Stop Wasting Money on Ads That Don’t Work – Here is How to Create TikTok Ads That Convert
So you want to create TikTok ads that convert. Well, you are in the right place! In this blog, we are going to go over tools that you can use to find inspiration to create ads, proven frameworks that you can go through and implement, and finally, best practices for creating TikTok ads. By the end of this article, you will have everything you need to start creating high-converting TikTok ads no matter what your budget, niche, or experience is. If you do not already have a TikTok ads account created, we have partnered with TikTok to offer a limited-time deal for all our readers, which you can access via this link.
Before jumping into what works for TikTok ads, let us first quickly address the things that do not work.
1. Copy-Pasting Ads from Other Platforms into TikTok
Copy-pasting your Facebook ad into TikTok will result in wrong formatting, lettering being cut off, and it will very much look like an ad. People on TikTok are used to seeing TikToks, so the ads that really convert often look like TikToks. That is a theme that you’re going to see consistently throughout this article.
2. Not Using the Vertical Format
Avoid having black bars on the top and bottom of your ads simply by using the vertical video format recommended for TikTok. Doing otherwise will result in lower conversion rates. If your ad does not look native to the platform, people will scroll right past it.
3. Over-Produced Videos that Look Like Commercials
Fancy texts, commercially-edited images and any additions that do not look native to the platform will certainly not yield the same results or conversions.
4. Using Only Images
TikTok is a video platform. If you just take images of your products and just scroll them through, you will not see great results.
Those are the four common things to avoid when it comes to TikTok ads. We will be going over a couple more throughout this article as well.
How to Create TikTok Ads That Work
This may sound really simple, but the one thing to always remember when it comes to TikTok ads is that there are three parts to a TikTok ad:
- The Hook: This is arguably the most important part of the ad. If people are not engaged enough to continue watching your video, then nothing else matters.
- The Information: This is the meat of the product. When creating information about the product, keep in mind that your information should fall into three buckets. Your information about your product or service should either be in the form of entertainment, education, or inspiration. Therefore, ensure you have one if not all three of these elements when it comes to the actual product information. Ask yourself, is this video entertaining, educational, or inspirational? Having all three is a super bonus.
- The Call-To-Action (CTA): We will cover further details on how important the CTA is in the course of this article.
These three parts form the basic framework for your TikTok ad.
Let’s go over a few hooks that you can use in your TikTok ads:
A. Here is a simple hack to help you X:
This is a very calm common hook. An example of its application includes, ‘Here is a simple hack to help you organize your tank tops’ or ‘Here’s a simple hack on how to clean your car”. This can be used on pretty much any niche, service, or product out there.
B. Do you have a problem with X? Here is a solution:
This one is a very good formula to follow. For instance, you can have a video with the hook, ‘Do you have a problem with getting curly hair? Use surf spray.’ You can then show the after-result with curly hair.
C. Don’t Buy This, Buy This Instead:
This hook is very native to TikTok and is somewhat of a trend. For instance, you can tell users, ‘Don’t buy this microphone, buy this microphone instead’ then expound on the XYZ reasons after comparing the two. This is very heavy education play and is super effective for bringing in conversions in sales.
D. Things That TikTok Made Me Buy:
This hook is also very native to TikTok, hence its title. You can run a search in your TikTok search bar to see more examples of similar videos with this hook. If you go through the analytics while watching the videos with this hook, you will see right from the beginning that they have nice bold captions that look native to the platform. They start with the hook and proceed to explain what they like about the product while unpackaging and showing the product.
The click-through rate will be high, the conversion rate and clicks will be at the top of TikTok ads and the people that watch all the way through will be among the top percentages of TikTok ads. This shows that it is indeed a super effective way to sell and market your product.
E. 5 Reasons You Need X:
This is an excellent strategy you can test along with the previous hook. Take the exact same product and create a video with the hook ‘Things That TikTok Made Me Buy’ then create another video with the hook ‘Five Reasons You Need X Product’. Add a powerful CTA and lots of text inside in form of captions so that your viewers can have an idea of what is going on even when the video is on mute. Compare the CTR, the clicks, and the conversions to determine which hook generates the best results in your niche.
F. Foreshadowing something that is going to happen to Build Curiosity:
This one is a super interesting strategy to go through and implement. It can be tough to pull off but when it does work, it works really well. For instance, using the hook, ‘I tried it and it worked’ brings in an element of foreshadowing and builds a lot of curiosity among your viewers, resulting in impressive CTRs and conversions. If you can go through and pull off a strategy like this, it is super effective.
G. Anything That Builds an Anticipation of Human Reaction:
This last hook is similar to the one before. Humans love to watch other humans react to things. It is just in our nature, for whatever reason, and this works well if you can format it into an ad. If the primary objective of your ad is to get reach and have people watch your ad through to the end, then this strategy is the effective choice for you.
