With Facebook getting more challenging by the day, many advertisers and marketers are turning their attention to advertising on TikTok. It seems like every day there is another statistic about how TikTok is growing into a massive platform for not just Gen Z but Millennials and older generations as well. 

Hours are spent scrolling through the feed as the algorithm cranks out content to keep its users glued in the uncomfortable yet addicting scrolling position. With such an effective attention trap, it should come as no surprise that advertisers, small businesses, and startups are eyeing the potential to put their ads in front of TikTok users.

While TikTok is still young, and its advertising platform is even younger, it boasts unique targeting options that may appeal to advertisers that have struggled to find their target audience on Facebook. So naturally, the next question is, “What’s the secret to making TikTok ads work? What makes a good ad on TikTok?” 

As a growth marketing agency, we’ve managed hundreds of thousands of dollars on TikTok this year and leaned on real insights and learnings to outline the information below. Let’s dig in! 

What type of ads work best on TikTok? 

A common mistake is thinking that a social media app is a social media app, and if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Many advertisers assume this for many reasons: Creative limitations, the similarity of the advertising platforms interface, the similar language, and that they’re all paid ads. This thought is a mistake.

As cliché as it may sound, no two advertising platforms are alike. Every social media app and advertising platform is different. They have unique features and unique users with varying behaviors. As such, each one has different strategies, tactics, and creative assets that work.

TikTok is no different. Do a quick google search on TikTok creative best practices and you’ll stumble on a myriad of well-crafted articles that tell you that the best TikTok ads are ads that feel like TikToks. It should come as no surprise then that TikTok has developed its own organic TikTok ad of sorts called Spark ads.

What is a spark ad? 

Spark ads are a new-ish ad format allowing advertisers to boost organic content by using organic posts as ads. Just like organic videos, users can comment, like, and share Spark ads. Unlike normal TikTok video ads, users can even click the handle name or profile picture of the account associated with the Spark ad. It’s almost like they’re organic posts because they are! There are two different ways to run spark ads:

1. By using your own TikTok account that has been linked to your business account
2. Using an authorized account or using authorized posts

For more information on using your own linked TikTok account visit this link.

Do TikTok Spark Ads work?

The best TikTok ads are ads that don’t feel like an ad at all. They feel like a native TikTok that the user is seeing as they doom scroll through the app. Maybe that’s why Spark ads have been extremely successful in a variety of different uses since they were introduced.

We had the chance to test Spark ads with one of our partners, Teachable. Initially, we ran the Spark ads alongside our normal creative in the same ad set – Eventually moving the Spark ads to their own ad set, as TikTok’s algorithm allocates spend differently between assets.

The results were wild! In our testing, Spark ads beat our normal TikTok ads in nearly every category. For context, we saw:

• The CPC was $1 lower with Spark ads than with our normal ads. 
• The cost per lead was 30% lower with the Spark ads compared to the normal ads.
• The number of times our videos were played at 100% of their duration averaged 22% with our Spark ads vs. the average of 6% with our normal ads. 
• The average watch time per person was also up by a whole second.

How We Pick Spark Ads at Tuff

When it comes to picking out what will make for a good Spark ad, there’s no perfect secret- sauce. There’s a bit of tacit understanding involved in knowing what’ll perform well. We’ve managed to capture some of the questions we typically ask when we’re evaluating organic TikTok videos for use as an ad.

 6 Questions We Ask When Selecting Spark Ads

1. Does it feel like a TikTok?
2. Is there text on the video?
3. Does it use a trending sound?
4. Does it use a trending style?
5. How much engagement (social proof) does it have?
6. Does it have a clear CTA

Does It Feel Like A TikTok

The type of creative that works on TikTok is UGC content that feels both authentic and like it’s native to TikTok. In fact, recent research reports that 92% of consumers trust UGC more than traditional brand ads.

So choose a video that feels less like an ad and more like a TikTok you’d want to watch.

Is There Text On The Video

Copy matters! And that includes the text on the video. Even though TikTok is a sound-on optimized platform by default, captions and words on the video help users quickly get the gist of the video and improve ad recall. 

Words can also strategically lure the viewer in further. To avoid getting too behavioral science-y, we can just leave it at: When someone views your Spark ad, they look at everything, and not just the video or product in a vacuum. What experience do you want the viewer to have when they see your ad?

Does The Video Ad Use A Trending Sound?

The sound you choose for your video is important. Using a trending sound might not be super important when it comes to reach for an ad like it would be for an organic TikTok post, but it is still important to your ad converting people effectively.

