In the ever-evolving landscape of digital media and marketing, new advertising channels are emerging at an unpredictable pace. While platforms like Snapchat, X, and Reddit continuously expand their offerings, TikTok is making a notable entrance into the advertising game. Starting August 1st, TikTok will launch its advertising options in Croatia and the Adriatic region.
With over 1 million monthly active users in Croatia alone, TikTok’s immense reach and dynamic audience will undoubtedly provide businesses the opportunity to advertise on the fastest growing and highly engaging platform in the world, probably becoming a game-changer in the Croatian digital advertising scene.
Needless to say, being among the first to advertise on a new channel offers a plethora of opportunities. First movers can establish market dominance and enhanced visibility at lower costs, due to the limited competition, offering a significant advantage to establish themselves as absolute leaders in the said channel in the long term.
TikTok’s unique approach to advertising is set to redefine the Croatian digital advertising scene, but is it right for your business? This blog will explore the fundamentals of TikTok advertising and help you to determine if integrating TikTok into your marketing mix can be a game-changer for your brand.
The basics of TikTok advertising
TikTok advertising involves utilising TikTok’s features to promote brands, products, and drive a desired action in a less intrusive and more engaging manner, aiming to attract Gen Z and Millenials in a way that “traditional” digital channels cannot match.
Known for its short-form video content, TikTok allows advertisers to create ads that seamlessly blend with user-generated content. This native style means users often don’t realise they’re watching an ad, making the content more engaging and appealing.
But, should I add TikTok to my marketing mix?
TikTok offers a fresh way of engaging users with creative, short-form videos, making it an ideal platform for reaching younger audiences who may be less active on other channels. Beyond entertainment, TikTok is increasingly becoming a go-to source for user research. People turn to TikTok to seek real user opinions and reviews, making it a powerful platform for building trust and credibility with potential customers. By incorporating TikTok into your marketing strategy, you can enhance brand visibility and interaction through dynamic content.
Additionally, integrating TikTok can complement existing strategies on Meta and Google. Using TikTok for brand awareness and engagement while relying on Meta and Google for conversions and remarketing, creates a multi-channel approach that maximises both impact and reach, leading to a more comprehensive and effective marketing strategy.
How to advertise on TikTok
To advertise on TikTok, start by opening a business account. Set clear goals, such as brand awareness, traffic, or lead generation, and choose bidding strategies that align with those goals.
Make sure to define your target audience and budget, and use different creative formats to enhance your ads.
TikTok’s fundamentals
To achieve a good TikTok campaign, follow the three TikTok guiding principles – Fuel, Build and Automate. These principles will give you a chance to efficiently start, optimise and monitor your campaigns. Let’s dive more into each one.
Fueling your campaign means providing the system with the inputs needed to deliver the desired results.
This involves two key factors: safe and reliable data connections, and creative variety.
Data connections essentially means tracking. Better tracking provides more precise analytics data. It also feeds the algorithm with the necessary feedback and data, to optimise campaigns for better results. To achieve this, standard tools like Pixel or API need to be integrated.
Supplying campaigns with more ads increases the chances to win an auction at a lower price. It is recommended to have at least 3-5 creatives per ad group. To achieve this, you can create and edit ads yourself (with tools such as CapCut) or you can use TikTok Creator Marketplace or TikTok Creative Exchange to discover creators and collaborate with them.
Now, of course, creators won’t publish your ads nor will they manage and optimise campaigns. That’s where account managers come in. TikTok calls this step Build, which involves implementing best practices regarding technical requirements. In general, ad accounts should have a simple structure, and enough budget to get ads out of the learning phase (more than 50 conversions) among others. You can find detailed information on TikTok’s Academy and blog posts. Alternatively, you can reach out to SeekandHit for expert campaign management and support.
Final step: Automate. Like most platforms today, TikTok offers AI solutions that will enhance performance, optimise budget spend and automatically produce high-quality creatives. While most of these features are currently in closed-beta, we believe they will provide significant value in automating campaign setup and optimisation once fully released.
Budgeting and bid strategies
When it comes to running campaigns, one must think about proper budgeting and bid strategies.
TikTok does require a minimum daily spend of $50 for campaigns and $20 for ad groups, so keep this in mind when defining your advertising budget.
There are two bidding strategies to choose from: Cost cap and Maximum delivery.
