Dropshipping on TikTok: Tips and Tricks for Promotion in 2024

When you decide to use an online advertising platform, what comes first is having a look if the audience of the platform aligns with the audience you are planning on targeting. In the case of TikTok, it is only a myth that most of its audience is aged between 16 and 25. Although the demographic on the app is skewed towards the younger generations, actually, based on statistics, 63% of TikTok’s audience is below 29. The remaining 27% of people belong to earlier generations. For this reason, you will surely find your target audience’s demographic on the platform regardless of the type of products you are dropshipping.

Video content is growing in popularity with 85% of businesses using this type of advertising in 2020. Moreover, 92% of advertisers claim that video content is a key part of their overall marketing strategy. There are many types of video content that are being produced by companies, such as explainer videos (72%), presentations (49%), testimonials (48%), and sales videos (42%). It is important that you find your voice and video style so you can attract your target audience the best. This will help you be among those video marketers (80%) that claim that video advertising directly helped with their sales.

When you are new to the dropshipping business, you would want to make sure that every advertising dollar you spend helps you generate leads and reach your advertising goals. As TikTok ads are relatively new and fewer companies use them, in comparison with Instagram and Facebook, you can make more of the same amount invested. An experiment run by Jungletopp found that, although Facebook and Instagram offer you a more sophisticated advertising solution, TikTop ads are cheaper and more effective to run. Moreover, they end up with better engagement and click-through results.

Same as Instagram, TikTok is also a great platform for dropshipping business promotion because it is concentrated on engaging its users visually. These types of visual content not only give brands the opportunity to be highly creative with their content but also allow them to partner up with influencers and run campaigns by product placement. According to statistics, there were over 3.1 million TikTok influencers in 2020 who had more than 1000 followers on their accounts. The leading country, in terms of the number of influencers on TikTok, is clearly the United States with 12.7% of all influencers, but India, Turkey, and Russia are not too far behind either. This means that you are likely to find an influencer that can promote your dropshipping products to your target audience through TikTok at a reasonable cost.

You might be amazed by the great power of advertising on TikTok, but you also have to consider your advertising budget as well when thinking about starting a campaign on the platform. Probably the only drawback of using TikTok for dropshipping business promotion is the required minimum spend daily limit that the platform sets for advertisers. To be able to advertise on TikTok, the minimum budget you need to have at a campaign level is 500 USD, while on an ad group level it is 50 USD on a daily basis. This, unfortunately, can be out of budget for some smaller businesses or those who do not have an extensive advertising budget available. However, if you have the means, TikTok is definitely a platform to consider and master before your competitors do.

If you decide to use TikTok for dropshipping business promotion, you have to be familiar with the type of ads you can run on the platform to find the one that best suits your brand. You can pick and mix from the four main types of ads listed below and test which one serves you the most.

The hashtag challenge is definitely the ad type that is the most typical for TikTok. It allows the creator to set up a dance, lipsync, or comedy challenge under a hashtag. This way, you can enable all users to include the original music or video in various ways in their own content and partake in the challenge. This package also includes Brand Takeover and One day ads and can cost up to 130,000 USD on a daily basis.

This type of advertisement allows brands to take over the screen for a couple of seconds when the TikTok app is opened on users’ phones. The daily cost of this type of ad is 53 000 USD, and it only allows one specific advertiser to market on that given day. This means that all of the users that will open the app on that certain day will see that particular advertisement.

These types of videos will show up on the for you page of your targeted audience, among the other content that they are consuming. In-feed videos also have two options that you can choose from. The first is the One Day Max Native Video that is restricted for 15 seconds and is shown in feeds for one day only. This type of in-feed video costs 25,000 USD for 3.6 million impressions. The second type is the Brand Premium Video which also costs the same amount, but the video is shown in a different manner. With this, your video will appear among the first 130 in-feed videos a user is watching on the app.

Lastly, brands also have the opportunity to create their own AR effects on TikTok that are usually 2D animated effects and are triggered by the user’s hand gestures or movements. TikTok’s in-house design team creates this content for the best results and can cost up to 45 000 USD each.

To start with, you will need to have a TikTok account for your business that you can create on the TikTok for business platform. After logging in, you have an option to set up a campaign based on the objectives you have set out for yourself. The first thing you will have to decide is what action you want your ad to trigger in the viewers, which can be chosen from a list of app downloads, conversion, traffic, catalog sales, and video views. After you have this outlined, you must set the name of the campaign and the budget. Your budget should be set to the maximum amount you are willing to spend on your campaign, as it will automatically run until this budget is reached.

When you have set up these top-line characteristics of your campaign, you can move forward to the ad group level where you can create ad groups and set different characteristics. For each ad group, you can set up metrics such as the amount of the total budget allocated to that specific ad group, its targeted audience, schedule, and delivery type. You also have to set up the ad details that include the displayed name and the profile image. For these, it is highly recommended that you use your brand logo and name, so your campaign is closely associated with your business.

During the last steps, you can also set up the creative type and upload the creative content as well. You can choose from two options when it comes to creative content. You can either upload a single image or a single video that will serve as the content of your ad. After you have uploaded your content, you can add a cover and enter a text for your ad. This can help you to further engage your target market and get your message through even more effectively. Also, remember to set up a Call to Action (CTA), so your audience knows what your goal is with the ad and what they need to do to engage with your brand.

When it comes to dropshipping on TikTok, the quality of the creative content you produce is even more important than in the case of any other digital and social platform. In order to succeed on TikTok, you have to ensure that you are producing top-notch video material both in terms of video quality and narrative. For this reason, make sure to set aside the time required and also think about the equipment that would be needed, otherwise, your marketing dollars will only be wasted.

After you launch your first TikTok campaign, it is time to analyze the data to see how well your ads performed. Set out the key metrics that are most relevant and important to your business, and focus on those as you can not possibly follow all metrics and you do not even have to. The most popular metrics to measure are the Click-through rate, Cost per click (CPC), and the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). When you have the metrics you want to track, you can build a report for each campaign or ad group and analyze which did the best. This approach will help you understand what type of content works the best for your target audience and make it easier for you to review and adjust your TikTok advertising strategy accordingly in the future.

Check out: TikTok ad examples

In order to successfully utilize TikTok for dropshipping and promoting your store, it is important to be able to stand out from the crowd and create better content than your competitors. You can champion this platform with:

• Using high resolution and clear videos where bright and contrasting colors are dominating;
• Creating content that truly resonates with your audience and showing your products in use to make your videos interesting;
• Inserting engaging TikTok bio to show customers what your store is about;
• Using short captions on your videos with the most important information as TikTok is a high-paced platform and long captions can end up unread;
• Centering your content to the middle of your screen, so all of the important details can be seen without something covering them;
• Keeping your videos vertical as they tend to perform better than square ones on this platform;
• Picking trendy music for your video;
• Keeping your ad brief and short in order to make sure it is watched from the beginning to the end;
• Keeping your eyes out for trends is also crucial to see what type of content is doing the best.

If you are familiar with running social media campaigns, it will come easy for you to learn how TikTok works and you will be able to set up campaigns much faster. As advertising and dropshipping on TikTok is a relatively new solution, it has the power to give you that competitive edge over your competitors that you wish to gain. Championing TikTok dropshipping and creating engaging videos will bring your products closer to your potential target audience across the globe. This will, of course, result in a whole new way of acquiring revenue and growing your business even further.