A trending sound could help your Spark ad, again, feel more native to the platform. As users scroll, they’ll recognize your sound and spend more time watching it as a result. This will increase your odds of converting. This leads us to…

Does Your TikTok Ad Use A Trending Style?

Your TikTok ads, especially your Spark ads, should ideally be entertaining but they should also be authentic and built to convert. That’s where trending styles like “TikTok made me buy it” or “Top X Hacks That Actually Work” come in.

Tapping into the trending styles will help make your ad relatable and entertaining to the users.

How Much Engagement Does It Have?

When choosing a Spark ad, looking at the number of views on the organic post could be an indicator of how well it performed organically. Just because something didn’t go bonkers as an organic post doesn’t mean it won’t kill as a Spark ad. 

That said, looking at the engagement when qualifying the posts could tell you what’s already working so that you could amplify that.

Does The Ad Have A Clear CTA?

Without a call to action, a Spark ad is just a boosted post. The purpose of an ad at the end of the day is to convert. Make sure your Spark ad has a clear CTA to tell users what to do next so that they don’t just swipe to the next post.

Even with these guiding questions though, there’s still no perfect way to know what will work. 

Remember that people don’t come to TikTok to look for ads. They come to scroll and be entertained or learn or laugh. So your ads should fit next to the content they want to see. The best way to make a TikTok ad that looks like a TikTok is to just make a TikTok. That’s what Spark ads are.

We’ve tested a lot on TikTok across our different partners from different bid strategies to new objectives to specific-to-TikTok audiences to new ad types – With that, we’ve learned a lot! If you’re interested in diving deeper into the world of TikTok, here are a few additional articles we’ve written that might be helpful for you: 

• How Much Do TikTok Ads Cost?
• Running a TikTok Ad Campaign: 5 Tips for a Successful Launch  
• Want To Run TikTok Prospecting Campaigns That Convert? Try This! [Data Included]
• The 5 Main Components of Effective TikTok Ad Creative

Want to skip straight to running some TikTok campaigns with us? Let’s chat! 

The post Do Spark Ads Get Better Results on TikTok? (Yes, but it’s Complex) appeared first on Tuff.

Author’s Note: We’ve given this blog post a refresh on November 2, 2023, complete with fresh information, new links, relevant data, and more.

In the past couple of years, TikTok has quickly become one of the top acquisition channels for startups and established brands. The platform now has 1 billion (with a B!) monthly active users total — Of which, the MAUs in the US have now passed 100 million, equaling 37% of America’s 267.6 million mobile internet users.

On most channels, it is relatively easy to repurpose your ad creative. With a few light edits, an ad created for Meta can easily become an ad for Display or an ad for LinkedIn – But on TikTok, each ad needs to be created specifically for the platform and getting it right is critical. You only have a few seconds to grab your target audience’s attention before they scroll past your ad.

So how do you make the right asset for TikTok? How do you introduce a compelling hook within the first 3-5 seconds so your audience stays to hear the whole value proposition? How do you create a diverse suite of low-budget videos in-house (with an intentional range of messaging, formats, creators, and styles) that you can test quickly and learn from? 

This article is here to help you answer these questions. I will cover the mentality of the average user in-app and the basic details for TikTok ad creative, including the ad specifications, inspiration for ad hooks and high-converting ad archetypes. Then, I’ll walk through three examples from Tuff’s portfolio as a TikTok ads agency to help outline why and how they work on TikTok.

TikTok Mentality In-App

TikTok was an app designed for entertainment vs. a platform like LinkedIn that was designed for education and thought leadership or a platform like Pinterest that was designed for inspiration and planning. 

TikTok has continued to evolve into a place for people to be creative and express themselves – And because of that there is a variety of content on the platform. This makes TikTok an ideal platform for organic content to thrive, as well as for paid content for advertising across a variety of  industries. 

The allure for TikTok advertising is that you’re able to capture your audience’s attention while they’re in a creative and imaginative headspace and if you design the right creative, you’re able to heighten brand awareness, increase consideration, and ultimately drive users to convert (whatever action that is for your business!).

Video Ad Specifications

Before you start planning your creative, let’s talk about the boundaries that you’re working in. 

• Video length: At most, TikTok ads can be 60 seconds long, but it is a best practice for videos to be much shorter: TikTok suggests videos be just 9-15 seconds in length. 

• Resolution: Professionally produced Tiktok ad creative tends not to perform well on TikTok. Instead, think: low-fidelity video content. Grab your smartphone and start playing around in the TikTok app creating videos – it’s fun, easy, and effective. 

• Sound: TikTok is a sound-on optimized platform – That means this is a hugely important element of your creative assets. Lean into the features that are available natively within the platform, like recording voice overs to narrate videos or selecting trending songs to have timely background music. 

