TikTok Ads That Surely Boost Your Branding

With over 800 million monthly users and over 1.5 billion total downloads. TikTok/Douyin has become one of the big guns in the app industry. TikTok was launched in September 2016 as Douyin in China, which later was changed to TikTok known worldwide by ByteDance. It’s the app where you can create 15-60 sec videos with various soundtracks, effects and so much more.

As the most popular video-sharing app in the market, TikTok turned into a marketing tool to help brands, pieces of music gain more exposure. You can pretty much see TikTok’s videos everywhere starting from Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and many other platforms. Many songs become famous by TikTok, not to mention there’re many dedicated playlists of TikTok’s songs on Youtube.

Nowadays TikTok has grown and you can run ads on it. There are various types of advertising campaigns you can do on TikTok and we’ll summarize them for you in this article. There are normal TikTok auction-based in-feed ads and more advanced ones such as a brand takeover, hashtag challenge, top view, and branded effects.

In-Feed Ads

As you scroll through the For You Page, sometimes you come across advertising content. This is what we call in-feed ads. The advertisements are mixed with organic content to ensure a smooth user experience. Advertisers should make sure that the content of the advertisement is well-made enough as viewers will skip your ads if they find it uninteresting. TikTok will place in-feed ads before & after popular content to ensure more engagements.

There are two types of in-feed ads. First is the Diversion type, and second is the Account type. Diversion in-feed ads are for you who want to lead the users to an external landing page. You don’t need to set up a TikTok account in advance. The Account in-feed ads are for TikTok users that want to increase their reach and followers on TikTok. TikTok also gives you some more interesting engagement formats such as interactive cards, voting cards, premium badges, and super like to enhance your ads.

In-feed ads are offered in 3 ways: Auction, One-Day Max and Brand Premium. Auction ads are the only type of ads that can be operated by advertisers directly through Tik Tok Ads Platform (i.e. advertisers may set their own CPC/CPA bid and run/pause the ads anytime), all other types of ads are operated by TikTok and slots have to be reserved in advance. In One Day Max, your ads will be the 4th in-feed video (1st ad) shown to users once a day. In Brand Premium, TikTok will randomly place your ads among the first 130 in-feed videos that users watch. You can also set the targeting options by age, gender, device, geography, etc., to reach your target audience better.

There’s also a brand new way to advertise in TikTok called Boosted Tiktok. Boosted TikTok is a type of in-feed ad in which advertisers can directly use their native posts from their TikTok social media account as the ad creative, which means they can promote their native organic posts directly, and viewers can follow their TikTok social media account directly from this kind of ads). It’s designed to give access to accounts to gain followers, increase views and engage with broader audiences. Click here to learn more about this new exciting way to advertise!

Brand Takeover

The first splash ad you see when you open TikTok app for the first time in the day. That is Brand Takeover Ads. Advertisers can put 3-5 second GIF/videos or still images and redirect people who click them to enter a landing page on their website. TikTok Brand Takeover ads support external and internal landing pages, so you can redirect the viewers to your TikTok account or external websites upon click. Make sure to make the landing page interesting as users will only see one Brand Takeover ad every two hours. In some countries, you can even set your targeting (age, gender, region etc).

If you want your brand to reach more people you must look at this Brand Takeover ads, as every user on TikTok will see this ad once every two hours. Furthermore, it’ll increase the user’s awareness on your brand image as TikTok give the brand 100% SOV (share of voice) on the splash screen, which means they exclusively let only one brand who can afford Brand Takeover ads per day.

Hashtag Challenge

TikTok’s Hashtag Challenge is THE choice when it comes to viral brand exposure and user engagement. A Hashtag Challenge is one where a brand asks users to perform a certain task and tag them using a specific hashtag. Usually, big brands will do a hashtag challenge with branded effects that help bring out the brand’s identity and it’s a great way to let users remember their brands. More will be talked about on branded effects later in this article.

While Hashtag Challenges do tend to go viral, not all challenges do. Therefore, advertisers usually offer attractive prizes to winners of the challenge to motivate more users to join the challenge in an attempt to win the prizes and in the process help create more user-generated content to increase the virality of the campaign.

TikTok also has an upgraded version of Hashtag Challenge called Hashtag Challenge Plus to drive more engagement and sales potential. The uniqueness of this Hashtag Challenge Plus is the additional “Discover” tab directly within the Hashtag Challenge Page in which you can add at least 3 out of 5 available interactive components such as Discover Banner, Product Carousel, Instant Survey, Offline Store, and Related Hashtags.

Top View

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TopView is the brand-new video ad format that will show your brands at the first sight of opening TikTok. You brand will enjoy 100% SOV on splash screen, so only one client can reserve TopView ad per day, just like Brand Takeover ads and you’ll also able to display your ad in a noise-free environment. TikTok supports both external and internal landing page and user engagement (like, comment, share, follow etc). Videos up to 60 seconds are available for TopView ads although only 15s video is recommended to deliver your brand message.

The best way to get the best result with this type of ads is to make a strong 3-second opening that is able to enchant the viewers to watch your videos until the end and ultimately click on the link which will redirect them to your landing page.

Branded Effects

As one of TikTok’s main selling points is its various effects, stickers, lenses, etc. Now advertisers can get more creative by adding their customized effects, stickers, lenses, etc powered by intelligent video recognition technology to engage more with the audience. Usually, Branded Effect is used together with Hashtag Challenges to add more fun and memorable interactions between your brand and users.

There is the standard branded effect such as 2D Foreground, 2D Facial, 2D Hand and Color-Based Filter as well as the premium ones like Face Distortion, Cosmetics, Raindrop Control, Hair Color FX, and the brand-new 3D Head. Now, these effects are clickable, which will direct users to the landing page directly and have their own page.

Which to choose?

At the end of the day, you must choose the type of ads that suit your needs and your budget. You have to plan the budget and determine the various targeting setups for each ad. Sometimes, TikTok might reject your ad. As official TikTok’s partner, we, Nanyang Bridge Media, can help you strategize, plan and manage your campaign so you can get the best out of your ads. We have a special promotion for first-time clients using our TikTok Ads services, contact us today to find out!