Social Media Expert Series: Q&A with Savannah Sanchez

I'm seeing significant traffic spikes, consideration, and conversions coming from TikTok. My clients are very willing to test the platform, even if they haven't advertised there before, and even after just a few weeks of testing with new accounts, I've generally been able to scale their launch campaigns. 

On Facebook, advertisers are starting to reduce spend and reallocate it to TikTok. Luckily, it is slowly recovering from the iOS 14.5 update, and CPAs are finally starting to coming down.

Brands are having to go outside their comfort zone on TikTok. 

Marketers need to rework or produce new creatives that were once formatted for Stories placements, and adapt them to TikTok instead. In your creatives, you have to provide value to the viewers in the form of emotion (humor, surprise, happiness), and be a real person behind - or in front of - the camera. 

Brands that are doing well are beauty brands providing tutorials/how-tos, apparel brands doing try-on promos and food & beverage brands sharing unique recipes.

From a campaign setup perspective, keep your audience targeting broad, and allow TikTok’s system to learn before you start refining down your ad groups. You might be surprised at your top-performing demographics. 

Ensure you have at least three creatives in any given ad group, and remember that your ad creative is the targeting, so test frequently (I inject a new ad in each account weekly). 

Lastly, test and utilize all of the features that TikTok Ads have to offer, such as Boosted Posts (now called Spark Posts) and Collection Ads.

Tell a story and be authentic! 

You want your viewers to connect and relate to your content, so plan your creatives based on what you think your ideal customer would want to see on their For You Page. Partner with content creators (macro or micro) that know the TikTok space better than anyone, and allow them creative freedom. 

In post-production, try to keep your content to 30 seconds or less, and use native text elements to make your ad look as organic as possible.

Due to the pandemic, eCommerce brands and marketers have been forced to produce content in their homes, while even large corporations and major brands have turned to UGC to advertise their products. 

It's easier, and less expensive, now more than ever to produce content with an iPhone versus coordinating a massive, expensive studio shoot. Brands are resorting to organic experiences from creators and customers to promote authenticity.

One of my most-liked and shared tweets from a few months ago read: 

"A top-notch ad campaign structure will fail if it has subpar ad creatives. A top-notch ad creative can thrive in a subpar campaign structure." 

For new marketers, my advice would be to not focus so much on the "perfect" campaign setup, but rather, learn how to create content. Immerse yourself in the platforms you'll be advertising on, and gather knowledge/inspiration from marketers or brands that are killing it in the creative department.

On TikTok, the biggest mistake I see is when brands use their existing content from Facebook and Instagram Stories placements. 

Slideshows, static images and over-the-top, studio-produced content is automatically detected as an ad from the viewers' perspective, and they generally swipe away instantly. 

And across all platforms, when advertisers don't test often enough, they'll experience creative fatigue, and scaling then becomes more difficult.

 

Savannah Sanchez is the founder of The Social Savannah, which manages media buying and creative social marketing strategies for a broad range of DTC brands. You can get in touch with Savannah via her website, follow her on Twitter or Facebook, or join her Facebook Ad Creatives group.