We all know the classic social ad tech stack. Depending on your audience and vertical, you may have some combination of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. But TikTok has earned its spot in any brand’s social stack – and we’re here to tell you why.

TikTok isn’t just a social platform for Gen Z dancing and lip-syncs – it is a sound-on entertainment experience used for sharing, learning, and discovery. TikTok has had a profound impact on culture — competing with social competitors such as Meta, search competitors like Google, and streaming competitors including Netflix and HBO Max. With half the users over the age of 30, this negative connotation of TikTok as a “Gen Z platform” can quickly be shut down with its sheer impact on the way we consume content, connect with brands, and, let’s be honest, market.

From Chipotle and The Empire State Building to the infamous Duolingo owl, companies of all industries and sizes are finding success through TikTok advertising by using their creativity and defining their unique brand voice to connect with their brand communities and future consumers.

Who should use TikTok Advertising?

Is TikTok a good match for my brand? Is my target audience using the platform? The answer may surprise you.

Due to its exponential growth, TikTok has quickly become a rival of Snapchat, Meta, and Google as users gravitate towards its culture of authenticity and social validity. But we aren’t just talking about using TikTok organically. The potential reach of ads on TikTok is as many as 888.4 million reaching almost 18% of total internet users above 18 years of age.

But the app isn’t just for younger generations. Gen Z continues to be the largest active age group, but this does not discredit 46% (and growing) of TikTok users over the age of 34 truly making it an advertising platform that can reach all ages.

Brands across all industries can find success marketing on TikTok. By using TikTok advertising, fast food companies like Dunkin’, Chipotle, and Wendy’s have found unique ways to connect with their communities through witty banter and turn up the cravings around unexpected menu items and collabs. Tech and SaaS companies have also found their way into TikTok as they are able to optimize for app downloads and have found success with how-to videos and demonstrations. There is even an opportunity to earn the first mover’s advantage for B2B brands, keeping in mind that there are human users with needs behind each lead they aim to win. But it’s DTC and consumer apps that account (for now) for the highest-viewed categories by TikTok users.

The international reach of TikTok also continues to expand as the app is currently available in 155 countries and operates in 75 different languages. This allows advertisers to target audiences based on location and language, while utilizing text overlays and auto-captioning to reach individuals outside of their own linguistic scope.

Finally, there is the consideration of gender. Globally, female users hold the majority at 55% of users, and in the United States account for 61% of the user base. Though marketers are able to target by age and gender on TikTok, it is important to understand exactly how your money will be spent.

How to Think About TikTok as an Ad Channel

TikTok is emerging as a leading channel of choice for brands quickly — and the biggest and most interesting challenge is understanding where it fits in your marketing channel mix, what percentage of the budget it should take on as investment, and how it works with the rest of the channels that are here to stay.

The first and most important thing to understand about TikTok is that the buying intent here is relatively low — this is due to the fact that users turn to TikTok primarily for entertainment and education. In fact, the average time users spend on the app seeking a dopamine rush is 95 minutes a day.

With this in mind, for a lot of brands, TikTok will be a better fit as an experimental channel working in tandem with other channels as a top- and middle-of-funnel driver, focusing on building brand awareness and solidifying a brand’s top-of-mind position amongst their target personas. For example, you can

a) stop the audience in their tracks with your ads,

b) drive them to your website,

c) retarget and convert them,

d) retain them.

With that being said, TikTok is a good choice for certain verticals — such as consumer apps or eCommerce, for example — that have a clear tangible product to drive bottom-of-funnel conversions alongside other channels such as Meta or Google.

To reiterate it again, TikTok is meant to complement your growth strategy and help diversify your channels and get a wider audience to move through your marketing funnel.

Let’s Talk TikTok Creative

If there is any platform out there that truly embodies the “Creative Is King” thinking, it’s Tiktok.

The best ad content on TikTok does not look like the traditional ad formats marketers have been trained on for years. In fact, the best performing ads on TikTok are the most unpolished, community-driven, and organic — which goes against the grain of the typical overproduced static and motion ads across the more typical ad channels dominating the space prior to TikTok’s advent.

There are some key advantages to the shift in successful ad formats towards authentic storytelling that brands can leverage.

• TikTok is the ideal playground for creative testing and experimentation. With fast learnings, wide reach and broad targeting, TikTok by far can be the best channel yet to test product messaging on a macro scale and delivery on micro.
• Raw, UGC-style videos are easier and faster to produce. This allows for a faster asset turnaround and the ability to conduct testing on a larger scale, at a quicker pace.
• Assets that don’t feel overly promotional do a better job at winning consumer trust. With more and more consumers making purchasing decisions based on their affinity and shared trust with certain brands.
• TikTok ads, once identified as winner assets, will drive results across other platforms. TikTok is an essential part of kicking off an asset-repurposing flywheel that can effectively ensure a consistent stream of high-performing content ready to repurposed across Reels, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest, etc.

But it’s also important to note what challenges brands face with the big change in thinking that TikTok brings about.

• TikTok requires a large volume of creative production. Because it’s one of the best experimentation channels to test on, it’s important to invest the resources into appropriate creator relationships and video production to sustain the testing. Additionally, a lot of businesses have licensing limitations on the sounds and music used in videos, forcing them to get creative and resourceful to maintain the organic feel of the native TikTok videos.
• Ad fatigue is high on TikTok. The amount of content consumption that happens on the platform means that brands need to keep up with fresh assets to update campaign creative every 1-2 weeks. The repetition of the same asset too frequently may lead to audience alienation and negative brand recall.

For a more detailed and step-by-step walkthrough on how to create successful TikTok content, refer to our guide here.

Getting Started with TikTok Ads

Before we dive in, it’s important to make the distinction between an organic account and a business account. TikTok accounts have the option to be categorized as personal, creator, or business accounts.

Brands can run ads via TikTok without having an organic account or presence, but if you plan on Sparking your content (essentially boosting an organic post), then you must first have an organic account that connects to your business account. Our recommendation is to leverage a combination of Spark and Dark ads depending on the campaign — and users are more likely to trust your brand as an advertiser if there is a true organic account attached to your paid strategy. It gives the consumer the reassurance that you inherently “get” the culture of TikTok and humanizes you.

Operating as a business TikTok account, brands can unlock the ability to run paid ads, partner with creators, run real-time performance tracking, access in-depth analytics, and have the ability to drive traffic to external landing pages. If you are planning on running TikTok ads, which we assume is why you are here, then this is the option for you.

Creating a business account is simple via TikTok Ads Manager. Once approved and authenticated it’ll be time to set up your pixel. The TikTok Pixel, similar to other pixels you may be familiar with, is a snippet of code that lives on your website which gathers information about site events. These events include user data such as location and device, and can also track user activity such as a product view or add to cart action. By tracking these events, TikTok will be better able to target your ads and get them in front of the right users.

But before we get too nitty-gritty, let’s get a little more familiar with the TikTok Business Center.

The TikTok Business Center

TikTok launched its Business Center in 2020 as a one-stop shop for ad resources, inspiration, management, and creation.

The TikTok Business Center is comprised of four main areas:

1. The Business Center – This is where various levels of users are added and assigned. Members include your team members that are operating the day-to-day management of the business account whereas Partners is the space where you can connect your client or brand’s business ID in order to connect to their specific Ads account.
2. Ads Manager – Ads Manager houses campaigns, audiences, creatives, product catalogs, and reporting. This is where the magic happens.
3. Store Manager – Once you connect your CRM platform, products can be uploaded and managed here to be displayed on your profile storefront with the ability to be tagged and featured in your organic and paid videos.
4. Creator Center – Discover and track trends, view top-performing ads, explore the TikTok audio library, and use the creative center video templates to turn still photos into beautifully branded videos.

With so many resources and promotion capabilities, why wouldn’t you give TikTok Advertising a shot? Here’s how to get started on TikTok Business Center:

1. Create your TikTok Business Manager account

To begin, sign up for your TikTok business account by going to TikTok For Business. Select whether you are a business or agency and enter your details including region, business name and currency.

Agencies will be taken to a a Business Center page such as the following to provide additional details whereas an individual business will have to choose an industry to help TikTok correctly categorize your business and advertising.

2. Add users and input partners

Whether you are an agency or business, next you will need to add additional users and members by inviting them via email. To add new members, go to the “Overview” tab and toggle to “Assets” and “Members.” When adding a new member, users can now have one of four access points for account access: Admin, Standard, Finance Manager, and Finance Analyst account access. Within each role comes additional restrictions that can be customized to your team’s needs.

Advertising Partners are similarly added under the “Partners” tab. Enter the Partner’s Business Center ID which can be found in their Business Center settings under “Business Center Information.”

Partners then have the option to share their individual Advertiser accounts, catalogs, and pixels.

3. Manage your assets and add Ad Accounts

To see all your accounts, catalogs, pixels, and shared audience types, toggle to the “Assets” on the left hand side. Also included on this navigation bar is Finance, Activity log, and business settings.

Under the “Assets” tab toggle to “Advertiser accounts.” Here you can create a new Ad account or request access to an existing account. If creating a new ad account, enter your business information and select account type.

An Ads Manager Account will allow you to run all campaign types available to your business via auction ads whereas a Reservation Account can only run reservation ads which is paying at fixed rate per number of impressions (CPM).

If requesting access to another business’ ad account, the original owner will continue to own it, whereas the requester can request Admin, Operator, or Analyst access.

So you’ve set up your ads account, now what? Next we’ll explore TikTok Ads Manager and get you and your business up and running on TikTok.

Navigating TikTok Ads Manager

TikTok Ads Manager is broken up into four areas: Dashboard, Campaign, Assets, and Reporting.

The Dashboard offers a birds-eye view of your current active campaign performance, cost, and trends.

Each of the following Navigation pages will give you a more granular view of campaign creation, asset management, and detailed reporting. But we’ll get into all that a little later.

Let’s discuss the nuances of TikTok’s ad formats.

What are the TikTok Advertising formats?

Like many other paid social platforms, TikTok’s ad platform is not one-size-fits-all. We believe in having an experimentation mindset to discover the best campaign types, ad groups, assets, and budgets for every account we manage. Once we find a method that yields results for each account, we continue monitoring, optimizing, and doubling down on what’s working. As a TikTok Agency Partner, our NoGood marketers are able to beta test new ad formats with our clients and get exclusive insights from our partners within TikTok.

TikTok currently offers five ad formats that can serve your brand at every stage of the marketing funnel. Within these ad types, there are additional customizations and targeting to reach your optimal audience.

Access to certain ad formats depends on your business size, budget, and industry.

In-Feed Ads

In-Feed Ads are by far the most popular among marketers as they seamlessly blend into a user’s For You Page feed. In-Feed Ads appear natively amongst organic content, making them less intrusive while a user scrolls.

The biggest benefit of In-Feed Ads is the multiple opportunities to call to action, leading users to an Instant Page, website, storefront, or app download. This ad format is also the most cost-efficient option for small to medium-sized businesses.

Unlike a typical ad, users are able to interact and engage with the content by liking, following, sharing, or leaving comments in the same way as an organic post. This ad format can run up to 60 seconds of video but an engaging hook and strong CTA will be the most important to get users to stop the scroll — and it’s best practice to remain within the 15-30 second range.

Managed Brands Ad Formats

Not all accounts have the same ad formats available to them. Managed Brands are accounts that work directly with a representative at TikTok and reach a minimum ad spend threshold. These reps can provide early access to new product roll-outs, make ad optimization suggestions, assist in troubleshooting, and provide access to additional formats. The following ad types are exclusively available to managed brands:

Brand Takeover Ad

Have you ever opened your TikTok app and were immediately faced with an ad from an account you don’t follow? This is a Brand Takeover Ad. These ads can also appear on your “For You Page” as a still photo, gif, or video with a clickable link leading to a landing page or branded hashtag challenge. Given the format, these ads are best suited for awareness campaigns, but advertisers should expect to pay premium prices for these spots especially since TikTok will only show one Brand Takeover Ad to a user each day.

See how Guess Jeans utilized a Brand Takeover Ad leading to their #InMyDenim Branded Hashtag Challenge landing page.

TopView ads

This ad type is similar to a Brand Takeover ad, but instead of appearing when the app is launched, these 5-60 second video ads appear in-feed after the first 3 seconds of a user’s scroll. Designed to target your audience in the most effective way possible, these placements include audio and custom links.

Branded Hashtag Challenge

Unlike your typical hashtag, Branded Hashtags are exclusive to the TikTok Advertising platform. When a user clicks on a sponsored hashtag they are taken to a TikTok landing page with brand info, a website link, a description of the challenge, and popular videos using the hashtag. Users actively participate in creating themed content that incorporates the branded hashtag which gets compiled on the challenge landing page. This format encourages user-generated content and only runs for three to six days.

This feedback loop is a great way to create community and build an engaged audience.

Goldfish created a duet challenge with basketball star Boban Marjanovic for their #GoForTheHandful branded hashtag campaign. They partnered with additional influencers to get the challenge going and ran in-feed ads simultaneously to make the biggest impact.

Branded Effects

Similar to Instagram filters and Snapchat lenses, TikTok offers branded filters, stickers, and AR lenses for users to engage with and use on their own videos. Branded Effect Ads can be run for up to 10 days and are available to search after that time frame.

Mucinex used a combination of a Branded Hashtag Challenge paired with a Branded Effect to raise awareness among Gen Z TikTok users and create a viral dance trend in the process.

Not every campaign type is suitable for every brand account and TikTok allows for creative flexibility with its many branded ad types. Experiment between ad formats, creative assets, audiences, and budgets to tailor your strategy to your campaign needs.

TikTok-Specific Advertising Optimizations

As you explore the Ads Manager, you’ll see it operates similarly to other ad platforms. While bid strategies and audience targeting are fairly straightforward, we’ll take you through some TikTok-specific optimizations you can implement to refine your advertising content in order to see strong outcomes.

1. Niche up, not down

We all know understanding your niche and your target customers is important when considering marketing campaigns. But when it comes to the content of the ads you will deliver on TikTok, you should start by niching up instead of down.

Our current trade secret for TikTok Advertising is targeting a broad audience versus an overly granular, specific audience segment. TikTok advertising works best for top-of-funnel and awareness campaigns as even any organic user has the ability to go viral. As the algorithm learns who your video is best suited for, serving it to a broad audience will set your ad up for more success at the awareness stage.

In the early experimentation stage, your content will be a bit broader than the content you create for your ideal customer who is ready to convert. Target and position your content towards an even broader audience — your top audience. This could be content from a related field or it could be personality-based content that appeals to users who do not want to convert right away. The idea is to connect with people in your broader audience and engage them with high-quality content until they are ready to learn more and become viable leads.

