TikTok Advertising: A Quick Run Down

The first step in advertising: find where your target audience is. And with 800 million monthly active users, TikTok advertising is a damn good place to start. Particularly if you’re in fashion advertising.

Huge brands like ASOS, Pretty Little Thing, Fashion Nova, Selfridges, Fenty Beauty, and Boohoo have taken to the platform like a fish to influencer-endorsed Fiji water. After all, the age range they want (18-24) make up for over a quarter of the 3.7 million active users.

In 2019 it was the second most downloaded app, beating both competitors, Facebook and Instagram, losing out only to WhatsApp. Considering it was only started four years ago, it scores tens across the board for impressiveness.

What is TikTok advertising?

Unlike Instagram where you have a matter of seconds to encapture that user and get them to take a look at your ad, TikTok advertising is designed to make users watch all the way through the content.

The videos are meant to be kept short, meaning brands have been forced to create top quality, engaging content for it – putting their best marketing foot (wearing sponsored boots, of course) forward. So when you take into consideration the average user spends over 40 minutes swiping away during one day, that’s a lot of hard-hitting advertising opportunity.

If that wasn’t reason enough for you to want to advertise through TikTok, the app does all the hard work for you. Their algorithm is so strong and spot-on that users make their own videos calling it out saying how it’s scary specific. Making it easier than ever for your audience to find you.

There tend to be four main types of ad products when it comes to TikTok advertising.

First up we’ve got brand takeovers.

This is an image, GIF or video ad that allows one brand to dominate a specific topic for the day. If you’re doing this – do your research. Make sure you’re pushing in the right direction.

In-feed native video.

This is the standard up to 15-second videos that you see in the app, on the For You page for example. However, if a video is recorded outside the app itself and then uploaded, it can be up to 60 seconds.

Hashtag challenges.

Brands create sponsored hashtags to encourage UGC (user-generated content) which engages and attracts influencers. Once something begins trending it is guaranteed to blow up on the app.

For example, earlier this month an artist named Bea Miller had one of her songs used on a hashtag challenge. The singer-songwriter now has 239, 623, 356 listens on Spotify – and that number is going up every day.

Finally, we have branded lenses.

These aren’t used as much as the others – but that’s not to say they don’t work at all. They take a lot more know-how as you’ll be creating 2D or 3D lenses that users can use for themselves. You may have seen these on Instagram more so than TikTok.

You may be thinking to yourself “well all this sounds well easy, we’re nailing it on Instagram anyway!” I got some bad news for you, your Instagram campaigns aren’t gonna cut it. It’s all about the organic campaigns with TikTok. You’ll get the best results from using primarily UGC content, product ads like you put on Instagram won’t get the same feedback.

As it stands, the TikTok advertising platform is only available to whitelisted advertisers, lucky for you, you’re looking right at one. There’s no better time for your brand to get on board and start sharing content or running ads.

With competition currently fairly low, you’re likely to see some strong results. Many brands are also getting verified status, so if you’re chasing that blue tick, this could be your year.

To find out more about TikTok and the benefits to your brand, get in touch!