TikTok Ads: Yay or Nay?

TikTok earned serious bragging rights for its three billion downloads and 50 million daily active users.

In 2022, TikTok was the second-most downloaded app globally, with Instagram coming in second.

But how does that all translate to marketing for your community, and should you even care about using TikTok ads at all?

Here’s how to know:

You should care about the platform like it’s your new best friend if your community wants to attract:

👉 Women ages 18 to 24 (24% of TikTok’s global audience)

👉 Males ages 18 to 24 (making up another 18% of the platform’s audience)

👉 24 to 34-year-olds (31% of TikTok’s audience falls into this category)

If you said "yes' ' to any of the above audience segments, you should also know that TikTok ads in the U.S. have a potential reach of 109,538,000 people.

Ad revenue is also rapidly climbing, making it inevitable that your competitors will hop on board eventually.

(Source)

The next step is figuring out how to approach TikTok ads because they’re not going to look like your PPC campaign or even Facebook ads.

TikTok is All About Entertainment

We’ve established that people on TikTok skew toward younger age brackets, but it’s not just an age game.

People on TikTok want to be ENTERTAINED. DAZZLED. AMUSED.

They’re generally not there looking for thought leadership or even the best rent special they can find.

It’s not that hard to give them what they want—TikTok audiences are looking for fun videos.

Imagine college grads and 20-something year olds scrolling through laugh-out-loud viral videos they can’t wait to share and then seeing:

NOW RENTING! NEW APARTMENTS! 📢 📢 📢

Yeah, no one cares.

If you’re targeting a high-intent audience, they may stop scrolling for a second.

But that intended audience still wants something fun to watch while they’re learning about your community and amenities.

They don’t care about ads. They want something interesting to do online.

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TikTok Success Requires Tailor-Made Content

There's somewhat of a science to TikTok ads, and it’s all about mastering tailor-made content.

Find the top video formats on the platform and take inspiration from them or mimic them.

A few examples are:

• 5 things I love about my apartment
• When your apartment community has X

What if someone wonders if your content is really an ad in disguise?

Congrats!

That’s a good thing, because you know you got their attention and aligned it with TikTok’s style.

Now you can duplicate that success and build towards viral content.

(Source)

Truth 💣: When you put up a generic video that's posted your website, LinkedIn, or even Instagram and not tailored to Tiktok, people will scroll by so fast that your ad won’t even load.

TikTok Demands Drilling Down On Your Goals

Beyond nailing the ad format, the most important thing with TikTok is drilling down on your multifamily marketing goals.

TikTok is primarily a brand-awareness platform (just like social sites tend to be).

If your goal is to generate leads, TikTok isn’t the first place you should look.

So what should you do on TikTok?

Let's take a look at a couple sample strategies based on your goal:

Goal #1: Generate Leads

Generating leads requires retargeting your website and/or profile visitors.

You want to use boosted posts from your profile and include a CTA to contact your community.

You can target TikTok's prebuilt "housing" audience, but tread lightly here.

It’s not a great ROI for this due to broad targeting parameters, so we wouldn't recommend doing this for an individual community.

Tip 💡: If you have a master site and one profile for all of your communities, you can entertain this idea and run with it, but you’ll also need to create a viral video, which is difficult to do and does not involve TikTok ads.

Goal #2: Brand Awareness

Serve up TikTok ads to your target audience's most common interest categories, from luxury shopping to adventure travelers.

Tip 💡: Next, serve those ads to the "housing" prebuilt audience on TikTok with entertaining content aimed at boosting your page's engagement and follower count.

These efforts can snowball into better performance for organic posts down the line.

If you're using boosted posts, this is easy: boost the videos with the highest organic engagement!

While platforms like Instagram and YouTube tend to produce slick, glossy videos and ads, you can go viral on TikTok with low production value.

Simply posting a reaction to something unique or interesting that happens in your community could be a winner.

Remember, TikTok is like any other marketing effort.

Just because it caters to a young crowd that wants to LOL at some videos doesn’t mean there’s not a strategy involved.

Tip 💡: Pay attention to what your competitors are doing, look at viral video formats on the platform, and continuously collect data and refine your efforts.

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