Know your ABCs: Performance marketing on TikTok

Looking to supercharge your performance marketing campaigns on TikTok? It's as simple as knowing your ABCs - Audience and finding your market, Bidding to help you scale and optimise, Creative to make your campaigns shine and Diversifying your funnel strategy to improve your performance campaigns!

A is for Audience

From broad demographic targeting through to niche interest groups, TikTok has the tools to connect new audiences to your brand. So, where do we recommend you start?

By bringing your own data. Whether it's your cart abandoners, your past purchasers or your high value customers, custom audiences are the secret sauce behind top performing campaigns.

Next, expand with lookalike audiences - use TikTok’s tools and automation to find new, relevant and engaged audiences to boost conversions for your brand.

What audiences should you consider for a first campaign?

1. Go broad

We recommend kicking off with two to three audiences and keeping the targeting broad. This is a simple and straightforward way to explore new audiences on platform and prospect new customers to your brand while giving you a better understanding of the power and effectiveness of your creatives. Broad audiences delivered 29% lower CPAs and 15% higher conversion rates than other targeting strategies on TikTok.

2. Explore your 1st party audience lists

Using your customer data to build retargeting and lookalike audiences helps boost activity and improve results for your brand.

3. Don’t forget to test

Sometimes the audiences you least expect can deliver incredible results. We recommend exploring and building new audiences as you launch campaigns - don't be afraid to test and learn!

B is for Bidding/Budget

So, you've got your audience locked down - how do you start optimising your campaigns?

As we know with a traditional conversion funnel, we need to make sure the right event is being targeted to drive optimal results. With our Pixel installed, we can analyse signal density per stage of the funnel and recommend the ideal setup for your business objectives. For instance, many of the campaigns we've worked on recently have optimised towards Add to Cart, and then moved down the funnel as signals and conversions increased.

Once your campaign event is defined, the next step is to use TikTok’s automation solutions to bid and allocate budgets. This allows our advertising platform to predict user outcomes and deliver the right creative, to the right user and drive a desired outcome.

Automation across targeting, delivery and creative takes away the need for manual optimization while giving the algorithm the highest flexibility to find users who are more likely to interact with your ads.

Which TikTok products support this goal?

Here's a few examples to get you started:

• Lowest Cost Bidding helps maximise conversions while delivering efficient cost and full spending. We observed 35% higher conversions when using Lowest Cost Bid for web campaigns.

• Campaign Budget Optimization helps you with the heavy lifting of creating multiple assets for the platform. Automated Creative Optimisation drove 85% lower cost per action and 155% higher conversion rates than campaigns without.

• Value Based Optimization amplifies product discovery, purchase and conversions with smarter intent-based targeting and advance creative features.

C is for Creative

When it comes to creative, our main tip is to build for TikTok! But here are a few other recommendations from our time running campaigns with Australian and New Zealand brands:

1. Add three to five ad creatives per ad group and refresh every two to three weeks. Campaigns with multiple ad creatives can be more effective in driving results in some cases.

2. Using creators can also enhance performance - we observed a 14% uplift in conversion rates when using creators to do a product demonstration or talk about an ongoing promotion.

3. Fun and engaging creatives that feel native to the platform are one of the best ways to capture your audience’s attention and drive viewers to your website

4. Product demonstration videos have also proven very effective!

D is for Diversifying your strategy

Adding a brand campaign to your funnel can improve efficiency and effectiveness for your conversion campaigns.

We have seen this across clients that adopted a brand campaign, with an average 14% reduction on cost per action and a 15% increase in conversion rates when going full funnel.

Ready to see performance in action on TikTok?

We unpacked it all at our recent TikTok Works: Performance Tour event in New Zealand:

For more brand case studies, check out our latest from teeth-whitening legend Hismile, nutrition superstar Tropeaka and Aussie furniture powerhouse Eva.