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How E-Commerce Companies Can Increase Sales with TikTok Ads

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In this article we will show you exactly “How E-Commerce Companies Can Increase Sales with TikTok Ads”.

TikTok is becoming one of the most popular social media sites and should absolutely be a part of your social advertising strategy. There are over a billion monthly users, and the platform is not just for teenagers anymore. 

One of the advantages of Tiktok is that its algorithm works differently than other social platforms. It favors content from creators you don’t know and will organically promote your content if you can create engaging and genuine videos that users interact with. 

The strength of your Tiktok advertisement is ultimately determined by the quality of the videos you can create. But don’t worry, we have a secret strategy for making videos your customers will go crazy for.

Let’s find out why you should use Tiktok ads to grow your business.

How do TikTok Ads work?

The two primary campaign types you can run on TikTok are: biddable and those that require a TikTok account manager. We will be discussing biddable campaigns as they have a $500 ad minimum and account manager campaigns typically start at $50,000.

From a management perspective, TikTok’s biddable campaigns are run through an ads manager similar to Facebook’s Ad platform. 

The ads themselves are broken down into the same three segments:

Campaign

  • Where you set your advertising objective

Ad set

  • Where you segment your audience

Ad

  • Where the creative content exists

The first step of creating your TikTok ads is choosing the correct objective. If you’ve read our article “The Ultimate Facebook Ads Campaign Structure [E-Commerce],” you’ll know that we do not recommend traffic campaigns on Facebook. 

When it comes to advertising on TikTok, you’ll have to start with a traffic campaign before you can switch to conversions. After you have 50-100 conversions, you can look at switching, but the ads won’t bid if you don’t have the conversion data to use.

The TikTok objectives are broken down into three primary categories:

Awareness:

  • Reach: Shows your ad to the maximum number of people

Consideration:

  • Traffic: Sends people to a destination URL
  • Video Views: Get more people to view your content
  • Lead Generation: Collect leads for your business
  • App Installs: Get more app installations

Conversions:

  • Conversions: Drive the users most likely to purchase to your website

The strategy that has been most successful for us is using a traffic campaign to get those first conversions and then moving to a conversions campaign.

The major difference between a Facebook and TikTok traffic campaign is that your TikTok traffic campaign will still result in a palatable conversion ratio.

Tiktok Ads – are they worth it for your e-commerce brand?

One of the benefits of TikTok ads is that their ad platform is still relatively young. This presents a unique set of challenges, but with those challenges come equally unique opportunities.

We typically see a Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC) that is about half as expensive as Facebook Ads, and conversion costs are about 10-20% less. 

This leads us to conclude that TikTok Ads can be worth the investment for your e-commerce brand.

We suggest that our clients get their Facebook Ads and other social advertising platforms in the scale phase before introducing TikTok ads because of the testing phase TikTok ads have to go through.

For instance, when you launch a new TikTok campaign, likely, it won’t spend any advertising dollars for 14-30 days. You’ll turn it on, and it’s just crickets on the other end. Eventually, they will start spending, and you’ll see the conversions start rolling in.

** Quick warning: if you try to shortcut the system and launch a conversion campaign on a new account, it will never start spending.

These challenges presented by this young advertising platform make your initial 90 days of advertising very experimental. It’s certainly possible that your first ad will go wild as a traffic campaign, and you’ll want to increase ad spend quickly. We just find it takes a bit more testing to get the Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) to a healthy and scalable rate.

Are your customers on Tiktok? Tiktok Demographics

75% of TikTok users are under the age of 35, and only 3.4% of the users are older than 55. 

This again presents challenges and opportunities. The main challenge is that the user base is younger than on Facebook or Instagram. However, many companies dismiss the platform as a result of this, which drives down the advertising costs to the older users.

As an e-commerce company, your customers are probably on TikTok consuming significant content. 

How to make Tiktok Ads that drive sales.

When creating highly relevant and engaging video ads native to the TikTok platform, we have a simple suggestion: don’t – get influencers to do it for you.

The most considerable benefit of using proven influencers to craft the content for your TikTok Ads is that they understand the platform’s nuances better than you do. You’ll want to take the time to learn and start running your ads, but you can expedite the process by leaning on their experience.

The success of your ad campaign will come down to choosing the right influencers and getting the best content. You can read our article here that goes over influencer marketing tips and negotiations.

If you are brand new to TikTok advertising, we suggest incorporating Reel Style video ads into your existing Facebook Ads account and testing them there first.

This will give you an idea of what will work on TikTok. The demographic is younger, so you can segment a test audience, but we find that it’s unnecessary, and a good reel ad does well on both platforms.

Tiktok Best Practices

  1. Partner with influencers
  2. Show how your product works and why they’ll love it.
  3. Create compelling content. Strong videos with catchy music that speaks directly to your customer.
  4. Use hashtags and participate in challenges.

Now, build your TikTok Ads 

You now know why you should be advertising on TikTok. The ads have a remarkably high engagement rate and often have lower costs than Facebook Ads.

Want our help maximizing and managing your TikTok ad account? 

Don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. You can do so on our contact page or email us directly at: [email protected].

If you found value from this article and want to learn more about advertising your e-commerce business, here are a few more articles that will help you out.

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