TikTok Advertising for SaaS - The 2024 Guide
November 25, 2023
Software as a service (SaaS) has traditionally done well using social media advertising. But only specific SaaS brands tend to do well on TikTok, for reasons that we’ll expand upon shortly.
Businesses like HubSpot, Dropbox, Shopify and Loom all use TikTok to expand their reach. What do they have in common?
The user base of all of these SaaS TikTok accounts offerings has a slight female bias and trends towards the 25 to 30 age range. Coincidence? Probably not.
We’ll talk about why certain SaaS companies are built for success on TikTok, and how you can optimize.
How Demographics Can Inform a TikTok Seller
The first thing that every SaaS TikTok seller needs to understand is that over 70% of adult TikTok users are aged 18 to 34. To narrow it down even more, around 42% are between 18 and 24 years old.
That is an absolutely massive bias. A lesser, but still significant bias is that women make up 57% of the adult user base of TikTok. Combining these figures, we get the following primary and secondary markets:
TikTok’s primary market: Females aged 18-24 - 23.8%.
TikTok’s secondary market: Males aged 18-24 - 17.9%.
This means that any creatives being designed for these campaigns need to resonate with the young adult crowd. This is possible for just about any SaaS, but don’t try to force a younger vibe if your brand image won’t allow it.
At the end of the day we’re talking about a few seconds of finished video or a single still image that needs to appeal to the under-35 demographic. Keep this in mind as we delve into the next piece of the puzzle.
Lining Up Your Demographics with TikTok’s
At some point you should have conducted some kind of research into who your current users are. The results of your product research need to be overlaid with your target social media platform.
If the majority of your users are adults under 35 years old, and you have a reasonable male/female balance or a female bias, TikTok is a great choice.
You’re going to hit a strong cross section of your target audience here. If at least 35% of your users are between the ages of 18 and 24, you have a great advertising medium on your hands.
If instead your product demographics show an older audience (25 to 44) and a more heavy male bias (60% or higher), then you would be much better off with Facebook Ads. SaaS advertising needs to be specific as far as the target audience is concerned, and picking the wrong platform will simply throw away your advertising dollars for little gain.
Why Does Getting to Know Your Customer Matter?
Some companies don’t poll their customers and find out who they are or why they buy and use their software. There are privacy benefits to that approach, and it shouldn’t be dismissed entirely.
But there’s a lot to be said for knowing your customer when it comes to the advertising side. And to really know them, you need to ask questions and invite participation. Ross Mason, co-founder of MuleSoft, said it best:
Take every opportunity to spend time with your customer. Whether you are a developer writing the software or the marketer telling the story, you must have a firm grip on the problem you are solving from the point of view of your customer.
Ross Mason
This goes beyond the demographics for your SaaS and delves into how you determine your internal best practices. If you want to make sure that your customers are loyal, you need to give them a voice. Your TikTok advertising should reflect that voice, so that the customers know that you’re listening and that you care about them.
Top of the Funnel Ad Content is Best for New SaaS TikTok Advertising
You might be considering doing deep dives into your product, creating content that shows off the cool complexities of what you have to offer.
But that would be a mistake. In order to capture as many users as possible in the brief time that you have during an ad, you need to paint with a much broader brush.
Your first advertising runs should be brief educational, tips and tricks, or simple Q&A content. You want to show potential users that you can solve common issues that they can relate to, and get them to click for more details.
After you’ve cultivated a presence, gotten some word of mouth, and shown yourself to be a reliable, helpful vendor, you can move into the realm of contests, giveaways, and deep dives.
Nothing is ‘Optional’ in TikTok Advertising
Any time you see that something about an ad is ‘optional’, plan to get it done.
That means your hashtag strategy is non-negotiable. You need to make use of the same core set of hashtags on each ad, varying the final two or three for content specific tagging.
User involvement is a must. Q&A videos and ads are so much more effective if a real user is asking the question. Sweepstakes have a larger participation rate if they start with a testimonial from the last winner.
TikTok Sellers Must Constantly Update Ads and Release New Content
TikTok is not a ‘fire and forget’ platform. It’s a high interactivity, trend following ecosystem.
That means you need to be willing to constantly update your ads with new content, new trending hashtags, and topics that follow current news cycles. Alternatively, contact us and we'll help you out with these things.
Either way, expect very few of your ads to be ‘evergreen’. TikTok is a social network of short, sharp impulses. The attention spans of the relatively young user base are shorter, and their memories are longer. Only fresh content will keep up with their insatiable appetite.
