How to connect with your target audience on TikTok

How to connect with your target audience on TikTok

July 28, 2022

TikTok For Business

Best Practices

Reaching the right audience on TikTok can help your brand create authentic connections, drive customer loyalty and boost sales. We're going to look at some of the best ways for understanding your target audience on TikTok and how to reach that audience using TikTok Ads Manager. Keep reading to learn more!

According to a consumer insights study by Neuro-Insight, TikTok’s powerful combination of relevance and engagement creates a more pleasurable experience and enables users to be more receptive to brand messaging and calls-to-action.

For brands, this combination of engagement and relevance results in higher response rates from audiences than traditional media—creating exciting opportunities to forge deep connections with audiences.

But before you can connect with potential customers on TikTok, it helps to know more about your target audience.

How to find your target audience:

- Understand your subcultures. It’s a good idea to spend some quality time on TikTok getting to know your community—and letting them get to know your brand. What type of content do they like to engage with? What’s the mood? The tone? Knowing your audience will help your marketing messages hit home. Get started by signing up for a TikTok Business Account. This will provide you with audience insights and other resources to help develop your TikTok strategy.

- Explore hashtags. Type an interest or keyword in the search bar of the TikTok app to see which hashtags are being used and how often. These hashtags provide a gateway for finding your subcultures and their interests. Explore hashtags, trends and creative insights on the Creative Center.

- Engage your audience. Join the conversation and take your place in the community. Creating original content is a great way to participate, but smaller actions matter, too. Commenting on videos, replying to posts, and following relevant creators are all ways to become part of the community.

Now that you understand your audience better, you’re ready to act on that knowledge with audience targeting for ads. On TikTok Ads Manager, you’ll have four major options for reaching the right audiences.

1. Custom & lookalike audiences

On TikTok, you can utilize information from previous marketing campaigns or your 1st-party data to create custom audiences. These custom audiences can be included or excluded from your ad campaign.

- Example: Your targeting strategy can include audiences who have previously visited your brand’s website, signed up for your newsletter, or engaged with your TikTok posts. You can also exclude audiences, such as people who have already purchased the product you are trying to sell.

TikTok Ads Manager also lets you create lookalike audiences, which are groups of users who share certain characteristics with your existing followers and customers.

- Example: If you have your beauty brand’s loyal customer list, you can upload that audience into TikTok Ads Manager and create a lookalike audience based on that list. Our system will help you find more audiences that share similar characteristics to your loyal customers, which in return can improve campaign performance.

2. Demographics

Demographic targeting allows advertisers to target ads to people based on characteristics such as age, gender, location and language. This method is powerful at capturing broad reach within the TikTok community. In TikTok Ads Manager, you can focus your targeting efforts based on the following demographics, as provided in the TikTok Ads Manager interface:

• 👉 Gender
• 👉 Age
• 👉 Location
• 👉 Language

3. Interests & Behaviors

On TikTok, brands can target audiences by their behavior on the platform. What types of videos do they watch the most? Which profiles do they tend to visit? What are they commenting on? By targeting consumers based on their interests and behaviors on TikTok, advertisers can find audiences who are more likely to make a purchase. Let’s break it down:

• 👉 Interests: Deliver your ads to audiences based on their higher interaction with certain categories of content, such as makeup, outdoor equipment, sports news or pet care. This can be as granular as keyword-level.
• 👉 Behaviors: Connect with TikTok audiences based on their recent engagement within certain creator categories, video categories or hashtags.

4. Device

TikTok Ads Manager also lets you target various device specifications, which can be helpful to further narrow and define your desired audience—especially for personal electronics and gaming brands.

- Example: If you’ve created an exciting new app for Android, you can specifically target Android devices in your marketing campaign.

Device targeting options on TikTok include:

• 👉 Operating system
• 👉 Operating system version
• 👉 Device model
• 👉 Connection type
• 👉 Carrier
• 👉 Device price

Brands are able to reach the right audiences on TikTok by targeting their ads based on 1st-party audience insights, demographics, interests, behaviors and device type. But remember, it all begins with audience research—and on TikTok, that means having fun. Play around on the platform and get to know your customers—understand how they engage and interact with each other.

Ready to start connecting with your community on TikTok? Sign up for a TikTok Ads Manager Account and start planning your next campaign today!

For more information about how TikTok collects, uses and shares data for advertising, click here.