotions. Each game has a set of emotions that it creates with the gamer, whether this is happiness, tension or even excitement. Your ad must convey the same emotion associated with the gameplay.
TikTok Context
TikTok Ad Creative Basics
TikTok is mostly made up of meme culture. Take advantage of this while creating your ad. A TikTok ad that fits into the TikTok context is what’s called a native ad on TikTok. A native TikTok ad helps keep your audience engaged and increases the chance of the user to download your game. How to get your ad to be a TikTok ad:
Take up a meme and transform it into an ad for your game. The meme should be somehow connected to your game. If you push too hard for that connection, you may receive backlash from your audience.
Humour reigns supreme on TikTok. TikTok is an entertainment app. If your ad manages to entertain your audience and functions as an ad at the same time, that is golden. This also increases virality of your ad, as users will start forwarding an entertaining ad to each other.
Make use of TikTok’s huge music library. Music is the driving power behind much of TikTok content. Choose a music that fits well to your game and your ad.
A native TikTok ad has huge advantages over a regular gameplay video ad. It will get your audience more engaged and will perform better. On top of this, you will also benefit from a common user behaviour on the app – forwarding. Many users on the app forward to other users the content they like best. If your ad is a TikTok that people like, you will get free impressions from people sharing your ad.
Gameplay Video Tips
Last but not least, any game ad must showcase the gameplay. Here are some tips to make your gameplay footage shine and stand out from the rest:
Make sure your gameplay footage is exciting and fun, and that it demonstrates the best bits of your casual game.
Make sure it’s easy to understand, and that you start teaching your audience about the gameplay even while watching the ad.
Introduce the key and pain points in the gameplay. You can use on-screen text or narration.
Show the difference between a rookie player and a veteran.
Conclusion
TikTok users favor ads that look like TikTok content! Have fun with it. Make sure your ad starts with an attention-capturing intro. Add some elements in the ad that will make it relevant to your target audience. Entertain this audience while advertising your casual game, as users on TikTok are on the app for entertainment. Make use of TikTok’s trends, memes, and music while creating an ad for your casual game.
We’ve written a simple, step-by-step guide for creating a TikTok ad. You don’t need to have a lot of experience to advertise on TikTok. Follow the steps in our guide to start advertising on TikTok today!
1. Create a Campaign
1.a Choose Your Objective
TikTok Campaign Objectives
Define what your business goals are. Think of what you want your audience to do when they see your ads. When you have a precise strategy in place, you can choose the correct campaign objective for a successful campaign.
You can choose from 5 different campaign objectives (as of June 2020):
Awareness:
Reach: The only option under awareness. Choose this option to reach the maximum number of people for the minimum budget. The app optimizes your campaign to show your ads to a maximum number of people.
Consideration:
Traffic: Choose this option to optimize for traffic. The app shows your ad to users who are more likely to click through the destination link you define in your ad.
App Installs: Use this objective to have the platform optimize for app installs.
Video views: Pick this objective to optimize for video views. This option shows your ads to users who are more likely to watch through your video content.
1.b Define Campaign Name and Budget
Campaign Settings
Choose an appropriate name for your campaign and set a budget for your campaign. The platform generates a random name for your campaign. Change this name to a name that makes sense and is easier for you and others to understand.
As for the budget, you can set a daily budget or a lifetime budget. The minimum setting for daily budget is £50 (or $50, depending on geographical location). Don’t worry, you can change these settings later.
2. Ad Group
2.1 Placement
Placement Settings
This is the element where you choose where you’d like your ad to be published. There are two main options here: ‘Automatic Placement’ and ‘Select Placement’.
If you choose ‘Automatic Placement’, TikTok will publish your ad on TikTok and other apps owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. Some of these apps are only available in certain regions and countries.
If you choose ‘Select Placement’, you will be able choose manually from 5 different placements:
TikTok
News Feed App Series (TopBuzz/BuzzVideo/News Republic/Babe)
Vigo (ads available in India only)
Helo (ads available in India only)
Pangle (Available in Japan, Korea and Taiwan)
2.2. Ad Details
Ad Details
Depending on your campaign objective selection, you will see several fields to fill in this part.
In the ‘Ad Details’ section, you will need to provide a ‘Display Name’, a profile image, and ad category and tags for your ads. The display name replaces the username in a regular TikTok and the profile image replaces the user’s profile image. You also need to choose a category for your ad, this will be the category of the business or the product or the app you’re promoting. Many categories also have subcategories, for instance, ‘App Install’ has two subcategories: ‘Mobile Game’ and Mobile App’. Both of these subcategories also have sub-subcategories and these are the genres of the apps. It’s important to choose the category that best represents your business and also fill out ‘Ad Tags’ too, since the information you put in both of these fields will help the algorithm to find the optimum audience for your ads.