For example, if your target audience is a marketing coach or a course creator, your middle audience might be a content creator in general, and your top audience might be someone looking for a way to turn their passion into a career.

These creative people who are looking for their passion may never become social media marketers, so they may never convert and buy your services. But by creating content they can relate to, you increase your chances of finding more of your ideal customers and leveraging TikTok’s extreme growth potential.

Once you have defined your target audiences and niche, it’s time to experiment with your actual content strategy.

2. Do your competitor research and follow relevant TikTok accounts for inspiration

TikTok is all about trends. What are other people doing in space, which sounds are trending, and what hooks are landing? Make a list of TikTok creators and brands you can use for market research and stay inspired by. If you are wondering how to find TikTok creators to follow, use the Discover feed and search for names, keywords, or hashtags to find related accounts and videos.

Begin by finding creators within your niche or industry – essentially accounts that are creating the same topical content that you would create. Next, research creators from related or even broader niches. For example, if you are in the fitness space, you might find a fitness coach, a nutritionist, and a motivational writer.

3. Choose your campaign objective

TikTok Advertising currently has seven ad campaign objectives broken into three categories:

Awareness

• Reach– Show your ad to the maximum number of people

Consideration

• Traffic– Send users to a specific landing page URL
• App Installs– Drive users to download your app
• Video Views– Optimize for the maximum video views
• Lead Generation– Collect leads through TikTok’s Instant Landing Page forms
• Community Interaction– Best for driving engagement by encouraging account follows and profile visits

Conversion

• Conversions– Designed to drive valuable actions to your website or app. This requires installing your TikTok pixel to track events.

4. Spark Ads vs. Dark Ads

When deciding on ad content, accounts have the option to “Spark” an asset that is running organically or post it as a dark ad.

An organic asset can be added to an ad campaign through an authorized access code from the app or if you are the account owner, you can link it directly from the Ads Manager platform. Marketers are unable to change the creative asset or caption copy but can add an additional CTA or Instant Landing Page. The content will continue to run organically and live on your profile feed, but it is being pushed out to your ad group audience simultaneously.

Dark ads are exactly as the name implies. These ads are uploaded directly to Ads Manager and are not connected to your organic account. This allows brands that do not have an organic TikTok account to run ads, or brands that want to make specific copy or creative adjustments to assets that will better serve the conversion goals. These ads do not get pushed out to your followers unless they are in your target audience and do not live on your organic account page.

A successful TikTok ad strategy leverages a combination of both spark and dark ads. Due to the community-driven nature of the TikTok platform, users are likely to trust brands that show a strong understanding of its zeitgeist and have an approachable, light-hearted, and value-driven presence on it. The benefit of sparking content is that it will always lead back to the brand’s true profile, adding a level of substance to the brand’s presence on TikTok. On the other hand, dark ads are a great choice for seasonal and promotional campaigns (e.g., holiday sale) and for campaigns that do not fit to be an element of a brand’s overall organic presence on the platform.

TikTok Advertising Brand Examples

2021 was a big year for TikTok and we have already seen app updates and feature roll-outs in 2022. The average user opens the app 8 times a day and spends 52 minutes per day scrolling. With these staggering stats, why wouldn’t you want to diversify your marketing stack? The platform prides itself on its motto “Don’t make ads, make TikToks,” and it’s clearly paying off as the platform is one of the best at native ad integration.

Now that you know how TikTok Advertising works, it’s time to take a look at some of the best-in-class brand examples that have provided an increase in brand visibility, traffic, and conversions.

The TikTok community continues to define the intersection of culture and commerce. In fact, our recent study found that 56% of users and 67% of creators feel closer to brands they see on TikTok – particularly when they publish human, unpolished content.

~ Bryan Thoensen, Head of Content Partnerships at TikTok

Duolingo – Setting the standard in #mascottok

Observing Duolingo’s rise to TikTok stardom has been somewhat of a masterclass in developing a brand persona on the platform. Duolingo’s TikTok account currently sits at 3.8 million TikTok followers and has amassed over 73.1 million video likes! But the Duolingo account was not an overnight success story. As they started with how-to videos and reactions to trends, the brand realized their videos that featured Duo, the company mascot, out-performed any other type of content. Duo became a personality of its own with its snarky/menacing behavior, obsession with Dua Lipa, and ability to quickly hop on trends.

It wasn’t until Duolingo’s 39th post that they realized what they had on their hands – an entertaining and loveable mascot that brought a big personality to the language learning app.

Pepsi

Pepsi’s #ThatsWhatILike campaign ushered in a new decade by encouraging consumers to unapologetically do what they enjoy, even in the face of others’ judgment – whether it’s clapping at the end of a movie, wearing an over-the-top costume for the fun of it, or simply enjoying a Pepsi. The campaign resulted in over 13 billion views and expertly played into the TikTok ethos by encouraging a barrage of silly videos that usually included Pepsi in some way. At the core of any good hashtag challenge, is free advertising and Pepsi won big on this one.

E.L.F’s viral “Eyes. Lips. Face.” challenge

It’s no secret that Elf Cosmetics has been thriving on TikTok. Elf even made history in 2019 as the first brand to commission an original song specifically for a TikTok campaign. It successfully leveraged a hashtag challenge ad with #eyeslipsface and the brand generated more than a million videos — the most videos of any branded hashtag challenge in history, according to Elf’s agency, Movers + Shakers. This was the first hashtag challenge that really, truly took off. By taking a risk and administering the help of a few influencers to kick off the campaign, Elf’s TikTok marketing strategy paid off, with the #eyeslipsface videos reaching a total of 5.2 billion views.

L’Oreal

L’Oreal’s #LetsFaceIt campaign aimed to de-stigmatize mask-wearing by reminding us that looking and feeling your most beautiful is never out of style, even while wearing a mask. The branded hashtag challenge has garnered 17.3 billion views with thousands of video participants.

Bagel Bites

Bagel Bites #BagelBopsContest offered up a chance to win $10,000 for people who made videos featuring an official audio clip the brand commissioned about pizza being the perfect food for any time of day. The contest encouraged users to “remix”- sing, lip-sync, or dance to the official audio and use the hashtag for a chance to win. The contest drew a total of 3.6 billion views over its 1 month run time.

Ryanair — Filters that take-off

Ryanair has made a name for themselves on TikTok with their fast reactions to viral sounds and Gen Z nature. Their #ryanair hashtag has even accumulated over 711.9 million views.

The lift is fairly low on content creation as they use simple filters, text overlays, and trending music and sounds to assist in their virality. The company is delighting (and outsmarting) its audience by associating its well-known brand with one of the most casual and well-known TikTok filters of putting a face over a still shot of their planes. It hardly takes itself seriously and conveys a sense of authenticity that earns it the respect of users who may not even realize it’s an ad.

With its direct posts, the company has amassed a following of 1.6 million and even sparked discussions and speculations about who is managing the account so skillfully on behalf of the company.

Maybelline – #Maybeli

Maybelline New York is a household name around the world when it comes to makeup. To promote the launch of its new product line in Vietnam, the company decided to launch a branded hashtag challenge using the hashtag #Maybeli and even shot a music video for the occasion, titled “May Be Li.” The creators created 75,000 videos and reached 19 million users from all over Vietnam. Their video was viewed more than 173 million times and brand preference increased by 141.26%. Most importantly, online sales increased by 32.4%.

Gushers

In addition to having a great organic presence on the platform, Gushers TikTok ads are some of the best. They really take the mantra of “Don’t make ads, make TikToks” to heart. Their first ad featured a boy fishing with Gushers captioned “Worms catch fish… Gushers catch friends?!” made a big splash and blew up their comments section. Users were asking if the video was even an ad because it looked like a post that would be on the “For You” page organically.

Cheetos

Similar to the Pepsi campaign above, the Cheetos #DejaTuHuella campaign encouraged users to show the world “what they are fuego” at, whether it’s film, fashion, art, dance, or food.” The campaign surrounded Cheetos’ new product releases focused on their iconic, finger-staining, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The campaign hashtag translated literally into “leave your mark” or “leave your heat” and was accompanied by a Bad Bunny song right on the tailwinds of him being announced as the most listened to artist of 2020 according to Spotify’s year-end Wrapped streaming report. Earlier in the year Cheetos also ran the #CantTouchThisChallenge which gave users a creative outlet to showcase their best “Cheetle” covered fingers rendition to the TikTok community.

Mercedes-Benz

This is one of the best TikTok ad examples that involve a brand takeover. Their marketing team at Mercedes-Benz knew to get Gen Z’ers and Millenials engaged, they’d need to get them involved in a unique campaign. To promote their #MBStarChallenge Hashtag Challenge (that included its own branded effect), they released high-quality Brand Takeover ads, along with a mix of In-Feed ads that used user-generated content.

The campaign went viral, resulting in over 185,000 videos by 73,000 users and video views reaching 180 million! Their Brand Takeover CTR was 17.5%. A post-campaign study showed a 66.3% increase in ad recall, an 18.2% boost in brand favorability, and allowed them to gain 30,000 new followers. In both the UK and German campaigns, page views topped 1 million.

Bumble

Working closely with TikTok, Bumble created an entirely new, always-on acquisition channel with significant scale, using clever TikTok-style direct response ads. The brand also worked with notable creators, such as David Dobrik and Brittany Broski, to build native video content that seamlessly blended into “For You feeds”. By tapping notable creators with significant organic followings Bumble successfully leaned into the “Don’t Make Ads, Make TikToks” and served relevant, relatable content to an engaged audience. The campaign is listed as a case study on the TikTok site along with the results of the campaign — a 5X increase in App Install Volume along with a 64% decrease in cost-per-registration.

NYX Gloss

NYX Gloss partnered with TikTok to develop the #ButterGlossPop Branded Hashtag Challenge. This premium branded campaign was specifically designed to have a viral impact and inspire content across the platform. The #ButterGlossPop challenge prompted the TikTok community to apply Butter Gloss with their own personal flair to be entered into a sweepstakes for a chance to win $1200 in NYX Makeup. The campaign was a knockout success because of an original, high-energy catchy song and clear instructions made it easy for creators to release their creative potential. The campaign resulted in 2M+ user-generated videos and over 11B+ video views along with a 42% lift in brand awareness.

In addition, the campaign included an integrated shopping experience that positioned the easily accessible product line directly in front of an engaged and interested audience, inspiring lower funnel action.

Balmain

Couture fashion brand Balmain usually showcases its latest high-end designs on the runway, but when the local shows were temporarily canceled, the company had to get creative. They decided to showcase Balmain’s latest designs via a TikTok live fashion show. In-feed ads were placed before and during the live stream to promote the show, and they also appeared during the broadcast. It was a unique tactic that definitely paid off.

The sponsored in-feed ads garnered more than 22 million views, as well as tens of thousands of new followers who signed up to be notified when the show began. In the end, 240,000 viewers watched Balmain’s unique TikTok fashion show, which would not have been as successful without an effective in-feed advertising campaign.

ASOS

ASOS leveraged a Branded Hashtag Challenge Plus for the brilliant #AySauceChallenge. It invited the community to “channel their ASOS vibe” and show off their three best outfits with a series of outfit changes over three weeks in the U.K. and U.S., set to bespoke music and an interactive augmented reality Branded Effect.

The Branded Hashtag Challenge Plus also included a spot on TikTok’s trending hashtags list and a bundle of additional ads—TopView, One Day Max and Brand Premium In-Feed Ads — all of which turbocharged exposure for the campaign and pushed users to the central challenge page, where all UGC entries were housed. ASOS also worked with 28 popular U.K. and U.S. Creators to kick off the challenge and provide inspiration for users to follow while also building the credibility of ASOS’ brand presence on the platform. Using Creators allowed ASOS to tap into an enormous combined following, paving the way for almost 500k videos created and 1.2B+ video views in just 6 days.

Simmons

Simmons Mattresses, working collaboratively with agency partners and TikTok, launched the #Snoozzzapalooza Branded Hashtag Challenge, one of TikTok’s premium Branded Solutions that is specifically designed for virality. This Hashtag Challenge encouraged the quarantined community to literally stage dive into a bed over the summer festival season without any live music due to Covid-19.

Simmons partnered with comedians, dancers, athletes, and celebs to cast a huge net and inspire as much of the community as possible to participate. Each of the creators uniquely imagined the challenge, transforming their rooms and creatively using the platform to showcase their vision of the ideal at-home music festival. To drive maximum participation and awareness, Simmons equipped the #Snoozzzapalooza Hashtag Challenge with a fun, upbeat original track that got the community moving.

The campaign resulted in 2M+ videos, amassing six billion total views, and an engagement rate of 20%. The six-day campaign boosted brand engagement through creative participation, raised brand awareness among Gen Z on the platform, and spurred a +107% increase in traffic to Simmons.com week over week.

The Path to Virality

If you’re looking for a way to reach new audiences, connect with Gen Z, and diversify your paid social channels, then TikTok is the platform for you. The most successful ad campaigns are generally:

• Original and native to the organic production quality
• Authentic and in line with the brand personality
• Conversational in tone
• Highly engaging to users
• High-energy and entertaining
• Relevant to current trends and sounds

When choosing creators to partner with, it’s also important to work with more established TikTok influencers to ensure ads are seen by an established audience. Let your creator run wild, as they know best what works for their audience.

When each of these components is packaged together into a video with a single objective, TikTok can drive massive amounts of engagement, reach a larger audience base, and turn views into conversions.

Through TikTok’s creator tools and Ads platform, brands and companies all over the globe have been able to leverage and target their audiences by creating engaging communities through entertaining content and advertising their companies in new and exciting ways.

The post TikTok Ads: The Complete Guide for Businesses and Brands with Examples appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

TikTok may be the king of short-form video, but other platforms have since rolled out their own short-form capabilities including Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat Spotlight, and more.

With all these avenues to share short-form videos with your audiences, content does not need to be re-created for each and every platform your brand has a presence on. We’ll take you through how to best source short-form UGC and drive your omnichannel content strategy to get the most out of your content while still connecting with creators and audiences to serve your organic and paid ad campaigns.

What is User-Generated Content?

User-generated content is unbranded content created and shared by individual social media users in the form of product use, reviews, FAQs, testimonials, and more. UGC can be free content from organic users that are fans of the brand or sourced from paid content creators who can be found through our TikTok Studio, TikTok Creator Marketplace, or Influencer Marketing agencies or programs.

Prior to the rise of short-form video, UGC could be found via static photos on Instagram or even user-shared pins on Pinterest. With short-form video, influencers have turned into full-blown content creators that function as their own production studios, writing, editing, and circulating their content. As content creators become savvier in their presentation, brands have begun to notice the power of content creators and the influence they have over their followers. If creators can do this for their own platforms, it only makes sense to harness this power of content creators and utilize their personal platforms for the benefit of their brand.

