In 30 seconds:
- Not sure about TikTok performance marketing? Our step-by-step process reveals all.
- Understanding the technicals as well as the creative is key to successfully reaching and converting your target audience. We have both.
- Brands need to find the right influencers to maximise ROI on their performance marketing campaigns. We’ve got a trick up our sleeve to help.
TikTok performance marketing can skyrocket your TikTok marketing ROI. But only if brands approach it with specific goals and the right strategy. With tighter targets and the need for data-driven campaigns, online performance marketing (OPM) is essential in 2022. Why? It gets results (especially on TikTok).
What is performance marketing? It is a data-backed form of digital marketing that drives immediate consumer action. It’s where brands pay marketing companies or social media platforms based on results, such as conversion rates, clicks or views.
TikTok is one of the best social media channels to deliver on this. 91% of TikTok users take an action after watching short-form video content on the platform, which is six times higher than other channels. That makes it the ideal place for ensuring your campaigns land.
So how can you ace your performance marketing strategy on TikTok in 2022? We’re here to tell you how to nail your targets, smash your TikTok advertising and keep your CPA down. Welcome to the ultimate guide.
Paid ads on TikTok
If you haven’t used TikTok ads before, check out our Paid Ads Social Manager, Ijjy Offor’s best tips for brands getting started.
Got a spare 2 minutes? Ijjy’s quick tips will help you get the most out of your TikTok ads.
“One myth that I commonly hear is – a lot of brands or companies shy away from paid ads because they think their engagement rate will fall.” Ijjy told us. “I think it’s really important to appreciate the value that you get from paid ads.”
What are TikTok ad auctions?
If you don’t know, TikTok allows bidding on their ads to ensure you get the most out of your performance marketing campaigns. They try to find the impressions that will give you the most “actions” for your budget. For example, if you want more website traffic, you can bid for cost per click. TikTok allows you to bid with the following methods:
- Cost per Mille/Thousand Impressions (CPM)
- Optimised Cost per Mille/Thousand Impressions (oCPM)
- Cost per View(CPV)
- Cost per Click (CPC)
Whichever bidding method you choose, you need to make sure your social media strategy is watertight. How can you do that? Follow the following important steps.
Step 1: Share data with TikTok
Before you start any social media marketing campaign on the app, you need to implement tools to help TikTok read your data. The channel needs to understand your user intent to push ads to the right demographics and maximise your campaign efficiency. This means sharing your website data with the app. How can you do this? There are several ways:
1. Web and app marketers should use integrations with TikTok
These integrations create a connection between two or more applications and let them exchange data. Web marketers can use either TikTok Pixel or API integrations, and app marketers can use TikTok’s integrated mobile measurement partners (MMPs) or direct Events API & SDK solutions (currently being tested).
2. No matter what stage of the funnel you are targeting, share full-funnel events
Whether you’re looking at brand awareness campaigns on the upper-funnel side or conversions on the lower-funnel side, you need to let TikTok know about all of these. TikTok can use this data to predict on all sides of the funnel, so make sure you post back all your event data.
3. Share all unattributed event data to TikTok too
Effectively, the more data you give TikTok before starting a performance marketing campaign, the better. You want to prep them as much as possible to maximise your ROI.
Step 2: Target the right audience
Unlike personal social network-based social media channels like Facebook, Linkedin and Snapchat, TikTok pushes content to users through interests. With this in mind, the app needs to learn which audiences are best to access. You need to target not only the right audience for your brand but also the right range of audiences for TikTok to work at its best. What is the easiest way to do that? Start big and get smaller.
1. Start with a broad audience
Although niching is essential, TikTok needs a balanced or large audience pool first to understand where to push your ad campaigns. You want to provide a wide selection so that the channel’s “learning phase” can begin. TikTok describes this as the “beginning period of ad delivery when the system continuously explores new customers to help the Ad group reach the most suitable audience.” TikTok has automatic targeting available, which you can use, too.
2. Remove the already converted
TikTok have an “exclude audience” feature that brands can use to discount users who have already taken the action you wish them to take. This will help you maximise ROI and keep within your budget.
3. Adjust audience targeting on the go
Why would you need to adjust your targeting? Sometimes users might struggle to get past the learning stage; you may have a drop in budget consumption or maybe your cost per ad is too high. At this point, it’s time to broaden your audience and adjust targeting to maximise on budget.
Step 3: Optimise the creative
There is a real science to ad campaign creativity. TikTok works especially well at integrating ads so that they land with users. Whether you are looking to utilise TopView ads, in-feed ads, brand takeovers or any other formats, you need to get the creative right. How? Here are our top tips:
1. Collaborate with TikTok creators (throughout the funnel)
62% of social media users trust influencers more than celebrities. Influencer marketing can help you reach the targets you’re aiming for. Since content creators have already built up a trusting relationship with their audience, brands can tap into that loyalty and stop thumb-scrolling faster than ever. Ads created for TikTok with creator partnership achieved 65% higher 2-second view rates.
