How can I make TikTok a viable marketing channel for my brands?
A group of top TikTok affiliates and advertisers shared their thoughts on this topic at a recent Affiliate World event. DigitechIO CEO Ali Moon, VisCap co-founders Cody Iverson and Tyler Stephens, and New Money Worldwide CEO Viktor Vallo shared their knowledge and insights to help you flatten the learning curve and make TikTok Ads profitable right away.
Sourcing Talent 🤩
In Cody’s experience, the best way to source video ad talent is by working with actors, not creators. And the way that they find their TikTok talent is through Facebook groups.
Let’s say you’re in the US, for example, and you want to shoot a video ad in Tennessee. You start by researching Facebook groups for Tennessee actors, Tennessee makeup artists, Tennessee models, etc., and then post in those groups. If you’re a brand, you can post a call for talent on behalf of the brand, and if you’re an affiliate or an agency, you can post a more generic request so you can reuse the videos for multiple brands.
There are also some university acting groups and drama societies where you can find affordable and talented actors. Another successful avenue is through referrals from your past talent, and TikTok Creator Marketplace and Fiverr can also work.
Scaling on TikTok 🚀
According to Tyler, your greatest chance for success today is injecting TikTok trends into direct response-driven frameworks. You get the best of both worlds because you’re creating videos that are relevant to people and the moment, but you’re also using proven principles to sell effectively.
Another key to scaling on TikTok is the opportunity to create meaningful variations of a winning ad. The TikTok algorithm is aggressive and creative fatigue happens fast, but you can analyze TikTok video performance to determine which video sections have lower retention so you can incorporate different elements. Changing ad hooks on existing content is a good place to start testing.
AI on TikTok 🤖
Another way to fight creative fatigue is by creating multiple edits from the raw footage of your UGC video ads. AI tools can help with this by adding animation or different cuts to make each 30-second video unique. This empowers marketers to leverage winning creative assets in multiple ways and maximize impact.
According to the panel, this is a good example of where AI works best in the marketing workflow right now — as a tool to enhance processes and speed up basic tasks. Generative tools like ChatGPT can suggest ideas or scenarios, for example, but they aren’t capable of creating high-performing scripts on their own.
Trends & Tools 🧰
Marketers with a unique product and engaging creative can stand out on TikTok, but you can also see what’s working for your competitors through tools like PPS and TikTok Creative Search Center. Tools like AdSpy, which also works on other platforms, can provide information about what’s performing well — so you can make a better version of it yourself.
To that end, TikTok makes tools for finding inspiration and seeing what’s working right now more readily available than Facebook’s Ad Library. TikTok provides deeper insights into trending topics, music, and other elements. Marketers who are new to the platform can get off to a good start quickly by pairing direct response principles with what’s working on TikTok.