In recent years, social platforms have pivoted away from a social-based model towards a content-based model prioritizing content that delivers value in a genuine and authentic way. TikTok has set the precedent of UGC video as a driving force behind their algorithm, favoring raw and real content over professionally produced videos. In fact, 65% of TikTok users believe “professional-looking” videos feel out of place on TikTok and when UGC is used in ads, they have a 4x higher click-through rate, receive a 28% lift in engagement and a 29% increase in web conversions.

The case is clear for using UGC in your organic and paid social media campaigns, but how do marketers source the perfect UGC? We’ll take you through how to find the perfect UGC videos for your brand and how you can use them across your social channels to minimize effort and maximize results.

How to find UGC

The opportunity to find and/or source good UGC videos is available to brands of all sizes. For newer brands, UGC may start with your own employees creating content or outsourcing to creators through paid partnerships. On the other hand, legacy brands may have hundreds of videos to sift through in order to find content that is worth using in any campaign.

Approaching a UGC social strategy may be intimidating at first, but with the right resources and tools, it becomes a part of any social media manager’s daily routine. Knowing what to look for, what makes good UGC, and how it aligns with your current brand strategy are all important elements to maintaining a social identity while building brand equity and social proof.

These are just a few of the ways to start sourcing UGC video that aligns with your brand values and campaign goals.

Branded hashtags

Community-led growth is one of the best ways to garner loyal consumers and create a participatory culture of sharing and interaction. A branded hashtag is a unique hashtag that typically contains your product or brand name that encourages users to follow and share. By implementing branded hashtags (whether created for free or via a paid TikTok campaign), it is a low-lift way to get started on gathering UGC by encouraging users to share their personal experiences with your brand or product.

Coca-Cola’s #shareacoke has over 635K entries ranging from cute pups with a can of coke to videos that have nothing to do with the drink at all. In this case, many users misused the hashtag due to its popularity, but Coca-Cola received thousands of free UGC videos just by encouraging their #shareacoke campaign across their many social platforms. #shareacoke works because it is memorable and encourages sharing with others whether IRL or through tags on social media. The campaign extended to their physical product when they decided to personalize Coke cans and bottles creating even more of a social frenzy and shareable moments.

Social media listening

Social listening gives brands the ability to track specific keywords, brand mentions, and industry insights across any social media source – even when they aren’t formally tagged. Social media listening can be incredibly resourceful as it is great for finding UGC, tracking user sentiment on a brand, and real-time market research. Programs such as Hootsuite, Dash Hudson, and Sprout Social are great tools for social media listening and monitoring.

Dash Hudson flags any and all brand mentions on owned, earned, and paid channels saving you countless hours of manual searching. The platform also provides organic insights, suggests similar creators, and predicts the content’s effectiveness rate to help inform your decision to use each piece of content.

Sourcing content creators

Partnering with creators to create UGC is a great option for brands that may have a larger social media budget or brands that need a little creative help in content creation. Content creators can be hired at the micro to celebrity level and often come with their own dedicated user base with high intent. At NoGood, we have a roster of in-house and outsourced highly qualified content creators across several verticals to pair brands with creators that will suit their needs. TikTok Creator Marketplace has also made it easy to find qualified UGC creators through the TikTok API which gives brands insights to the creator’s profile which detail reach, audience demographic, and video performance.

There are also influencer agencies and platforms which can assist in end-to-end sourcing, creation, and reporting. Some of our favorites include Grin.co and Aspire.io. Individual platforms besides TikTok have also rolled out their own creator networks such as the highly anticipated Instagram Creator Marketplace, Pinterest Creator Hub, and LinkedIn for Creators.

Applying UGC to your omnichannel strategy

You may have heard the buzzword, channel diversification, but what does this mean? Channel diversification, as it relates to social media, is the practice of leveraging a specific combination of platforms to maximize your brand’s reach. Channel diversification mitigates risk and expands your brand’s potential to reach audiences that gather on or favor different platforms. We can’t be everywhere at once…or can we?

This is where an omnichannel approach enters the chat – and short-form video is the hero in that category.

An omnichannel strategy is a multi-channel approach where brands produce a consistent output and connection with their community across all touchpoints. An omnichannel strategy creates a seamless user experience no matter where or how they come to you. This consistency works well for content creation as content can be repurposed and optimized per platform but still maintain a consistent brand voice, messaging, visual identity, and positioning.

While short-form video can be more production heavy than a single graphic or photo, the same bit of content can be sliced and diced across all platforms where your brand has a social presence. Whether that’s TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Snap Spotlight, Twitter, LinkedIn, (etc, etc, etc), your short-form UGC video content can be repurposed across channels with minimal optimizations making the most out of your content creation efforts.

Your cheat sheet for an omnichannel short-form UGC video strategy

That’s a mouthful! But we’ll take you through our best practices to maximize your content creation efforts in order to minimize your ad spend (and effort) across your omnichannel strategy.

Know your audience

Though many platforms offer short-form video hosting, not every channel will be appropriate for your content, audience, or brand. While channel diversification is key to a solid marketing strategy, spreading yourself too thin will not only be a nightmare for your social media manager’s bandwidth (and mental well-being), but minimize your community-building efforts by not fully committing to any one platform or strategy. Start with a few platforms where you’ve determined your audience gathers and stick with it! Water your community as you would your newest house plant. Once it is thriving, you will be ready to acquire another one, and so on and so forth.

Each platform has a slightly different audience but here are some tricks to help you begin deciding which platform(s) will be best for your short-form UGC.

Stay native to the platform

Have you ever wondered why your TikTok isn’t performing well on Instagram? It may be because you uploaded it with the watermark. The Instagram algorithm specifically suppresses content with the TikTok watermark so as to not promote their competition. Social platforms want their users to be creating content natively and another platform’s watermark is a sure way to out yourself on repurposing.

Our best rule of thumb is to download content without the watermark from one platform before posting to another or edit your content in a 3rd party app prior to uploading in order to have a “clean” copy of your asset. If working with a content creator, they will send you their content sans watermark which will then make it easier to upload to your different platforms (depending on what you agreed upon with your creator).

When uploading to various platforms, we suggest using that platform’s specific features including text overlays, music, voiceovers, green screens, location stamps, stickers, and more to tell the algorithm and your audience that this content was made specifically for them. When done this way, your video will appear native to the platform and not be suppressed due to being posted on another platform.

Not every video will be suited for every platform. Be strategic with what you consider repurposing and make nuanced edits to cater to that specific platform and audience.

Music and sound licensing

In addition to appearing natively across platforms, make sure to understand each platform’s limitations. This is specifically important when it comes to content duration and music licensing.

Getting your audio removed is not only bad for impressions but a wasted effort on the creator’s part.

TikTok and Instagram both have massive music libraries, but the licensed sounds may not be available for commercial use on both platforms. This is especially important if you are going to be running your UGC in any paid campaigns. Sounds are often removed from videos if flagged but assets and accounts can be completely blocked for this type of infringement as well.

TikTok has a dedicated commercial music library that showcases sounds that are licensed for commercial use if you are planning to run your content as ads. Music for YouTube shorts is quite extensive but time will tell what will be commercially available once they roll out their ads capabilities.

Video duration

Time allowance changes from platform to platform and you may need to cut your video down to fit within these time limitations. Both inShot and CapCut are good apps for editing short-form videos due to their easy-to-use interface and extensive editing features which can assist in breaking down videos to fit each platform’s needs.

Below is a table of each platform’s video duration limitations:

TikTok: < 10 minutes

Instagram Reels: < 90 seconds

Facebook Reels: < 60 seconds

Shorts: < 60 seconds

Twitter: < 140 seconds

LinkedIn: <10 minutes

Snapchat: <10 seconds

Pinterest Pins: <15 seconds

Though you have the option of producing longer videos on several of these platforms, the overall consensus is the 7-second mark for short-form video. Most viewers fall off after around 2 seconds, but if you grab them with a punchy hook, on average they’ll stay engaged for around 7 seconds. Monitor your video analytics to find the average length your audience is interacting with your videos to ensure they are watching the most important information.

Experimentation and testing

Experiment, experiment, experiment! Let the data drive your decisions when choosing your platform, content length, posting day and time, and even the combination of assets per platform. Not all content will work for every platform – what your LinkedIn audience responds to will be completely different than your TikTok audience. Be strategic and selective with the type of content you are sharing to maximize opportunities for building community and interaction.

When tracking our video performance across channels we start with macro experiments and move down to micro experiments. Macro includes testing different content buckets to see what your audience is gravitating towards– this includes trends, educational content, skits, lip-syncs, and different delivery styles. Once you nail down the combination of content buckets each platform’s audience prefers, then you can begin running micro-experiments such as timing, hooks, sign-offs, and even captions, and hashtags.

Through experimentation and testing, your strategy will be better informed, supported by data, and resonate with your audience per platform.

Tools to assist in your omnichannel strategy

Repurose.io

This tool may be the best thing since the Bernie Sanders meme – it’s the gift (or tool) that just keeps giving. Repurpose.io connects to each of your social media platforms and can then transfer the post from one platform to another. This is huge when it comes to short-form UGC content as the platform will download the video without a watermark and automatically deliver it to any of your chosen workflow connections.

Another favorite feature of repurpose.io is its ability to save your content to Dropbox or Google Drive allowing you to automatically have your entire library of videos all in one place in case you’d like to reuse or repurpose (no pun intended) your content later.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite, which recently went through a rebrand, is a social media management platform that allows users to automate posts and track platform analytics. Hootsuite creates maximum efficiency for brands by publishing content across multiple platforms, determining optimal posting times, and tracking trends to better inform your future content. One short-form video can be duplicated and customized to specific platform specifications all through their simple-to-use desktop site or app.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a similar auto-publishing application but includes additional features (and a higher price tag). We’re including Sprout to highlight their social media listening tools.

Sprout’s social listening tools allow brands to “tap into the global social conversation by extracting actionable insights, identify industry gaps, and improve overall brand health.” Not only is this a way to monitor brand sentiment and competitor performance but can be a way to discover brand-specific or brand-adjacent UGC to use in your own campaigns across your omnichannel content strategy.

UGC Video Examples

With all this talk of UGC, it’s only fair to show a few examples. Below are a few demonstrations of how short-from video UGC can be used across different platforms in similar ways. For even more examples of brands successfully using TikTok-specific UGC in their cross-channel marketing strategies, read our Top Brands Using TikTok UGC here. 

Fenty Beauty x TikTok

Many beauty brands find success using UGC video content due to the visual nature of their products. Successful UGC videos include before and afters, how-tos, and product launches. Rihanna’s beauty brand Fenty uses UGC videos from creators of all backgrounds representing a diverse clientele and flexibility of their products.

Starbucks x Reels

Starbucks reposts UGC videos from its employees, brand ambassadors, and consumers. They also give the creator a platform by making sure to tag them in the caption. The video below was sourced from TikTok user @alan_tayyyter and shared to Reels for cross-channel video sharing.

Etsy x Pinterest

Etsy and Pinterest may make the perfect pair due to their similar audience demographics and discoverability of what consumers are looking for. Etsy has over 4.7 million Pinterest followers with thousands of pins created and shared. Etsy features seller UGC videos to not only promote the seller but also showcase the unique products and people users can interact with and purchase from.

Amazon x Snapchat

Amazon features UGC videos on their Snap Stories featuring user video reviews most likely sourced from platforms such as TikTok and Reels. This gives their business Snapchat account a more humanized feel and shows the viewer social proof of products other consumers have rated.

The short-form round up

UGC video content can be sourced from many different social media platforms and reused across your entire social strategy. Be sure to give the creator credit and/or ask permission to use their content. When working with a content creator, brands may only have the authorization to use their UGC for a specific number of days or on specific platforms only. Be clear in your contracts to ensure you have the rights to their content for what you would like to use it for.

By using short-form UGC video in your omnichannel strategy, you are maximizing the efficiency of your social team and getting the most out of user-generated content by sharing it across multiple platforms. UGC video has become a powerful advertising tool as it is the best way to display the use of a product, user sentiment, and brand authenticity. By tapping into your community through encouraging UGC, users feel more connected as supporters and advocates of a brand.

The post Guide to a User-Generated Video Content (UGC) Driven Social Strategy with Examples appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

With the rise of UGC across all social advertising channels, content creators keep these components in mind as their approach to social selling includes authentic storytelling, specific delivery styles, video editing, and the ability to genuinely engage and connect with users.

Ads served with UGC have a 29% increase in web conversions. These are the strategies brands are implementing to increase their revenue with TikTok UGC.

As TikTok continues to expand its paid advertising offerings in addition to the rise of social shopping on the platform, TikTok Creator Marketplace (TTCM) is the perfect place to discover and partner with content creators, execute campaigns, and monitor performance all through TikTok’s proprietary platform.

From Influencer to Content Creator

As social selling has evolved, so has the role of the social media influencer. Influencers may begin as users with celebrity status, aspirational lifestyles, or charismatic personalities, and can become crucial salespeople on behalf of your brand. An influencer’s audience is equally as important as the influencer due to their loyalty, engagement, and eagerness for product recommendations. It’s no surprise that brands would want to tap into this influence.

On TikTok, influencers have a slightly different role, as content creation is much more involved than posting a photo on Instagram. This is why many TikTok influencers prefer the term “Content Creator.” We’ve made a list of some of the most influential TikTok creators here.

Partner with top creators in your industry who have driven over a 350% increase in revenue for the World’s most influential brands.

What TikTok’s algorithm has done is, it has democratized the path towards becoming a content creator, effectively marking the rise of the nano- and micro-influencers. TikTok completely stripped away the need for an influencer to have a polished online presence, produce content that’s extremely strategic and oftentimes far from the truth. Instead, TikTok normalized creators who build authentic relationships with their followers through sharing their truth — and doing so with as little as a smartphone and a ring light.

Oftentimes, TikTok Creators come to the platform from other social media platforms including Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts. When they join TikTok, they not only bring their entourage of current followers but are put in front of millions of more eyes as the algorithm favors engaging content allowing anyone the ability to go viral.

How else does a TikTok Creator differ from a traditional influencer? Unlike the more passive content of Instagram, TikTok’s model encourages community interaction through hashtag challenges, filters, and special effects — with the comments section often being more entertaining than the video itself. TikTok naturally lends itself to growth loops that are driven by community engagement — and the most successful creators are the ones who are quick to identify what their viewership desires to see and turn user feedback into their content strategy.

This is what builds the authentic recognition that TikTok creators specifically bring to the table — and specifically with nano- and micro-influencers, the engagement rates and connections with their respective communities are stronger and thus a more popular choice for brands to invest in.

Because of the increased ability to go viral and be seen by thousands, if not millions of viewers, brand ROI is taken to new heights. No other platform has seen the virality that is created by TikTok’s algorithm.

The above chart is how the TikTok algorithm determines which content gets pushed to which viewers based on completion history, content type, demographic, and more. Now when brands use TikTok as an advertising tool, the reach is significantly more targeted to not only get in front of more eyes — but the right eyes. When this ad strategy is paired with assets delivered by an appropriate content creator, the ability to go viral and lead audiences down the marketing funnel is enhanced even more.

So how do brands find the right creators to create winning content that will assist in reaching their campaign and sales goals? The answer is TikTok Creator Marketplace. By joining TikTok Creator Marketplace, brands have access to hundreds of thousands of TikTok creators in over 100 regions who can produce video content for their products or services. Keep reading to see how you can benefit from finding creators on TikTok Creator Marketplace.

What is TikTok Creator Marketplace?

TikTok Creator Marketplace (TTCM) is TikTok’s premier platform that gives brands the ability to collaborate with content creators by assessing their analytics based on reach, engagement, views, demographics, and more. The benefit of TTCM is total end-to-end project management from discovery and negotiation to management and analytics reporting. Though there are other influencer agencies and platforms that do this, TTCM gives brands transparent creator data not available to other platforms while remaining entirely in-app.

TTCM also makes it easy to search for creators who match your campaign criteria. Shortlisting also makes it easy to organize creators for current and even future campaigns. There are plenty of filters to help narrow your search that we’ll get into later.

Payment is secure and flexible as creators have the ability to charge a flat fee of their choosing, negotiate the terms, or receive a gifted product (which also may be necessary for their video). Based on creators’ following, engagement, and conversion rates, some are charging upwards of $100,000 while many are open to negotiation.

Upon finding the creator you want to work with, T assists in adding a creator to your brand’s specific campaign, determines proper fees, tracks conversions, and delivers detailed performance analytics. TTCM encourages in-app project management versus going off-app for communication and accountability which makes for a seamless and secure experience for both the brand and Creator.

Why Join TikTok Creator Marketplace?

Working with creators to produce UGC is a big part of advertising on TikTok and TTCM makes it easy to find creators that will best fit your brand. The app offers an end-to-end experience that is seamless for both the brand and the creator. With its easy-to-use workflow and simple interface, TTCM keeps brands and creators accountable for content delivery, secure payment, clear communication, and in-depth analytics reporting for every account. Instead of risking a shot in the dark with creators that you “think” might work for your brand, TTCM is supported by the data of each creator’s TikTok account – and if you know NoGood, we’re all about data-driven strategies.

Finding creators with TTCM is a much smoother experience when compared to finding creators on Facebook and Instagram, which can be a clunky and unproductive process. Brands traditionally would have to track relevant hashtags, short-list accounts, manually calculate the account engagement, determine their region/audience based on follower research, DM the user or find their email in their link in bio, hope they respond (and not end up in the DM requests black hole), negotiate the terms, wait for the follow-through of the creator (all while the creator just hopes they get paid), and then finally praying the ad converts and is not just a big waste of resources.

With access to creators’ first-party data through the TTCM/TikTok API, TTCM takes out most of the guesswork, creating an accountable and reliable flow for both the creator and the brand.

And the best part? TikTok Creator Marketplace is free for any TikTok business account.

How to Join TikTok Creator Marketplace

If you’re a brand looking to work with a creator, here’s how to get started.

Though it isn’t necessary to have an organic TikTok account to work with creators and run ads, at NoGood, we believe in both organic and paid strategies that work together.

On TikTok Ads Manager, brands have the option to run “dark ads” or “spark ads.” Dark ads are ads that go out to a targeted audience but do not live on an organic account page whereas spark ads are assets that have been posted organically and then authorized to be used in a campaign. When working with a creator on TTCM, brands have both of these options as well as the option to run an authorized spark ad through the creator’s account (best for traffic campaigns).

To begin working with creators on TTCM, any account that is verified through Ads Manager can login to TTCM using their TikTok Ads Manager credentials. For brands not set up on TikTok Business Center, registration is easily done by creating an account and uploading business verification documentation. Official TikTok partner accounts are also automatically eligible to join TTCM.

Once logged in through your Ads Manager account, verified users must provide their business name, industry, account name, and user ID — all of which can be found in Ads Manager. Contact info will also auto-populate.

Next, you will have to verify your business and input tax information. Brands have the option (though not required) to handle all payments through TCM, making it simple and painless for the creator and the brand. Currently, you can only utilize in-app payments with creators that are in your same country.

Once you’re all set up, it’s time to start finding content creators.

How to Find Creators

The comprehensive search is unparalleled due to the analytics TikTok provides from each creator through their API. Following your initial search (outlined below), TTCM provides even more first-party data within the creator’s profile that is unrivaled to any other creator platform.

But before diving into your creator quest, do your research on what exactly you want out of a creator. Think about the campaign objective and goal, topic or niche the creator may operate in, target audience, budget, and also what style you want from your creator (lip-sync, scripted comedy, product testimonial, etc.). These considerations are also search filters that can help narrow your search on the TTCM platform.

Searching for creators is easy to define and refine. The comprehensive search parameters include country/region, topics and interests, reach, average views, audience location, audience gender, audience age, and audience device. These parameters help brands find appropriate creator candidates by displaying profile cards with a detailed overview of each creator’s statistics.

The search parameters also let you toggle between Brand Experience (Expert or Emerging) and Fast Growing Creators (creators with high follower growth in the last 14 days). These filters help to narrow down the creator pool to help find the right creator for your brand – and at the right price.

Let’s take a look at a creator profile after performing a search. This is @corporatenatalie – a millennial favorite on TikTok.

We can see her core metrics including average views, engagement rate, user interactions, and follower growth rate. The audience demographics are also important here as you want your brand’s target audience to align with the creator you choose. We can see here that @corporatenatalie’s audience is 77% based in the US, 76% female, and 50% in the 25-34 age group.

Further down, you can see brands @corporatenatalie has partnered with in the past as well as an archive of the videos she has created for brands using TTCM. Engagement and performance reporting for each branded video, in direct comparison to the data on her organic videos, are also provided to better guide brands in finding the right creative partner. This key feature allows brand to get a better understanding of how well a creator’s branded content has previously performed, and how they are able to marry their authentic style with a brand’s message to avoid alienating the audience with overly promotional content.

These search features and clear reporting make the creator selection thorough and streamlined as brands can view creators’ work within the platform instead of going on a journey to find sample content and metrics.

Once you find the creators you want to work with, brands can save them to a shortlist to be revisited and applied to campaigns later.

Setting Up Your TTCM Campaign

You’ve joined the platform and shortlisted creators… now what? It’s time to build your campaign. If you’ve used TikTok Ads Manager before, the process and interface are quite similar. Here you can read our step-by-step guide to setting up TikTok advertising campaigns.

To begin, navigate to “Create campaign” or click “Add to campaign” on the creator’s profile. Once in the campaign builder, brands can also add a creator from their pre-saved shortlist.

Similar to Ads Manager campaigns, brands can choose from the following campaign objectives:

1. Increase brand awareness
2. Increase followers
3. Increase website traffic
4. Increase product sales
5. Encourage downloads

Next is the creative brief. Here, you can provide detailed direction and guidelines for your campaign to ensure the creator understands the assignment and intention. The brief also includes campaign dates, product description, campaign description, and your payment options which include negotiating a price, agreeing to the creator’s set price, and/or the option to gift the creator with free product. These are all the details your creator will see before they agree to do the campaign, so it’s important to be thorough and provide all the links and info they’ll need to make their decision.

Don’t forget to provide your value prop and important messaging, as well as the ideal format for your campaign. Additionally, a PDF can be uploaded to provide a more custom creator brief if your process is already standardized.

Finally, the customized flow. This feature makes it easy to understand where you and the creator are in the process of the campaign.

1. Creator accepts invite
2. Discuss payment and collaboration details
3. Creator uploads video for review
4. TikTok reviews uploaded video
5. Brand reviews uploaded video
6. Creator posts video
7. Optional step for brand to promote using Spark Ads (one of our favorite ways to promote content on TikTok)

The flow provides a clear path to campaign completion and keeps both the creator and brand on track.

New TTCM Features to Consider

TTCM also continues to expand the boundaries of its offerings to brands consistently. There are two new additions to the suite of features that TikTok has introduced recently that allow brands to incorporate creator-led growth in their strategies.

Open Application Campaigns (OAC)

TikTok recently introduced Open Application Campaigns, which essentially simplifies the creator search process by turning the tables and allowing creators to pitch their ideas in their applications for a brand’s campaign. Not only does this solve for “unsearchable” attributes such as delivery style or creativity, for example, it also allows brands to exercise full control over the filtering process with the help of preferencce filters and screening questions.

Open Applications are very easy to navigate and can be selected at the point of campaign creation.

The preferred qualifications allow brands to filter applications based on criteria such as demographics, audience and region (for the creator or their audience), creator keywords, specific creators you have in mind, and even benchmark metrics such as engagement rate or follower count.

The screening questions are customizable and mandatory for creators to answer, making sure that brands come as close to the candidates they desire as possible. Questions can be selected and adjusted from categories such as, for example, previous product/service experience or partnership history.

From the publication date of the campaign, advertisers have 7 days to respond to a creator application. After browsing through the submissions of individual creators to view their application and their answers, brands can accept or decline the application, and creators will receive an in-app notification once their application is accepted, declined or modified.

If you have specific creators in mind for your campaign, you are able to invite them to partake in the open applications through the same process.

Invite Links

Last but not least, the common drawback of TTCM has always been the risk that the creator a brand feels strongly about would not be in the platform database. TTCM has solved this issue by introducing Invite Links, effectively making it possible to invite non-TTCM creators to partake in brand campaigns regardless of their presence on the platform.

In this process, the brand typically follows similar steps in creating a new campaign but specifically selecting the invite link option.

After selecting the “Invite Link” option, the process remains quite simple — including filling out brand information, campaign details, deliverables and desired payment. However, note as the feature is still in beta and there are some limitations to consider:

• Payment default will be set to “No” as it’s not supported for the feature yet;
• Asset approval is also not available at the time due to beta limitations.

Launching with TikTok Ads Manager

Once assets are provided from the creator, it’s time to upload to Ads Manager, Spark as an authorized post from the creator’s account, run as a Spark or dark ad from your brand account, or upload to your organic profile. There are some limitations to using TCM when receiving assets as only one asset can be uploaded per creator request. Currently, if multiple assets are required, multiple creator campaigns must be requested.

When Sparking from the creator’s profile, authorization must be granted. Authorization can be requested for 7, 30, 60, or 365 days. This is the amount of time you have permission to run a particular asset as an ad under the creator’s account (same as Sparking on your own account).

If running the asset organically or under your business account, the asset can be downloaded directly from TCM or synchronized to Ads Manager where you can then attach it to your specific campaign and ad group.

Track, Measure, & Analyze Campaign

Like all campaigns post-launch, marketers should track and analyze the performance of the ad. Ask yourself the following questions: Can any additional optimizations made? Is the landing page converting or does it need to be switched out? Is the copy resonating with the audience? Is the video engaging? What is the CAC, CPA, CPM, impressions, reach, and ad frequency?

TCM provides detailed analytics on campaign performance including engagement and audience reporting as seen below. If running your campaign via Ads Manager, the reporting is even more detailed for further insights.

Examining the ad metrics will help inform your next move whether that’s pulling the ad, sparking it on your branded account, or working with the creator again on a follow-up campaign. Track your creator’s analytics as you would any in-house created ad and analyze those results to better inform creator decisions in the future. Did the content convert? What did users respond to? Was the creative strong enough? What about the target audience – does it need to be narrowed or broadened? Was the copy clear and reflected in the content? Asking yourself these questions while reviewing the TCM analytics will help optimize your ad spend and increase your ROAS.

Competitors

If you don’t have access to TikTok Creator Marketplace and want to get started working with content creators, there are other platforms that can help you source the perfect creators for your campaign.

Grin.co

Grin prides itself on being the world’s first creator management platform. Similar to TikTok Creator Marketplace, Grin’s platform provides a seamless end-to-end flow from recruiting content creators to reporting performance analytics and nurturing relationships. A major benefit of Grin’s platform is its integration with eCommerce platforms such as Salesforce, Shopify, and WooCommerce which makes gifting your content creators easier than ever to get your product into their hands and into their videos.

Aspire.io

Aspire is an influencer platform that makes it easy to find content creators based on specific keywords, industry, demographics, and more. In addition, Aspire doesn’t take any commission which increases your ROI. Aspire also offers social listening tools that allow you to tap into your brand community and utilize the content from creators that are already fans of your brand.

NoGood.io

With our newly launched Creator Studio, we have an internal roster of carefully selected content creators who specialize in delivering high-quality content across a wide variety of verticals including B2B, SaaS, Healthcare, and DTC. Through our experiment-learn-scale strategy, we’ve unlocked the key to growth on TikTok through authentic, relatable, and high-quality content standards. Not only do we source the best creators for your brand, but we lead and execute the content strategy and utilize real-time analytics reporting through our proprietary custom-built dashboards bringing you real-time data insights allowing us to optimize and scale.

Instagram’s Creator Marketplace

In line with Instagram’s feature-chasing strategy, Meta launched the Instagram Creator Marketplace as a response to TikTok Creator Marketplace. Though it is still in beta testing on an invite-only basis, the platform looks eerily similar to its competitor’s platform offering filters for sourcing creators based on age, demographic, interest, and location. Brands will be able to communicate directly with creators via the Partnership Messages inbox and coordinate Instagram campaigns via the Meta Business Suite.

If you’re considering working with creators to promote your brand on TikTok or utilizing creators to produce short-form videos in general, TikTok Creator Marketplace is the way to go. The powerful tool not only provides vetted and experienced content creators, but an end-to-end experience for both the creator and brand to collaborate and benefit from. Don’t believe us? Check out these 10 TikTok stats to further convince you that TikTok is a powerful marketing tool and by partnering with content creators it is made all the more powerful in creativity, reach, and conversion.

If you are a UGC content creator and want to work with some of the world’s most iconic brands, join our creator community by filling out our creator application.

For brands wanting to unlock their growth potential on the internet’s fastest-growing platform, reach out to our TikTok studio today.

The post TikTok Creator Marketplace: The Ultimate Guide for Brands in 2024 appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

The concept of brands using UGC as a means of promotion is nothing new. Public social users have been contributing to UGC far before the name was ever coined. Today, brands use UGC or user-generated content sourced from the public, employees, or content creators as a way to show what a product looks like, how it is used, build consumer loyalty, trust, and garner social proof. This type of content-driven advertising was solidified with the rise of TikTok and short-form video, the age of the traditional influencer has taken a backseat to content creators as mega influencers have been replaced by niche, nano- and micro-influencers with more engaged and tight-knit communities.

The nature of social advertising has changed as today’s consumers would rather hear about a product from another consumer than directly from a brand. Now, they are turning to social media to learn about new products. 84% of Gen Z users have reported purchasing a product after seeing it on social media and 37% of users trust content creators over brands when discovering new products. These statistics emphasize the need for UGC in a brand’s social media strategy to gain and maintain user trust. What’s more, ads served with UGC have a 4x higher click-through rate, receive a 28% lift in engagement, and a 29% increase in web conversions. UGC can be sourced and used in so many ways, and one of our favorites has been TikTok UGC.

TikTok’s content DNA is, essentially, UGC. When a brand posts UGC on TikTok, it performs 22% better than branded content. Due to its short duration, fullscreen real estate, entertaining delivery, and overall authenticity, TikTok is the perfect platform to source and share UGC.

UGC makes it possible for creators and brands to genuinely connect with users and TikTok’s full-funnel ad potential makes it the perfect pairing for a winning marketing strategy that resonates with today’s consumers.

What is User-Generated Content?

User-generated content (UGC) is creative, brand-specific social media content created by users for users that brands can display on their social profiles or use in social ad campaigns to connect with consumers in an authentic and genuine way. UGC takes the form of photos, videos, testimonials, reviews, and more. This type of content displays social proof and builds trust among consumers throughout the entire marketing funnel.

Why Leverage UGC, Specifically on TikTok?

93% of marketers agree that consumers trust content created by customers over content created by brands. Moreso, brands that utilize UGC are 2.4x more likely to be viewed by consumers in comparison to brand-produced content – so if your brand isn’t utilizing UGC, you are losing the opportunity to build a trusting relationship with your audience and could be missing out on authentic content from users who already know and love your brand.

With a TikTok UGC growth machine, your ultimate goal is to build a network of reliable content creators, or an in-house content creator, that will create high-quality content that aligns with your brand goals and target audience. The pattern of sourcing and utilizing UGC in social ads creates a growth loop that will replenish your content bucket and create loyal brand advocates to maximize your brand awareness and reach. By encouraging UGC, brands allow consumers to enter this self-sustaining loop that inspires sharing, brand loyalty, and community while being relatively low-lift for marketers.

So how does one go about building this TikTok UGC growth machine? We’ll take you through our exact process of how we create content growth loops using TikTok UGC.

There are a few key advantages that TikTok-specific UGC specifically carries, making this channel a valuable investment for any brand as part of their growth strategy.

• TikTok is a perfect experimentation channel with fast learnings. TikTok allows you to test variables such as brand positioning, messaging, video formats, delivery, and more in a short span of time, yielding fast and substantial learnings to apply to your strategy on TikTok and across other channels.
• If an ad performs on TikTok, it will perform on any other channel. The beauty of TikTok UGC is that it can be considered the “origin” of truly organic content — and if you uncover top performers on this channel, they are perfect assets to be repurposed across your strategies on Meta, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
• UGC is a fast-turnaround content format. The upolished and organic feel of these videos means that they can be created with as little equipment as a smartphone and good lighing — meaning that the turnaround times are shorter and production costs are significantly lower.
• UGC equals automatic community validation and social proof. As mentioned earlier, consumers are more likely to follow the recommendations and advice of a peer or a creator rather than a brand — and UGC is essentially content with a built-in social proof mechanism that establishes consumer trust from the first second of the ad.

Building a TikTok UGC Machine

1. Build Your Social Ads Audience

Posting ad content on social media must be done strategically and methodically. Leverage top-performing ad groups from your other ad platforms and collect all historical data from your consumer data platform. This will take out the guesswork when building your TikTok audience.

First-party data will be highly valuable as we move into a cookie-free world. In Google Analytics, leverage your Cohort Analysis, Audience Insights, Demographics, Interests, and Affinity Categories to discover new audiences, their interests, and more. This analysis allows you to get into the mindset of your consumer so you can build more effective and tailored audience targeting and creative assets once you’re in TikTok Ads Manager.

Another platform to leverage is your CRM platform, such as Shopify, to pull geographic, age, gender, one-time customers, returning customers, at-risk customers, and loyal customer reports. Learnings can also be applied based to identify audience expansion opportunities based on LTV (lifetime value) and GMV (gross merchandise value). This data should line up with your previous analyses and confirm the profile of not just a unique visitor but a converting customer.

If available, tap into predictive analytics to better understand your audience and how their purchase behavior is evolving. This information will help in future decisions including content themes, assets, and messaging for you to stay ahead of the consumer and approach your social ads with the full funnel in mind.

If the above data is not available, you can utilize 3rd party data and research to inform your audience creation. To make your research more granular, find your top ten customers by name or email on your CRM or mailing list platform and perform field research. Where do they currently gather? Search for them on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. If you’re able, see what type of content they engage with, what brands they follow, and what kinds of content they post. Look for patterns across these consumer accounts and use that data to tailor your marketing strategy.

By pulling findings from these various channels, you can begin to build your ideal TikTok consumer based on data.

2. Understand Your TikTok Consumer

Now it’s time to meet them where they are at.

You’ve built your ideal customer – now it’s time to put yourself in their shoes. To be a successful growth marketer, it is important to think from the consumer’s perspective to better understand their wants and needs.

Here are a few questions to get you started:

• What is their occupation?
• What are their hobbies?
• Where do they shop?
• How do they get their news?
• Which social platforms do they spend the most time on?
• What do they value?
• What kind of content do they interact with?
• What keeps them up at night?
• What problem do they have that they are aware of or unaware of?

The more you can understand your consumer, the easier it will be to create content that speaks to them and converts. But good UGC doesn’t just happen on its own. Though good social advertising may appear like an organic post, there is much thought that goes into the production process so it can be optimized for the proper channel, audience, and campaign goals.

It is estimated that the average American encounters between 6,000 and 10,000 ads per day – most of the time without even realizing it. Consumers have become utterly numb to advertisements due to the sheer amount, but also the expertly veiled ad content that appears native to any given platform. Successful TikTok UGC has the power to be posted organically or in an ad campaign and has the potential to convert no matter what your campaign goals are.

3. Source UGC Creators

UGC can come from brand enthusiasts, employees, influencers, or our preferred method of partnering with content creators. UGC can be sourced across various social media platforms through social listening or users that use a branded tag or hashtag. This content is great for brand awareness, but if choosing to use UGC in any paid ads, you may want to consider hiring a content creator to create UGC for you.

But before reaching out to anyone, it is important to solidify your ad goals before expecting UGC that is aligned with your brand and campaign goals.

Here are some questions to consider while in the planning stage:

• What is the objective? (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion)
• What is the ideal content format? (Filming requirements)
• What is the core value prop or messaging you want to communicate? (We want audiences to purchase this product, etc.)

When it’s time to find creators, go back to your prior research where you identified your audience’s key influences. What types of creators (if any) were they following? Which accounts were they interacting with? Identify and reach out to 10-15 rising stars or micro-influencers who align with your brand category or brand adjacent category.

Take Equinox, for example. Equinox falls under the health and wellness vertical. Their audience is metropolitan, they have expendable income, are well-traveled, and care about their mental and physical wellbeing. A creator for Equinox wouldn’t necessarily have to be a buff gym rat but could be an upscale traveler, a fancy food blogger, or a Goop-like influencer. These accounts also have followers that would fall under the same category as Equinox.

It’s okay to start small and not go for the $50K per post creators. In fact, it’s our best recommendation. When starting to build up your creator partnerships, look for creators with less than 100K followers who are more likely to have higher engagement rates (and lower contractual rates). These creators tend to convert higher than some of the larger accounts. Big followings do not equal high engagement or ROAS – even TikTok Creator Marketplace can tell you that.

The skill set that goes into shooting short-form video is much more nuanced than snapping a shot with your phone. Many brands in turn felt the impact of limited bandwidth to create the videos necessary to keep up the cadence of TikTok which lead them to hire content creators to fill the gaps.

Though it seems like every content creator is looking to hit it big as a UGC creator, not every creator or piece of UGC will align with your TikTok strategy. Keep in mind your content pillars, broader social media goals, and if the UGC is used in a paid campaign, your objective.

Never source a creator purely based on a single numeric dimension (read: follower count) — and pay close attention to the skill of the creator before anything else. Here’s a shortlist of items to keep an eye out for when selecting the creators (in-house or partners):

• Impeccable storytelling. Your brand is battling a high level of saturation of content across multiple channels and it’s simply not enough to showcase aesthetic photos or stop-motion videos of products. The creator should showcase a strong ability to weave your product or service into a relatable, valuable story.
• Unique perspective. The best creator partners are those who are able to inject their unique personality into the content to make it captivating, scroll-stopping, personal, and more importantly, relevant.
• Shared values. Surprisingly, this point is overlooked more often than desired — and it’s an indispensable qualifier for any successful brand-creator relationship. It’s not enough that the creator has the skill and the numbers you seek — the true success of any collaboration or long-term partership stems from a strong connection between the creator’s values and the brand’s own. Consumers are savvy enough to quickly recognize a relationship that’s transational, so a personal affinity is almost a pre-requisite to successful UGC content creation.

4. Contact UGC Creators & Start Building Relationships

There are several influencer marketing platforms and partners that can source creators for you, including our own TikTok Studio with our in-house, dedicated creators and a creator network for any collaborations necessary. These agencies source from their own roster of partner creators based on your criteria through algorithmic matching including niche, platform, and budget. Though some just provide sourcing, others offer end-to-end campaign management from finding creators and negotiating contracts to delivering assets and monitoring ad performance.

For a more personal approach, it never hurts to reach out to a creator directly to build a personal connection. The more connected a creator feels to your brand and its mission, the more authentic and aligned their UGC will be. 62% of users say they would trust a content creator more than an A-list celebrity. When relationships are created and maintained, creators can turn into true brand ambassadors that users learn to trust.

Because relationship building is such an important aspect of this strategy, it is important not to burn any bridges. Treat your creators well and they will work to produce the best content they can. Establish a relationship with the creators that show passion and dedication for the idea, follow your guidelines, and provide authentic, thought-through content. Though building relationships one at a time can be a time-consuming process, it allows your brand and the creator to produce more meaningful content that will resonate with your target audience.

5. Provide a Content Brief for TikTok UGC Creators

Before letting your chosen creator run wild, developing a creative brief and general guidelines is important to ensure the final product is worth your money.

Key questions to ask yourself when forming a content brief include:

• What is your objective?
• Who is your audience?
• What is the ideal content format and where will it be posted?
• What is the core value prop or messaging you want to communicate?
• Will the creator need the product?
• Do they need to shoot in a certain way?

Share your goals with your creator and challenge them to come up with a few ideas that have a single message and objective. Don’t overcomplicate things for them – there should only be one objective. Be clear and provide guidelines and examples of what a successful content collab is for your brand.

When it comes to creators, they are masters of their content domain and community. They already have their unique voice, hooks, persona, and creative style – this is what makes them successful creators. While you should clearly define success, timelines, and examples, allow them creative freedom. They have gotten this far for a reason and their loyal followers trust their unique identity and the brands they stand behind.

6. Launch, Track, Measure, & Analyze Organic Content

Once you receive your UGC, it’s time to launch your assets. You’ll want to keep track of your TikTok UGC by maintaining records of the content produced and tracking your mix of evergreen brand awareness content against viral TikTok trends to find the ratio that works best for your audience all while maintaining your consistent brand identity and voice.

Not only is it good practice to record post analytics, but to also have a saved copy of your content. When possible, download your video without the TikTok watermark to keep a record and have the ability to repurpose it for other platforms. Repurpose.io is a great site for downloading posted content and sharing it across other social media platforms.

For tracking analytics, use a clearly labeled spreadsheet with links, dates, sounds, and hashtags for your records. Following posting, you’ll want to keep track of the analytics including views, reach, interactions, watch-time, and follows. Though tedious at first, these stats can later give you a bird’s eye view of what is working (or not working) to better inform your future campaigns and content requests.

Now, remember those downloaded videos? It’s time to repurpose them for your omnichannel strategy. Begin with Facebook and Instagram Reels before posting to YouTube Shorts and Snapchat Spotlight. If there is continued success, consider sharing to Twitter and Pinterest organically and as ad content.

Analyze and track the video’s performance and identify what trends and styles are working per platform. Are users gravitating toward trending skits on Pinterest or just on TikTok? Which platform has the highest CTR for your top-performing video? Look for common characteristics from platform to platform, but also consider your unique audiences per platform. By experimenting with different types of content on different platforms, you can better tailor your content for those particular audiences.

7. Sparking Your Organic TikTok UGC

Until you know what type of content will resonate with your audience, we test our TikTok content organically first before deciding which posts to Spark or run as dark ads. Oftentimes, top-performing organic videos will be most successful in paid campaigns as you already know they are resonating with your audience.

Currently, there are two types of ads you can run when working with UGC from creators. These are Spark Ads and Custom Identity and can be used for any of the advertising objectives and campaign types.

Spark Ads are similar to boosting an Instagram post, but more powerful. This native ad format allows you to leverage your organic posts to generate even more results at any stage of the funnel. The content, pulled from the organic post, includes all the features of the original post with the addition of a CTA leading to your chosen landing page or a TikTok Instant Page (which serves as a lead generation form). The Spark Ad is pushed out to your pre-determined Ad Group audience or a new custom audience while it still runs organically. A Sparked Ad not only increases content performance but it assists in putting your content in front of your target audience with conversion results in mind.

When choosing to Spark a post, you have the option to use your linked account or a custom identity. The beauty of Sparking includes the ability to run an ad from another authorized account – this is especially pertinent when working with creators and UGC.

For example, JVN Hair’s TikTok account can Spark their own organic posts or Spark organic content from authorized accounts including Founder Jonathan Van Ness’s TikTok account or creators and influencers who produced UGC. The Spark Ad can appear to come from the creator’s account or your brand account allowing the content to appear in front of even more audiences increasing reach, awareness, and conversions.

With these options in custom identities, brands can experiment with what works best for their UGC. Do audiences trust content that appears from content creator accounts or only brand-owned channels? Play around with not only the different types of content sparked but campaign types and identities to determine the best combination for your target audience.

8. Analyze Paid Assets

Now that you have a mix of organic and paid UGC circulating, it’s time to assess what’s working. Remember that spreadsheet you created earlier? Create a separate tab with paid analytics including CR, CTR, CPC, CPA, CPR, and more. Take note of which asset was sparked and what the starting point was prior to it being sparked. This will help identify if the Spark was worth it and help inform future content decisions.

Keep a continuous watch on your direct traffic and followers. Not all campaign goals will be to increase followers but it can be a direct result of a Sparked ad. When analyzing a specific ad, compare it to how it performed against previous assets. What was the production quality? What was the identity of the Spark Ad? What was the intended result? By testing different types of UGC produced by creators and in-house, determine which assets your audience engaged with more and double down in that area working with the creator to produce more content or find similar creators to diversify your feed.

Finally, take a look at that CPA column – cost per action. The data received from TikTok Ads Manager only tells half the story. The CPA provided is just a result of the ad CPA, but additional determination must be made. Calculate your influencer’s fees and cost for goods provided in addition to platform fees. Based on these results, you can ask yourself: what is the total ROI, and could this be a worthwhile long-term process that can be duplicated and scaled? If the answer is yes, you’re well on your way to creating a TikTok UGC machine. If not, it’s time to look back at the drawing board and determine where you overspent or where you can make additional optimizations to improve your ROI.

9. Enter the TikTok UGC Flywheel

You’ve looked at your ROAS and ROI and determined that this is a sustainable ad platform – congratulations, you’ve now entered the UGC flywheel.

This growth loop not only assists in increasing conversions but builds community along the way. By encouraging UGC through hashtags, giveaway challenges, or consumers just loving your product, brands can tap into their social community to use UGC, or work with brand-aligned creators to produce UGC that will benefit both their audience and your own.

Identify the long-term win-win for your creators. Is it equity, larger-scale partnerships, bigger returns, or free products or services? What does the creator get out of your partnership and more so, what does their following get out of it? Are you providing a special discount code for the creator’s followers? Are you providing a larger platform for the creator to gain exposure? Determine what’s in it for your brand and the creator and their followers.

With a TikTok UGC growth machine, your ultimate goal is to build a network of reliable content creators that will create high-quality content that aligns with your brand goals and target audience. Content creators hold much responsibility as a representative of your brand. Be sure they are reliable, consistent, and able to deliver quality content that resonates with your audience, increases ROAS, and yields big results!

TikTok UGC Brand Examples

The following brands are accounts that have been killing it with their use of UGC. Not only are the videos native to the TikTok style but they align with their brand persona and achieve their overall awareness and conversion goals in a relatable and authentic way.

• JVN
• GoPro
• Chubbies
• NoGood
• Jones Road Beauty
• SKIMS
• Supergoop!
• Walmart
• Public.com
• Adobe

JVN Hair | @jvnhair

JVN Hair, founded by Queer Eye celeb, Jonathan Van Ness, has amassed a large TikTok following through their how-to videos, before and afters, and fun and relatable skits all featuring their suite of products. The JVN Hair account has a pulse on pop culture and editing that remains native to the TikTok platform.

On their profile feed, one can see their diverse clientele using JVN products — each in their own individual way. Their bio reads “Come as you are” which perfectly encapsulates the individuals represented in their content. The brand doesn’t discriminate against age, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality and makes its platform a welcoming and inclusive place for everyone.

GoPro | @gopro

Who better to show off your product in action than your customers? GoPro’s handheld video cameras are built for adventure and users have used them to film their outdoor activities from every corner of the world.

Before the launch of TikTok, GoPro packed their YouTube page with UGC to not only show their products in use but the quality of their product. This approach led them to build a YouTube channel that’s over 10 million subscribers strong. Once TikTok gained momentum, GoPro jumped on the platform quickly with the same approach as their YouTube channel — using UGC from their consumers.

Submitting videos has become such a phenomenon that GoPro now has a submission portal on their website allowing users to upload their content and, if they are chosen, will receive rewards in cash, gear, and of course, global exposure. This submission platform is a brand-led way to generate and encourage UGC without having to go out and source creators.

Chubbies | @chubbiesshorts

Chubbies feel anything but meticulously curated and overproduced. As “the official outfitters of Friday at 5 pm” the casual menswear brand brings the personality of their colorful shorts to their UGC on TikTok. Chubbies partners with tons of well-known and lesser-known content creators that each produce content in their own style diversifying the Chubbies feed and showing a lifestyle filled with fun and style.

NoGood | @nogood.io

As a growth marketing agency, our data scientists specialize in skills ranging from SEO, SEM, CRO, social advertising, data visualization, a full creative design studio, and newest to the lot – an in-house TikTok Studio providing content creator sourcing, editing, advertising, and data reporting.

What makes NoGood’s TikTok stand out from the competition is that we don’t just talk the talk, our experts walk the walk. Our TikTok page is filled with educational content, breakdowns of brand strategies, best content creation practices, corporate humor, office antics, and more. By building our own TikTok community of over 100K strong, we use our page not only to educate but provide examples of what we can do for your brand.

Our content creator internship program also allows creators to learn how to work with brands in many different verticals, execute creative briefs, and prepare them for future partnerships as content creators.

Jones Road Beauty | @jonesroadbeauty

Beauty brand Jones Road Beauty, founded by the makeup artist Bobbi Brown, aims to create clean makeup products for every skin type and tone. Competing in an oversaturated beauty market already on TikTok, Jones Road Beauty differentiated its page by posting videos of women over 50 sharing their insights and using their products.

Something unique Jones Road Beauty does is partner with their founder’s account @justbobbibrown often. The two channels play off of each other growing both platforms simultaneously. Though Jones Road Beauty puts roughly $4,500 per day into their TikTok campaigns, they wouldn’t be anywhere without their organic UGC content that later gets Sparked via TikTok Ads Manager. Its aggressive paid and organic strategy is paying off so much that 34% of its yearly revenue comes from TikTok.

SKIMS | @skims

The success of Kim’s shapewear brand SKIMS is serious business as one of the Kardashian-Jenner empire’s most successful brands. SKIMS found early success not only due to Kim’s celebrity reach, but their aggressive marketing strategies to get the product in front of the most eyes possible. Their influencer strategy was prevalent early on and once the brand launched on TikTok, they continued leaning into content creators for TikTok UGC.

Much of SKIMS TikTok content is UGC from creators and consumers of all backgrounds and sizes, showing the products’ inclusivity made for “everybody.” One thing SKIMS always makes sure to do is tag the creator in the bio giving the creator exposure and encouraging followers to post their own content in hopes of being reposted.

Supergoop! | @supergoop

Supergoop! is making SPF cool again by disrupting a sleepy category through its high-quality sun protection products and fun collaborations and partnerships. UGC and social proof are incredibly important when trying to educate a consumer on an age-old product, but by partnering with the right consumers, Supergoop has been able to break through the noise and become a household name. Founder, Holly Thaggard, refers to influencers and creators as her “megaphone” being sure to get to know them on a personal level and ensure they are a good fit for the brand’s mission.

TikTok was a natural fit for Supergoop! As creators reiterate the importance of SPF and the value proposition of the brand while users can see demonstrations of the product and learn more about which is best for their skin care needs. Through authentic, educational, and fun video content, Supergoop! has earned strong brand recognition and developed a loyal community on TikTok.

Walmart | @walmart

Just like you never know what you’re going to get at Walmart, you never know what you’re going to get on Walmart’s TikTok. Walmart boasts over 1.2 million followers for a combined “Likes” total of 6.9 million likes. Their TikTok page is filled with user reviews of some of their favorite Walmart products, new product drop announcements, fun skits, and plenty of lip syncs.

Not only does Walmart work with micro to celebrity influencers for original content, but they also encourage social sharing through their branded hashtag #Gotitatwalmart. Not only is Walmart successful in creating a community of users but they are encouraging a culture of social proof and sharing which they in turn can repost to their own page.

Public.com | @public

Public.com’s main goal is to make stock market investing more accessible through its dynamic social feeds, educational resources, and the ability to not break the bank by purchasing a fraction of a share. Backed by sports superstars and Hollywood celebrities, this 2017-founded start-up plays it cool with its user-friendly interface and approachability no matter the size of your pocketbook.

When it comes to advertising on TikTok in a “restricted vertical” (ie sexual wellness, legal cannabis, or cryptocurrency) there are many rules and regulations to the type of content you publish causing Public.com to have to get creative due to their product being in one of these restricted verticals. On their branded organic profile, users will find high-quality educational content that breaks down complex concepts in a simple way. But where Public.com thrives on TikTok is in their UGC. Public.com has content creators posting to their individual channels about their experience with the app and leaving it to the creator to deliver the content in their own unique way. By using a diverse group of creators, Public.com is able to expand its reach to become a household name and reach users in ways it may not be able to from its own branded account.

Adobe | @adobe

Adobe Creative Cloud is a suite of design apps used across the globe. TikTok, being the creative platform it is, is the perfect place to display actual design examples from its millions of users and showcase their software in action.

In order to swift through the millions of videos of content under the Adobe umbrella, Adobe taps into hashtags to do the categorizing for them. #Adobe alone has 1.2 billion views but users get product specific which helps when searching for tutorials and product FAQs such as #adobeillustrator, #adobeMAX, #adobepremiere, and #adobephotoshop.

By encouraging users to utilize these hashtags, Adobe is creating an army of UGC creators and built-in ambassadors that share their work and enter the growth loop for social proof, product feedback and reviews, design inspiration, and community.

TikTok UGC is for Everyone

Based on this list alone, UGC on TikTok isn’t just for DTC brands but can be utilized in every vertical including SaaS and B2B accounts. Finding creators to work with can come from your own employee’s content, outsourced on platforms such as TikTok Creator Marketplace, discovered organically through hashtags and social listening, or by partnering with the NoGood TikTok Studio.

By using UGC on TikTok, brands remain native to the platform, expand their TOF reach and brand recognition, provide social proof, and build user trust and loyalty. Whether hiring content creators to make specific UGC for ad campaigns or discovering UGC via social listening, users feel more connected discovering a product through a friendly face versus an overproduced, more traditional ad.

UGC as it reflects user sentiment, builds brand awareness, and represents advocacy and loyalty. Whether or not UGC is shared on your branded account, it helps build community and encourages social interaction and sharing.

If you’re looking for a creative TikTok partner, let’s talk.

The post The Complete Brand Guide to TikTok User-Generated Content (UGC), Strategies, and Examples appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Social’s Place in a Digital Marketing Strategy

Social is an important channel within your digital marketing strategy. Top of funnel ads do an excellent job at introducing brands to potential customers, and lower funnel ads compel users to convert. However, social is generally considered more of an upper funnel play when compared to a channel like SEM.

Another key difference is that social is a ‘push’ channel in which you’re trying to ‘push’ your message to new users, and SEM is a ‘pull’ channel because users are already searching for your products – the demand is already there.

Popular social platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Later we’ll dive into best practices for each of these platforms so you can drive success no matter which ones you choose to launch.

How Organic Social Content and Paid Social Ads Can Work Together

Organic social content is free to post and largely based on building a community around your brand. Paid advertising presents you with an opportunity to introduce your brand to new users and expand your reach beyond your organic community. This is important because the average reach of an organic Facebook post is only 2.6% of a page’s followers – if you have 10,000 followers, only about 260 will see your post.

The most obvious way to integrate organic and paid strategy is through boosting content. ‘Boosting’ is a tactic you can use after you identify a piece of existing organic content that has generated a significant amount of interest through video views or click-through rate. After you’ve selected the content, you can ‘boost’ it, which just means putting ad spend behind the content via your paid media campaigns to reach additional users.

5 Pillars for Success on Social

Before rushing to spend money on social media, it’s important to set yourself and your business up for success. If you incorporate all of the following pillars into your social strategy, you’re well-positioned for successful social media ad campaigns.

Goal Setting and Measurement

It’s hard to achieve results when you don’t know what your goal is in the first place. Understanding your business objective is critical in both the short and the long term for successful campaigns.

Most marketers these days are data-obsessed, and the data you receive from your ad results can inform your next campaign, tighten up your audience, and increase your ROAS (return on ad spend). Analytics is your friend and will help you make the most out of your social efforts to optimize current campaigns and inform future ad content and strategy.

When you set goals, you first need to align on what is the most important for your brand in the next 12 months. Some brands want hockey-stick growth and aren’t concerned with efficiency. Other brands want to keep scale low but be hyper-efficient. Most brands want to scale drastically while maintaining excellent efficiency.

You should have an honest conversation with your team about what is non-negotiable. Those non-negotiable metrics will usually involve total revenue, number of purchases, leads, or another metric that you can tie directly to your business’s bottom line. Once you have that solidified, you can discuss the ideal efficiency you want to hit with your paid spend.

Platform Selection

Social media platforms are not one-size-fits-all. The best platforms for your brand depend on your audience, budget, goal, and the creative assets you have available.

Social ads are pay-to-play, and you’ll want to factor in auction costs as well. For example, platforms that are older and more established, like Facebook, have a lot of competition. This competition drives up auction costs and makes advertising more expensive. If your audience is on a smaller platform with less competition, you should consider running media there to offset elevated CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) elsewhere.

Although you have several social platforms at your disposal, it doesn’t mean you should use all of them in your strategy. You want to find where your audience is spending their time and meet them there. Why would a children’s clothing brand advertise on Discord? Those mommy bloggers are gathering on Pinterest – but it takes crucial social media listening to confirm this.

When starting or revamping your current social media ads strategy, start by considering your top-performing organic channels. This is usually a good indication that you’re in the right place. Find out where your content performs best by looking at metrics like click-through rate and video views. Your marketing budget is likely finite, so it makes sense to invest in channels where you’re already seeing traction.

Audience Targeting

To ensure you’re getting the most out of your ad spend, knowing exactly who you’re targeting is crucial to social ad success. What’s the use in paying for ads and putting the effort into content creation if it’s not going to be seen by the right people and lead to high-intent consumers?

Targeting can go from extremely broad to exceptionally granular, and lookalike and retargeting makes it even more specific. Going beyond general targeting, you should evaluate your first-party data to understand more about your users and create personas.

You can start to develop personas as you ask deeper questions: What product lines do your customers purchase from? How often do they repurchase? Do they checkout with multiple items in the cart? Once you have your personas, you can more effectively target them and experiment from there. The more you test and experiment, the more you’ll learn about your audience.

Creative

Creative is the single most important lever at your disposal for social. Although targeting is important, it’s clear that platform algorithms are advancing to the point of prioritizing high-quality content in auctions, and it will be more likely to be served to users.

