TikTok has been in the news often in the last few months, but often it was for the wrong reasons. There was a big scare that the platform would be banned in the US, but for now, things are working as usual.
Now that that isn't something affiliates need to worry about anymore, they can focus on scaling on the platform! Scaling on TikTok isn't hard, but it has a lot of differences to how you scale on other platforms, as the algorithm is a lot different. But by using the right strategies, you shouldn't have any issues with scaling your campaigns while keeping performance!
Create Engaging Content That Fits TikTok
TikTok has always been an unique platform due to its content style and how it got started. Before it was known as TikTok, it was called Musica.ly and most of the content was short videos of people lip syncing songs and doing trendy dances.
When they rebranded to TikTok, they focused on short form, simple, and user-generated dance and meme videos that made the platform that we know today. Due to this, the audience is quite young and they don’t respond well to classic advertising. If you want to reach them, you need to make videos that look organic and honest.
- Use Native Looking Creatives: UGC (User generated content) videos are the king on TikTok, and ads that use this style perform a lot better than others. Avoid overly polished or pro looking content, and keep it simple with just a phone camera and interesting pitch.
- Focus On Storytelling: The platform is known for the videos where users share their personal experiences and try to show the audience what they have done and how they could have done it better. Instead of selling a product, try crafting an engaging story behind it that users can relate to.
- Trendy Dances, Songs, and Memes: For professionals this might sound like the worst combination ever as the content that follows these rules will look amateurish, but that's the point. Popular songs that are trending, silly dances, and memes are what sell on this platform!
- Creative Tools: TikTok and its companion app Capcut offer a lot of creative filters and tools to improve your videos and make them more appealing to your audience. Sometimes the effects look weird, but the community won't mind!
Test Your Targeting Strategies
TikTok has gotten a lot better with its ads since it started, and now they offer all sorts of strategies and targeting you can try out. Finding the one that works best for your vertical and approach is key to having good performance.
Usually this is how you would test and find your ideal parameters:
TikTok’s algorithm is incredibly powerful. It is very fast and it will give you results incredibly fast. Forget about optimizing slowly and waiting days for results like on Meta. TikTok is all about fast-paced and agile strategies.
Start broad and analyze your performance data. Once you have dialed in who your audience is and what their interests are, try creating lookalike audiences. Targeting them can give you a bigger dataset of people that are interested in your content and help you scale further.
You should also note that unlike on other platforms, creatives on TT experience incredible fatigue in just a few days. Ideally, you should rotate in new creatives every few days if you want to keep performance!
Bidding And Automation
Scaling on TikTok can often be difficult as it loves eating up your budget and decreasing your performance if you aren’t doing everything perfectly. This is where bidding and automation can be quite helpful!
- Bidding Strategies
Once you have everything down, it's time to get into bidding.
Bidding is one of the most powerful strategies on TikTok and the way it works is quite simple. It's the same as cost cap on Meta! This means that you give a bid that you would like to not cross with your budgets per desired action, and the algorithm does its best to adapt to it.
Cost capping your ad groups can be a great thing as the algorithm is so fast. You can duplicate winning campaigns multiple times and just add a cost cap to them. They should all perform quite well but die off quickly. Then you should make new creatives and repeat this process.
You can also use lowest cost bidding (the default) which acts as you would expect, and value optimization bidding for high ticket items or maximizing customer lifetime value (LTV).
- Automation
Automated Creative Optimization (ACO), Campaign Optimized Budgeting (CBO), Smart+ Campaigns, and Automated rules are all great ways to optimize your campaigns and make them run bigger and longer!
You should pretty much always start with ACO or Smart campaigns so that the TikTok Algo can go through your creatives and ad-text and find the ideal audience. When doing this, we recommend you make a couple of duplicates, as the algorithm likes to keep the audience targeting roughly the same for each campaign until it figures out what audience responds well to the certain niche.
After the system has found the audience, you can switch to CBO and test out various adgroups and creatives with your combination of interest, demographic, and age targeting. You should also test out various creatives. The great thing about CBO is that it will see which of your adgroups performs the best and focus most of the budget on it, making sure you get a good return on your investment!
Expand Budget And Placements
- Scaling Budgets
Same as on any other platform, just increasing the budgets to crazy amounts won't give you the results you want. TikTok prefers horizontal compared to vertical scaling. This means that you should have multiple lower spend campaigns and not a few high spenders. Increasing your budget should be max 20-30% per 2-3 days. If you go overboard, you might experience significantly lower results for a while.
Duplicating winning ad sets, and even duplicating them with bidding enabled, are some of the best strategies you can implement. It's better to have 10 low spenders than a few high rollers. And things like bidding can ensure you dont overspend at the same time.
Sometimes trying different campaign objectives can also have great results!
- New Ad Placements
If you are not in the US, you might try new placements by expanding to Pangle Ads. These ads are within TikTok's network, but not on TikTok itself. This means that you can have your ads shown in some games and third-party platforms that might bring in new customers!
- Organic Boost
You can also try enabling spark ads, which will try and boost your organic account though ads run through it. Depending on your content and what you advertise, this might be a great idea!
Retargeting and Optimizing
As you scale, you will need to retarget audiences and do optimizations if you want to maintain results!
To retarget your audience, you can create custom audiences that have already watched parts of your ads but didn’t convert. These people are likely interested in what you have to offer, but they aren't convinced by your marketing or angle. You can try targeting them with different creatives that approach them from different angles. You can try doing it the next day, or even after a few days to make sure you don’t bombard them with your content.
Just make sure it's not too long after the first ad, as they will forget about you in the first place, and then you lose the advantage of already being familiar to them.
Retargeting people isn't enough. If you want to succeed, you will need to change things all the time. The first thing that you should focus on is your creatives. You should try to add new creatives to your ad groups every few days. If possible, you could even switch them all out every week or so. TikTok is super fast with their algorithm, and ad fatigue comes in super fast.
You should also optimize your Landing page and consider using the native Instant page, which loads faster and is native to the app. These can help you retain better CTRs and Conversion rates over time!
Conclusion
While TikTok isn't the same as Meta or Google, most of the common issues you could face when scaling on those platforms are the same. It's important to note that creatives are the key to success, and you should always focus on UGC content and change up the videos as soon as you can.
Horizontal scaling is also way better than vertical on TikTok. Due to how the algo works, don’t expect to create a few campaigns and let them run on autopilot for weeks and months. You will need to always make small adjustments if you want the best performance!
Please log in to Facebook to access the comments section