It’s no surprise that businesses all over South Africa, and the world, are clamouring to advertise on the insanely popular social media platform, TikTok.
The short, fun, and oftentimes quirky videos found on the platform provide a refreshing take on what is typically shown by advertisers, i.e. heavily edited professional videos that come across, oftentimes, as inauthentic and to a certain degree, unrelatable.
With TikTok, though it’s different. Businesses have the unique opportunity to express themselves creatively, without having to worry about if their videos have been shot at the perfect angle or in the perfect light.
Making them more real and relatable to younger audiences.
Millennials and Gen Zs make up the bulk of TikTok’s audience, which makes the platform a great place to advertise if your brand appeals to a younger demographic.
Why TikTok Advertising Works
TikTok videos range between 15 and 60 seconds, making it easier for users to consume a lot of content in a short space of time.
With more time spent watching, TikTok ad placements have become extremely desirable because they don’t get buried in a flood of competition, as is the case with a lot of other social media platforms.
The Benefits Of Advertising On TikTok
If your audience happens to be on TikTok, here are some benefits of advertising on the platform:
- High Engagement: Videos are short, which makes it easier for TikTok users to spend large amounts of time, consuming content.
- Effective Local Reach: TikTok is now available in more than 150 countries around the world and continues to be a popular platform that is growing at an impressive rate.
- Detailed Analytics: Very similar to other social media platforms, TikTok allows you to track your campaigns, providing helpful and detailed metrics.
- Precise Targeting: TikTok allows you to target your intended audience with detailed targeting settings based on gender, demographics, age, location, interests, and more.
TikTok also allows for DMA (designated market area) geotargeting. One of the best ways to target TikTok’s 80 million odd active users.
DMA geotargeting adds more value to advertisers who want to target a particular region or city and allows them to reach consumers on a more granular and localised level.
How To Create A TikTok Ad Using DMA Geotargeting
1. Login into TikTok Ads Manager and begin by creating a new TikTok Ads Campaign. If you don’t have an existing account you’ll need to set one up.
Once inside TikTok Ads Manager, click on “Campaign” at the top and then the hot pink “Create” button as seen below.
Then select Custom Mode to have more control over the settings.
Start by defining your brand’s objective. This could be, awareness, consideration or conversion.
If you select the conversion option and don’t have a TikTok pixel on your website, you’ll need to create one.
A pixel is a piece of code that gets placed on your website in order to optimise your campaigns, measure ad performance and find new clients or customers.
Once you’ve specified your advertising objective, navigate to the settings section. This is where you’ll name your campaign and set your budget.
You can either set a daily or lifetime budget, which will limit the daily or total spend of all ads in your ad group.
If you choose to create a split test, you’ll have the ability to simultaneously run TikTok ads against each other to experiment in order to find the best results. Any potential reach will be split between your ad groups.
The campaign budget optimization setting will aim to use your budget to find the best opportunities for each ad group. Your total budget will be allocated in real-time to ensure the best possible results.
2. Set up your TikTok Campaign Ad Group
You’ve created your campaign, now it’s time to create an ad group.
This section is where you’ll have the opportunity to fill in all your ad details, like choosing placements, defining target audiences, selecting a budget, schedule, bidding method and delivery, as seen below.
To use the DMA geotargeting feature, select South Africa in the location category and then click the drop-down box to access another drop-down menu to narrow your range by province or DMA region, as seen below.
It’s important to note that South Africa can only currently advertise to the following countries on TikTok:
- Egypt
- Indonesia
- Korea
- Kuwait
- Malaysia
- Morocco
- Qatar
- Saudi Arabia
- South Africa
- Thailand
- Turkey
- United Arab Emirates
If you don’t want your ads to run on a continual basis, you can set a start and end time and date as seen below.
The final step in creating your ad group is bidding and optimisation. With certain campaigns you’ll have the ability to set your goals based on clicks, reach or conversions.
3. Create your TikTok Ad
With TikTok ads, uploading creative assets is a breeze. All you do is give your ad a name and choose whether you want a video, a single image, or collection ads.
It’s important to note though that image ads are currently not supported on TikTok. However, images can be used on TikTok’s newsfeed.
When uploading creative assets, you can choose to upload them from your computer, TikTok library, or create brand-new videos using TikTok’s video editor, as seen below.
The next step involves entering the text, emojis and hashtags for your ad. Keep in mind that you are limited to a maximum of 100 characters.
Finally, add a CTA (call to action). You can choose from the dynamic or standard options. The dynamic option tests a number of different CTAs to see which ones work best. While the standard option allows you to choose only one CTA, as seen below.
Once you are satisfied with your ad, click submit and once it’s gone live you’ll have the option to duplicate it for a new campaign or delete it if you are not satisfied with how it turned out.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for some inspiration to get started with TikTok ads, take a look at some of these hashtag challenges that are currently trending.
A hashtag challenge is a great way to engage your audience and inspire them to create content specifically for your hashtag.
Need help with TikTok ads for your business? Contact us today to see how we can assist!
