Over the past five years, TikTok has grown to be the global entertainment platform with over 1 billion users, and a destination for advertisers to authentically connect with their community to turn discovery into results. People come to TikTok to be entertained and leave discovering new products and trends. With 61% of users having purchased something after seeing content on TikTok, people are taking real action as a result of their experience on the platform.

This week the TikTok introduced Smart+, a brand new advertising solution, now available in METAP and internationally. It will help brands tap into the full power of TikTok, enhance their ad creation and deliver the right ad to the right person with the best performance.

A deeper dive into ad automation
Smart+ automates the performance advertising process across targeting, bidding, and creative. Advertisers simply input their assets, budget, and targeting goals and Smart+ automatically creates or selects the best creative asset, chooses the right audience, and puts the best ad in front of the right customer at the right time. Smart+ utilizes TikTok Symphony, a suite of creative solutions powered by generative AI, which scales content development, creativity, and productivity on TikTok, making everything – from writing a script to producing a video and optimizing assets – simple and efficient.

Smart+ simplifies the ad buying process while maximizes business outcomes with various campaign objectives including:

• Smart+ Web Campaigns – Drives traffic and lower funnel actions, including sales, on advertisers’ websites;
• Smart+ Catalog Ads – Drives lower funnel outcomes by automatically delivering relevant product recommendations to people based on their interests, intent and actions;
• Smart+ App Campaigns – Leverages the power of discovery on TikTok to drive app installs and conversions;
• Smart+ Lead Generation Campaigns – Turns leaned-in audiences into high-value customers utilizing our next gen, lead gen solutions.

Brands are talking about innovative marketing on TikTok
Brands have already started testing Smart+ and have been seeing significant results. For example, Trendyol, the e-commerce platform renowned for its innovative marketing strategy, sought to enhance its performance and drive sales for top products in the rapidly growing digital markets of the UAE & KSA. To accomplish this, Trendyol collaborated with TikTok to optimize its online presence, delivering highly engaging and relevant ads to a broader, tech-savvy audience while focusing on maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS).

Trendyol leveraged Smart+ to deliver maximum performance efficiency. Focusing on a full-funnel strategy, Trendyol set out to increase brand awareness and drive conversions during peak shopping seasons, when e-commerce demand is at its highest. Smart+ seamlessly integrated performance best practices into one cohesive, highly efficient campaign, enabling Trendyol to optimize its efforts across all stages of the customer journey. Additionally, the platform’s powerful creative optimization tools allowed Trendyol to leverage TikTok’s advanced AI to enhance creative assets swiftly, significantly reducing both production costs and ad fatigue. By automatically reallocating budgets to the best-performing creatives, Smart+ not only improved campaign effectiveness but also eased campaign management, freeing up the marketers to focus more on strategic growth rather than day-to-day operations.

By utilizing the power of Smart+, Trendyol saw outstanding results: a 21% lower cost per acquisition (CPA), a 26% increase in conversion rate, an 89% improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS). This highlights the power TikTok’s targeting and optimization, unlocking significant efficiency and growth for Trendyol’s digital strategy.

“At TikTok we are always building for the future. We have been listening, learning, and innovating with our advertiser partners to continuously develop solutions that deliver performance,” states Shadi Kandil, General Manager, Global Business Solutions, Middle East, Turkey, Africa, Central and South Asia – TikTok. “TikTok is a unique ecosystem where culture, discovery, and commerce come together. Our goal with these new solutions is to empower brands in the region to engage their communities on TikTok and achieve business results.”

TikTok is helping advertisers meet their community where they are – discovering, searching and buying on TikTok. The platform is focused on helping our partners deliver real business outcomes, in addition to helping them achieve their media goals.

The post TikTok launches its new automated performance solution, Smart+ appeared first on My Startup World - Everything About the World of Startups!.

“The global Mobile App industry has been experiencing exponential growth, with the number of Apps covering all sorts of consumer needs expanding by the day. As the competition in this space grows, we held the first ever TikTok Apps Summit, bringing together pioneering figures from the industry, shedding light on global growth opportunities, and providing a space for them to collaborate, share expertise and learn about some the best examples of successful growth strategies,” commented Shadi Kandil, General Manager, Global Business Solutions, Middle East, Turkey, Africa, Central and South Asia, TikTok.