Cost cap focuses on CPM optimisation, and is used when you aim to get more impressions to reach desired conversions.
Maximum Delivery works on the basis of Cost per click (CPC), Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM), Cost per view (CPV) and optimised CPM strategies. It is designed to maximise delivery within your set budget.
But, how do my ads show?
Well, it’s pretty simple and, like on other platforms, your TikTok ads are shown based on the ad auction. To be positioned higher than the competition, you have to consider Ad Rank, a score that determines the position of an ad in the auction. This score is determined by the bid amount and the ad’s quality and relevance.
Make sure to focus on creating good creatives, and well-defined bidding strategies to have a successful TikTok advertising campaign. While account managers will handle most Ad Rank components, clients must ensure their ads are of high quality and relevance, targeting the right audience. This will signal to the algorithm how engaging and suitable your ad are for the target audience.
To do so, you’ll have to think of user targeting and ad creatives.
User targeting
What are the options when it comes to targeting users on TikTok? How deep can you really go to target the right customer?
TikTok provides robust targeting options to ensure that your ads reach the right audience (either by including or excluding certain parameters). Targeting can thus be done by demographics, interests, or with the help of custom audiences and lookalike audiences.
TikTok Creatives best practices
TikTok is all about video, so its best practices are pretty straightforward. It should be a vertical video, length 15 to 30 seconds, include some text and a visible call-to-action, a caption and audio, among other things.
However, there are two things to differentiate on this matter: User Generated Content (UGC) and Paid Ads.
UGC is found on the For You Page (FYP). This content is user-created, non-targeted and non-monetized. If done well, it helps businesses to build their community and engagement organically.
TikTok ads also appear in the FYP (in between UGC) or at the top of the feed. They appear with a call-to-action (CTA) button, a feature that UGC doesn’t have. They are monetized, targeted, and must follow the Global and Regional Advertising Policies guidelines.
These ads can then be published on different and new ad formats, unique for TikTok, such as top view-ads, branded hashtag challenges, brand takeovers and many more, along with the classic and most popular in-feed ads. Our next blog will include a detailed overview of all ad formats of Tiktok, so stay tuned!
TikTok analytics
So, your campaigns are up and running. What options does TikTok offer for measuring and analysing their performance?
TikTok Ads Manager offers an overview of the ads performance. While your account manager generally monitors these metrics in line with your campaign objectives, it’s essential for you to understand these metrics yourself. Knowing how to interpret them will enhance collaboration and help you achieve the best possible outcomes.
Campaign effectiveness metrics include:
Upper funnel metrics like impressions and reach, frequency, CPM etc.
Engagement metrics like shares, comments, likes, clicks, cost per click (CPC) click-through-rate (CTR), view-through-rate (VTR) etc.
Conversion metrics like leads, sales, calls, cost per conversion (CPA). For utilising them, you need to have Pixel installed (or API etc.)
Value metrics like conversion value (revenue), cost of sale and Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Audience metrics like performance by age, gender, location, device etc.
Video performance metrics like views, average watch time, completion rate etc.
To effectively measure your campaign’s success, ensure that these metrics are supported by detailed reports on campaigns, ad groups, audience, conversions, attribution, and engagement.
Additionally, experimenting with different bid strategies, creative variations, audience segments, and ad formats through A/B testing is essential. These tests will offer deeper insights into what strategies are most effective for driving optimal results.
So, should I implement TikTok advertising into my marketing mix?
TikTok’s entry into the Croatian market provides an immense opportunity to leverage the platform’s vast reach and dynamic audience.
TikTok’s advertising solutions, including detailed ad formats, provide versatile options to showcase your brand creatively. Comprehensive targeting and audience management provide you with opportunities to target your custom audience more effectively.
Its extensive bidding and budgeting options can ensure maximum potential for campaign optimization. Also, reporting section offers many reports and metrics that are sufficient enough to provide meaningful data about campaign performance, so that you can further optimise and achieve better result.
All in all, TikTok advertising seems to be the real deal. If major brands like Levi’s, Crocs, and Domino’s are already achieving great results, TikTok might be the next big step for your advertising strategy.
As the platform continues to grow, TikTok can be a great addition for many brands. Being the fastest-growing social media platform, it offers a singular chance to increase brand visibility and increase sales and revenue. o, should you consider TikTok advertising? Given its potential to amplify your marketing efforts, the answer is likely a resounding yes.
