Social media has been tough sledding as of late. Engagement on “The Big Three” — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — has come to a screeching halt while TikTok seems to be the one major driver of engagement among platforms. TikTok is still very much in the learning stages, though, and many of us are trial-and-erroring our way through content for the platform.

I recently shifted a third of my budget towards TikTok advertising, boosting both pre-existing and new posts, and netted big, big results in a short amount of time.

With this ‌client, our main focus is building an audience on social media. That will eventually lead to site traffic and lead generation, but the primary focus is growth. Growth on TikTok almost relies on “going viral” and hoping one of your videos blows up to 10K, 50K or 100K views in order to have any significant type of impact on followers and engagement. That can be quite the challenge to find the secret sauce in what makes one video pop and another flop.

As new and fresh as the platform is, TikTok advertising is uncharted waters for many of us and there’s much to be learned in terms of what works, what doesn’t and how to maximize success on varying budgets. What I did to help boost engagement and impressions was simple: Boost some of our best-performing posts from the past while also putting resources behind any new content we shared. I found that a little bit goes a long, long way!

83K views, 96K views, 159K, 221K!! We had good content all along, but organic reach just wasn’t quite taking off like we had hoped. Sprinkle in some paid, and posts started erupting. Our audience grew by 10 percent, profile views spiked, shares shot through the roof. The account was finally gaining some traction on the platform with very little monetary resources behind it.

Now, CPC and conversion numbers look grim on the surface. But remember, none of our paid ads were geared towards driving people to a site or lead generation (yet). No links or landing pages were included in any of our paid ads. The motivation was strictly audience growth and awareness. We certainly didn’t have an end goal in terms of registrations, purchases or form fill outs (yet).

Now that I know a bit more about TikTok advertising as a whole and the ROI it can produce, the focus can shift to those other metrics. I can spend the next few months benefitting from the overall awareness of the account, and use future ads that are more geared towards linking back to our site, driving leads and purchasing behaviors.

Continue to push the envelope of digital media and marketing with IOI Ventures today!