Apps’ user behavior is changing
An insightful deep dive into industry intelligence with Sensor Tower, an enterprise focusing on insights and analytics for Mobile Apps globally, showed:

• Users are becoming more selective and are close to finding sweet spots of apps that are worth their time and money. Data shows that over the last 5 years, there’s been a deceleration in app installs (only 5% CAGR), while spending on apps keeps growing year on year by 27% CAGR.
• Apps need to diversify their monetization strategy across subscriptions and one-time purchases: getting a download or a conversion is not the end of the road. Apps can maximize ARPU (Average revenue per user) by retargeting their users with add-ons and enriching their in-app experience.
• Adding AI features to an app leads to an immediate spike of 12% increase in revenue.

Community performance
On TikTok, content is curated based on what communities find entertaining. TikTok community has a diverse range of interests and a high level of engagement, which encourages them to contribute and join conversations – and brands can use this perfect blend for their benefit.

Communities play a significant role in driving stronger adoption, by adapting to the authentic behaviors of people living in a highly-informed and interconnected digital world. They seamlessly tackle the phases of the decision journey, but more importantly, the in-between phases.

1. Firstly, between awareness and consideration, communities provide social proof: an app is only worth my time and money if it’s worth other people’s time and money. Doubling social proof leads to double the downloads.
2. As users learn about the app’s selling proposition, and before they actually convert, communities help them understand how the app fits their lifestyle and needs: an app earns its slot on my home screen if it earns its slot in my daily life. Data shows that creator collaborations lead to an increase in purchases by 3.5 times.
3. Finally, what TikTok has shown time and again, is the ability of its communities to turn apps into sensations through orchestrated virality: an app deserves my advocacy only if it’s part of a larger conversation. Leveraging content engagement and virality can lead to a 2.5x increase in revenue.

Community performance, that TikTok uniquely offers, significantly impacts results across the conversion funnel. TikTok shared cases of brands who unlocked the influence of communities and how they were able to increase conversion rate by 41%, decrease customer acquisition cost by 18% and boost overall quality lead-generation by +22%. The more brands deploy and leverage the communities, the bigger their addressable audience and the more cost effective and efficient their strategy is.

Symphony: TikTok’s AI-powered creative solutions
During the event TikTok gave an update on its recently introduced range of creative product suite called Symphony, which helps businesses of all sizes, creators and agencies blend human imagination with AI-powered efficiency to scale content development, creativity, and productivity on TikTok. Now apps companies can maximize their return on creative: with ideation, script generation, avatar video generation and dubbing to 10+ languages and dialects, Symphony Studio drives efficiencies across the entire production process, while ensuring videos are TikTok-optimized.

Apps going global: geographical expansion on TikTok
TikTok works closely with app businesses to find opportunities and create strategies not only to capitalise their initial markets, but to expand globally. The platform helps businesses understand which markets show the best potential for them, learn consumers’ needs and preferences to better inform the strategy, localise their app creatives to resonate with consumers and, finally, apply best practices in order to drive tangible results. The approach to a successful geographical expansion strategy on TikTok consists of 4 steps:

1. Identifying the markets that work best for the brand,
2. Understanding everything about the relevant TikTok communities in the targeted countries: from digital shopping habits ,
3. Localising creative assets,
4. Optimising performance by testing new audiences, refreshing creatives and adapting offerings.

Success story
One of the great examples of capitalising on the platform’s opportunities is the campaign by Careem Quick, a widely popular superapp from the MENA region. The brand used TikTok to boost its grocery segment discovery and conversion, measure the effectiveness of its performance campaign and increase cross-selling with current user base. They utilised a TikTok Measurement Marketing Partner to build customized user lists, as well as used audience split tests to measure lift in discovery and first orders. As a result, the app discoveries increased by almost 6% on iOS and by 25% on Android, whilst first orders on iOS increased by 15%.

The post TikTok unveils opportunities for mobile app industry appeared first on My Startup World - Everything About the World of Startups!.

