TikTok Rolls Out Quick ‘Promote’ Ad Option to All Business Accounts

After testing it out with selected profiles over the past few months, TikTok is now rolling out its Boost-like ‘Promote’ option to all business users.

As per TikTok:

“Starting this month, Promote is available to help businesses reach more people and grow their community with their TikTok videos. With Promote, you can turn any organic TikTok video into an ad, directly within the app. You can start reaching new audiences, build a following, and drive traffic to your business website.”

The option, as noted, is similar to Facebook’s Boost button, which enables you to amplify your posts by quickly putting together an ad campaign.

When the option is available on your profile, you’ll be able to launch a quick promotion by:

1. Selecting the video that you want to promote – You can choose any of your own TikTok videos to promote. We suggest starting with one of your best-performing organic videos to reach more people with your most popular content.

2. Setting up your promotion – Choose a goal for your campaign (more views, website visits, or follows), set a budget and length of time to run the promotion, and select the audience you want to reach with your video.

3. Watch your numbers grow – After your promotion is approved, you can check in to see how your video is performing and how many new people are learning about your business! 

You’ll be able to access TikTok’s Promote option via the fire icon on each video, through TikTok’s Creator Tools menu, or via Business Suite.

The Promote process enables you to choose from three objectives:

• More video views – This helps get more people to watch your video
• More website visits – This guides more people to your website.
• More followers – This helps you gain more followers.

If you choose ‘More website visits’, you’ll then be asked to enter your website URL and choose an action button for your website (e.g. ‘Learn More’, ‘Shop Now’, or ‘Sign Up’).

In terms of targeting, you can either choose ‘Automatic’, meaning TikTok will display your promoted clip to people that it determines will likely be interested, or ‘Custom’, through which you can define the targeting specifics (gender, age, interests) for yourself.

It’s also worth noting that Promote is only available for public clips that don’t use copyright-protected music. So if you were looking to jump on a trend related to a popular track, you won’t be able to amplify that clip.

Promoted clips will appear in targeted user For You feeds with a ‘Promoted’ label, signifying them as part of paid outreach.

So how effective is it? Well, no one knows for sure as yet, but many brands have been seeing good results with TikTok campaigns in general, and it could be a good option for quickly amplifying your top-performing clips. In the past, some marketing advisers have recommended against using Facebook’s Boost option because the targeting tools are more limited, and if you’re going to run a campaign, you should utilize all of the available options with a proper ad campaign.

But maybe TikTok’s Promote tools will be different, and produce different results – and TikTok’s algorithm is particularly good at showing people more of what they want to see. Maybe that will also make its automatic ad targeting option more effective in this respect – but really, at this stage, it comes down to experimentation and seeing what results you might get from the options.

It’s another consideration for your approach, and with the holiday season fast approaching, it may be worth a test.

You can learn more about TikTok Promote here.