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Get Your Social Ads Tik-ing

Chelsea Owens

Social Ads Manager, Oozle Media

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Like Chris said, I’ve been with Oozle for about two and a half years now, and I’ve loved it. I’m super excited to be joining my fellow Oozlers for The Summit. Earlier, Steph talked a little bit about organic marketing strategies on TikTok, but I’m here to talk a little bit more about that, but I’m going to talk about the paid TikTok advertising.

So let’s hop into it. Let’s just get right to it and get your social ad strategy tik-ing.

What Is the Marketing Funnel?

All right. So we all know the marketing funnel, but I just wanted to review it before we get started. The funnel is broken down into three parts as we know.

Marketing Funnel

We have the top of the funnel or awareness phase. This is where we’re introducing ourselves to our new friends. The second mid funnel or traffic campaigns, this is where we’re inviting users to learn more about us, get to know us a little better, and create some relationships. Lastly, at the bottom of the funnel, we have our conversions campaign. We’re asking our new friends to take actions at this point, whether that’s our business needs to be generating sales, collecting leads, downloading apps, whatever it is your objective is. Right?

So, now I’ve come to realize that each social ads platform can be placed in different parts of the funnel, but we’ll lean into platforms that Oozle specifically focuses on.

Social Media Ad Platforms

So, the first is Facebook and Instagram. As we all know, they’ve proven to be very effective at all levels of the funnel, reach, traffic, and conversions.

Next is Snapchat. Snapchat is a platform for more communication and less for entertainment. So, this is putting users into the mindset that it’s okay to be interrupted. Snapchat ads reach audiences Facebook and Instagram might not be able to, and users are more willing to check out a website from this app and have potential of being a lead, which is super cool.

Lastly, TikTok, who’s the newborn baby of the social media world. They’ve proven to excel in the awareness phase of the funnel or the top of the funnel. However, because TikTok is a platform built for more entertainment and less for communication, users are less willing to leave the platform from an ad.

That being said, you can still get conversions on TikTok, even though the platform might be more optimized or oriented towards awareness. So, as we go through this presentation, I would love for you all to keep in mind that TikTok is still super new, and they kind of lack the amount of data that allow people to crush their advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

Let’s Talk TikTok

So let’s get into more of TikTok, right? Let’s talk TikTok. I’ve heard time and time again that TikTok is an app for the youth who like to dance to popular music. Though that’s not a lie, I think we all have an uncle or parent or grandparent who are always scrolling on their phones on TikTok. I know I catch my dad on TikTok all the time.

TikTok also isn’t just an app for dancing and music, though. It’s a platform for creating, sharing, and discovering short videos, things like cooking, gardening, styling, tutorials, and so much more. So my point is you can reach just about any type of person on this platform.

TikTok was created for video scrolling. I know we all catch ourselves two to five hours later, it’s 2:00 AM, we’re laying in our beds, and we’re still scrolling through videos. We scroll because something’s catching our eye or something’s making us laugh or we hear a trending song that we really like, whatever the case might be. And guess what? You can use this to your business’s advantage.

Why Should Schools Advertise on TikTok?

So, why should we advertise on TikTok? What are the benefits of paid advertising on this platform, and how can I get my business to connect with users without coming off too much like a used car salesman, right? So I have four points for you.

  1. You’ll have a higher chance that more people will see your post rather than just praying to the TikTok algorithm that it goes viral
  2. You get more audience targeting control. You’re able to send your ads and your posts to your specified target area and demographic, rather than just any user that’s on the platform already.
  3. Your business might lack the amount of time or resources to produce organic content on a weekly or even day basis. I know that’s a huge pain point for a lot of you guys.
  4. Lastly, you have the power to take control of 100% of the mobile screen space. This is still somewhat of a novelty in the digital ad world.

I mean, we don’t really see this concept on YouTube because it’s a horizontal screen and Google ads because it’s all text. Facebook and Instagram feeds, you still don’t really get that too much as well. But the only placement comparably similar are stories and Instagram Reels, but even then, those placements are only single options within many placements within those platforms.

But TikTok is always in the vertical full format.

Why advertise on TikTok?

TikTok’s Ad Campaigns Objectives

Just like other social ad platforms, TikTok provides a variety of ad campaign objectives. And a lot of them will look super familiar to you, as they’re the same objectives used on other ad platforms.

Since TikTok ad platform is so new, they’ve had the advantage of researching these platforms, these other ad platforms, such as Facebook, and they’re modeling theirs just as much as they can to those other platforms to ease the learning phases for us. Very nice of them, right?

