Reaching Beyond Your Target Audience with TikTok Promote
How to use a TikTok Promote campaign to reach your target audience generating more website visits and increasing views for your highest achieving videos.
Navigating the endless list of new features on each social media platform can be time-consuming, but staying on top of the game is worth it in the long run. One recent feature you should pay attention to is TikTok Promote, a tool offering a new, unique way to advance your brand’s presence on the TikTok app for more engagement and more action. Explore how this feature can help your brand, why you should add it to your marketing strategy, and our top tips for success with TikTok Promote.
What Is TikTok Promote?
Promote is a newly released feature that allows creators to promote previously posted videos so they can reach new audiences. Compared to other advertising features on TikTok, the Promote tool is available for any type of TikTok account, including non-business accounts.
Promote places your videos on the For You Page (FYP) of more TikTok users, gaining you additional views and potentially upping your number of likes, followers, and even website visits, depending on your goal.
Using the Promote feature will not affect your organic video views, but it may improve the performance of your promoted videos after your marketing campaign ends. If you use it effectively by strategically choosing videos to promote, you might see a longer-term payoff in followers and views.
TikTok Promote: Benefits for Your Brand
We’ve covered the value of TikTok in social media marketing, but is TikTok Promote really worth the money? The answer is yes – but only if you know how to use it effectively.
TikTok Promote differs from other in-app advertising forms, like influencer marketing or even top-view TikTok ads. It gives you the same creative control that other paid advertising offers (rather than collaborating with a content creator), but it still offers some authenticity in that it promotes videos you’ve already made. If you’ve been focusing on creating authentic, engaging videos on your business account, but they just haven’t been hitting, TikTok Promote can give you the chance to put those videos in front of the people that will enjoy them most. With that, it offers three distinct benefits:
1. More Views
Making engaging videos and using the right hashtags can only do so much for getting you in front of a larger audience to gain new followers. Instead of trying to navigate the algorithm by simply following trends, using hashtags and effects, and posting at the right times every day, Promote campaigns let you increase your view count by simply using the tool. Keep up the work with hashtags and trends, but use Promote in combination with your other strategies for the most benefit.
2. Connecting with Your Target Audience & Reaching New Audiences
Closely connected to finding more views is reaching old and new audiences alike. More video views can mean more audience engagement when the videos are crafted purposely and in line with the essential elements of TikTok marketing. By using TikTok Promote, you give some of your high-performing content the chance to appear as an ad on people’s pages. New users can then see those ads, and if it’s high-quality content, you’ll have a broader audience moving forward.
3. Website Visits
For most ecommerce businesses, the end goal is website visits (and all the customer actions that come once their foot is in the door). When using Promote, you have the option to set your campaign objective as getting more website visits or more hits to your landing page. Once selected, it will then have you enter your URL and make a CTA choice, whether that’s “Contact Us,” “Shop Now,” or something else. Gaining extra website clicks ensures that your TikTok content is as valuable for your brand off the app as it is on it.
How it Works
You can access TikTok Promote through your Creator Tools or Business Suite, where you’ll also find the metrics and data on ongoing and past campaigns. It’s also possible to complete the Promote process through a previously uploaded video. You can choose from any of your own videos containing original sound or sound from the Commercial Music Library.
After choosing your video, you’ll continue the process:
1. Choose Your Objective
TikTok offers three goals for your campaign: more views, more followers, or more website visits. Select one of the three based on your business’s needs, current standing on the TikTok app, and any other marketing data that can inform your decision.
2. Select Your Audience
Along with a campaign objective, the other major decision you’ll make is between audience types. With TikTok Promote, you decide between automatic (TikTok chooses the audience for you) or custom (you identify the demographics of your preferred audience).
Tips for Using Promote on TikTok Videos
Finding the most success with TikTok Promote relies on your choice of objectives, audience, and high-quality videos. While the tool will place you in front of audiences no matter what, your ability to manipulate those results by making strategic choices on those three fronts can win you even more success. Here are some quick tips for navigating TikTok Promote:
Objectives
TikTok defines the available objectives for ad campaigns as either awareness, consideration, or conversion goals. In Promote, those objectives are:
- Views
- Followers
- Website visits
If your aim is awareness, whether in an effort to increase reach, build trust, or otherwise expand your name, amplifying your views is the most direct approach. Alternatively, increasing followers and website visits fall into consideration: driving awareness, interest, and even engagement.
Audience
You have two choices for your audience: custom and automatic. An easy rule for deciding between these two options is to consider your current understanding of your target audience. Brands that haven’t devoted extensive time to researching and understanding their audience or potential users can find success with the automatic option, which gives TikTok the authority to choose the audience.
Alternatively, selecting custom gives you the power to decide on the demographics of your target audience, including gender, age range, and interests (education, travel, pets, food and beverage, etc.). If you’ve done your research on your target audience, custom is the better choice. While TikTok’s automatic setting may overlap with your user base, custom lets you build on your other marketing strategy and understandings.
Video Quality
TikTok suggests – and we agree – that you can get the most out of TikTok Promote when you promote your highest-achieving videos. Instead of choosing a short video that you thought should have gone viral (but didn’t), go for one that got the most views or engagement.
Don’t know where to start? Get creative. From tutorials to challenges, find new video trends that are going big and follow them with your own innovative twist. Even better – link up with a partner that knows what works on TikTok. At First Media, we take the creative pressure off of our partners by making content that works, offering high-quality media that drives action.
Conclusion
TikTok Promote is a simple tool to work with if you follow the basic formula for high-performing content. That said, low-quality media that lands in front of the right audience won’t help your brand at all: you need effective video content to see the benefits of TikTok Promote.
TikTok has the power to offer you success in a range of objectives – it’s all about knowing what works. When you partner with First Media, you get access to a team that understands the intricacies of TikTok content. Our comprehensive digital media experience, combined with skilled creative teams and exclusive AI, ensures your engagement and growth across all platforms.
