TikTok Advertising Influencer Strategies For eCommerce Brands

Key Takeaways

hey everybody my name is savannah sanchez today i'm going to be talking about all things tick tock ad creatives especially for ecommerce brands so a bit about me i've been working with the tiktok ad platform since april of 2020 for my e-commerce clients i am an e-commerce paid social consultant i work with a handful of brands on their facebook snapchat and now tick-tock advertising strategies some of the brands i've worked with on tick-tock include blend jet our place thrive market jing kitsch just to name a few so really excited to share my learnings from working with their ad platform and specifically what works for ad creatives a bit about my team i work with lauren who is my ad creative designer she helps design a lot of the tik tok ad creative so more technical side of the design and then i also work with natalie who is our resident ugc or user generated content maker and makes a lot of tick tock ads for us and in terms of filming her own content as well which is really exciting so that's me that's my business my business is the social savannah this is my team and i'm excited to share with you what we've learned so far about tick tock ads all righty so i'm going to play a few examples for you as well so tick tock people go to tick tock to be entertained no surprise about that and to be delighted by short-form videos so you have to speak the language that tick-tockers expect if they sniff out that it's an ad they're going to quickly swipe away so when i first started with tick-tock advertising i think that my first instinct was i'll just take whatever is working on my instagram story ads on my snapchat ads and try it on tiktok it seemed like a really easy way to get started on the platform boy did those ads bomb something i've really quickly learned about tiktok advertising is that they have to look like tick tocks you cannot just take what's working for you on facebook and shove it on tick tock ads manager and expect it to work tick talkers they are making a decision about whether they're gonna watch your ad within the first thumbnail of seeing your ad creative literally under a second it takes them to decide if they're gonna watch your ad or if they're gonna swipe away so it's really important to make it look as native to the tic toc ad platform as possible so the two examples i just played on screen are ones that we've made for our clients and we're using organic tik tok text we're using transitions that tick tick-tockers are used to but most importantly they don't look like ads so if there's any key takeaway from today that you get make ad make tick-tocks not ads is really the name of the game so how do you get this type of organic looking style and i'll play these examples for you guys as well so um you have to work with creators on the platform that's the great thing about tick tock creators they already understand a lot of these direct response principles in terms of getting attention in the first frame getting people to watch the entirety of the video that's why i love working with tick tock creators as opposed to even instagrammers because tick-tockers understand how to grab attention quickly and how to look native to the platform so when i source creators for the brands that i work with i'm looking for those creators that know how to capture attention and to almost give them a lot of creative freedom as well in terms of the content that they're making when i work with tick-tock creators for user-generated content for tick-tock ads often i'm relying on their own creativity i give them some brand guidelines and the main value props of our product but that's the great thing about tick tock creators most of them are extremely creative and talented that if you give them a bit of direction and let them put their own flair on it you get really great content like the ones i just showed you so just to reiterate what i said letting creators be creators i'll share with you a couple examples from my clients this was a creator we paired up with for my client kitsch to show their pony full so just a simple product tutorial i found that product tutorial videos and unboxings work especially well for tick tock ads one thing that's also really cool about working with tic toc creators is that there's that there is this new beta feature on tick talk ads where you can actually boost posts from an influencers page which has worked really well for my clients so what this means is that if you're working with a tick tock creator have them post the ad directly to their tick tock page and then you can request an authentication authenticator code for you to run their ad through their page so if any of you guys use facebook ads pretty religiously you probably know about whitelisting facebook ads where you use an influencers facebook page it's the same content here so like you can see with the influencer that we used we're running it through her page and we're adding that shop now button so again that is a feature that is still in beta something that i've been able to get my clients access to to run ads through an influencer page but by far i've seen much better performance running ads directly through a creator's page in boosting those posts adding the shop now call to action than running it through a brand's page and the reason why is because it adds that level of social proof when it's coming through an influencers page and you're boosting their post it doesn't look like an ad and it genuinely portrays that the influencer is interested and promotes the content as opposed to coming to the brand's page so that's just a little hack for you guys so here's just some quick fire tips about the best tick tock ads we've made and what we've learned from them number one is use of striking visuals tiktok is an extremely visual platform add a visual that captures attention by using vivid colors and text on screen you have to remember that not all people are viewing ads or tick tocks with sound on although many people do listen with sound you have to be able to have an ad that is understandable with sound off so that's the reason why when i'm showing you these tik tok ad examples we've made you don't even need sound to understand what's going on you can get the entire message of the ad with sound off so by using striking visuals and text overlays that can help you achieve that goal it's also great to keep your ads on the shorter side i've seen that my best performing ads are between 9 and 15 seconds so don't go too long you want to do most of the explaining on the landing page of your website your tick tock ad is all about just getting attention and then enriching the content adding subtitles writing captions and the use of background music also pay attention to the format you want to make sure that the content you're making is vertical which should be tick tock 101 vertical video content is what you want to be filming for and then also make sure that you're keeping the most important visual elements in the center of the ad so when you're going through your tick tock page you'll notice that the caption on any post and also the user's profile and various other buttons take up room visually on the screen so you don't want to have text or any important visuals unless you say the bottom left corner or on the far right of the screen because that's going to be taken up by tick tocks different buttons in overlay text so keep the most important visuals in the middle of this screen so that it's not obstructed by any of tick-tock's