So looking ahead, I want to focus on just three of these objectives that are probably the most prominent for you beauty schools.

Reach Campaigns

The first one is the reach campaign. The reach objective is to allow you to advertise to the largest audience possible but staying within your target demographic.

Reach ads will expand your audience to new consumers that you wouldn’t be able to reach through other platforms. This is putting yourself in front of as many people as possible.

Influencer Marketing Hub provides these two facts:

  1. TikTok users spend more than 850 minutes per month on the app.
  2. As of January of this year, TikTok now has 1 billion monthly active users.

And we know that number will only increase from there. It probably already has, honestly.

Reach

So on the right side of this slide, you’ll see a TikTok ad feature called Spark Ads. And if you’ve dipped your toes into the platform at all, you might have heard about this. TikTok defines Spark Ads as a native ad platform that enables you to leverage organic TikTok posts and their features in your advertising.

Just like Facebook and Instagram, you’re pretty much boosting or promoting your organic content through the ads platform. However, unlike these platforms, TikTok, their Spark Ads, they allow you to not only boost your own content, but other TikTok content made by other users, obviously with their authorization. You have to get permission. But this is huge when it comes to influencer marketing, and we always talk about user-generated content. It’s going to make that that much easier for you.

Traffic Campaigns

The next objective is the traffic campaign. Interestingly enough, when people click on your profile from an ad you’ve sent out on TikTok, they won’t send the user to your profile. They’ll take the user straight to your website instead. And of course there’s always the call to action button provided on the ad that will take them there as well.

If you’re looking to get people to your website, a traffic campaign on TikTok is literally perfect for you. If you remember from our social ads funnel review before with a traffic objective, we’re simply inviting consumers to learn more about us and build that relationship with them. What can we do for them?

So, if we’re asking people to get to know us, they’ll think to check our profile, but instead they’re going to just go straight to the source. They’re going to go learn straight from our website.

Lead Generation

Lastly, let’s take a look at the new on platform lead generation form fill. This new objective will allow you to collect user information, only interrupting the user scrolling for a brief moment, and you’re not requiring them to visit your website. With pre-fill options on mobile devices, the objective couldn’t be more simple for you to collect that information that your business needs to grow. It’s going to help your admissions team, right?

TikTok allows you to create your lead form exactly how you want it. So however you have your lead forms on your landing pages, you can build it the same way. Include things like contact information, program interests, and information like that, and location.

But remember, simple is better. No one wants to spend too much time on filling out information if they could be watching funny videos instead. Okay.

I know this is more or less what you guys were wanting to see, some TikTok ad examples, but before we get started on watching videos, I’m going to make you wait a little bit longer.

Common TikTok Ad Questions for Businesses

What Kinds of Videos Should My Business Be Advertising?

I want to answer a few questions that you might be asking yourselves first. So our first question, what kind of videos should my business be advertising? Well, you can shoot for all sorts of video perspectives, things like TikTok video trends that you see on the platform, call to action videos, just asking users to simply enroll, educational videos, whatever you can think of.

I would recommend to you that you do a little research within the TikTok platform first, just to see what’s out there and what might be working for other people within your market space. See what your competitors are doing.

Who Creates the Video Ad Content?

Question number two, who creates this content? Anyone can create this content for you, from your students, to your educators, to your front desk people or even hiring an actual, dedicated social media specialist. They can all do this for you. And obviously, user-generated videos make content creation that much easier for you.

As Stephanie talked about in her presentation earlier, the best social media strategy is other people saying good things about you instead of you trying to promote yourself. So get on your students talking about your school, get on that user-generated content.

How Can I Get These Ads Done?

Question number three, our last question, how do I get these ads done? A lot of people will suggest to you taking an hour out of each of your day within the week to simply film any and all perspectives of your class. You can film things like in-class content or things that are going on in your salon, interacting with educators, the front desk, whatever you can think of, whatever’s going on in your school that day.

But I know we don’t all have this kind of time. So in my opinion, taking one to two hours in your week is actually plenty of time to collect that video. You can upload these videos to a folder, a Drive, the Cloud, whatever it is. And your editors, whoever they might be, now have this endless library that they can create TikToks from. This is a great idea as well if you’re using an agency to run your actual ads.

Examples of Good TikToks for Beauty Schools

Okay, we’re going to get into watching these videos. The first one is popular trends and sounds. You see a lot of dancing trends on TikTok or people using the same sound bites. So, this video’s going to show how these guys use a sound bite to their school’s perspective.