TikTok Creator collaboration isn’t just great for brand awareness goals. You can also achieve lower-funnel results like conversion rates, clicks and other targeted metrics. Influencers have unprecedented “influence” over their audiences due to their close relationship with them. If you find the right influencers who align with your brand, your performance marketing campaigns will deliver.
Ensuring TikTok creators are on the same page as you is essential to the success of any influencer marketing campaign – whether it’s for organic content or paid. Searching out talent that clicks with your company and also has the potential to deliver on goals can sometimes make influencer outreach complicated. Frustrating right?
Well, luckily, we have a trick up our sleeve. Enter Bytesights – our in-house social listening and data insights tool. It helps us cherry-pick the best possible influencers for performance marketing strategies and TikTok influencer marketing campaigns. It’s also how we track campaign progress in real-time, meaning we can offer instant feedback – so you can make the right marketing decisions, improving your performance marketing strategy every step of the way.
2. Leverage trends
What makes TikTok videos so entertaining and their growth so explosive? Answer: Trends. TikTok uses the tagline “trends start here”, and it’s clear they really do. One of TikTok’s unique benefits is that it’s just as much of a creation platform as it is a consumption platform. This means the potential for UGC (user-generated content) campaigns and organic growth in response to your TikTok performance marketing content is huge.
You can nail your TikTok ad auctions by jumping on current and upcoming trends. Why not use relevant hashtags to start a hashtag challenge – or jump on an existing one? The trick is to make ads blend into the entertaining TikTok content users see on their FYP (for you page). If consumers engage with the content through multiple watch-throughs, likes and comments, TikTok’s algorithm will push it to other relevant demographics.
You may also want to use trending sounds. Just make sure you don’t stumble over copyright issues by reading our article – TikTok Commercial Sounds: What Brands Need to Know.
3. Revive creatives
Why throw out a good idea? Don’t start a whole new creative ad campaign if your current one suffers creative fatigue. Consider refreshing your current campaigns to rejuvenate the data and measure its performance. App advertisers can use Dynamic Scene within TikTok Ads Manager to create variations based on existing creatives. If it still doesn’t work, you should only make a new ad group with fresh creatives.
4. Use TikTok tools
TikTok ads manager (available to users with TikTok for Business accounts) has a few tools to help optimise creatives. These are:
- Video insights – This measures engagement and performance to inspire creative improvements.
- Split test – you can run scientific A/B tests.
- Automated Creative Optimization (ACO) – This helps you select the best-performing creatives and automatically create new ones too.
Looking for more help on optimising your TikTok ads? Check out our article: TikTok Ad Formats: Everything You Need To Know
Step 4: Get bidding
To scale and create the right framework for successful TikTok campaigns, you need to bid and budget correctly.
1. Make sure to enter the maximum budget for conversions
Select the highest possible CPA that you can accept (if you choose “Cost cap” as your bidding strategy). This will help the ad auction’s competitiveness and aid TikTok in finding the right audience.
2. Use a daily budget
To maintain delivery, you need to set a daily budget for each ad group instead of the whole campaign. This will safeguard against any stops in your ad group delivery. You can use TikTok’s campaign budget optimisation to help with this.
3. Use past data to help you bid
You can refer to CPA or ROAS from the past seven days to inform your bidding strategy. If you can’t find these or don’t have access, you can run ad groups with the Lowest Cost or Highest Value bid strategies. After a while, you can utilise your current CPA and ROAS for your successive bids.
Step 5: Tweak your performance campaigns
With every TikTok ad campaign, monitoring is essential to maximise ROI. You can do this in several ways:
1. Track vital metrics
You need to know your goal metrics first. Once you have determined these, you can use them to identify when you may need to up the ante (refresh or optimise the campaign performance).
2. One at a time
Marketers need to treat ad groups individually, so making adjustments to each (as well as waiting two days before you make any tweaks). TikTok recommends: “Don’t immediately decrease your CPA bid or increase your ROAS bid when the actual CPA/ROAS does not meet your targets.” This can be detrimental and lead to drops in budget consumption.
3. Flex your budget
Whether you want to increase your budget or decrease it, you need to do it based on CPA and ROAS expectations. When the budget consumption rate is above 95% and your campaigns meet your expectations, you can increase your budget. If you use Lowest Cost and Highest Value bid strategies, reduce your budget to control CPA and ROAS.
No two performance marketing strategies are the same
Although we have presented some killer guidelines to help you ace your performance strategy on TikTok, there is one thing all brands need to remember: every campaign is different. Not all of these guidelines will work for specific scenarios, so it’s intrinsic that brands work with current, meaningful data and extrapolate on the go.
Campaign functionality is a fine art. Marketers need to produce flexible strategies that can adapt to changing trends. Only with consistent adjustments and technical changes will your TikTok marketing strategy succeed.
Better yet? Get us to do the tricky bits for you. We at Fanbytes by Brainlabs have dedicated teams to help campaigns on TikTok produce the best results. Get in touch to find out how we can optimise your TikTok ads, ace your conversions and make performance marketing on TikTok work for you.
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