Beware the Secret Formulas
Every Facebook ads consultant out there is now suddenly a TikTok ads expert, right?
Watch for the flood of courses with the “secret” formula to massive viral success and $1 leads.
ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, reached out to me last year, asking for help in building a proper course on TikTok ads.
We’ve been testing hundreds of campaigns and looked at the results shared by our friends in real estate, e-commerce, agency, legal, and so forth.
It’s the stuff you do before you upload to social’s business manager that matters most.
I’ll save you the $2,500 course and tell you the “secret” right here: It’s in your simple, vertical video shot from your phone– that doesn’t look like an ad, has a “hook” in the first second to capture attention, has big text so people know what it’s about, and tells a “story”. No crazy targeting or sophisticated campaign setup is necessary
The super smart algo uses your content’s performance. Same for spark ads, where you boost someone else’s post (called “creators” no longer “influencers”).
Hiring an agency makes ZERO sense unless they can actively coach you through making 15-second videos. The campaign set-up is relatively easy, so long as you already have your digital plumbing (pixels, tracking, data) in place.
The frothy white waves of hype about TikTok being the next tsunami of traffic is true — just like we saw with Google and Facebook. Traffic is about 1/4th the cost on Facebook on the paid side (because base CPMs are about $2.50, meaning CPC, CPL, and CAC are correspondingly lower).
Optimize to Your Objective
Of course, you’re optimizing to the objective (algo is so smart), using base traffic cost as one of many diagnostic measures.
But make you’re not jumping in just because of FOMO…..but because you’re shoring up the fundamentals of collecting your client stories in 15-second videos, have a process to process these within your operations, have your digital plumbing properly in place, and are putting money on the winners.
I was at Jake Paul’s house making 15-second videos for the social media marketing course we have for young adults. One of the videos leaked out and got half a million likes. It had nothing to do with our course and wasn’t even on his TikTok account– but one of the guys helping film. But TikTok also recognized it was Jake Paul’s house in the background of the video, showed it to fans of Jake Paul– and then it went viral.
You’ll see more stuff like this blow up out of nowhere on TikTok, almost exclusively on the organic side. But these are unlikely to be the posts you will be boosting as an extension of the Dollar-a-Day strategy.
Same Algorithm, Same Themes–Still a Dollar a Day
Instead, you’ll find that the same themes that worked for you on Facebook will work on TikTok, adapted to their format of storytelling via 15-second videos. It’s the same algorithm as Facebook and Google (fight me on this), which seeks to optimize to your chosen objective based on conversion data you allow it to see.
TikTok didn’t want me to tell you that you can absolutely reuse Facebook strategies– since they want you to make TikToks only for their platform and know that most existing videos suck too badly to be repurposed.
But if you’ve found success with the fundamentals of the Dollar a Day strategy, I’m pretty sure you’ll find success on TikTok– when you repurpose videos, extend your conversion tracking/remarketing, and start testing at $10/day.
There’s no better time to implement or refine your Dollar-a-Day process across Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all social networks. We are seeing a growing convergence on the data and ads side of social platforms– since they are all dependent upon the same optimization algorithm that balances user experience with ad monetization.
Remember this each time you see a breathless pitch on how you need to jump on TikTok ASAP– to buy their secret before you forever miss the boat.