• Subtitles and Text Overlays: While TikTok is a sound-on optimized platform, subtitles and text overlays are also hugely important elements of the creative asset – That might seem counterintuitive, but many people watch TikTok videos on mute. Including captions or other text ensures you capture their attention no matter if the sound is on or off. 

Inspiration for Ad Hooks

We’ve talked about some of the detailed ad specifications for TikTok ads – Now, let’s dive into arguably the most important element of creative assets designed for TikTok: Hooks! 3-5 seconds is essentially all the time you have to hook your audience to convince them to stay engaged with your content and ultimately your brand. 

Some common and more effective ad hooks to lean into:

• 3 ways to improve your… 
• Did you know…?
• That is why your [X] isn’t working and how [X] can help.

High-Converting Ad Archetypes 

At Tuff, we define an ad archetype as any popular style of ad creative that can be tweaked and tailored for any industry or product.  

These will look different depending on what audience you’re targeting. For example:

• For prospecting cold audiences, you might lean into an ad archetype that initially draws them in with a listicle or a behind-the-scenes style video that gives your audience a reason to stay around. 
• For retargeting a warmer audience, you might want to introduce an archetype that includes testimonials or social proof to inch them further down the funnel to convert.

TikTok Creative Best Practices: 

Telling your story and communicating your brand’s value proposition in less than 15 seconds is not easy, even before considering all the limits above. But it’s absolutely possible, and if you can crack the code, TikTok can be a huge growth driver for your brand. 

Let’s take a look at five successful TikTok creatives and explore what our team has learned from them as we develop more and more TikToks for our clients. 

1. Soona

TikTok Creative Here

Insight: This ad concisely explains how Soona’s process works, walking the audience through the key steps in working together. It clearly states the problem Soona solves, introduces various products, and highlights the key benefits brands can get from working with Soona. 

Despite the fact Soona is a photography business focused on creating beautiful images, this TikTok video has a production quality that’s more in line with other videos on the platform, helping it to feel more like organic content than an ad.

What to Do: To effectively introduce your brand to new audiences, focus on defining the key value drivers you need to convey in a short video. Consider incorporating them into a “how it works” ad creative like this one – these help potential customers understand the process much better, removing any uncertainties and boosting conversion rates. 

2. Fizz 

TikTok Creative Here

Insight: This ad introduces a story element within the first 6 seconds that highlights recent grad struggles and how he could not get a credit card. It starts with a person talking to the camera with very light branded animation to support the storyline, and the messaging throughout speaks specifically to an immediate need.

What to do: Use existing user-generated content that you have available to create a narrative that supports your brand’s mission. Lean into the TikTok-styled text and add in your brand’s visuals when relevant to increase brand recognition.

3. Sabio 

TikTok Creative Here

Insight: The ad leans on a strong value proposition for Sabio – “You won’t just learn how to code, you’ll learn how to solve real-world problems for real companies, so you’re job-ready on day one.” The idea behind this video was to combine a VP we know converts for Sabio with features within the TikTok platform that make creative assets feel more native to the platform, like on-screen text and trending sounds. We learned a lot from this specific video that we were able to incorporate into future rounds of ad testing.

What to Do: Isolate your brand’s key value propositions and highlight the problem, solution, and benefits to educate your audience and incorporate elements that lend themselves to longer video views (engaging in-platform features!). This should naturally hook your audience. TikTok moves FAST, and you have to ensure your messaging – Whether on-screen, voicing over, or in the caption – is sticky, intentional, and very clear.

Start Creating TikTok Ads Today

You don’t need a big media budget or a fancy creative agency to start producing TikTok ad creative – all you need is a smartphone and some imagination. Producing winning creative holds the key to a successful TikTok marketing campaign, but you might not get it right the first time. 

At Tuff, our media team is constantly testing out new Tiktok creative assets for our client. If it doesn’t work, we’ll drop it right away, and keep testing out new ideas until we land on the winning formula. 

Got some TikTok ad ideas you want to try for your brand? Hit us up – our team of TikTok experts has the skills and experience needed to supercharge your campaigns! 

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post TikTok Creative Best Practices: How to Make Great TikTok Creative [Updated] appeared first on Tuff.

When it comes to driving more traffic and applications online with growth marketing, the big challenge is how to scale and which marketing channels will help you grow fastest. With limited time, money, and people, you can’t afford to waste it on strategies and tactics that are sub-optimal. 

