Felt like cheating, how I got 50k plays on this crappy tiktok

Felt like cheating, how I got 50k plays on this crappy tiktok

Ok, so I'm not a Tiktok genius.  I'm a marketer.

My approach to any marketing channel is to test it rigorously scientifically and then share my results with others.  

A lot of what you seen on Tiktok by the self proclaimed Tiktok geniuses is click bait, headline trend stuff that is not designed to help you, it is designed to entice you.  So the key lesson of this post is that if you want to be successful on any channel, including Tiktok, then you need to take any advice given on the channel with a grain of salt and publish your own content with the primary goal of testing.

My Tiktok Experiment

So recently I decided to test Tiktok with a shiny new profile (@  ) and I did using this method;

  1. Research - spend a few days just browsing and searching for accounts that served my target audience.  I also researched on YouTube and on websites.
  2. Planning - based on my existing content plan, I created a Tiktok specific plan for 16 posts which were designed to help me understand the following questions that I had (which post types got the most organic reach?, which got the most engagement? and which got the most follows?)
  3. Execution - based on my plan I simply posted one, to two posts per day and watched what happened.  During this time I also did a bit of engagement on other accounts by liking, following and commenting in thoughtful and positive ways.

Early Results

So very quickly, I found that my results fell into three distinct categories;

  1. Low engagement, 200 plays
  2. Moderate engagement (5-20 likes), 200 plays
  3. Higher engagement (30+ likes +some comments), 1000+ plays


The interesting part of this was that what I was hearing from a lot of 'experts' about using trending sounds, trending tags and trending topics was simply not making any impact at all.

I took these results and did some more searching and found that my results were pretty normal since the most recent algo update. There was event a '200jail' term used to describe this situation.

Phase 2 - Analyze results and add money

So my default approach to social media is to do an early phase of testing and then to try another test involving sponsored posts. This is something that I strongly recommend that you do - even if you only have a small budget.

(if you are unsure about spending any money on Ads, definitely sign up for my mailing list as I have an upcoming article that digs deep into understanding the return on investment of social ads versus the time that you spend creating 'viral content' - I think you'll be shocked).

So what I did next was to quickly set up a Tiktok Ads account at https://ads.tiktok.com/ and then created a campaign and ad group (which allowed me to target my ideal customer a bit more) and then gave a chosen post that had received only 214 plays a $100 NZD budget.

That is it - nothing too complicated, no online courses required to get this far.

I should note that, for this new brand and account, I'm looking for awareness and not leads right now so I chose to sponsor a post that clearly carried over my key talking point ("Stu is the Shoestring Marketer and he's starting a podcast).

If you looke at the results over just 8 days above you'll see that Tiktok gave me a huge boost of reach which resulted in 51,000 plays for only $144.31.  The reason why it is over my original budget is that I, like any good marketer, have decided to keep investing in the ad up to a budget of $300.

Why I chose to double my budget

This new budget is less than two hours of my charge out rate to clients and if I look at all of my other posts combined, they took around four hours to plan and create and they have accumulated a total of less than 20,000 plays. 
 

  • From an awareness perspective - the money that I have spent on Ads more than doubles the ROI of my organic efforts.
  • From a targeting perspective, the individuals who see my Ads are more likely to be people who I want to listen to my podcast, purchase my book and attend a courses than if I were using trends, dancing and trending music to gain deeper reach.
  • From an authoritiveness perspective, having a pinned post on my brand new Tiktok page that has more than 50K views gives a subliminal boost to those who look at my page and ask themself if I'm 'qualified' enough to follow.
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So What Next?

I started this article by stating that I'm not Tiktok expert but I'm enjoying learning how to create brand awareness on the platform and understanding the nuances of this platform versus others.

I feel like my first test was successful so my next testing phase is going to tackle the following challenges;

a)  How do I increase the volume of engagement?

b)  How do I get users from Tiktok, to jump over to my website?

c) How do I get those website visitors from Tiktok to join my email list?

For each of these key questions, I'll be writing a Tiktok specific article and podcast just like this one so make sure that you are on my mailing list or subscribed to the pod.