TikTok case study

TikTok is a social media platform that's taking the world by storm. With its rapidly growing user base of over 1 Billion, this TikTok lets you create and share short videos of 15 to 60 seconds. TikTok is famous for its viral dance challenges, lip-syncing clips, and comedic skits, but it's also a home of talented artists who showcase their music and creativity on the platform.

Although mired in controversies, TikTok has become a cultural force that brings people together through shared interests and trends, influencing and reflecting the popular culture of today's digital age.

We started working with TikTok in 2018, from the beginning of its popularity when it was called Musical.ly. Therefore, we helped the application to gain early adopters.

We started with a clear goal in mind: To gather data through A/B testing campaigns. We focused on finding the most efficient way to reach our target audience. The client allowed us to test very different approaches, so we ultimately found the most successful strategies. We started working through a Cost Per Install model of cooperation.

The clients first KPI was the retention rate. Our main task was to bring an active audience that used the application and, if possible, reviewed the content daily.

We used a vast range of different approaches for promotion. This entailed different triggers to engage the audience, such as dating, video editing, challenges, etc.

We not only attracted users for this client, but also content makers who had ready made content.

At this stage, working conditions changed a little. The client slightly increased the retention rate. The client also cut down on marketing partners. TikTok, for its part, was very much in control of all indicators. After 6 months, we continued to work without other partners. Soon, we remained as the leading partner.

Also, the TikTok team decided to attract a more adult audience. They put restrictions, and we had to attract users over 18 years old. It was quite difficult since the product was interesting to a younger audience. But despite the hard KPI and the sudden change in the audience category, we still brought good results to the client.

By this stage, TikTok had already become a well-known and quite popular application. This time, the promotion strategy focused on Tier 1 countries.

Every year the requirements grew higher and higher. The client had high expectations for both indicators and download volumes. Over our long history of cooperation, we noticed how an apps popularity makes it difficult to attract a new audience. Our team's next challenge was searching for new approaches and creatives.

So we came up with a new approach - to focus on product functions. In our creatives, we revealed the strengths and features that the client himself wanted to draw the audience's attention to. And our approach worked well. Therefore, our advertising strategy was tightly tied to the product's features in this stage.

Our final and most important stage was quite long. We found an approach to increase the retention rate.

Our team of media buyers conducted a deep analysis and discovered that if we targeted users with the latest versions of IOS and Android, we would definitely increase the retention rate.

And so it happened. At this stage, we needed to track 3 indicators: CPI, RR, and ROI.

We had a huge monthly budget, and at the same time, we gave more than 1 Million Installs per month in the USA. We did a very large number of A/B tests on creatives and texts. We had a lot of stable campaigns that could guarantee general steadiness. And it was good because we had a space to do tests and find new ways to reach the client's targets.

From our creative tests, we noticed that pranks, animal content, some shocking content went well.

It was equally important to optimize campaigns in the following areas:

• On installation,
• On installations with the ability to perform a targeted action,
• On events.

We've always tried to find a balance between these 3 types of campaigns. This made it possible to satisfy and correspond to the client's goals, giving quality installs in large volumes.

Next, we decided to test advertising on YouTube using creatives with actors and native speakers for this, which brought us good results. You can see some of these creatives below:

We also launched creatives for various holidays, such as Easter, Mother's Day, or, for example, Superball.

Working with TikTok gave us a unique experience of working with a market leader in the top geo. The product itself is very famous and well promoted. So it was a big responsibility for us as an agency. We managed to cope with our tasks despite the hard KPI. Once again, we proved to ourselves and the client that we can turn even the most challenging goals into a big reality.