How to Use TikTok Promote to Reach New Audiences

Want to grow your TikTok reach? Wondering how to boost your organic content?

In this article, you’ll discover how to use the TikTok Promote ad feature to amplify your content and reach more people.

What is TikTok Promote?

After months of testing, TikTok has released its new Promote feature, which allows you to promote your organic videos to reach new audiences. This is exciting news for anyone looking to find their target audience without their organic reach getting penalized or shadowbanned. TikTok may even reward those who hop on the new trend quickly.

Similar to Facebook Boost, TikTok Promote is a tool for advertising to people on the platform. It allows creators, businesses, and influencers of any kind to push posts out to a larger pool of consumers. This feature can help you grow your community on TikTok by connecting with more like-minded audiences in a cost-effective and straightforward way.

For this type of campaign, you can only promote public videos with original sound, or a sound specifically created for commercial purposes. (There are more than 100,000 free-to-use sounds available in the TikTok library.) The Promote feature isn’t available for videos containing copyrighted sounds.

Here’s how to set up a new video campaign to promote an organic video and analyze its performance.

1: Choose a Goal for Your TikTok Promote Video CampaignThe first step in creating a Promote video campaign is setting a specific goal based on your overarching business objectives. You have three options: more views, more website visits, or more followers.

More Views

If you’re trying to reach a larger audience on TikTok to get the word out about your business or offering, choose More Views as your goal when setting up your campaign.

This goal will get more people to watch your video, boosting your potential for higher engagement on your post and profile. If consumers like what they see, they’ll be more likely to engage with additional posts, follow you, and maybe even check out your website to learn more.

More Website Visits

Promote offers you an option to guide people straight to your website. If this is your goal, choose More Website Visits for your campaign. When setting up your ad, you’ll enter your website URL and select a call to action (CTA) button. CTA options include Shop Now, Learn More, Contact Us, and Sign Up, among others. This feature works similarly to Instagram’s swipe-up feature.

More Followers

If your main objective is to grow your TikTok following and community, choose More Followers. Increasing the size of your audience can also help you reach other goals like boosting engagement, as long as you target people truly interested in your business. Having a more significant following will also give you a larger community to market (and eventually sell) to.

If you’re a new business, new to TikTok, or haven’t successfully grown an audience on the platform, growing your following could help you create a solid foundation to build from.

Identify Organic TikTok Videos to Promote

Now that you’ve chosen a goal for your campaign, it’s time to identify the best video to help you reach that goal. You can choose any TikTok video you’ve created as long as it’s an original, public video without copyright issues.

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Try to choose a video that has already performed well organically. The video should also authentically show off your brand. Using your most popular content—the video with the most reach and engagement—is a logical way to reach and engage more people. You’ll gain views, traffic, and followers on top of the organic engagement you’ve already earned.

To find your top-performing TikTok videos, start by visiting the analytics section of your account. Simply tap on the hamburger menu in the top-right corner of your TikTok profile. This will take you to your settings.

Next, click on either Business Suite or Creator Tools and then Analytics.

The first screen you’ll see in your TikTok analytics is the Overview tab, where you can view account data ranging from the last 7–28 days.

Note: You can download data if you use the desktop version instead of mobile.

To dig into the analytics for your TikTok videos, click on the Content tab. Here, you can view your posts from the past week and see which ones are trending. Click into a specific video for deeper insights like total play time, total views, average watch time, and audience information.

Identify your most popular TikTok content in terms of views, reach, play time, total watch time, and engagement (likes, shares, and comments). Your top-performing video has the best chance of performing well through promotion.
3: Set Up Your TikTok Promote Video CampaignTo set up your campaign, you can use either the Promote button on a post or go through TikTok Business Suite.

Using the Promote Button. To start setting up your campaign with the Promote button, you have a couple of options.
The first way to access Promote is to go directly to the video you want to use and tap on the three dots near the bottom-right corner of your screen.

Tap the Promote button to begin setting up your campaign, starting on the “What is your goal?” page.

The second way to access Promote is via your settings. Tap on Creator Tools and then Promote. Next, choose the video you wish to promote and select your goal.

If you chose More Website Visits as your goal, you’ll enter the URL of your landing page and a CTA to encourage people to click.

