In this article you will learn what tools will be useful for musicians to promote their music on TikTok. We will also disclose the mechanism which is the most accessible – In-feed Native Video. In-feed Native Video is an advertising clip which is embedded directly in the feed recommendations of other TikTok users.
What Is An In-Feed Native Video?
TikTok video has various tools to promote music on TikTok, or build your brand, one of which is In-feed Native Video. It’s a pop-up ad in the users’ feed that’s between 5 and 60 seconds long and, at first glance, looks like another TikTok in the recommendation feed (or “river”). Mimicry is important here: make such videos in such a way that they cannot be immediately distinguished from the native content of other users.
The ideal timing for a clip is 9 to 16 seconds. This is enough time for the service user to decide if the content has caught his or her attention or if he or she can keep browsing. If the user may need more time to perceive the song you are advertising, it is worth increasing the timing of the clip to a minute. Remember, the video should include the catchiest part of your song.
Important Things To Know Before Launching In-feed Native Video
Make sure the track you’re promoting is properly uploaded to TikTok. Your publisher and distributor can help you with this, and make sure it’s royalty free music. Notify the label or site in advance of the exact segment of your song that you need to upload, so that when you continue to use the service, the clips will not sound separately downloaded tracks (the platform calls them “original audio”), but precisely the licensed track – from the service’s catalog. In this case, videos, challenges, and other user activity using your music will be counted as a stream of the official release.
In some countries, artists are already making money from music on TikTok, including in the United States and the CIS. If a user has posted a video and taken your track from the app’s official catalog, you can earn from 3 to 30 cents per clip. Most likely a similar option will appear in all regions of the world, and taking into account the current vector of the platform’s development, we can assume that soon TikTok will turn into a semblance of a full-fledged streaming service.
How To Launch In-feed Native Video?
In-feed Native Video is launched through the TikTok Ads advertising account. And although this feature is new, the service already demonstrates great coverage and conversion rates compared to other social networks. To launch an advertising campaign in TikTok, there are a few rules to follow:
1. Be sure to verify the account
To get access to the TikTok Ads cabinet, the musician who runs the ads must verify his account. You need to specify that you do not work with alcohol or tobacco brands and other banned products in TikTok – the platform has rather strict rules on this point. A recommendation from an approved user will help increase the chances of verification of your account.
The service is more receptive to advertisers who promote TikTok systematically – PR agents, taggers, and advertising agency employees. This provides the service with a constant flow of content from trusted partners and makes it easier to moderate ads. The ideal option for a musician would be to run a promo through a friendly agency.
2. Deposit a minimum of $50 in your account
According to the rules of the service, this is the minimum amount spent per day on advertising. With $50 on the account, a musician can provide a continuous display of advertisements in TikTok. This amount is spent not on each individual video, but on the promotion of the entire project. A whole series of videos with one theme can be created and promoted as part of a campaign, while an individual video may require a minimum of $20 a day. Thus, you can run more than two ads simultaneously with different targeting settings, allowing you to achieve better results.
The peak of the campaign, when the algorithm picks up the best response and broadcasts your ad to the greatest number of relevant contacts, occurs on the fifth or sixth day of its operation. This means that advertising campaigns launched for $300 or more are more effective. If we talk about coverage, CPC (price per click) and CPM (price per 1000 impressions), now they are not comparable with other social networks and with the right settings can be up to 0.0005 cents per view.
Despite these advantages, TikTok Ads is still in the development stage and limits the territorial coverage of your ads quite a bit. Commercials can only be shown in specific regions suggested by the system. It is also important to understand that through TikTok Ads the user can not advertise himself, but only his product – an album, merch or, for example, a link to Patreon. Advertising in TikTok is aimed at selling a product, not at developing a personal brand.
How does it work?
TikTok’s algorithm works on the principle of an inverted pyramid. First, your content is shared with your friends and friends of friends. The neural network then examines the growth and engagement rate of your videos, and examines your content for illegal topics such as alcohol, violence, and drug promotion. If the video has proven itself and has been well received by the grassroots, TikTok lifts it up in prominence and shows it to a wider audience.
In that sense, TikTok is as good now as Spotify was in the early years, when it pulled “Despacito” from the depths of the Venezuelan charts and gradually turned it into a major world hit.
This transparency of TikTok’s algorithms is likely to be temporary. It is very likely that big brands and major labels will come to the platform, which will actively promote artists, songs and Challenges. But for now, TikTok, like any promising young project, gives the green light to talented young artists.
Other Advertising Tools In TikTok
- Hashtag Challenge – a separate banner in the search section with your hashtag for the Challenge. This tool is among the most effective, hashtags help users find content, unite in communities and form trends. The only downside to this method is its price. In the case of the Hashtag Challenge, a six-day promotional campaign would cost $150,000, which usually only big brands can afford.
- Brand Takeover is a three-second banner or short video of up to 5 seconds that is shown full screen immediately after you open TikTok. Thanks to the full screen mode and the ability to select your target audience, this method is also considered quite effective, but with Brand Takeover, your ads are only shown to the user once a day. The price of this product is $50,000 per day.
- Top View is an ad that pops up when you sign in to the app. It resembles Brand Takeover in terms of the mechanism and results, but its timing is extended to one minute. Click-through rates are about 18%, and such a banner costs from $60,000 per day.
- Various branded effects, stickers, and masks (similar tools you may have seen on Instagram and Snapchat). They range in price from $80,000 to $120,000. This type of advertising seems less effective because it doesn’t involve your ads appearing in the feed, but it’s important to emphasize that about 64% of ticktockers use masks and effects.
- Direct connection to Tiktokers. You don’t have to build your brand in TikTok from scratch – instead you can integrate into the content of famous bloggers. However, frontal advertising in such a case will be ineffective, so you’ll have to get creative. You can, for example, use product placement – place a poster of your album cover in the background of the video. It is important to choose ticktockers with an audience close to you. The price for such promotion will vary greatly depending on the popularity of the blogger you are partnering with.
Keeping in mind the triviality of head-on promotion, it’s important not to overdo it with subtlety. A promo in which a ticktocker reads shorthand while holding a can of Pepsi on the table can be effective, but such product placement will only give results to well known brands.
All of these are just a small part of the ways of advertising interaction in TikTok. To use them, it is advisable to enlist the support of a professional marketer and work with statistics that will help understand the growth rate of the service, its audience and the quality of the required content.
Such data, for example, can be found at the agency of Influence Marketing statistic report. Be that as it may, it is high time to discard preconceptions about TikTok and start using it as an effective tool for promoting music releases: now this social network can offer much more than publishing cats with false human lips and so on.
[See related post: Why Having TikTok Followers Is Important To Your Business?]
[Images – Main Photo by Thibault Trillet from Pexels; Megafone Photo by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels; other images from their respective websites and/or social platforms]
Acquiring a wealth of experience in writing articles on trends and prospects for the development of the game industry in the world I I’ve found myself as a Freelance Journalist. I am writing now about blockchain and cryptocurrencies trends, sometimes covering importance of bitcoin for various other industries.