The Chinese tech firm Bytedance bought the music sharing app called musical.ly in 2018 and merged it into a new app called TikTok. It began as a video-sharing social network where members could post a short video of themselves lip-synching and dancing to trending music. It was an instant hit, and since its inception, the site has reached astronomical success and has grown over 800% in a short span of time. As of September 2021, TikTok has a user base of over 1 billion active users. So it’s no surprise brands are utilizing TikTok ads to reach an even wider audience.
To help out marketers, TikTok launched its ads library tool that allows marketers to view the top-performing ad campaigns across the app. These tools ultimately aim to provide valuable insight to marketers with information like click-through rates, impressions, and the overall performance of the ads. They can then use this information to formulate a better ad campaign to drive sales.
Types of TikTok Ads
In-Feed Ads: In-Feed Ads are comparable to the advertisements that appear while you scroll through your Instagram feed. A post-like ad lasts between 9 to 15 seconds and usually has a call to action button to entice users to visit the company website or purchase the product. Another feature of in-feed ads is users can interact with the ads by liking and commenting on the post; this also helps in user engagement.
Branded Takeover: One of the most expensive forms of ad that appears when you open the TikTok app for the first time. The ad would appear as a full-screen video on the user’s device and run for 60 seconds, which is significantly longer than any other TikTok ad.
Branded takeovers are, however, exclusive, and only one brand can show their ad in a single day, making them quite expensive.
TopView: Similar to Branded Takeover, a top view also appears when you open the TikTok app, but the ads run for 5 seconds. The top view ads are also great for customer engagement and typically gain millions of impressions in just a week.
Branded Hashtag Challenge: Sponsored hashtag challenges that appear on TikTok’s Discover Page are known as branded hashtag challenges. When a user clicks on the sponsored hashtag, they are taken to a landing page that includes the sponsor’s logo, website link, challenge description, and the most popular videos that utilize the hashtag.
Branded Effects: Brands may modify their advertising utilizing AR filters, stickers, lenses, and branded shareable stickers using this ad format. You may even make your own custom filter right in the app. This ad format is best suited for a business that wants to add a bit of personality to its ad campaigns.
Tools to enhance ads
On top of the advanced analytics that TikTok provides, the platform offers other useful tools to help you create an effective ad campaign.
Video Template: To help you quickly get started, the TikTok ads library offers a wide range of video ads templates that you can use to get started quickly. These templates are made by professionals and look clean and are proven to help brands engage customers. TikTok also offers templates for a wide range of industries, so no matter what niche you are in, there is a template for every business.
Advance video editing: Video editing is expensive, from advanced tools that are often paid to hiring a professional videographer can all contribute to making your ad expenses go out of bounds. To help small businesses solve this problem, the TikTok ad library offers advanced video editing capabilities right into your ad manager.
Inspiration: TikTok is a very fast-paced platform that is constantly evolving. Therefore, it is essential to keep up to date with the latest trends to make yourself relatable. TikTok acknowledges this and has a feature where you can see all the latest trending music and videos so you can use them to create an engaging ad campaign. You can filter them by song hashtags and also see what the best performing TicTokers are doing.
Tutorials: TikTok ads library was released in 2019, meaning the app is still in its early stages, and there are not many tutorials on the internet. To address this issue, TikTok itself has made an array of high-quality tutorials that teaches you everything you would need to get started with the ads library tools.
Bottomline
TikTok ads are a great way to engage with the customers to increase your lead generation and generate sales. TikTok’s ads library does not try to reinvent the wheel; instead, they offer a very similar interface to Facebook ads. Anyone familiar with other ads libraries will feel perfectly at home. It also has a ton of features like video editing capabilities and a resourceful library of music that you can use in your ad campaigns.