Based on your choice of campaign objective, the ad details section will have additional settings.
If you chose ‘Traffic’ as your campaign objective, you will need to input the destination URL you’d like to draw traffic to. You can also activate a TikTok pixel associated with this URL.
If you chose ‘App Install’ as your campaign objective, you will need to choose the app which you would like to promote (you need to set up your ad in TikTok for Business beforehand).
2.3 Creative Type
In this section, you can turn on ‘Automated Creative Optimization’. This function will automatically generate combinations of your creative assets (images, videos and ad copy) and test these combinations within this ad group.
We recommend this option if you have several video assets and ad copies that are centered around the same concept and you would like to test random combinations of these.
2.4 Targeting
Targeting Settings
In this section, you define the audience you would like your ad group to target. If your app or business has previous custom audience data, you can use it on TikTok. By clicking on the ‘Create New’ button next to the audience field, you can get to the ‘Audiences’ page. There you can create custom audiences or lookalike audiences. There are four options to choose from while creating a custom audience:
Customer file: Upload a file containing customer information (name, email, location, etc) and find matches with people on TikTok to create an audience.
Engagement: Create a list of people who saw, clicked, or engaged with your content.
App Activity: Create a list of people who took specific actions with your app (download or in-app actions)
Website Traffic: Use TikTok pixel to create a list of people who visited or took specific actions on your website.
You can also use the ‘Excluded’ field to exclude some people from your audience, for example people who already downloaded your app.
Under ‘Demographics’, you can narrow down your audience based on location, gender, age and language. Choose the appropriate options here to pin down on your target audience.
Interest Targeting
TikTok has a vast selection of categories when it comes to interest targeting. Here you can choose from many categories and subcategories. For app promoters, you can choose interests in many different genres of apps. For game promoters, you can choose from different game genres.
Device Targeting
You can target based on device as well. TikTok lets you target based on the user’s devices’ operating system, connection type and carrier. You can even define a device price range, which means TikTok has the device brand and model information of users.
Audience Size
Audience Size Dial
It’s important to be aware of your audience size. If your audience size is too narrow, TikTok may not be able to serve enough ads to spend your budget. If your audience is too broad, then your ads may be shown to people who are less likely to take the desired action. Depending on your campaign objectives and your budget, the audience size diagram on the right of the screen will show your audience size in a dial diagram. It’s recommended to keep the dial in the center.
2.5 Budget and Schedule
Budget and Schedule Settings
You can define a daily budget for your adgroup. You can also define a schedule for your ad group. You can either choose your ad group to run continuously or define a start date and an end date. Furthermore, you can also choose specific time periods of the day for your ad group to be running.
2.6 Bidding & Optimization
If you chose as your campaign objective ‘Reach’, you can select a frequency cap for your ads.
If you chose as your campaign objective ‘App install’, for ‘Optimization Goal’ you can choose between ‘Install’ and ‘Click’.
If your campaign objective is ‘Conversions’, for ‘Optimization Goal’ you can choose between ‘Conversion’ and ‘Click’.
If your campaign objective is ‘Traffic’, your ‘Optimization Goal’ will be ‘Click’ by default.
You can choose from two different bidding strategies: ‘Standard Bid’, ‘Max Conversion’. Depending on your business requirements, choose your bidding strategy and define a bid. The table below shows advantages and trade-offs of each strategy:
Bidding Strategy
Recommended Usage
Budget Setting
Bid Setting
Delivery Expectation
Standard Bid
More control on cost per result.
Your target budget.
Your target cost per result.
1. Daily spend may fluctuate. 2. Stable cost per result and possibly lower than the bid.
Max Conversion(Without Bid)
More stability in daily spend.
Your target budget
No need to provide a bid.
1. Daily spend is stable.2. Daily cost per result may fluctuate.
Max Conversion (With Bid)
Willing to trade a higher cost per result for more spend.
Your target budget.
Your target cost per result.
1. Daily spend fluctuates within a certain range. 2. Daily cost per result fluctuates within a certain range.
3. Ad
Your ad can be in the form of an image or a video.
You can upload the file from your computer or from the library on TikTok for Business. There is also a video creator, which helps create ad videos from your existing assets. Additionally, you can use video templates, which will help turn your assets into more engaging TikTok videos.
There is also a Smart Video Generator. This software uses AI to cut your videos to match the music beat and add video transitions, according to the number of shots in your uploaded video. You can even choose video style: dynamic or peaceful.
‘Text’ is the ad copy you would like to use on your ad.