Throughout 2023, we have seen the TikTok community in the MENA region celebrate authenticity and share diverse talents, ideas, knowledge, and memorable moments. The platform has developed into a digital fusion hub, connecting users with various backgrounds and cultures globally, while offering businesses, regardless of size or industry, to break through the noise and thrive through innovation, creativity, and talent.

To empower marketeers with insights into the latest preferences of the TikTok community and support them in shaping their strategies for the coming year, TikTok has introduced its fourth annual trend forecast – the TikTok What’s Next Report 2024. The report introduces the concept of Creative Bravery as the guiding mindset to be embraced by the TikTok community in 2024. Brands showcasing Creative Bravery on TikTok, characterized by a blend of curiosity, imagination, vulnerability, and courage, will create deeper connections within the community. Succeeding on TikTok requires a shift from occasional displays of Creative Bravery to incorporating it into everyday behaviours and strategies. Brands that consistently capture global curiosities, reimagine traditional storytelling, and build trust with their audiences will see the most success.

Shadi Kandil, General Manager, Global Business Solutions, Middle East, Turkey, Africa, Central and South Asia, TikTok said: “This past year, we have seen so many creative minds push the boundaries of what it means to create engaging content. Because of the talent we see on the platform and across the regional creative ecosystem, communities on TikTok are redefining traditional storytelling, fueled by a blend of curiosity, imagination, vulnerability and courage. For brands, this presents a huge opportunity to embrace creative bravery, build deeper community connections and engage with relevant audiences.”

The report spotlights the most practical and long-lasting trends: Trend Signals. Trend Signals are recurring content patterns showing emerging behaviours and interests, providing brands with insights to shape their extended content strategies. These Trend Signals can be categorized into three groups:

• Curiosity Peaked
• Storytelling Unhinged
• Bridging the Trust Gap

Curiosity Peaked
People come to TikTok looking for far more than a single ‘right answer.’ Every curiosity and interest leads to relevant perspectives, uncharted discovery, and IRL action thanks to the perfect blend of discovery and an active mindset. In fact, TikTok users in KSA are 1.3x more likely to agree that TikTok introduces them to new topics they didn’t even know they liked. One of the key trends, highlighted by TikTok’s What’s Next Trend Report – Curiosity Peaked – reveals that users flock to TikTok out of curiosity about their world, popular culture, trends, and brands.

There have never been more options to discover new ideas or things, but finding relevant answers has never been more taxing. For brands, this means creating hyper-relevant, delightful, and useful content that piques every curiosity, even the ones communities didn’t know they had.

Storytelling Unhinged
The ends of stories start first, multiple story arcs can happen at once. Communities are making up fictional celebrities and narratives. Against the backdrop of what’s often felt like an overwhelming reality, TikTok users have embraced a shared community of what’s been dubbed #delulu or delusional comfort. Rooted in fandom culture, #delulu is a blend of fantasy and manifestation – adopting a fake-it-til-you-make-it persona for audiences to tap into, fantasizing about their hopes, dreams or self-defined delusional realities.

From co-created content to ‘staying true to #delulu’ on TikTok, the shift where everyone can have a voice has unleashed creativity for all – where diverse voices, collaborative formats, and subject matters are flipping everything we know about traditional storytelling on its head.

What brands need to keep in mind is that it’s the most intriguing narrative structures that guide viewers past the first few seconds and deeper into the story. In the UAE and KSA, TikTok ads intended to make users curious are proven to keep them watching 1.4x longer.

Bridging the Trust Gap
There continues to be a growing trust gap between consumers and brands, igniting audiences to seek engagement beyond a one-time sale. They’re also looking for brands to lead positive societal change and transparency. Establishing clear brand trust and values are non-negotiable. On TikTok, brands have an open line of communication with their consumers and community.

For brands, it’s key to consider each campaign and organic piece of content as an opportunity to share, listen, and learn, building brand trust and values together to generate deeper loyalty on and off-platform. After seeing an ad on TikTok, viewers in KSA trust the brand 24% more, are 42% more likely to be loyal to the brand, and are 33% more likely to say the brand is a good fit for who they are as a person (vs. before seeing ads on TikTok). This is driving action IRL, as well as on the platform.

The post TikTok’s What’s Next Trend Report reveals key marketing insights for 2024 appeared first on My Startup World - Everything About the World of Startups!.