@tspadallas

They think they have it hard🙄 #cosmetology #redken #mannequin #tspa #MakeADogsDay #myfinALLYmoment

♬ original sound – Hayu

This one’s kind of fun. It’s showing the perspective of an interaction between a brand new cosmo student versus a student who’s getting ready to graduate. She’s on her way out. Okay.

Next one. I like to call these ones low-key promo videos. They’re using the POV trend that you see a lot on social media or the point-of-view trends. So, this one says, point of view, you find your best friend at cosmo school. This is kind of like a soft call to action, right? Like who wouldn’t want to make really good friends doing something that they love, right? Taking beauty classes together, having a good time, whatever it might be. So, let’s watch this.

@tspadallas

Tag your cosmo bestie #cosmostudent #tspadallas #CloroxMistChallenge #fypシ #blondebrunetteduo #redken #dressupday

♬ Hat Made Of Mistletoe – Cody Johnson

Kind of fun. Kind of cute. Right. And who knows who created this video? Right? These two girls could have been students. They could have been educators. They could have been the girls at your front desk. We don’t know, but it looks great.

All right, next one, student work. This is what we’re really looking for, right? We want to see what’s actually happening at your schools. We want people to know what goes on at beauty school, what it’s like. So this one is going to show a makeup day, right? So let’s look at that.

@izzzneice

The best days💄@thecoldestwater#thecoldestwater#fyp#foryou#makeup#paulmitchelltheschool#pmts#beautyschool#HotwireHotelGoals#cosmetologystudent#mua#pgh

♬ More Than Friends – Aidan Bissett

Awesome. I think these ones are so fun. Didn’t they look so beautiful? Obviously, this was a much longer video and if we’re going to run this on ads, we want it to be a little bit shorter. But this just gives you a little bit of inspiration and idea for when you start filming. All right.

Lastly, I want to talk about design ads on TikTok. If you’re looking to enter the TikTok ads market quickly, using already designed ads is a great way to get started. These ads might be something you’ve designed for other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram stories, and they’re already in the right aspect ratio. So why not use them?

So they’re promoting their start date, their upcoming start date. Obviously, this is an older ad, but it kind of pops out with the hot pink, right? It’s kind of fun. All right.

Measuring TikTok Ads

Last thing, we’re going to talk about measuring TikTok ads. So when you put together a social ads report for all your other platforms, what are the metrics you’re typically looking for? I’m kind of thinking we’re looking for impressions, clicks, conversions, cost per result, right?

TikTok ad performance

When we get into TikTok, not much changes there other than we’re going to want to include some more video view metrics. So things like average time video watched, percentage of video watched, how many video views am I getting, the frequency, etc. So you’ve probably heard that TikTok is pretty cheap compared to Facebook advertising. TikTok requires a $20 daily budget minimum. From there, your results can only get better as you increase your budget.

Word of Caution With TikTok Advertising

In the education space as we know in the beauty industry, it can be very niche in some areas, resulting in some higher costs. And this is not really a surprise to us as we probably have seen this on some other platforms, depending on where we’re at, right?

Again, because this advertising platform is still super new, there’s not a lot of data to show advertisers platform or industry benchmarks. Some articles on the internet will show numbers that might be what good performance metrics should look like. But unfortunately, we don’t really know where those numbers are coming from. Are they valid? Can we really trust them?

So as of right now with the platform being still super new, we want to measure our own business performance on TikTok. We want to measure against ourselves from month to month. And we want to improve our results by constantly asking ourselves, “How effective was my ad? How can I get a user to watch my video for longer? How can I get a user to watch again? How is my market changing and what do I need to do to adjust?”

And keep in mind, a lot of our results have to do with our creative. Honestly, most of our results have to do with our creative.

TikTok Ads Are Still New to the Market

And before I let you guys go, one last reminder, I know you’re sick of me saying this. TikTok ads are still so new. They’re about two years old. So that means they’re still developing and they’re constantly changing. But that shouldn’t stop you from entering into the platform.

TikTok ads are new to the market

Dip your toes into the platform now, before your competition gets in there and before the market space fills up. Get ahead of the competition. Get going now.

And that’s all I have for you guys. Thank you so much. If you’re not sure where to take your social ad strategy, or if you have questions about TikTok advertising, we have a short survey link we’ll post in the chat.

If you think it’s worth additional conversation, go ahead and put that in the notes. I’ve also provided my email on here. So if you’d ever like to get in contact with me, if you have questions, you want to chat, go ahead and send me an email. I’d love to talk with you. And that’s all I have.

Thank you.