TikTok ads intro
Over a billion active users and growing. An unsaturated platform with exponential user growth. Impressions between $1-5 on average (~1/10th the price of Facebook’s).
Marketers’ mouths should be watering.
TikTok is no longer the next big opportunity in paid social. It’s already here.
And yet, most businesses haven’t tested a single TikTok ad.
What gives?
Uncertainty and a lack of understanding of this massive opportunity:
- TikTok’s creative requirements are more complex than other ad channels. Marketers avoid it because they’re not sure where to start.
- TikTok’s isn’t just for Gen Z. Half of users are over 30. Marketers often aren’t sure if their target audience is on TikTok, let alone how to advertise to them.
- You can’t follow your Facebook ads playbook and expect the same results. You need a new strategy.
This Demand Curve guide teaches you proven strategies to acquire customers with TikTok ads.
We’ll cut through the noise and show you what’s working on TikTok now. So crack your knuckles and grab a notebook. Let’s get to work.
Topics covered
To make this guide the best it can be, we consulted with two expert TikTok ads agencies: Slope and Hawke Media.
With their insights and our research, we blew this channel wide open. We’ll outline a TikTok ads strategy you can launch today to get conversions for your business.
Guide Contents
Getting started
If you’re just starting with TikTok ads, we recommend reading the chapters in order—each one builds on the last.
There’s a lot of ground to cover, but before we dig into actionable best practices, let’s cover the fundamentals.
By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand why TikTok has so much potential. You’ll know whether TikTok ads are right for your business, and you’ll have a clear path to get started.
The 3 things every marketer needs to know about TikTok ads
For your TikTok marketing to be effective, you need to understand user behavior—how and why people use TikTok.
1. Why people use TikTok
People use TikTok primarily for entertainment. That means buyer intent is low on this channel.
What draws people in is the “For You” Page.
The For You Page (FYP) is a personalized and endless scroll of short video clips—a torrent of dopamine hits that users love.
TikTok’s algorithm curates videos so well, that the average user opens the app eight times a day for over an hour total.
- People of all ages spend time on TikTok because the breadth of content is so immense.
- Videos range from educational tips and tutorials to viral memes, comedy sketches, and plenty of dance videos—all designed to grab your attention and not let go.
2. How to incorporate it into your growth strategy
For most brands, TikTok is best suited as a secondary channel to drive top-of-funnel traffic.
At a high level, the paid strategy we recommend looks like this:
- Get people to stop swiping and pay attention to your ads.
- Bring them back to your website (or app) to track, retarget, and convert.
It’s the same two-pronged approach we recommend Growth Program students follow to acquire customers on any ad platform.
For a smaller subset of businesses—particularly those selling visual products with broad appeal and short sales cycles OR those targeting Gen Z—TikTok is worth exploring as a primary acquisition channel to convert customers right away.
Note: To reiterate, TikTok isn’t only for Gen Z, but younger generations are more accustomed to today’s integrated social shopping trend.
3. It’s all about the creative
The secret sauce on TikTok has nothing to do with technical media buying—it has everything to do with your content.
Rigorous creative testing is how you’ll succeed here.
We walk you through how to approach content creation for your ad creatives in the next chapter.
But for now, let’s continue with the fundamentals and talk about why you should care about TikTok in first place.
Why should you care about TikTok ads?
TikTok was the world’s top-grossing and most downloaded mobile app in 2021, now surpassing one billion active users, like we stated in the intro.
It’s projected to overtake the ad revenue of Twitter and Snapchat combined in 2022—and match YouTube within two years.
For comparison, see how TikTok’s reach stacks up against major social ads channels:
Most popular social media by the number of active users.
Despite the app’s mass adoption, many marketers still think of TikTok in terms of teenage dance videos and singsong duets. The reality is that 75% of TikTok users are over 20 years old, and 50% are over age 30, like we mentioned at the beginning.
That means you aren’t advertising exclusively to Gen Z and younger millennials who lack significant purchasing power.
Here’s the latest breakdown of users’ age demographics in the United States: