Tag: Advertising

In the advertising space, TikTok presents a playground of opportunities for brands to utilise. This is especially true for beauty brands, with 68% of luxury consumers stating that TikTok has inspired them to buy from premium brands.

As a relatively new social media platform, there are still some kinks for TikTok itself to iron out in terms of how both original and paid content makes its way to users. Some plans have been laid in place, including the fact that brands must not only outbid competitors, but also win the entertainment battle.

With this in mind, you might be asking yourself, “How can I use TikTok to get my beauty brand in front of the right people?” well, we’re here to help. I caught up with one of our PPC Specialists, Alex Cox, off the back of a recent project with one of our newest clients to get his views on how to advertise on TikTok as a beauty brand.

TikTok Advertising Options

Firstly, let’s review some of the options available to brands for paid advertising:

In-Feed Ads

In-feed advertisements are exactly that: advertisements that are displayed within a user’s TikTok feed. As your audience members scroll through their For You Page, they encounter a mixture of content that is picked out via an algorithm, as well as content paid for by advertisers. It can be difficult to discern what content is organic and paid, as these ads are usually curated to make them feel seamless within a feed.

In-feed ads are great for driving referral traffic to your website. If you’re promoting a product, sale, or service, you might consider using in-feed ads first.

Top-View

Top view ads are by far the most expensive and impressionable type of ads on offer. These adverts are displayed at the very top of a user’s feed, placing your brand front and centre.

Due to their bold nature, top view ads are excellent for brand awareness. Pushing products and services with an ad like this would be a less-than-ideal approach, as users tend to scroll past the first thing they see anyway.

Remember, these ads are the very first thing users will see on their TikTok journey for that  day. Make it exciting, bold, and entertaining.

Brand Takeover

Brand takeover ads are very much like Top view ads in the sense that they are displayed at the top of users’ feeds, except with the addition of a five second, unskippable section at the beginning of each ad.

These ads are best used to hook the attention of viewers within those first five seconds. Place the most important information of your advert here, make it engaging enough to keep watching, and you’re on to a winner.

Spark Ads

Like other paid social platforms, TikTok also has its own implementation of post boosting under the guise of Spark ads. If you have a post showcasing your product that has performed well or maybe even gone viral, you can use Spark ads to give them an added jolt of visibility.

Spark Ads are great for boosting your brand’s authenticity on TikTok. Content that is created solely for paid success can sometimes appear very blatant, whereas Spark Ads feel more like the usual type of algorithmically curated content that a user would normally see.

TikTok Considerations for Beauty Brands

With the basics out of the way, let’s look at some more beauty specific tips for TikTok:

Never Forget Influencers

Before jumping straight to paid advertisements, it helps to first consider your options with influencers. Influencers are an incredibly powerful tool on social media, bringing with them the power to introduce your brand to a sizable audience in just one simple post.

Collaborating on content, sponsoring videos and gifting products are just a few of the ways you can get started with influencer marketing.

If you feel like learning more about the subject, we’ve got you covered: 6 Tips For A Top-Performing Influencer Marketing Strategy.

Use the Right Language

TikTok advertising regulations are as strict as anywhere else. That’s why it’s so important to adhere to them when advertising your beauty products.

There are risks of advertisements being rejected depending on the type of claims they make. Beauty products can often be misconstrued as having health benefits, which is something TikTok heavily regulates. Before publishing your advert, we sincerely recommend that you cross-reference your phrasings with TikTok’s Industry Entry Policy to avoid any delays.

Target the Right People

TikTok provides the ability to segment your audience depending on how much money they spend. High spenders can be split out to avoid improper targeting to those who are more financially restricted, which provides advertisers another layer of intricacy with the ads they publish.

By doing this, you can create adverts for your premium, mid-range, and lower end products that all get delivered to the people who are most likely to buy them.

Rinse & Repeat

Trends come and go, so there’s never really a justification for just having an advert run continuously. TikTok ads are susceptible to the dreaded “ad fatigue”, a case where your creatives have run their course and come to a natural plateau of both viewership, engagement, and most importantly, ROI.

As a result, try to refresh your visuals every 2 to 4 weeks. This will allow you to benchmark what type of adverts perform best, while paving the way for improvements in the future.

Keep it Natural

On TikTok, polished content typically doesn’t perform as well as organic-looking content. Content that isn’t created on the platform sticks out like a sore thumb; and it’s enough to really put a pause to your advertising success.

For starters, try and piece together your adverts using TikTok’s own posting tool. There, you’ll have access to trending audio clips, filters, voice overs, etc. All of this will help your content blend in to a user’s feed.

Integrate Your Storefront

We cannot stress this final point enough: Integrate. Your. store front. Whether it’s Shopify, Woocommerce or another platform, doing so allows you to sell products directly from within the TikTok app, removing yet another barrier placed in front of your potential customers.

Setting this up takes a matter of seconds, and gives you access to all sorts of statistics that can be tied directly with your TikTok analytics.

How Much Does it Cost to Advertise on TikTok?

Like all other types of digital advertising, TikTok’s cost structure is scalable depending on the amount of views or impressions your campaign receives. Costs begin at just £8.26 CPM (Cost Per Mille/Cost Per Thousand Impressions), and advertisers are required to spend at least £400 on a campaign. But every campaign spend should be bespoke depending on your goals and the specific market you’re operating in.

Brand Spotlight: Cult Beauty

One of the best TikTok examples we’ve seen comes from Cult Beauty. After scrutinising its progress on the platform, we’ve seen some genuinely brilliant utilisation. Here’s what Alex had to say:

“I almost see Cult Beauty’s TikTok as a reference sheet for other brands to follow. While not being a beauty brand itself, Cult does an excellent job of showcasing a wide range of products through a mixture of both influenced and organically-created content.”

Product hauls, shop floor tours and look tutorials are everywhere to be seen, so it’s no surprise that the brand has gained almost 50k followers in little over 2 years.

“Scrolling through the feed, it’s almost impossible to determine where the paid content starts and the organic content begins, which is really an ideal scenario.”

Consumers, especially those looking for beauty products, are much more clued up these days, and are less susceptible to obvious advertisements and false language. This is something Cult Beauty has clearly recognised on its TikTok.

Need Help with Paid Social Media? Foundation Can Help

With these initial considerations, your beauty brand is in a strong starting position for plenty of ROI on your next advertising campaign.

At Foundation, we take the hard work of managing campaigns, budgets and objective setting away. With a portfolio of both high profile and independent beauty brands, our team of beauty experts can give your brand the digital attention it deserves. Speak to one of our paid media specialists for a consultation session, today.