Your ad may be the first touchpoint a user has with your brand, and first impressions matter. The quality of your creative can determine whether they keep scrolling or pause to learn more about your product or brand. Creative is not only a way to communicate your message clearly, but also drive emotional connection and resonance through visuals, tone, and storytelling.

Consistently strong creative builds long-term brand equity and brand loyalists, which are priceless for any business.

Testing

Rapid experimentation is our secret sauce to sustainable growth marketing. Testing can take place across all areas of social ads including audience, graphics, placement, etc. You want a winning campaign strategy, and sometimes one minor change can bring your ROAS through the roof. It’s easy to rely on a winning asset, but even evergreen content will fatigue.

Analyze campaign performance first to get an understanding of what elements drive campaign performance. Is there certain imagery, in-asset copy, or products featured that tend to correlate with higher conversions? Rely on performance data instead of your gut or existing biases to analyze performance and decide what you want to test next. It’s important to iterate upon existing concepts to make them even stronger and also test net-new ideas to keep your creative fresh for your audience.

How to Build a Paid Social Strategy by Platform

• Campaign Overview
• Facebook Ads Manager
• TikTok Ads
• X Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• YouTube Ads
• Pinterest Ads
• Snapchat Ads

Overview of a Paid Social Media Campaign

When planning any paid social strategy, there are three campaign types in which almost every platform organizes its ads campaigns. These are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.

If you need a brush-up, awareness is your Top of Funnel (TOF) campaign type that generates interest in your product or service. Marketers can increase brand awareness by telling people what makes their business valuable to them.

Consideration, or Middle of Funnel (MOF), is best for getting people to think about your brand and encouraging them to seek more information. The Bottom of Funnel (BOF) or Conversion campaign type is designed to encourage people who are interested in your product or service to take action via an app download or purchase.

Depending on the maturity of your brand, these goals will vary. Early stage brands will be focused on more TOF to bring about brand awareness while more legacy brands will be focused on more BOF conversion campaigns due to already being known entities.

Within these three campaign types, you’ll find various ad objectives that you can use to build your ad groups for targeting and individual ad assets. Your advertising objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads – you should tie these objectives back to your company’s overarching goals and specific OKRs in relation to your ad spend.

These are just a few of the objectives campaigns can include:

• Increase website traffic
• Build brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Boost engagement to page or posts
• Increase app installs
• Increase conversions

Facebook Ads Manager (Instagram Lives Here Too)

Meta has several properties – including Facebook and Instagram – under its umbrella company. Meta has more than 3 billion users worldwide, making it a powerhouse in the world of advertising. 

Meta’s ads platform, Facebook Ads Manager, might be the OG of social advertising and comes in behind Google as the #2 digital ad seller in the US. Though iOS14 put a bit of a buzz kill on Facebook’s data tracking, marketers are still on trend to spend over $58 billion on Facebook advertising this year.

Social operations for both Instagram and Facebook are housed within Facebook Ads Manager. Though Facebook has traditionally held Meta’s market share in digital advertising, Instagram drove $70.9B in 2023 and has steadily increased year-over-year.

The Instagram audience is slightly younger than the Facebook audience. Instagram is used by 65% of Gen Z users, whereas Facebook is a bit lower at 56%.

So why use Facebook Ads? Facebook Ads are extremely versatile and offer up to 11 different variations you can use to solve a variety of business goals from driving traffic to your website to reaching people in your local area.

After selecting your campaign type and what to optimize for, there are a multitude of ad formats to compliment your campaign. Creative assets can be shared between a business’s Facebook and Instagram pages, making it a quick process for marketers to build campaigns.

Facebook offers photo ads, video ads, stories ads, carousel ads, slideshow ads, collection ads, messenger ads, and playable ads, while Instagram’s ad types include Stories, Reels, Instagram Shopping, and Branded Content Ads when working with creators.

**NoGood Tip: We like to start with a TOF campaign with video creative. This way, even if the user doesn’t engage with the asset, they’re still considered a video viewer and can later be retargeted.

TikTok Ads

Entering the U.S. market in just 2016, TikTok has amassed over 1.8 billion users worldwide, with the vast majority between the ages of 18-24. Though TikTok is known for its entertaining and playful content, its advertising capabilities cannot be underestimated for both DTC brands and B2B brands.

TikTok generated an estimated $16.1B in revenue in 2023, a 67% year-over-year increase. In comparison to its social media platform competitors, TikTok advertising still remains largely undersaturated by B2B brands, which positions it as a less competitive market with bigger returns.

TikTok launched its Business Center in 2020 and continues to roll out new ad optimizations and campaign types for businesses of all sizes and budgets. Any business account can run full-funnel campaigns via TikTok’s Ads Manager, but accounts that are considered “TikTok Partners” (brands that meet a minimum spend threshold) are paired with TikTok representatives that can assist with specific TikTok ad types. With the help of their rep, managed brands can run additional campaigns including branded hashtag campaigns, brand takeovers, and branded effects.

TikTok’s Ads Manager offers three levels of campaign types with several objectives to choose from.

**NoGood Tip: We’ve noticed that it takes a bit for TikTok Pixel to learn and become efficient at retargeting; therefore, start with a TOF awareness campaign prior to working towards conversions.

Within the ad group creation, marketers can choose to target at a broad or granular level, including choosing audiences that are interested in specific hashtags or that have completed certain actions (watched till the end, liked, commented, shared, followed, or viewed profile).

An ad format unique to TikTok is Spark Ads. Spark Ads are assets that are posted organically first and then boosted within a campaign. Once the asset is posted organically, marketers can add an additional CTA linking to a landing page and push it out to their targeted and organic audience simultaneously. 

This is in opposition to a Dark Ad, which does not live on an account’s organic feed and only appears in front of the targeted audience. Dark Ads are a good option for accounts that do not have an organic TikTok presence or are optimizing for lead generation, app installations, or other conversions.

TikTok’s Spark Ads tend to drive stronger conversion rates vs. Dark Ads, which encourages accounts to build and maintain their organic presence while running social ads.

X (Formerly Known as Twitter) Ads

When building an X campaign, the three funnel objectives are the same as Meta’s Ads Platform, though underneath, you’ll find eight different objectives unique to X.

X ads are often seen as native in a user’s feed since their flagship ad format blends seamlessly into the feed (only marked as “promoted” to differentiate). Though this may be the most discreet ad format, X offers several other ad types that are more standard such as video and carousel.

Promoted tweets are best for awareness, driving website traffic, or promoting time-sensitive content such as giveaways. Video ads are best for storytelling, demonstrating a product in use, or displaying movement. Carousel ads work very well for e-commerce, app downloads, or multi-feature promotions because of the way they can tell a sequential story and encourage engagement.

Read our comprehensive X Ads Guide for more tactical strategies.

LinkedIn Ads

70% of users are confident LinkedIn delivers a positive ROI, ranking above Instagram and Facebook. Most effective in the B2B sector, LinkedIn is the best platform to get in front of specific industries, companies, or even people. 

As the largest platform for business-minded interactions, LinkedIn values professional connections for individuals, while LinkedIn ads can drive traffic to your landing page, identify quality leads or potential employees, grow your page’s network, and show your expertise through thought-leadership.

As with the other social platforms we’ve examined, all three campaign objectives have a different core KPI, which will determine how your funds are distributed. Unlike Meta’s Ads Manager, LinkedIn works off of a “second-price” auction model, meaning you only pay one cent higher than the next bidder. Advertisers can set their max bid and adjust the allocation as they see fit.

YouTube Ads

Over 40% of retail shoppers have bought products they watched YouTube videos about; the platform presents a massive opportunity to engage with and connect with audiences.

Users on YouTube can be targeted by channel, interest, search intent, placement, topic, location, age, and more, giving advertisers the ability to reach their target audience at an affordable rate.

YouTube Ads are actually built on the Google Ads dashboard. If you’re familiar with building Display or Search campaigns, you’ll already be familiar with the YouTube Ads interface.

Instead of selecting a traditional campaign type, marketers select a campaign goal followed by an ad format.

Similar to TikTok, YouTube offers unique ad formats specific to its platform, including overlay ads, bumper ads, responsive video ads, and skippable or non-skippable in-stream ads. All of these ad types offer unique opportunities to showcase your product in use, target users as granular as a specific YouTube channel or keyword, and create and maintain connections through introductory ads and retargeting (especially if non-skippable).

Pinterest Ads

Pinterest is a visually-driven, board-centric platform used for creative exploration and expression. Though few last-touch conversions come from this platform, it’s a powerful tool to leverage during the consideration phase.

Due to its authentic and creative nature, traditional ads used on other platforms may not work as well on Pinterest. Social ads on this platform must feel authentic and organic in order to drive performance since they appear among a user’s search results.

Pinterest offers three campaign types with limited options in objectives.

Its audience targeting is similar to those of other platforms, but we find it most similar to building a paid search campaign. Because Pinterest allows keyword targeting, we recommend leveraging Pinterest-provided resources including Pinterest Trends and Pinterest Predicts to help align your audience with the traffic Pinterest is reporting.

For more on Pinterest Ads, read our Complete Guide to Pinterest Marketing.

Snapchat Ads

Introduced in 2014, Snapchat’s advertising was built for large companies with deep pockets. Today, Snapchat has made it simpler and more affordable for brands of all sizes and budgets. Though it may not be top of mind in the realm of social media, Snapchat has been steadily growing year after year and has grown 7% from 2023 to 2024.

Depending on your campaign goals, Snapchat offers various ad formats under Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion objectives. With as little as $5 per day, ad formats range from single images or videos to story ads, AR lenses, filters, and commercials up to 3 minutes long.

We recommend beginning with top-of-funnel awareness campaigns on Snapchat to nurture your audience before retargeting those that have interacted with you in a consideration or conversion campaign. Retargeting on Snapchat is done through an Ad Engagement Audience, which is a strategy that’s confined to actions taken only on Snapchat ads. This effectively helps move users down the funnel.

It’s Not One-Size-Fits-All

Though there are a multitude of social media platforms offering advertising services, not every platform will be right for your brand and audience. We recommend meeting your audience where they are, which you can figure out based on organic performance, social listening, and data-driven targeting.

But even when running ads on social media, the goal is to continue to resonate with your target audience and build your brand community. Social proof and the use of UGC have become increasingly powerful as users prefer to hear about a product from a trusted source instead of an overly curated social campaign.

Be sure to remain native to the platform you’re advertising on and monitor engagement, interaction, and brand sentiment that builds community and successful social ad campaigns.

Work with an expert on your social media ad campaigns.

The post Social Media Ads 101: Choosing The Right Platform for your Business appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

So you may be asking yourself, which platform is the best for my brand? When comparing Reels, TikToks, and Shorts, they may seem similar (if not identical at times), but each platform offers its own particular sets of strengths and weaknesses depending on your audience and campaign goals.

This article will take you through the ins and outs of Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts to help you understand which platform is best for your brand and ad budget.

TikTok

Let’s start with the ultimate trendsetter — TikTok. Founded in 2016, TikTok has taken the world of short-form video by storm. Even with its 1.2 billion active monthly users, TikTok doesn’t consider itself a social media platform. Rather, they have labeled themselves as an “entertainment platform” not only competing with social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat but also coming for the likes of more traditional over-the-top (OTT) video streaming platforms such as Netflix and Hulu. In Q1 of 2022, TikTok reported the most profitable quarter of any app… ever – $840 billion in-app revenue to be exact. Though OTT streaming has three times the consumer spend on short-form mobile video, Gen Z is spending 3 times more on short-form video.

Valued at $50 billion, TikTok has set the standard for short-form video sharing and consumption. Driven by content creators and the support of Gen Z, TikTok is less about following friends and more about finding niche communities to connect with. TikTok users aren’t concerned about how many followers one has or curating the perfect aesthetically pleasing feed; rather, it rewards high-quality content by means of entertainment and value that users want to engage and interact with by liking, commenting, or even co-creating through duets and stitches.

When TikTok first launched, users could create 15-second or 60-second videos but have more recently rolled out 3-minute and even 10-minute-long video capabilities. Upon posting, videos live on a profile feed similar to Instagram’s interface and are also discoverable on the “For You Page” as well as in hashtag searches.

One of the biggest advantages of TikTok is its discoverability and top-of-funnel opportunities. Any user has the ability to go viral due to the algorithm’s focus on visual discovery, entertainment, and trending topics — whether in an organic or paid ad strategy. Branded accounts have the ability to stand out even more on TikTok due to fewer brands taking the leap from their Meta ad spend and using TikTok as a viable ads platform.

TikTok can be for entertainment and conversion — that being said, TikTok requires a brand to break down its barriers and step out of its comfort zone. It involves having a strong pulse on culture but also gives the opportunity to humanize a brand and the individuals that make it up. It is a sound-on experience that can range from silly skits to educational bites, all with a pulse on trending topics and culture. Brands that take themselves too seriously or are not willing to create in the style of the platform may not find as much success. The best way to know if TikTok is right for you is to jump in with organic content and begin exploring all TikTok has to offer.

Instagram Reels

Meta launched Instagram’s short-form, swipeable video feature known as Reels in August 2020 as, let’s be honest, a response to TikTok’s growing success and popularity among Gen Z users. Though seemingly a TikTok copycat, the new feature was a hail mary touchdown for Instagram — with Zuckerberg himself admitting that Reels was the biggest contributor to growth on Instagram and the platform’s fastest-growing content form.

Though Instagram may seem like they are going through an identity crisis (i.e. Adam Mosseri announcing it is not a photo-sharing platform that had social media managers shaken), Reels has been a hit with its users – first starting with 15-second videos, expanding to 60-second, and most recently 90-second videos. While Reels may be Instagram’s version of TikTok, the beauty of Reels is also its flexibility on the platform. These videos have the opportunity to reach 2 billion monthly active Instagram users through discovery, a user’s feed, or on the dedicated Reels tab. 

The algorithm favors Reels and is continually pushing them in front of audiences to enjoy and encouraging users to create their own. In fact, Instagram is paying eligible creators up to $35,000 in their Reels Play Bonuses program as they incentivize users to opt-in to the new feature. Instagram pledged to invest $1 billion into creators and payments are contingent on the number of Reels plays over a 30-day period. This is one of the largest creator funds we’ve seen and validates Instagram’s dedication to its Reels platform.

Instagram is already well established, joining the short-form video space with an audience already built-in through the years as a legacy platform — building a culture of subscribing to relevant accounts. Instagram has historically established a steady cadence of rolling out new features that users are quick to adopt. With the addition of Reels, Instagram built upon its Stories features lowering the learning curve and tapping into its built-in audience.