You have several different call-to-action prompts you can choose from:
With the best quarter for any app ever in Q1 2020 and surpassing 2 billion downloads globally, TikTok is the latest of the mainstream social media apps. You may be asking, what is TikTok? Who is on it and how can brands use it?
As an overview, here are some important TikTok statistics you should know:
1. TikTok is now the sixth largest social network in the world. It has 800 million monthly active users.
2. India, China and the US are the top three countries that account for the 2 billion downloads.
3. Monthly active users in the US were reported to be 28 million in November 2019, we estimate this amount to be over 80 million after the surge in the app’s popularity during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
4. TikTok has not disclosed the number of active users in the UK specifically. However, there are several TikTok influencers in the UK that have over 10 million follower counts.
5. According to a leaked TikTok pitch deck, the average American user opens the app 8+ times and spends over 46 minutes on the app daily.
TikTok is a short-form mobile video-sharing app, as described on their website. It allows users to record, edit, and share videos while watching what other users created.
The Content on TikTok
The range of content on TikTok is diverse. The users on the app create videos of a length of 15 seconds up to a minute. Typical content found on TikTok is as follows:
· Users acting, playing short scripts of jokes.
· Dance videos
· Lip syncing
· Pranks
· Artists such as comedians, photographers and painters showcasing their skills.
· Pet videos
· Cooking videos
· Educational videos
Along with many more.
The FYP Page
TikTok’s For You Page
TikTok’s homepage is called the For You Page. The FYP is described as an “endless stream of short videos that feel personalized just for you” on the app’s page on the App Store. The FYP is algorithmically personalized for each user based on the user’s past engagement, interests and demographic. The users don’t need to follow anyone on the app, the algorithm populates the FYP page automatically.
Thanks to the algorithm, the FYP shows popular videos to millions of users and keeps other videos to very limited audiences. The number of views a video gets on the platform may change from as low as 50 views to hundreds of millions. In fact, there is a record holding video that hit a view count of 1.7 billion views.
How do users engage with one another?
Users on TikTok can like videos, comment on videos and share videos. Users can share videos on the app, or across different platforms on apps like WhatsApp, Instagram or even Twitter.
Users can even use the same soundtrack, record reaction videos or duets with one another.
User with over ten thousand followers can do live video sessions, where they can interact with their followers on a more personal basis.
Video Editing, Effects and the Music Library
TikTok’s Music Library
TikTok has over a hundred effects, transitions and stickers. Users can use these tools to make their videos more engaging, more creative and express their feelings or a story.
TikTok has a huge licensed music library. Users can add the music over to their video or dance over the music. They can even incorporate the lyrics into their story play.
TikTok Profiles
TikTok’s Profile Page
Each user has a TikTok profile page. On this page, the number followers and the number of accounts followed are shown. Users can add a link to their Instagram and YouTube account on their TikTok profile.
If you like a video on your FYP page, you can go to the creator’s profile page, follow them and watch other videos they created.
How is TikTok different from other social media apps?
Tiktok is different than Facebook or Instagram as it puts the focus on creativity rather than being social. As described by Josh Constine of TechCrunch, TikTok created a new category of social apps – social entertainment, rather than competing with other social media apps.
Unlike Instagram, TikTok isn’t about sharing what you’re up to on spontaneously captured stories. TikTok is about entertaining your audience – and whatever that takes. To get a piece of TikTok fame, ordinary people from all around the world invent characters, create storylines and act.
Who uses TikTok?
TikTok has reportedly over 800 million monthly active users in the world. TikTok is available in 150 countries in the world. TikTok has the most users in India, followed by China and the US.
According to a leaked TikTok pitch deck dated 2019*, the audience stats are as below:
· Age 16-24: 69% vs Age 25+ 31%
· Female 60%:40% male
· Android 46% – Apple 54%
Age breakdown:
· Age 13-17: 27%
· Age 18-24: 42%
· Age 25-34: 16%
· Age 35-44: 8%
· Age 45-54: 3%
· Age 55+: 4%
*The current data is not readily available. However, we estimate that the average age of the user base has grown, as the older generations started adopting the app.
Rise in TikTok’s Popularity During Covid-19 Lockdowns
By November 2019, TikTok already hit 1.5 downloads worldwide. At that point, the growth came from countries such as India and Turkey. The app also had 28 million users in the US. It started gaining traction by the promise of fame, as some users such as @charlidamelio had already over 10 million followers. Luring in many more users, especially from the Gen-Z population, the app continued its growth in to 2020, when something much unexpected happened: COVID-19 lockdowns.
Growing interest in TikTok coincides with covid-19 lockdowns in Google Trends
As the COVID-19 breakout caused many major cities around the world to be under lockdown, the interest in TikTok grew. Check out the graph above taken from trends.google.com showing the interest in worldwide searches containing the keyword, “tiktok”. The leap on the graph coincides with the dates lockdowns around the world started.
