TikTok has quickly become the "new" Instagram or Snapchat and a highly effective way to reach young, affluent millennials and the early adopters who like to stay current on all the trends.
Many marketers have maxed out their spend on other social channels or it may have become too cost prohibitive. With Facebook CPMs ever increasing, targeting the same people on TikTok using a custom audience will improve your return on advertising spend (ROAS) due to lower CPMs.
Although not actively discussed in the executive ranks for brand advertisers, TikTok already has 800 million active users globally - more than Pinterest, Reddit, Snap & Twitter - with close to 50% between ages 18-24 years old (Hootsuite). The opportunity to reach your target customers cheaply, however, only exists before more advertisers figure out the bargain to be had and drive up CPMs.
Younger audiences enjoy the raw authenticity of TikTok videos so developing a creative strategy and executing campaigns on TikTok will be different than your typical social media manager can handle. Influencer agencies like Influential can help find the right influencers for your brand and execute a winning campaign matching creative content to custom audience data and measuring the impact post campaign.
Top 5 Reasons to Advertise on TikTok
#1. Scale
TikTok has been downloaded over 1.5 billion times already so reaching your desired audience where they get their entertainment is not a problem. The problem with too much scale however is targeting the right TikTok users or else you waste ad spend. If your target demographic contains people age 18-34 you need to include TikTok in your media and data planning.
#2. Engagement without Investment
TikTok is unique from other social platforms in that any individual post can go viral and reach millions of people very quickly regardless of how many followers the account has. The addictive quality of TikTok keeps users coming back for new and fresh content so higher quality videos get more play.
#3. Competition & Cost
Newer platforms mean fewer advertisers, less demand and therefore cheaper CPMs. TikTok's ad platform is progressing but is also fairly new. It does not have the native targeting options of a LinkedIn or Facebook but does have the ability to build custom audiences instead. In Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) this works out well so you can upload your own highly defined list of prospects for targeting or customer for remarketing efforts.
#4. Viewability
Viewability on TikTok is 100%. No BS below the fold inventory. You may only get a second of attention span from this generation but they will see your content. Think of those brief views as acceptable subliminal advertising!
#5. Use your customer's content
Does your company have raving fans? If producing content is too hard or costly for your company look to your customers. The power of user-generated content creates value based on authenticity, 3rd party credibility and the production cost is hard to beat. Some times just documenting the inner happenings or process your company goes through to deliver your products or services is interesting enough. Might seem mundane to you but even mixing paint can attract attention nowadays. Find customers or influencers willing to create content featuring your brand and products.
[button link="https://skydeo.com/tiktok-audience-activation/" color="green" newwindow="yes"] Skydeo Audience Request for TikTok[/button]
How to Create TikTok Custom Audiences
TikTok allows advertisers to create different types of custom audiences in ad groups.
- Website Traffic: Standard retargeting option to plant a pixel on your website and create custom lists for retargeting later.
- Engagement: Create segments based on TikTok interactions with your account.
- App Activity: Create custom segments based on certain events that happen within your company's app
- Customer File: Create custom audiences based on uploading a list of "customers".
Skydeo specializes in using the Customer File option for TikTok custom audiences. If your company doesn't have an app, we can help you convert your customers to mobile IDs so that you can create customer files.
For prospecting new customers, Skydeo creates TikTok custom audiences for you based on any type of targeting criteria you need using Skydeo Segments. For more advanced targeting, audience extension or look-alike modeling, we use Skydeo's advanced insights to create high value affinity audiences for your brand and send the best prospects to TikTok for targeting.
Many marketers don't have access to their mobile identifiers (MAIDs, IDFA, GAID or AAID) so creating a custom audience for Exclusion can increase your advertising performance by not advertising to existing customers.
TikTok Custom Audience Best Practices & Instructions below for do it yourselfers. Please contact us when you are ready to acquire new customers.
Choose Your File Type
- ◦IDFA/GAID Original Value
- ◦IDFA/GAID - MD5
- ◦IDFA/GAID - SHA256
- ◦Note:
- ▪Secured MD5 and SHA256 hashing methods are supported. The content of the file before hashing needs to be in all uppercase or lowercase.
- ▪IDFA and GAID can be combined in the same file, but you should keep the capitalization consistent.
Upload File：
The uploaded content needs to be IDFA or GAID, each piece of data should be on a separate line.
File Preview: Preview the content of your uploaded csv or txt file. 1000 random pieces of data from your file will be shown for preview.
Material Requirements
Supported formats: .csv or .txt format (zip file is not supported)
Size: Up to 1GB
Note：
Custom Audience created with Customer File does not auto refresh. You must manually add new IDFA/GAID in the existing Customer File Audience
There is a minimum audience size requirement of 1,000 in order to use the audience in an ad group.
You can have up to 400 custom audiences at one time within the account.
Best Practices
If your campaign objective is about apps, we recommend using a custom audience to contain only IDFA or only GAID so that you can choose the operation system accordingly when setting up the campaign and avoid unnecessary data loss.
Your IDFA and GAID data should be from the same geographical location where your ad is targeting (for example, if you want to advertise in Japan, both types of data should come from Japan). This way, your data can make most of its value and avoid data loss when delivering.
Update:
Targeting Considerations for iOS 14
There are three types of custom audience products (Customer File, App Activity, and Website Traffic) that will likely see substantial impact due to a decrease in the amount of users who can be matched for custom audience creation.
Customer File Audience
For those advertisers who upload customer file with IDFAs, emails, or phone numbers in original value or hashed format (matching via email and phone numbers are only available for selected markets via allowlist), please expect a much lower audience size after matching with TikTok users. This is due to the fact that TikTok's Customer File Audience solution relies on device IDs (IDFA and GAID), emails, and phone numbers as the matching keys. Our product team is scoping options to mitigate impact. Please reach out to your sales representative for more detailed guidance.
Recommendations
Advertisers can continue to upload customer file with GAIDs. Additionally, they can create Lookalike Audience based on GAIDs for a broader reach.
App Activity Audience
App Activity Audience solution relies on Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) posting back app events with TikTok as the foundation of this type of custom audience. Previously, Mobile Measurement Partners have relied on IDFAs to attribute conversions to different marketing channels. With the likely decrease of IDFA usage, each Mobile Measurement Partner is currently developing their own solution to mitigate impact. In general, you can expect smaller audience size due to the decreased volume of IDFAs available for Mobile Measurement Partners.
Recommendations
Advertisers can continue to create App Activity Audiences, but the audience size is expected to decrease significantly. As a result, this audience solution is likely to be ineffective.
Website Traffic Audience
Website Traffic Audience solution relies on post-back events from TikTok Pixel. Advertisers should expect a smaller audience size when creating Website Traffic Audience due to decreased volume of IDFAs, emails, and phone numbers available for audience matching purposes.
Recommendations
Advertisers can continue to create Website Traffic Audiences, but the audience size may be smaller.