While TikTok is an entirely different platform for brands to learn, Instagram has legacy loyalists and accounts that are already established. On TikTok, brands are left to build accounts from the ground up, discover their audience, and find their community. This can be intimidating for brands that are already familiar with Instagram’s features, have established audiences, and are familiar with Facebook’s ad capabilities.

YouTube Shorts

YouTube Shorts was first launched in India in 2020 and to much acclaim officially was rolled out to U.S. users in April 2021. With ¼ of the world’s population being YouTube users, the traditionally long-form video platform was sure to make a splash with its new TikTok-style feature. Shorts are optimized for a mobile viewing experience, though they can be consumed via desktop as well. Similar to Instagram, YouTube has a Shorts Creator Fund of $100 million to entice creators to use their short-form video feature.

Due to Shorts being a newcomer, we don’t have much information on the feature’s stats specifically – except for the fact that Shorts champions over 5 trillion all-time views (trillion, with a T). That being said, we do know YouTube’s overall statistics and they are not to be underestimated. YouTube has 2 billion dedicated monthly active users who are already coming to the platform to consume video content. Though users may be looking for the traditional long-form and landscape style, creators can tease their longer content with up to 60-second long skits and sketches similar to the style of TikTok and Reels. During their beta test in India, Shorts had 3.5 billion views per day. Following their global launch, that number has reached 6.5 billion daily global views – a number that cannot be ignored.

YouTube has many advantages over its short-form competitors, specifically with the YouTube audience accumulating a massive 14.3 billion site visits per month. These dedicated users are sure to back any of YouTube’s new features and Shorts has been no different. Video is already native to the app which gives users and brands an additional avenue to practice the content format for further reach. It also is still early on in YouTube’s newest feature, therefore it is a good opportunity for brands and creators alike to join and garner an even wider following and reach potential.

TikTok vs. Reels vs. Shorts By the Numbers

Screen Time

The average human spends 40% of their waking life online at roughly 6 hours and 58 minutes per day. Social media accounts for 35% of that total at 2 hours and 27 minutes per day. So how much per day are users spending consuming content on these three short-form videos?

YouTube accounts for the most time spent per month at 23.7 hours per month, more than likely due to its legacy long-form content offerings and robust live streaming capabilities. TikTok comes in at 19.6 hours per month followed by Instagram at 11.2 hours per month. It is important to note that TikTok has fewer users, therefore their users are spending more time per day at 52 minutes globally.

App Downloads

Not only was TikTok the top downloaded app social media app in 2021, but it was also the top downloaded app worldwide at 656 million downloads. Though this number is down 22.8% from 2020 (presumably due to the pandemic boom), it still beats out all other app categories. Though we can’t be sure if a user was downloading Instagram or YouTube for short-form video content, it is likely they used the feature at some point.

Active Monthly Users

In our research, this was of the hardest statistics to nail down. Many companies hold these stats close to their chests. Though Facebook is still the world’s most-used social media platform with 2.9 billion monthly active users, YouTube is closing the gap at 2.5 billion. Instagram globally ranks #4 at 1.4 million and TikTok comes in at #6 globally with its 1 billion monthly active users.

Advertising

While Meta’s Ads Manager Platform may be more tested and established, TikTok’s Ads Manager continues to impress as they continue to roll out and optimize its features and campaign types that we haven’t seen on other ad platforms. With more brands and marketers still advertising on Meta’s platforms, brands on TikTok may see more results and higher ROAS in comparison to Instagram or Facebook. 

That being said, Meta’s Ads platform is much more robust and established than TikTok’s especially when it comes to its retargeting and lookalike audiences. However, TikTok was quietly building up its Creator Marketplace, more recently making it available to all Ads Accounts and Creators with 10K+ followers. The Creator Marketplace allows brands to find creators that align with their campaign goals in a seamless end-to-end flow from sourcing and communicating the brief to running the ad, measuring analytics, and completing payment to the creator. Creator Marketplace uses the TikTok API which gives brands transparency into creators’ content and audience analytics in ways we haven’t seen access to before. As a response to TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, Instagram recently launched its own platform and we continue to see others such as YouTube and Pinterest playing catch up to facilitating creator partnerships as well.  

Advertising on YouTube is not a new concept – in fact, 70% of consumers are open to learning about products they see through YouTube video ads. It is only a matter of time before YouTube’s full advertising capabilities will make their way over to Shorts with their plans to roll out BrandConnect, Super Chat, and shopping capabilities. 

As all channels continue to evolve, ideally, it shouldn’t be a singular choice for a brand in regards to where to invest ad dollars — a healthy marketing mix includes a variety of diverse channels that account for the entire user journey from awareness to conversion. With this in mind, certain advertising channels are better for certain objectives — and this is widely dependent on the brand industry, vertical and maturity as well.

Social Shopping

Social Commerce or Social Shopping is the union of social media and eCommerce. In 2021, 35.9% of internet users in the US made at least one social commerce purchase and by 2025, over 5% of total eCommerce retail sales will come from social media. Marketers are spending more than ever on social networks, and are predicted to spend $56 billion in 2022. 

TikTok and Reels both already have extensive shopping capabilities with YouTube predicted to roll out their Shorts shopping capabilities later this year. YouTube currently has Live Shopping and shoppable ads on their longer-form videos so it is only a matter of time before this will become available on Shorts.

Instagram and TikTok’s shopping capabilities have proven to be quite successful. Similar to a feed post, Instagram accounts can tag products in their videos with shopping tags. Users can select the “view products” button to save, buy, or learn more about the featured product. Accounts with Instagram Checkout can even collect payment through the app so users don’t even have to leave the app.

Launched in 2021, TikTok’s shopping experience came in like a wrecking ball as users spent $2.3 billion dollars on the app, a 77% increase YoY. The interface is very similar to Instagram’s with its own Storefront shopping experience. Users can view which products are tagged in the video and by clicking on the product are taken to the product page where they can learn more or continue to the website to purchase. 

Engagement

Having a large following is good and well, but it doesn’t actually make a difference if your users aren’t engaging with your content – engaged followers mean higher intent, higher ROAS, and lower CPAs. The engagement rate is calculated by the number of engagements divided by the number of followers x 100. Engagement includes interactions such as likes, comments, saves, and sends.

Based on data from Upfluence, TikTok, and micro-influencers specifically, has the highest engagement rate across the three platforms. Designed for discoverability, the algorithm assists quality content in receiving maximum visibility and rewards videos with higher engagement to continue being pushed out to users.

Though engagement is highest on TikTok, it does not diminish the fact that engagement for growth is massive on Reels. We’ve seen first hand the number of views can vary greatly from Instagram to TikTok to Shorts. As an example, we posted the same video across all three platforms.

On Reels, our goop breakdown video received 5,767 views. It had 167 interactions resulting in an engagement rate of 2.89%.

On TikTok, the same video received 1,462 views, 130 interactions, and an engagement rate of 8.89%.

On YouTube Shorts, the video on received 61 views and 2 interactions with an engagement rate of 3.27%.

Taking these analytics into consideration, engagement was highest on TikTok while views were much higher on Instagram. Depending on your KPI growth goals, different content will perform differently across all three platforms, therefore it’s important to experiment with all three to know what combination will work best for your brand.

Reels vs. TikTok vs. Shorts: Final Comparison

When considering which short-form video platform to put your ad spend or resources behind, there are a number of factors that are important to consider when choosing where to run your video campaigns. Each platform, whether that’s Instagram Reels, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts has its own set of pros and cons depending on your campaign needs. Our side-by-side comparison below is just a snapshot of the factors to consider including each app’s sound library, editing capabilities, average engagement, and core audience.

Content Aesthetic

When it comes to video quality, legacy Instagram users are used to a more curated look and aesthetic which can put pressure on creators with the quality of their Reels. On the other hand, TikTok videos are perceived as more authentic due to their lower visual quality with a homemade feel in comparison to Instagram’s high-quality and perfect-looking feed. This makes for an interesting dichotomy when TikTok is viewed as more genuine while Instagram has more sophisticated targeting (and retargeting) options.

Editing capabilities on Shorts still have a long way to go, but YouTube has always been driven by more professionally produced content, so the lack of AR, greenscreen, and in-app editing shouldn’t impact YouTube creators as they are used to editing outside of YouTube anyway. The Shorts editing capabilities and quite basic. There are no AR filters for users to play around with (unlike their competitors), and greenscreen capabilities are limited to photos only – an area TikTok completely dominates in through their extensive library of effects. YouTube is also known for its passive, longer-form content, not short-bites. Users may not be necessarily coming to YouTube to consume this type of short-form content, but at the same time, it may not be as difficult to convert long-form fans into short ones through teasing different types of content. Though some may see the lack of editing as a downside, content can easily be repurposed from other short-form platforms and edited down from long-form content.

The value placed on Instagram vs. TikTok quality is also reflected in the users consuming the video. Gen Z, who largely gravitates towards TikTok, places a large importance on authenticity, social proof, and values-based marketing. This is reflected in the quality of TikTok videos and UGC marketing. Whereas on Instagram, Millennials are the largest portion of its audience and value connecting (and showing off) to their peers through perfect filters and feeds. 61% of millennials are using social media to connect with family and friends versus 66% of Gen Z-ers that use it to pass the time. This is the only generation that ranks killing time on social media above connection. 

Social Search

TikTok’s other strength to consider is its rise as a social search engine that’s directly competing with Google. As a key discovery channel, TikTok is increasingly becoming the ultimate destination for Gen Z and beyond in finding answers to their questions, learning new facts, and discovering products and activities. In fact, a key part of any content strategy on TikTok needs to include TikTok SEO, introducing a new alley for brands to meet user search intent and rank for key terms that desired audiences search for. The superiority that TikTok search results hold in contrast to Google and other platforms goes back to the initial argument about the raw and unpolished, community-validated nature of the videos on this platform, which automatically earns any brand points in the eyes of the consumer and inspires more trust than traditional Google search results cluttered with ads and SEO hacks.

Content Strategy Advantages

When it comes to introducing audiences to new features and brands to new platforms, Instagram and YouTube have the advantage of legacy users and advertising capabilities. Though having an established audience, developed pixels, and editing comfortability on Instagram and YouTube is all and well, it also can’t be argued that Instagram and YouTube play second fiddle to its younger competitor TikTok. TikTok was the first to roll out their full-screen, swipeable short-form video experience, therefore Reels and Shorts not only seem like a copycat but come in at second and third best as their features are not as innovative or quick to roll out as their competitor.

Similarly, as TikTok is an entirely new platform with a singular focus, Reels and Shorts complement (and sometimes compete with) additional in-app features and creative formats including Carousels, Stories, Lives, Feed, YouTube Premium, Subscriptions, and more. On one hand, content is created specifically for each of these features on the same account which spreads creators and resources thin as assets have to be created for each content type.

However, once these initial crises are reconciled, the diversity of formats in creative, in fact, introduces new opportunities for brands to create robust content strategies. For example, the static carousel format (still very much alive) on Instagram complements Reels in a strategic way: brands can plan short-form video to reel in new audiences and expand reach, while more specific value-driven carousels can engage the existing community and address more niche needs and questions that the brand’s followers have. With this dual approach, brands can maintain high community engagement while growing their overall audience with two distinct yet complimentary post types.

The same goes for YouTube Shorts. While at a first glance, it might seem like Shorts compete with the native long-form video format YouTube is known for, it’s important to think of the two video formats as part of a singular content ecosystem. YouTube Shorts are a powerful tool for experimentation and quick results to refine content pillars, and video delivery, and take various ideas on a test run. With this experimentation and validation of ideas at hand, brands can be more strategic with what longer-form videos they choose to invest in and produce, resulting in a better-informed and more efficient content production system internally.

TikTok, in its turn, is not stopping at short-form video and continues to introduce new formats for creators and brands alike to engage with a variety of audiences. Reviving image carousels and stories and borrowing a page from Instagram’s book and bringing longer-form video formats similar to YouTube, TikTok is evolving its content offerings as well — which is a further confirmation that brands need to take advantage of the variety of post types that each platform offers.

Advertising Capabilities

As of now, TikTok is a strong driver for awareness and consideration, with the natural UGC and value-forward content immediately earning user buy-in without alienating audiences with promotional content. Depending on the industry, it may or may not be a strong fit for conversions — as it stands, it’s best to be a primary channel for eCommerce and consumer app brands and an experimental awareness channel for the rest.

With Meta, considerations are more different — largely due to how the ad platform has held a monopoly over being the top advertising destination for most brands. Despite the recent privacy roadblocks and app tracking complications, Meta remains a go-to choice as a starting point for experimentation and is typically a successful investment on a full-funnel basis.

Where the major Meta advantage comes in is that with the addition of Reels, the platforms have diversified the types of creative that brands can leverage in order to reach their desired audience. Whether it’s UGC for building trust or GIFs to incite action, brands have a strong arsenal of medium types to experiment with different creative choices, visuals, copy, and messaging across all funnel stages.

When it comes to YouTube, the offering is in full growth mode — with YouTube pouring investment in short-form video, it remains to be seen how the ad offering for this will continue to evolve. With that said, our prediction is that YouTube’s offering will very likely become extremely competitive to Meta’s due to the original user base YouTube already boasts, the lengths the platform goes to reward creators, and its historic success in full-funnel results.

Content Repurposing Flywheel

Last but not least, short-form video’s strongest advantage is in how easy it is to repurpose cross-platform, whether it’s for paid or organic efforts. As a rule of thumb, the leader in the short-form video strategy for repurposing is TikTok — due to a few reasons:

• TikTok allows a faster pace for learning and experimentation.
• TikTok’s innate discoverability, paired with SEO tactics, makes it a priority to prioritize posting on this channel first.
• If a piece of content works on TikTok, it will work anywhere — due to the fact that UGC is TikTok’s inherent, native content type.

With this in mind, by kicking off content creation (organically), brands can effectively build a multi-channel content repository that provides winning short-form video assets tested and proven to resonate with desired audiences.

This allows for a higher threshold for experimentation across other paid and organic initiatives and can happen in parallel with other efforts across channels.

Short-form video has taken marketing by storm and as more platforms roll out their own version of the full-screen video experience, marketers and brands are having to learn the skills to keep up with the content form and ever-evolving landscape of social selling and advertising.

Reels, TikTok, and Shorts each have their own pros and cons and these platforms continually are updating their features and introducing new campaigns and ad types for marketers to test. Our rule of thumb is experiment, experiment, experiment until you have enough data to decide where to spend your ad dollars and content creation efforts. Your organic audience engagement and interaction will help lead these decisions and be further supported by your paid targeting strategy.

The post Reels vs. TikTok vs. Shorts: The Complete Guide appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.