Lockdowns were great for TikTok’s organic growth, as it kept different generations under the same roof for extended periods of time. Empty nesters had their households full again as college students went back home. It wasn’t long before there were several videos showing parents with their kids doing their takes of popular TikTok dances.
At the same time, millennials started discovering the app and started flocking to the app. #millenial got over 1 billion views.
#millenial on TikTok
How can Brands use TikTok?
There are three main ways brands can use TikTok:
1. Building a page on TikTok and posting videos
2. Paid ads
a. Performance marketing
b. Brand marketing
3. Influencer marketing
Building a TikTok Page for Your Brand
Due to the nature of the platform, great and well-crafted content can reach millions. However, creating great content for TikTok is a challenge.
TikTok is a platform where having a great number of followers does not guarantee great reach. If your content doesn’t gain attention from viewers it will surely “flop” (a term used by TikTok creators to describe videos getting very little views).
Using existing assets to create TikTok content
The branded content you use on your Instagram page or Facebook page won’t work on TikTok. TikTok context is entirely different than that of IG’s and FB’s.
A brand may boast their product’s function or benefits in Instagram and gain reach to their followers, but that same content in TikTok may get as little as a few hundred views. TikTok is a platform where people tune in to be entertained.
In order to reach hundreds of thousands of viewers on the platform, you will need to repurpose your existing assets to include the entertainment element. Your content needs to show the fun side of your brand.
You can also create new content by having your brand hop on one of the ever-changing trends on TikTok. Every week a new trend, challenge or song is popular on the app. You can create content adapting to these trends and maintain a fresh, up-to-date brand image on the platform.
Watch below a piece of content by Boss, where they showed the fun side of the brand by surfing in a suit:
TikTok has a self-service ad platform just like Facebook and Snapchat. The ad platform is pretty new and it has a lot of catching up to do to get on the same level of functionality like that of Facebook’s. However, we have seen that it is quickly developing by adding new features onto it every day.
The ad platform lets you run ads in the in-feed video placement of the TikTok app. The platform also has a few more placements from other media channels ByteDance, TikTok’s owner company, has. The ads are 5-15 seconds long, auto-play, and audio-on. The ads are designed to feel like native advertisements. This is accomplished by the ad looking just like another video in the feed and the call to action appears only after the 9th second.
TikTok lets you run ads to interest-based audiences and choose from available demographic options. You can also create lookalike audiences as well.
TikTok also has the conversion ads feature, where you can set up a TikTok pixel on your website or use measurement partners’ data to feed in-app events to TikTok. TikTok has the ability to optimize these ads based on the conversion data from the client-side.
Brand marketing
TikTok has additional ad products for brands. These ad products have minimum budget requirements. There are three main products:
1. Brand Takeover
2. Hashtag Challenge
3. Branded Lens
A Brand Takeover ad appears upon opening the TikTok app. It is the first screen users interact with as they open the app. It can be a 3-4 second long GIF, image or video. Brand Takeover ads start from $50,000 for 1-day buy.
A Hashtag Challenge is a sponsored hashtag, where users are encouraged to create their own content. This package starts from $150,000.
A Branded Lens is a sponsored special effect added to the effects toolbar of TikTok. Users are encouraged to use the effect and create their own content. This package ranges between $80,000 to $120,000.
The price ranges for the Brand Marketing packages are included in this article only as a reference. These prices were taken from a leaked TikTok pitch deck dated 2019.
Influencer Marketing
TikTok is already a viable platform for influencer marketing. There are hundreds of TikTok influencers with following counts ranging from a few thousand followers to millions of followers.
The TikTok influencer with the highest follower count to date is Charli D’Amelio, @charlidamelio. Charli is a teenage dancer who has over 50 million followers. She’s already struck several deals with brands, including Prada, Sabra Hummus and UNICEF.
There are several challenges with influencer marketing on TikTok. One is that many influencers struggle with getting consistent views. Since TikTok is a platform that focuses on content, an influencer’s video’s views may tank when they try and promote a brand. For this reason, influencers on TikTok are experimenting with new ways of monetizing their audience without hurting their reach.
TikTok also launched a marketplace for influencer marketing. The platform is called “Creator Marketplace”. The marketplace helps brands and agencies contact select TikTok creators. The marketplace is beta-invite only for now.
Conclusion
TikTok is distinguished from its competitors and has become a mainstream and up and coming channel. Monetization of the channel has allowed more and more advertisers and marketers to start utilizing this channel. As many brands aren’t there yet, it is an opportunity for brands to hop on this new channel and gain a competitive advantage.