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Get In TouchSetting an Influencer Budget
One of the most effective ways to leverage popular TikTok content creators is to pay them to use and recommend your SaaS.
You should expect to budget at least a few thousand dollars if you wish to launch a broad influencer campaign. Decently sized influencers are going to cost at least $100 per sponsored clip. Larger influencers can run hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Alternatively you can try to get a combination of many smaller influencers for $50 to $70 each. It’s possible that you’ll have more total reach per dollar when doing this, but there’s more of a risk involved as well.
Of course, demographics matter when it comes to the influencers that you target. You want their audience to match the age range and interests of your typical customers, unless you’re confident that the campaign will help you break into a whole new market.
TikTok sellers need to make sure that their influencers are popular with potential buyers of their SaaS product. It doesn’t matter if an influencer has half a million followers if the vast majority of them are under the age of 18, for example. Those are not the decision makers that you’re hoping to target.
TikTok’s Spark Ads program is a native way to reach popular influencers. But it’s just one of many different TikTok advertising types to consider.
You also have the option to collaborate with creators through a dedicated marketplace for TikTok influencers.
TikTok Advertising Types for SaaS Clients
There are a few popular formats that you should be aware of (in addition to the Spark Ads we’ve already mentioned) so that you can make an informed decision.
Playable Ads are interactive games or puzzles that engage potential users within the ad itself. For example, if you were selling an image editing suite as a service, you might have a little Playable Ad that allows a user to edit a character’s clothing color, or shift which character is in the foreground via a primitive layering system.
Image Ads are one of the best ways to promote the name of your brand and provide some text that describes your offering. They allow you to keep your company and product name and image front and center, increasing brand recognition.
Video Ads are the most popular, and one of the most effective, TikTok advertising types. Because most users are on the platform to view short form videos, it certainly makes sense that they would respond to video advertisements as well. These aren’t the best for pushing your brand, but are arguably the best ad format for a particular SaaS offering.
TikTok Advertising Types for SaaS Clients
Creating or Participating in TikTok Challenges
TikTok challenges are how influencers and brands try to get the viewing audience to participate and generate viral content on TikTok. This results in trends that sweep the entire platform, but only a certain number of challenges become hot at any given time.
Remember that at least some of your TikTok ads need to constantly be refreshed, you can dedicate some of them towards these challenges by either participating in a major influencer’s challenge, or partnering with an influencer to issue one on behalf of the company.
Participating in a TikTok challenge is easy: Feature your app, your team members, or your users taking part. But make sure that the challenge is safe and not mean spirited. The last thing you need for your brand is to be accused of supporting activities that get people hurt. Your content should feature your SaaS product or your logo in some way.
The more challenging route is to partner with an influencer to create a challenge that involves your software in some way. This is particularly effective if you have a trial or demo version of the product that users can download for free in order to participate. Again, make sure it’s safe and not mean spirited.
A home remodeling app might have a TikTok challenge named ‘Build Your SO’s Dream Home in Five Minutes’. The fun comes from users downloading the app and then trying to quickly build something that should really take much longer. Epic failures will be funny, given the reaction of the users’ significant others. Successes will be amazing, showing quick thinking and deft use of the app.
A graphic design app might have a challenge named ‘Do a Five Minute Self Portrait with Your Off Hand’, where the users need to draw themselves using their left hand if they are righties, or vice versa. Again, both the great successes and great failures have the potential to get funny or heartwarming reactions.
Worry About Your Own Ads, Not Other TikTok Sellers
This cannot be stressed enough. Reacting to the moves that your competition makes is a losing game in advertising. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, said it best:
Forget about your competitors, just focus on your customers.
Jack Ma
Advertising is competitive, but remember that the competition is over the minds and hearts of customers. Nothing could be more important in the world of SaaS, where the customer is probably never going to set foot in your office, visit a physical location, or meet you face to face. All they know is your software and your ads. That’s the entire landscape of your relationship.
The demographic that you’re targeting is a generation that is completely comfortable with long distance relationships, both in business and in their personal lives. Software as a service isn’t a concept that they need to be sold on; it’s not something that’s new or risky to them. Some have spent their entire lives without seeing or using physical media, beyond perhaps a SIM card and microSD card for their smart device.
So it’s very possible for your SaaS solution to become part of their daily lives if you focus on them instead of being distracted by the competition. Learn about who they are and how they communicate, then use your ads to reach out.
Takeaways
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about TikTok advertising.
Denis shares strategic expertise and forward-thinking approaches on driving brand growth and optimizing marketing efforts, leveraging his extensive experience.