Chapter 9: TikTok Ads
The nice thing about running TikTok ads is that the process is largely identical to Meta. The dashboard is basically the same, the tracking, audiences, and reporting is completely the same. Which makes sense, since Meta set the standard for basically all social media advertising. It’s worth noting that TikTok only accounts for ~9% of social media ad spend, while over 70% goes to Meta. For this reason, this course is going to largely focus on Meta, as the skills and processes covered can easily be applied to TikTok if you so choose.
Do TikTok Ads Make Sense?
Whether or not TikTok ads make sense for your business largely depends on your product and content strategy. Right off the bat, there’s loads of products that probably don’t make sense to advertise on TikTok (products that target older audiences for example). The other piece of the puzzle is your content strategy for creating new ads. If you have a content pipeline that spits out videos of actual people reviewing your product or talking about it and showing it in use, then it’s probably a good idea to try out some TikTok ads with that content. However, I would never recommend putting a large portion of your budget on TikTok out the gate. Start small, and test a few things (test, test, test!). If you get good results, you can scale up the budget, and optimize between Meta & TikTok depending on which is performing better.
One of the more widely applicable advertising angles on TikTok is the TikTok Shop and Shop ads. We’ve gone over how to connect your Shopify site to Meta in order to activate your Instagram or Facebook shop, but you can do the exact same thing with TikTok as well, allowing you to directly sell your items on TikTok without users having to go to your website. TikTok Shop has something IG & FB don’t though - affiliate marketing. TikTokers can earn affiliate commissions by marketing your products through TikTok Shop. This can be insanely powerful, and if your product becomes popular, potentially serve as free marketing & sales since TikTokers will want to sell your products for you (so they can get paid too). You can also run ads for your TikTok Shop products, although these should follow the same rules as we outlined above (test, compare to Meta, optimize if profitable).
Overall, TikTok ads can be hit or miss, so test them out but don’t go too deep right away. That being said, TikTok Shop should not be slept on.