What if you could get in front of a huge audience with just a little bit of effort and money? TikTok is making that easy for creators, influencers, and businesses just like yours through their TikTok Promote tool. Today, we’re gonna go over everything you need to know so that you are able to maximise your reach, but also your ROI.
Selecting a Video to Promote
The TikTok Promote feature is much like the Facebook Boost feature, except it’s much more streamlined, and it allows you to maximize on TikTok’s incredible algorithm and everything happening on the platform. But before you start promoting your video, you have to first figure out what your goal is. Do you want more website visits? Do you want more views? Or do you want more followers on the platform? I’ll go into this in a few minutes when we create our first promoted video.
Once we have our goal in mind, the second thing we need to do is identify which organic TikTok video that you actually want to promote. You wanna look for content that is already getting a good response from your target audience. So there are two ways to choose which video is performing well. The first way is by going into your analytics, and we have a whole video all about analytics in the description, so you can click on that and learn all about that, but my favorite way to promote a video is by literally going to your profile. So if you’re not sure if this is the right video to promote, click on the video and all the way at the bottom, you’re gonna see the number of views and/or shares. You click in that space, and that’s gonna pull up all your analytics for that video.
Deciding on Your Goal
Once you’ve decided that this is the video you wanna promote, go back to the regular video. In the lower right-hand corner, click on the three little dots, and then click on the word “promote.” Once you get to this screen, it’s gonna ask you, “Do you want more video views, website visits, or followers?” Each of these will help you grow your business, they just do it in very different ways.
To help you decide which one you should choose for your business, here is a quick summary of how each of them will work. For video views, this is an opportunity to get more eyeballs on your content, meaning, more people knowing that you exist. Because if they know that you exist and are interested, they may click on your profile, begin to consume more of your content, and then either follow you and/or click the link in your bio and visit your website.
Website visits is very unique, because once you walk through the prompts with TikTok, they’re gonna give you an opportunity to put whatever URL you wanna have on the video, and then when the video is being promoted, they’re gonna see a button that’s gonna ask them to take an action, which will drive them to your website.
And growing your following is important because once they follow you, not only will your content show up on the “following” page, but also, it’s more likely to resurface on the “for you” page, whereas normally it wouldn’t have done that.
Creating a Promoted Video
For this example, we are gonna promote a video to get more website visits.
So once I’ve identified the video, then I’m going to click on the three little dots in the lower right-hand corner. And then a screen is gonna pop up, and I can click on the word “promote.”
Once you do that, it’s gonna ask you for the goal. We’re gonna click on “website visits.” Next, enter the URL where you want the video to drive them to. So when you’re taking this step, make sure you send them to a landing page, that way they have one action to take. And also, make sure that you put “http://”when you’re putting the URL in. Then you wanna choose the actual button that you want them to hit, such as Sign up now, Learn more, whichever one you decide to choose.
Next, you wanna go ahead and choose your audience. You can choose the gender, you can choose the age, and then the type of content that they are interested in.
So on this next screen, this is where you’re going to choose your budget. Now, depending on if you have an iPhone or you have an Android, it may look a little bit different. If you have an Android phone, you’re gonna see actual dollars. For those with iPhones, you’ll see coins. You have to purchase the amount of coins you wanna use for the campaign.
Then, you just hit “start promotion.” Once you hit “start promotion,” you’ll see on the video where it says, it’s gonna be under review for about 48 hours. But, note this, it actually happens a lot faster, and all you have to do is click on your notifications and TikTok will tell you that your video is now live.
Understanding Promotion Performance
To check the analytics of that video, what you need to do is is go back into the creator tools, so just click on the hamburger menu in the upper right-hand corner, then click on Creator tools, and then, Promote.
Scroll down to the bottom, and you’re gonna find the video that you just promoted. Then, you’re able to click on “see details.” Once you pull that up, you’re gonna be able to see how your video is performing: who’s watching it, their age, their gender.
Since this is a campaign about website visits, we’re gonna pay close attention to link clicks. This is good inside of TikTok, but we would also recommend that you check and see what your analytics are like on your website. That’s gonna let you see the traffic that has come from the TikTok platform. This is why you wanna send them to a specific landing page versus just to your home page.
TikTok Promote Tips
And here’s a little something we suggest you do. Before running an ad, go to the video and do a screenshot of the views, the comments, and the shares, and then the watch time of the video. That’s gonna show you what your video was doing before and after promoting a video on TikTok.
For your next campaign, choose a different type of objective so you can see how your videos are performing. And also, from time to time, let TikTok choose your audience for you. That way, you can see if they’re able to choose the right people for your video better than you are. Keep an eye on your analytics, so you can see how TikTok Promote is serving your business. But also, don’t forget that TikTok’s organic reach is absolutely incredible, and we have all the details in our TikTok for Business series. So make sure you click on that, and stay tuned for our next post!