In case these weren’t enough examples for you, here is a list of another 20 hooks that you can use in your specific videos.
Tools for Finding Inspiration for your TikTok Ads
The examples we just went over were just a few inspirations that you can draw for your TikTok ad. You need to arm yourself with the following tools to help you find these trending videos:
1. The TikTok Creative Center:
This platform allows you to explore the top ads on TikTok. You can certify brand products, keywords, or different trending searches. Furthermore, you can filter your search by industry, state objectives, likes and duration, within the platform.
You can then see the data when you click on the ‘View Top Ad’ button on the video. This will direct you to a view where you can see the click-through rate of these ads, the conversion rates, clicks, conversions, and remain. Therefore, this is a super powerful tool for finding inspiration for TikTok ads and learning what works.
2. Search Hashtags or Keywords on TikTok Itself:
This is another great way to find inspiration for your TikTok ads. Simply go to the search bar and type the product you are selling. TikTok will show you some of the top videos in your niche. You can go through and watch the content for inspiration, whether or not they are ads. Learn what works and see if you can convert those ideas into ads.
You can also click the filters icon next to the search bar to sort the results by date posted, relevance, or by most liked. Oftentimes, if you want to find the most current trending content in your industry or niche from which you could create a TikTok ad, just filter content for the same week and then opt for the most liked videos. Chances are that if you were to take one of those videos and format it in an ad-type way for your product or service, it would probably work out very well.
3. TikTok Creative Solution Finder:
This is a pretty awesome tool that allows you to take a little quiz to understand what creative direction you should go with your TikTok ad. Once you take the quiz, it will walk you through a ton of different resources that will help you find your inspiration for your TikTok ads.
The 2 Ways of Making TikTok Ads
Having discussed various ways for finding inspiration for TikTok ads, we can now cover how exactly to make TikTok ads. There are two main ways:
1. Using Creators to Make Your TikTok Ads:
If you opt to use creators for your ads, here are a few tools for finding the right creators:
- The TikTok Marketplace: The TikTok Marketplace allows you to search for specific creators by their engagement rates, country, or amount of followers, and reach out to them. Therefore, it is a great resource if you want to find creators very fast.
- TikTok Spark Ads: This tool essentially allows creators to give you an authorization code that then allows you to run their post as an ad for your product or service.
Thus, this is another super effective way to run TikTok ads. If you aren’t sure how to set up Spark Ads or you want to learn more about the process, check out our YouTube Video with a full step-by-step tutorial on that
2. Creating Your Own Ad:
The second option is to go through and make your own TikTok ads. A few different resources for this is CapCut and Creative Center Audio Library.
CapCut is TikTok’s editing software. What we like most about this is that they have both a mobile and a desktop app. It also has a text feature that allows you to instantly auto-add captions quickly. It automatically generates the captions and places them onto the video. However, the generated captions may be kind of small and may blend in with the background. Simply click on the captions, go over to the system, and find a bolder font and color. You can also change the font size. CapCut also has lots of different templates that you can use for editing your videos a lot faster, as well as an audio library for adding background music and sound effects.
Speaking of Music, if you are running TikTok ads, you will need to make sure that the music is set for commercial use. A faster way to find commercial sounds is at the TikTok audio library. When using your desktop, you will see that for usages, you have the TikTok series and then TikTok commercial use. If the audio is for commercial use, you can use it for marketing, advertising, sponsorships, and endorsements.
Therefore, as long as you make sure that this TikTok Commercial Use is checked, all of the music shown should be free for commercial use.
If you are editing from your mobile app, when adding a sound to your TikTok video, click on the sound drop-down at the top and select commercial sounds. This will filter only music that is free for commercial use in your TikTok ads.
One final resource for best practices for your TikTok ads is the TikTok Creative Center. TikTok has compiled a lot of data on what ads work there are great insights to learn from.
For instance, in these insights, videos with high-quality resolution have a 312% lift in conversion, videos with a 9:16 aspect ratio full-screen have a 91% lift, a video duration of anywhere from 21 to 34 seconds results in a 280% lift in conversions, and a vertically oriented format gets a 40% higher lift in impressions. Adding a clear Call to Action (CTA) at the end indicates a 152% lift in conversions.
Here are a few additional Golden Nuggets as well. Our rule of thumb for when you are creating TikToks is to try to cut the video so that every three seconds the user is seeing something new to keep them engaged. Therefore, videos with over 5 scenes result in a 171% lift in conversion.
For e-commerce, adding captions and displaying a written CTA results in an 80% lift in conversion, while adding a real voiceover CTA results in an 87% lift in conversion rate.
Be sure to check out the limited-time deal for a TikTok Ads Account.