overlays and then lastly include a compelling call to action so as an e-commerce advertiser ultimately what i'm trying to do is get people to click to my client's website and ultimately purchase so so you want to make sure that you're having an enticing call to action such as shop or sale now or tick tock exclusive sale is one i've used before make sure to give them a special promotion to entice them to purchase right then on the ad so i wanted to highlight quickly one of the influencer campaigns that i ran for my client blend jet what we did is we reached out to a variety of influencers that were in the food and beverage space or cooking and gave them a blend jet too and we boosted ads from their account so this was a very successful campaign that we ran with tick tock influencers again giving them general brand guidelines of the value props and the type of content we want to see for ads but ultimately leaving it up to their creativity and we were really impressed with the end result from what the tick tock creators provided for us and like i said before i really do think that the future of tick tock advertising is these white listed ads so make sure that when you are getting access to a tick tock influencer that you're asking for that boosted post access so that you can run ads through their page if you are working with a tick tock agency or if you have a tick tock rep that you're working with they should be able to allow you on this boosted post beta i really do think it's going to be available to all self-serve advertisers too so if you don't see it now you'll definitely see it in your ad account soon enough but you might want to take a screenshot because these are just the steps of how to get that authentication code so that you can boost organic tick tocks from influencers alrighty so let's go through some of the best ad creative types that i get from my clients and i think that these are the ones that you should first test in your ad account for your ecommerce products [Music] so this one was one that we did for a client peel and it's essentially a product demo so i can show you what it looks like after so we tried to use a really organic tik-tok transition of the snap and having the case come on the phone this was one that worked really well for us so definitely test unboxing videos and showing your product in use this one is an organic shopping ugc so for this ad what we did is we showed a comparison between our clients leggings which are jing and lululemon leggings and then showed how it looked on our model again using those organic tik tok text overlays making it look organic as possible and then that cta of shop now at the end so if you're looking for new content for your ad account definitely test using handheld style video navid native text subtitles and hit the viewer with a punchy intro line and then comparing the product to your competitors essentially showing the process of ordering your product online so i've seen this work really well for tick-tock ads it's actually showing the process of how to order so for this client it made a lot of sense because what this product is is you take a photo of your pet you upload it to the website and they send you a cute blanket but actually showing the steps of how to order and then what the final product is once it arrives is a really great format for tick-tock ads and lastly i'll leave you with some final tips and tricks of how to improve your tick-tock ads number one what i've seen work really well is providing a creator with a tick tock specific referral or discount code so example like tick tock 15 or natalie 15 influencer 20 whatever the t the code you choose to provide as a discount and what you'll do is you'll have the influencer say it out loud in the ad so use my code natalie10 for 10 off your first purchase so not only is this a really compelling call to action because you're giving tick-tockers their own unique code to use but also it's great for attribution so tick-tock attribution can be a little tricky so utilizing a specific code when you're doing an influencer post can help with that attribution tracking also more advice to give to your tick tock influencers i've worked with a lot of tick tock creators now on ads and now the best advice i give them is although we want them to use text overlays still keep the text on screen minimal not to overcrowd or overload the user with information so sometimes learn from my failures i've gotten some tick tock ads back that have like paragraphs of text on the screen or like multiple sentence bullet points flying through and it's just too much information it's great to have like one liners or maybe three different bullet points that show up on screen but you don't want to overload it with text because ultimately you want to leave the viewer hanging so they can click through to your website and then learn more about your product and then this is advice i have not only for tic toc ads but also for facebook and snapchat is designing for second and zero so a good creator should know it's already but it's always good to reiterate in your guidelines the first frame or what we like to call second zero should either contain the main message or the reason why the viewer should keep watching this is specifically why i love working with tiktok creators because they already understand this concept when they're trying to get views on their videos they're trying to capture attention in that first second and give people a reason to watch to the end also when tick tock ads are running usually people are only watching the first few seconds of it before they decide to scroll along so you really want to get your main message into the very beginning of the ad so in that second zero make sure you're showing your product and hooking viewers so that they can watch for the rest of the ad and then lastly encouraging engagement the more comments saves and shares a video gets the more it gets served to other accounts on their for you page so part of the content can include a reason why someone should comment so include a giveaway a life hack a recipe i've seen that my best tic talk ads are the ones that get a lot of comments even negative comments has really boosted performance for example we did a brand for a beauty we did an ad for a beauty brand and we showed 10 affordable beauty hacks but the hacks weren't very affordable and we got so many comments people saying like these are not affordable beauty hacks like these are pretty expensive but all of that negative engagement actually really boosted our ad performance and our delivery i'm not saying to necessarily go out and try to get negative engagement of course positive engagement is the best type of engagement but engagement nonetheless is going to help your ad performance so also something that i notice is doing like oddly satisfying videos have had a lot of engagement or asmr videos so having like the sound effects that's like really soothing it encourages people to kind of start a conversation about it and comment their thoughts so when you're thinking about working with tick-tock influencers or creating your own tick tock ad content try to incorporate a reason why someone should comment and create engagement on your ads so i hope you found that these tick tock ad creative tips were helpful of course if you want to work together on your tick-tock ad creative strategies or your media buying on tick-tock please do not hesitate to get in touch with me at my website which is the social savannah.com thank you guys so much for watching