Next, choose the audience you want to target. You can select Automatic for TikTok to choose for you or Custom if you have specific preferences.

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If you customize your targeting audience, you can select a gender, age range, and interests. When making selections, think about who you want to reach. Are they interested in a product like yours or a form of entertainment that relates to what you sell?

Let’s say, for example, that you sell hiking shoes for people in the U.S. Your audience is comprised of avid travelers, digital nomads, and adventure-seekers. They’re active, most of them have a dog, and they love trying a good beer in a new city (or small mountain town). They also love the simple life and are primarily female, working from home, and in their mid-20s to mid-30s.

You could make the following selections for your target audience:

After you’ve customized your audience, tap Next to set a budget and duration for your campaign (how long you’d like to run your promotion).

If you have an Android device, you’ll need to add payment information before submitting your ad for review. If you’re an iPhone user, you can recharge your account with virtual coins. TikTok Coins are the app’s currency that you can purchase using real money. The value of these coins changes over time, but you’ll see how much they cost when you’re ready to buy.

Finally, tap on Start Promotion. Once TikTok approves your campaign, it’ll begin running.

Using TikTok Business Suite

Using Business Suite to set up your promotion is very similar to using the Promote button. If you have a business account, you can navigate to Settings and Privacy > Business Suite > Promote. Then follow the same process described in the previous section to set up your ad.

4: Analyze the Performance of Promoted TikTok Videos

During and after you run your promoted TikTok video campaign, you can check its performance. To view the analytics of your post, tap on the three dots in the bottom right-hand corner of the post. Then tap on Analytics. You’ll see this screen filled with the data from your video ad:

Here’s a rundown of what each metric means and how it pertains to your ad’s performance.

• Views (play icon): How many times your video plays for someone. A view can consist of anything from a millisecond to minutes of watch time. If your video loops for someone several times, TikTok counts each loop as a distinct view.
• Likes (heart icon): The number of likes your post has received.
• Comments (conversation bubble icon): The total number of comments your post has received.
• Shares (arrow icon): The total number of times someone shared your post.
• Total play time: The amount of time—cumulatively—that people have spent watching your video. Use this metric to compare your current video play time with that of other videos you’ve posted. You can find which ones get the most play time overall.
• Average watch time: The average time viewers spend watching your video. The longer your video holds people’s attention, the more engaging it is. Your goal is to get people to watch to the end (if not multiple times).
• Watched full video: This is the total number of times people have watched your video through to the end.
• Reached audience: The total number of unique users who’ve seen your video.
• Video views by section: This metric shows you where your traffic comes from. Sources may include the For You section, people already following you, searches, hashtags, sounds, or personal profiles.
• Video views by region: This metric breaks down your audience by territory (their location).

Analytics for Website Visits

If your goal is to drive traffic to a landing page on your website, you can measure referral traffic through TikTok. The Promote tool allows you to track the number of people who visit your website by clicking on your link.
To view these analytics, go to Settings and Privacy > Creator Tools > Promote. On the Promotions page, tap on See Details.

Insights for Video Views

If your goal is to increase video views, you should primarily focus on monitoring views and reached audience. You can also calculate your post reach percentage to determine what percentage of your audience saw your post.
Here’s the formula:

Post reach percentage = (Reached audience / Total number of followers) x 100
As you run future campaigns with the same goal, you can begin comparing each post’s performance in terms of views and reach.

Follower Growth Rate

To find the analytics for your follower count, go to Settings and Privacy > Business Suite > Analytics. You’ll find analytics for your entire account in this section, including engagement metrics, follower information, and content data.

If your goal is to grow your following, focus on the graph on the Followers tab. It will show you your total number of new followers, the growth rate, and demographic information.

You’ll also gain insight into what countries your followers are from and their activity (which times and days they’re most active on TikTok). Studying these analytics can help you optimize future campaigns and posting times.

Conclusion

Marketers can experience numerous outstanding benefits by investing in TikTok and its new Promote feature. Jumping on the latest trend just might push you ahead of competitors who haven’t yet taken advantage of the opportunity.

TikTok Promote could be an effective way for you to spread brand awareness, gain new fans for your business, and send leads straight to your website. 

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