7 Common TikTok Advertising Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Are you looking to advertise on TikTok?

Many brands and entrepreneurs have used social media platforms to advertise their products and services.

Unfortunately, many advertisers make mistakes and fail to build their brand through TikTok. Competition on the platform is fierce and you’ve got to find a way to stand out from other brands.

So what are these TikTok advertising mistakes? How do you make sure you create successful advertisements using TikTok?

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Not Going for Easy Likes

Many advertisers often try to be too original with creating content for TikTok. While this isn’t a bad thing, you can miss out on getting easy likes.

While the best way to get TikTok likes is to use a paid service, you want to complement this with getting easy likes.

For example, use the popular hashtags that are in your niche. You can also create videos that follow the popular trends on TikTok. This is a great way to build likes and create a solid audience.

Once you’ve secured likes and an audience, then you can work toward targeted advertising.

2. Being Too Broad

This continues with where we left off on the previous point. One big mistake that many TikTok advertisers make is that they don’t focus on targeted advertising.

You want to figure out who your target audience is and find a way to create content for them.

For example, you might be tempted to create content in a variety of languages to reach a wide audience. But what if you can’t reach a global audience — at least for now?

Focus on keeping your audience small for now. Once your brand grows on TikTok, you can then try to expand to other markets. Focus on turning 10 followers into customers before you reach out to 100 followers.

3. What Are Your Brand Values?

Many companies try to promote popular values or even political opinions through social media. Often, this is done to show solidarity with a cause and to garner more customers.

But, this can also backfire on many brands. The backfire on a social media platform such as TikTok can be incredibly harsh and can hurt your brand.

For example, what happens if you promote a value that doesn’t align with your brand? Or what if you promote a political opinion that the majority of your followers don’t agree with?

You want to think carefully about your brand values before you start creating content on TikTok. You might also want to consider avoiding political opinions or promotion on the platform. In some cases, it might help your brand. In others, it might cause you to lose customers!

4. Not Using Influencer Marketing

One of the biggest mistakes that smaller brands make is that they don’t take advantage of influencer marketing.

Influencers are TikTok users who can represent your brand and promote it on your behalf. They’ll likely have a larger follower base than you and will be better at creating posts on TikTok.

Many brands wait till they grow bigger to use influencer marketing. But many influencers are also willing to work with smaller brands.

It’s best to avoid mega-influencers at the moment. They’ll likely be more selective with the brands that they work with. Mega-influencers are those with at least 100K followers.

You can instead focus on micro-influencers that have between 1K to 10K followers. They’ll be happy to work with you to promote your brand on TikTok.

5. Failing to Plan the Budget

TikTok advertising does charge small fees to create ads and reach a wide audience.

However, these small fees can add up in the long run. As you scale your brand, you want to pay top dollar to take advantage of TikTok’s advertising campaigns.

As such, you want to plan your budget well in advance. You want to estimate how much you’ll spend on an advertising campaign each month. Make sure you have the budget for this set-aside.

6. Fun Content

You have to remember that the main reason people use TikTok is to have fun and get entertained!

If your profile is a bombardment of ads you can expect to lose your follower base rapidly.

As such, you want to blend your ads along with fun content. The majority of your content should consist of fun and informational content. Keep the ads between 5% to 20% of your profile. In the beginning, keep it closer to the 5% mark as much as possible.

You should focus first on creating a profile that offers entertaining content to build a follower base. Once you find that there’s regular interaction between your profile and your followers, you can start creating ads.

Make sure you don’t overwhelm your profile with ads even as your brand scales. You want to keep track of how your ads perform compared to your fun content.

If you find that viewership and likes are low, then you should cut down on ads. Focus on a few great ads rather than several ads that are mediocre.

7. Updating Captions and Hashtags

Finally, you don’t want to forget about your old content!

Go back to your old posts and edit your captions. Change the wording to make it more appealing to an audience. Add SEO-friendly keywords and remove any keywords that aren’t high-ranking anymore.

You also want to update your hashtags when needed. If a hashtag is no longer popular, then you should remove it from your caption.

You should also add new hashtags that are popular and relevant to your content. You’ll be surprised and how your older content can bring in new followers.

Avoid These TikTok Advertising Mistakes

Now that you know the common TikTok advertising mistakes, you can create the best TikTok advertising strategy for your brand.

Make sure you first focus on gaining as many likes as possible. You want to also focus on building a solid base of followers.

Afterward, you want to focus on targeted advertising and crafting your brand’s image. Follow the steps in this guide and you’ll have no problem with advertising on TikTok.