The Step-by-Step Guide to Promoting Your Side Hustle with TikTok Ads
TikTok’s self-serve ad platform presents a tremendous opportunity to promote side hustles and sell products. With over 1 billion monthly active users, TikTok gives you access to an engaged audience ready to discover your brand.
This guide will walk you through how to create and optimize TikTok ads to drive traffic and sales for your side business.
Step 1: Set Up Your TikTok Ad Account
First, you need a TikTok for Business account. Switch over from your personal profile in account settings.
Then access TikTok Ads Manager to create ad campaigns. Choose objectives that align with your goals:
- Traffic – Drive site traffic and conversions
- Awareness – Get more eyes on your brand
- App Installs – Promote downloads of your app
- Video Views – More visibility for product videos
Step 2: Define Your Target Audience
One of TikTok’s greatest strengths is its precise audience targeting options. You can target based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
Take time to understand your ideal customer and direct your ads to people most likely to purchase from your shop based on:
- Age, gender, location
- Interests and lifestyle
- Shopping habits and intent signals
- Past engagement with your content
Step 3: Create Engaging Ad Creative
The key to success on TikTok is captivating video creative. Choose from a variety of high-impact ad formats:
TopView – Full screen video ads Brand Takeovers – Brand “takes over” the user’s screen In-Feed Videos – Seamlessly blended video ads Hashtag Challenges – Encourage user generated content
Craft video ads that educate and entertain viewers while highlighting your products or services.
Studies show the most effective TikTok ads feel authentic and blend seamlessly into user feeds. Mimic the style and content people love watching natively on TikTok.
Creating opportunities means looking where others are not.” ~ Mark Cuban
Step 4: Set Up Tracking and Optimization
TikTok’s robust analytics help optimize your ad strategy. Make sure to implement tracking pixels or SDK to attribute site conversions back to your TikTok ads.
Review performance metrics like click-through rate and cost per result to identify best audience segments and creative.
Set up an A/B test between two ad variations to determine what copy, visuals, or offers resonate most.
Use automatic or manual bidding strategies to balance budget and conversion goals.
Step 5: Retarget Engaged Users
Remarketing helps turn interested viewers into conversions. Create custom audiences of people who engaged with your videos or site to keep your brand top of mind.
Retarget warm leads across devices and platforms. TikTok pixel data can be used on Facebook/Instagram too for expanded reach.
Step 6: Monitor Performance and Iterate
Continuously analyze campaign performance and make adjustments. Refine creative, audiences, bids, and targets to increase results over time.
Experiment with different products, content angles, captions, and calls-to-action. TikTok is perfect for rapid testing.
Conclusion
For side hustlers and small businesses, TikTok ads represent a game changing opportunity. The combination of precise targeting, engaging creative formats, and sophisticated tracking provides the perfect toolkit.
With a strategic, data-driven approach, TikTok ads can help take your ecommerce side project to the next level.
What are you waiting for? Start promoting your TikTok side hustle today!
