How I helped grow a songwriter’s TikTok page by 80,000 followers.
Everyone wants to blow up on TikTok in today’s social world, but doing so takes some finesse and know-how. So, when one of Justin Bieber’s songwriters reached out to me about helping her roll out her new singles and grow her TikTok at the same time, I jumped on board immediately to assist with some creative consulting and targeted advertising.
If you have a TikTok account, you might already be aware that you can promote your content through the app itself. However, TikTok has a slew of powerful advertising campaigns you can also run through the Ads Manager. Setting up an advertising and business account is time-consuming, though. You also have to check off a few boxes to allow your account to run ads and then generate special codes from each post, or Spark Ads, as they are called. These are similar to Instagram Boosts. If you have never set up an ad account or approved your account for ads before, it can feel daunting and confusing, so people tend to resort to the advertising they can run through the app.
The ads manager looks like this:
However, running ads directly through the app instead of the Ads Manager severely limits the power of your ads because the interest targeting is straightforward. This is done on purpose to increase ad revenue on TikTok since people can set up an advertisement for their post in five minutes. As someone who has tried both methods, I can tell you for a fact that you get much better performance and more bang for your buck when you go through the more rigorous method of setting up ads through Ads Manager.
This is where I came in for the songwriter I was helping out with. She had been running ads through the app but wanted them to perform better, so she handed off her ad spending to me, and I took over by running more targeted ads through the TikTok ads manager. Within ads manager, you can search and discover new interests, target people who have viewed a video in a certain time frame, target users who watched the full video and even target people who followed a page from an ad. There is A LOT of power behind doing that and doing that the right way.
From there, I calculated a budget based on the Cost Per Followers formula. Basically, if she wanted to reach a certain amount of followers, I had to figure out how much that total would be for her. So, after a few rounds of initial testing, I was able to determine that the average cost of a follower for her was about $0.10. Which, compared to Instagram and Facebook which is about $1 per follower, was an amazing deal. After we figured out that, we then just had to figure out which content to promote and which content to keep producing while she was seeing all of this additional traffic to her page and new followers.
After a few consulting sessions with her and her manager, we discussed how she should talk about her songwriting history, while also promoting her new singles. Even though the focus was on her new music, her legacy was also important to communicate with new followers. She wasn’t just another songwriter, she was Justin Bieber’s songwriter, and that carries a lot of weight. We finally came to the idea that she should start filming a series highlighting her song and giving her followers a behind-the-scenes look at her writing process.
So, now that we had the creative component down, it was time to get down to the advertising portion. This is where things start to get interesting! We first started off just by boosting the posts for views and engagement, with the intent that people will check out her page and give her a follow, and it worked a bit. Then, along the way, TikTok rolled out a campaign to optimize for Followers. This was when I started to see actual results. Suddenly, her page was growing by thousands of followers a day, all from the advertisements we were running. After four months, we not only achieved her goal of 50,000 followers but surpassed it and hit 80,000 followers! Now her new followers engage with her content, and one of her videos hit 1 million views for the first time organically.