When we first partnered with Multiverse (a start-up company that provides an outstanding alternative to college through corporate training and professional apprenticeships) as their startup marketing agency, we wanted to test different campaigns with clear metrics to figure out which ones work and then focus on scaling those channels.

In this post, I’m going to focus in our our paid social strategy, with a focus on a deep dive on TikTok ads. We’ll look at why we selected TiKTok ads, the campaign structure, the best performing creative assets, and the results compared to other channels in our mix. (Spoiler: TikTok generated 3x times more applications than Instagram with a 52% lower CPA.) 

Diversified Channel Mix 

In our growth marketing strategy for Multiverse, we prioritized testing campaigns with social ads and PPC. 

For social ads, we focused on Instagram as the primary channel where we allocated 67% of our total budget and then we dedicated a portion of the total budget (33%) to testing other social ad channels. With the Multiverse target audience being between the ages of 18-26, we were super eager to test TikTok to see if this channel would be effective in driving applications and if effective, if it would be scalable. 

Clearly Defined CPA Targets and Goals 

Our goal for Multiverse was to prioritize high-impact growth campaigns to quickly drive key learnings, then invest in additional campaigns to scale up on what works. Since Multiverse didn’t have a ton of historical data in the US for us to learn from, we did some research on competitors and the average costs for TikTok ads and Instagram ads to come up with our KPI goals. 

Instagram KPI goals (for the first month): 

• Cost-per-click: $3.00
• Cost-per-application (CPA): $65

TikTok KPI goals (for the first month): 

• Cost-per-click: $2.00 
• Cost-per-application (CPA): $80 

Identifying the Target Audience & Funnel Stage 

When launching campaigns for a new partner, our social ads team at Tuff will put together an audience targeting strategy for each stage of the audience funnel. However, since we were starting from scratch and building campaigns on new platforms for Multiverse, we knew we needed to focus on the top of funnel audiences since we haven’t built up the brand recognition or audience size to retarget users based on previous ad interactions through bottom-funnel audiences. 

For TikTok, our primary focus was targeting a large, top of funnel audience that we could then educate and convert to applicants through our video creative. 

A Campaign Structure for Scale 

For Multiverse’s US paid acquisition, we were focused on six markets, including New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Phoenix and Boston. We knew we needed to drive as many applicants on TikTok as possible in each market, so we set up a prospecting campaign for each location, that way we could control the budget at the campaign level based on demand needs per market. 

Within each campaign, we wanted to test two different audiences on TikTok: 

1. A broad audience with no interest targeting, ages 18-26 
2. Education or motivation interest targeting, ages 18-26

After a few weeks of testing, we saw that the broad targeting was outperforming our interest-based targeting with a lower cost per application. Compared to other social ad platforms,  the TikTok algorithm is extremely accurate in serving your ads to your target audience (just think about how it perfectly curates a For You Page that’s specific to each TikTok users’ interest). So removing the interest targeting allowed us to widen our audience pool and let TikTok do the work of finding the users who were likely to apply for a Multiverse application based on the algorithm data.  

High-Peforming TiKTok Ad Creative 

When it comes to TikTok creative, videos that feature trending and relevant content are the key to success (check out our tips for creating trending video content). For Multiverse, we wanted to move QUICK, which meant that we needed to develop 3-5 TikTok videos fast to be able to launch on TikTok. 

For the creative, we wanted to lean into the Multiverse value props to educate our top-of-funnel audiences about Multiverse in a fun, trending and captivating way. 

Check ‘em out!

1. Job without degree
2. College vs. Apprenticeship 
3. Student Loan Stress

Results

So how did these TikTok campaigns perform? The short answer: we far surpassed our goals for applications and cost-per-application which allowed us to scale the monthly budget on this channel by 5x. 

• Average cost-per-click (CPC): $0.47
• Applications: 357
• Average cost-per-application (CPA): $16.77

But how does this compare to the other paid channels (like Instagram)?

TikTok generated 3x times more applications than Instagram with a 52% lower CPA. 

For Multiverse, we measure apprenticeship applications based on last-click attribution in Google Analytics, so while these results far exceeded our expectations, we also wanted to see how our campaigns have helped increase non-last click conversions. 

Since launching TikTok ads, we’ve seen a 110% increase in Multiverse Google Search branded conversions in the US. 🚀

Based on these learnings, we’ve continued to scale our TikTok campaigns and have found it to be the most cost-efficient paid channel driving the lowest CPA for Multiverse in both the US and UK. 

Are you interested in launching TikTok ads to help grow your business? Let’s chat! 

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.

The post TikTok Ads for Startups: How Multiverse Drives Quality Conversions at Scale (with a CPA lower than any other channel) appeared first on Tuff.