TikTok Marketing for Beginners - Everything Marketers Need to Know

Ready to immerse yourself in the next big social platform? Here’s a quick guide on key things you need to know to get you started on TikTok Marketing.

1. Cost & Bidding

Since TikTok videos don’t always organically go viral, you can boost your content with several ad spending mechanisms to increase your exposure, or achieve your marketing goals.  The minimum spending on TikTok is currently US$500, and it can be flexibly adjusted by you, with two types of budget limits: Daily Limits or All-time Limits. TikTok also offers various cost arrangements to align with your marketing or business goals:

• OCPC (Optimization Cost per Click)

This arrangement ensures the system optimizes your advertising budget to get more conversions, such as app downloads or purchases in website landing pages.  TikTok machine learning algorithms will focus on displaying yours ads to users whom have a higher probability of fulfilling your conversion goals

• CPC (Cost per Click)

Unlike OCPC which optimizes for conversions, CPC optimizes for clicks, thereby focusing on delivering your advertising budget to get more clicks for your advertising campaign.

• CPM (Cost per Mille)

Cost per Mille is also known as cost per thousand impressions. This arrangement optimizes your campaign and advertising budget to focus on delivering more impressions of your ad to TikTok users.

2. Audience Targeting

One of TikTok’s key value proposition is its ability to target specific sets of audiences based on interest and demographics, which are uniquely Millennial and Gen Z:

• Ad Targeting

TikTok’s Ad Targeting option lets you focus on displaying your ads towards specific demographics of users based on age, gender, location, network, and operating systems of browsing devices.

• Interest Targeting 

TikTok’s Interest Targeting option lets you engage with targeted users on a more intangible but possibly more relevant level, based on specific users’ interests such as Beauty, Cooking, Games & Technology, Comedy, Fitness, and many more.  TikTok categorizes its users’ interests based on past interactive behavior with types of content or ads, and optimizes your TikTok Ad campaign to target audiences that have more interest and relevance to your brand.

3. Tools for TikTok Ads

• Video Creation Kit

Video Creation Kit is a tool that lets you instantly create engaging and entertaining content. With this, you can quickly create video promotions by choosing a desired format and importing existing photos, videos, or other resources, and then turning them into TikTok videos. The Video Creation Kit currently now offers 11 adjustable layouts, including 8 vertical formats and 3 flat formats. 

• Landing Page to Video Tool 

This tool lets you create an instant microsite landing page by attaching your URL, and then adding music that already has copyrights and is in accordance with TikTok’s content guidelines. 

• Smart Video and Smart Video Soundtrack 

Smart video is one of TikTok’s many AI-powered tools that helps you decide what type of content is best to upload and generate engagement. The tool analyzes photos or videos that you upload and automatically determines what music and creative video cuts/effects are suitable to add to your content.