How to Advertise on TikTok

TikTok is one of the most frequently used social platforms worldwide ever since its first introduction in late 2016. In terms of monthly active users, TikTok is the 6th ranking app among all social media platforms. This makes TikTok a great place to promote your business, whether it is a local one or somewhat more extensive, in addition to its various built-in features for advertising. So you should definitely contemplate how to advertise on TikTok and how the app can help you promote your business.

There are varying methods to advertise on TikTok. In this article, we focused on advertising on the app by using its built-in ad features.

Which Businesses Can Benefit from TikTok Advertising?

Although TikTok has many advertising features that are often better than other platforms, TikTok is not the best app to advertise on for every industry. This is mostly because of the app’s young user base. While TikTok has users of all ages, its huge use r base mostly consists of younger audiences. To illustrate this, more than 41% of TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24 globally. Therefore, before we cover how to advertise on the app, you need to analyze the TikTok user base metrics. Then, you can decide whether to advertise on TikTok or not.

Now, let’s move onto instructions on how to advertise on TikTok using its built-in ad feature.

Sign up for a TikTok Business Account

You need to have a TikTok ads account to run ads on TikTok, which is different than a common TikTok account. You can create one from the “Sign Up” section on the TikTok business home page.

Create the TikTok Ad Campaign

Once you have a TikTok ads account, you can create an ads campaign on the platform. To create the TikTok ad campaign, follow these steps, take the following into account.

1. Navigate to the TikTok ad dashboard.
2. Click on the campaign tab located at the top of the page and click “Create”.
3. Choose your ad campaign goal from the list.
4. Name your ad campaign.
5. Set the ad budget from the “Daily Budget” or “Total Budget” options.

Set Target Audiences and Adposition

There are countless metrics to determine the audience for your ads’ campaign on TikTok. Narrow down your target audience by selecting location, language, interests, age, gender, devices, and many more. You can place your ads on TikTok between TikTok stories, users’ feeds, and more. You can also let TikTok decide your ad positions.

Decide on the Budget and Ad Scheduling

Now, you need to set your total budget for the ad and its scheduling. You can pay daily or set a total budget to be paid at the end of the campaign in this section. 

Define the Goal

In this section, you need to define your goal for the ad. So that TikTok can optimize your bidding on the goal you’ve selected. You can define your goals as conversion, click, or impression.

Design the Ad

This is the last step for your TikTok ad campaign before it gets published. You can arrange the ad to be horizontal, vertical, or square. These ad dimensions are also applied to images. To design apps, TikTok offers a built-in video creation kit. You can use the tool to make your app unique and appealing. You can design the app before and upload it to the platform without using default dimensions. Now, let us look into different TikTok ad formats. 

Different Types of TikTok Ads

TikTok offers four main creative ad formats. They function differently and where your ads are going to be seen. They are brand takeovers, native video ads, video hashtag challenges, and branded lenses/filters.

Brand Takeovers

Brand takeovers are displayed when a user opens the app before any user-generated content. They are exclusive to their categories, and only one brand from a certain category can appear in a day. Brand takeovers mostly include external links to another website or account as well as internal links within TikTok, such as a link to a video hashtag challenge.

Brand takeovers can be videos, GIFs, or images, and they are the highest priced built-in TikTok ad format.

Native Video Ads

Native video ads on TikTok are displayed in users’ feeds between user-generated content. They are 9 to 15 seconds long vertical in-feed ads that can be skipped or scrolled past. Native video ads support external ads and can be very useful for call-to-actions, such as app downloads or site visits.

Video Hashtag Challenges

TikTok challenges are prevalent among its users. So brands and businesses always try to come up with creative video hashtag challenges on the app. 

Sponsored video hashtag challenges encourage user-generated content. They appear with a unique banner on TikTok to drive users to participate in the challenge. When users click on the hashtag, they will visit the brand’s TikTok page with links and logo, where they also view the challenge description. 

Branded Lenses and Filters

There are countless great lenses and filters on TikTok. TikTok users use those filters while uploading content to the platform. So their frequent use makes them a great way to engage with TikTok users if you are looking to promote your business.

TikTok offers branded lenses and filters as an ad format, similar to Instagram and Snapchat. Advertisers design a filter, such as 3D objects or face filters, for TikTok. Then, the app publishes them as a new branded filter. This way, the brand can improve its awareness as more and more users use the filter on their videos.

How to Advertise on TikTok in Sum

While TikTok still is a relatively new social media platform, it quickly became one of the most popular ones. As its user base grew tremendously, TikTok quickly came up with different ad formats to monetize this. In this article, we explained how to advertise on TikTok and covered its main ad formats. If you have read thus far it means that you have high expectations on TikTok. If you want to utilize this platform to its fullest and maybe even get famous on TikTok, start reading our instructions on the subject.

If you would like to share your favorite TikTok videos with friends who don’t have a TikTok account, you can download and share them using a TikTok video downloader!