As TikTok continues to grow, more and more brands are appearing on the platform, tapping into their creativity and engaging the TikTok community through TikTok targeting. At VROOM Digital, our Paid Social team understands that it’s not always easy to stay up to date on what you need to know in the social media landscape. However, with the average time spent on TikTok reported to be over 95 minutes a day, it’s important to understand how you can find potential customers on this platform as well as drive further business online.
TikTok has created a user-friendly experience to pinpoint your target audience on their platform. TikTok targeting allows you to reach your ideal audience more efficiently with your planned budget and the help of the algorithm.
What is Tik Tok Targeting?
Currently, TikTok offers four different targeting categories, which are:
- Audience
- Demographics
- Interests & Behaviours
- Device
Audience
Audience targeting is the section in which you can find the choice of Lookalike Audiences or Custom Audiences. You can then select which audiences you would like to use, such as users who visited your site or a lookalike audience of purchasers in the past 30 days. Considering how long people spend researching holidays and travel plans online, this is a very useful type of targeting which will allow you to reach ‘warm’ leads.
Demographics
Within Demographics targeting, you can find multiple options to define your audience based on Location, Gender, Age, and Language. When deciding on implementing demographics, it’s important to know exactly who your target audience may be as if you are unsure, you could be narrowing down your target audience a bit too much and stopping interested users from seeing your ad.
Interests & Behaviours
Interests and Behaviours allow for your business to highlight certain topics or actions that the user has shown interest in on the platform. For Interests specifically, the user can highlight the topics that their ideal target audience may be interested in and then have their ad displayed to users that have interest in this topic. Behaviours will then allow the user to select based on the target audience’s recent in-app interactions. The user can then select video behaviour or creator interactions based on category options (e.g. Food, Fashion). To learn more about Interests and Behaviours, please see this helpful guide.
Devices
Over the past couple of years, there have been several updates from both android and IOS businesses to make their devices more unique than the other. With this, Tiktok offers targeting based on device usage online. Defining which carrier your viewer may have is also an option. This type of niche target can be useful. For example, if you sell phone covers for the iPhone 13, you can select the device model that the viewer may be using to interact with others or if you offer a service with a specific phone carrier.
Why is it important?
It’s important to weigh the options that TikTok offers with targeting. Based on the level of the pixel which your business chooses, your pixel events or API can expand your learnings with tools such as advanced matched targeting. If you already have a developed or detailed user profile it may not be as necessary to have advanced matching.
It’s best to get familiar with the interests and behaviours subsection prior to publishing campaigns to understand what might work best for the target audience which you may have in mind. Consider reviewing the options for interest and behaviours then drafting three user profiles that you believe will be successful. Moving forward you can test which profile performs the best by using a traffic campaign. This technique can be repeated several times so that further on you can develop conversion campaigns that use these user profiles to drive effective results for your business.
It’s worth noting that what happens on TikTok doesn’t stay on TikTok according to Search Engine Journal.
TikTok users are 56% more likely to research new brands or products on the platform than on other platforms, even for bigger-ticket purchases like automotive and travel.
However, these TikTok-inclusive journeys also see:
- 65% of users conducting more online research.
- 57% of users seeking more details on where to buy products.
- 54% of users also conducting in-person research.
Conclusion
Advertising on TikTok can be overwhelming and confusing but recognising its current power in developing trends and driving results is the first step in doing the same for your business.
If you want some guidance, please reach out to our Paid Social specialists to learn more about the options for your business and how we can help develop results on TikTok.
