5 Reasons Why TikTok Advertising Is Worth It For Your Brand
Are TikTok Ads worth it? This is a valid question that’s being asked by brands of all sizes. TikTok definitely lacks data when it comes to advertising, especially if you compare their data to that of Facebook, this could potentially mean that you’re not able to target your ideal customer. The primary age group of TikTok is also much younger than that of other platforms, like Instagram or Facebook, so if you were to advertise would the end-user even have the purchasing power to buy your product?
While these are all valid concerns that could have you wondering if TikTok ads are worth running, it’s for these exact reasons that you absolutely should be looking into running TikTok ads for your brand. These things should not be seen as flaws, but rather windows of opportunity for early adopters to take advantage of.
TikTok statistics show that TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform ever, it would be foolish to not at least experiment with advertising on the platform for this reason alone. If you’re the type of person that has been pondering on whether TikTok ads are effective, the best way to find out is by trying them for yourself.
Let’s dive into five reasons why TikTok advertising is worth it for your brand.
1. It’s Early
TikTok is still in its infancy.
Starting to run TikTok ads today, rather than in a year from now, will allow you to gain an advantage over your competition. A large part of pulling ahead of your competition is associated with finding arbitrage opportunities (places where nobody else is looking) and then executing on those opportunities to gain an advantage.
Since TikTok is still a new platform when you compare it to the others in the market, starting earlier will allow you to become more familiar with the platform and the mechanics of how things work. By the time your competition comes around to running TikTok ads, you will be lightyears ahead.
As more people begin running TikTok ads, the competition heats up, people get better at optimizing their ads, and the barrier to entry for new advertisers grows larger.
2. TikTok Ads Are Cheap
Since TikTok as a platform is still young, advertising remains cheap, and it will only become more expensive to advertise on TikTok as time goes on.
Social media platforms typically follow the same playbook, we’ve seen this pattern with platforms like Instagram and Snapchat as well. When the platform is in its infancy, the primary goal is to keep users engaged by offering them a great experience. In the case of TikTok, a great experience equates to a curated content feed called the For You Page, and an insane amount of organic engagement for users that post content. As a result, users flock to the platform and this creates a viral growth loop. More users mean that TikTok can collect more data that can be sold to advertisers.
With TikTok being so young, they don’t have a lot of data to sell to advertisers and as a result, TikTok ads are cheap in order to attract these advertisers.
There’s no doubt that as TikTok continues to collect more data, and competition for advertising heats up, the cost of running ads on TikTok will increase.
If you’re wondering whether or not TikTok ads are worth the financial investment, it’s definitely better to learn them now rather than later.
3. Data on TikTok is Less Important, Creatives Matter More
TikTok’s lack of data should not prevent you from running ads on the platform.
While TikTok lacks data when compared to larger platforms like Facebook, TikTok ads are more dependent on good ad creatives when it comes to performance.
Traditionally, when running ads on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, the magic would happen in the ads manager where you set your ads targeting. This was possible because of Facebook’s ability to collect data, but with the world moving towards privacy, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for platforms to collect data as they have in the past. These days, the magic is in the ad creative. A good ad creative with minimal targeting can do wonders on TikTok.
Ask yourself these questions when creating an ad for TikTok:
- Does the ad look and feel organic?
- Does it speak to your target audience?
- Does the ad leave your audience with some sort of value?
Before you run TikTok ads, it’s important to understand how to create killer TikTok ad creatives, this will be the key ingredient to a winning TikTok ads strategy. There are also a ton of tools on the market that can help with advertisement design and creation, and by using these tools you can speed up your workflow.
4. Access to GenZs and Millenials
Millennials and GenZs are the future of our workforce, and with this comes a lot of purchasing power.
It’s estimated that millennials will make up 75% of our workforce by 2030, and GenZs will follow soon after. As these generations begin to make more money, their purchasing power increases. Millennials are currently the largest living generation, and they collectively spend $600 billion annually in the US alone.
While other platforms like Facebook and Instagram continue to age, TikTok has been able to capture the younger generation of consumers. Capturing the younger generations can be vital to your long-term success as a business, and TikTok ads are a great way to achieve this.
5. Use Content Creators for TikTok Ads
One of the trends we spotted while putting together our influencer marketing report for 2022 is the fact that more brands are finding influencers to create content for them ever since Apple released their iOS 14 update which allows users to opt-out of having their data collected.
This update meant that you had to depend on really good ad creatives to win over consumers since targeting is not like it used to be if you just depend on the data available to you in the ads manager.
The good news is that TikTok makes it extremely easy to advertise organic content made by content creators. With TikTok Spark Ads you can put ad spend behind organic content that was posted to a creator's feed, as long as they authorize you to do so.
This makes advertising on TikTok much easier since you can simply find an influencer, have them create a curated piece of content for your product, and then put ad spend behind that content and boost it to the audience of your choice. This reduces your workload since you don’t have to actually create the content yourself.
If you choose to work with influencers, it’s always great to have access to an influencer price calculator which can give you a rough estimate of what you should spend when you hire influencers.
Final Thoughts
If you’re the type of person wondering whether or not TikTok ads are worth it, then you should seriously consider the above five points and make a decision on whether or not right now is a good time to dive into running TikTok ads.
Unfortunately, there is no yes or no answer to whether or not TikTok ads are worth the effort, but one thing we can say for sure is that TikTok definitely presents itself as a rare opportunity for those looking to get ahead and it can’t hurt to be an early adopter.