Detailed explanation of Tik Tok information flow delivery strategy!

Nowadays, more and more companies and projects are starting to place advertisements on Douyin. As a relatively new advertising medium, what are the precautions that we must avoid, and what strategies can quickly increase the volume and achieve rapid growth of the product? Let me share it with you today.

The main platform used for Tik Tok information flow delivery is the Bytedance advertising platform. Whether it is creating an account, establishing a plan, or optimizing, all operations are completed through this system. Next we will explain it from three aspects: account, plan, and optimization .

1. Account

Applying for an account is usually a relatively routine process. From preparing qualification materials, authorization stamp to first recharge, it can usually be done within 3 days if you are quick. What is noteworthy here is that the product cannot contain medical, sensitive content, Douyin competitors and other related functions (even if it has relevant qualifications). However, the relevant content must be removed before review or other methods must be found (such as business-level communication).

When opening a new account, the first three weeks are the most important . If an account does not grow in volume within three weeks, the probability of it growing again later is relatively low.

So sometimes, to be on the safe side, when opening an account, we often choose to open two accounts, one for Android and one for iOS , in case one of the accounts cannot be increased for various reasons, which may cause a delay of three weeks or more. Another important point is to keep the budget in your account sufficient. If the system recognizes that your budget is almost used up but you have not recharged yet, the system will automatically reduce consumption.

II. Plan

Once you have an account, the next important step is planning. We all know that planning is the most core and basic element in increasing volume. It can be said that the entire early work of Douyin information flow was centered around how to quickly build a plan and how to quickly test it.

A plan includes the following core modules: user targeting, bidding, delivery strategy, video and title, and landing page.

How these modules are set up depends first on what your goals are. For example, do you want to acquire users quickly or stabilize costs first, or do you want to balance the two? For example, what is the upper limit of user costs you can accept, and what is your budget under this upper limit? For example, what are the attributes of your target users (region, age, gender, etc.)

2.1 User Targeting

Let’s talk about user targeting first, which is divided into precise targeting and general targeting.

• Precision targeting means that you accurately define the region, age, and gender of your target users based on their profiles, and only advertise to these precise groups of people.
• General targeting means that you do not restrict these conditions (no limit on the selection of related options), and learn through Tik Tok’s own background model those users who are more suitable for your materials and products.

My personal suggestion here is that if your target users are a group with a particularly broad audience and a particularly large base , such as e-commerce and games, it is still necessary to narrow your user range by limiting targeting in the early stage , so as to learn more quickly about the ones that are suitable for your target users (except for large-scale S-level publicity and promotion festivals).

However, if your product is in a certain vertical field and your user base is relatively small, you can try to expand exposure through general targeting in the early stage and quickly develop a stable model suitable for your product . It is normal for a plan to cover tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of users. If it is less than this level, you may encounter difficulties in increasing the volume.

Another important point is the issue of the population package . It is basically a must to exclude the population that has already installed or converted. Here, Toutiao will provide us with a default installed population.

However, the author has found through personal testing that this population package is not very accurate . Users who have installed our app can often see related advertisements. So if you are more concerned about accuracy and you don’t have many users, you can package your users, encrypt them, and send them to the background for exclusion.

However, if you already have tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of users, it is not so realistic to upload them in packages, and sacrificing some accuracy is inevitable.

In addition, many companies hope to upload a population package based on their own high-quality users, in the hope of learning similar high-quality and precise populations on Toutiao. This method is certainly feasible, but we must also be careful not to make the population package too small. It should usually cover at least hundreds of thousands of users and use intelligent expansion functions. Otherwise, even if we learn about the precise population, the scale may be very small and the significance is not very great.

If the targeted crowd package is found to have significantly reduced costs and significantly improved corresponding user quality after running for a few days, this means that the effect of the crowd package is quite obvious. Otherwise, we should promptly try testing other population packages to find the best population package portrait in terms of cost, scale, and user quality.

What is recommended here is that for the same plan, multiple population packages with different portraits can be tested simultaneously to find the population package portrait with the best balance of cost, scale, and user quality as soon as possible.

2.2 Bidding

Regarding bidding, I think every company will have a definition of customer acquisition cost based on its own ROI, strategy or other considerations.

Generally speaking, for a new plan, the initial bid should be slightly higher than our expected cost . After the plan has passed the testing period, we can slowly lower the bid to the target cost.

But there are a few things to note here:

First, in addition to our own bids, we also need to pay attention to the bidding status of competitors or industries . For example, if the average bid in your industry is 50 yuan, and you insist on bidding 5 yuan, you will definitely not be able to escape.

Another thing is that when bidding for new plans to grab volume, you must also pay attention to cost control . The bid should not exceed 140% of your set target price. Otherwise, even if the volume is successfully increased, you may face the dilemma of costs exceeding the target price by too much and being difficult to suppress.

In addition, cost itself is a dynamic process and is closely related to specific plans.

Because the information flow of Douyin is consumed in the way of ocpm, the same CPM has the same consumption. At this time, the better the back-end conversion rate, the lower the planned cost.

Therefore, companies that have strict cost considerations need to pay special attention to the cost situation of each plan. For plans that exceed the target cost, they should strictly control the budget or optimize the materials to improve the conversion rate. For plans that are lower than the target cost, they can run as much volume as possible, and at the same time, copy the plan elements as much as possible to establish a new high-quality plan to run together (note that the plans cannot be too similar, otherwise they will not pass the review, and they will face the dilemma of competing with their own plans for volume).

Of course, one thing worth noting here is that for plans that are still in the learning stage, cost may not be used as the core assessment factor for the time being. Because the learning model is not stable at this time, it is possible that your bid is 10 yuan, but the final result is 50 yuan. However, as long as your plan has passed the testing period, that is, the number of conversions generated exceeds 20, the cost will usually be close to your bid.

At the same time, for plans with excessively high costs during the testing period (exceeding the target cost by 20%), Douyin will also compensate in full for the excess amount (provided that the plan must first pass the testing period, and that bid adjustments should not be too frequent, with bid or targeting changes not exceeding twice a day. See the figure below for specific compensation rules). Of course, if your costs still haven’t gone down after the testing period, it means that the learning model of this plan is inaccurate, and you may need to re-establish the plan and run it.

Another point to note is that for those plans that have not been suspended due to difficulties in increasing volume during the testing period, we must delete them in a timely manner to avoid affecting the account weight. If you have a plan that has been tested well on other platforms, you can also use it to test Douyin.

2.3 Delivery strategy

Regarding delivery strategies, Toutiao’s backend provides three strategies: balanced delivery, priority on volume, and priority on low cost. Each company can choose the corresponding strategy to run volume according to its own goals.

2.4 Video

Another important point is video. For the Tik Tok algorithm, what matters more to videos are the CTR, completion rate, and click rate of the download button. The core factors that influence these indicators are title and content.

Let’s talk about the title first.

How to catch the user's attention through an eye-catching or attention-grabbing title is an issue that must be paid attention to in any type of content.

The commonly used strategies here are shocking content, using more numbers, using loss aversion psychology to create titles, creating suspense, getting straight to the point, etc. It is more common that Douyin users prefer novel or curious content, and the effect of this type of content is generally not too bad. The Douyin delivery backend also provides us with system-recommended titles and the function of testing multiple titles for one plan.

At the same time, when it comes to content, Douyin pays more attention to the matching degree between the title and content. You can’t have a title that mentions a certain point, while the video talks about another point. The conversion rate of such materials is usually poor. In addition, in the first 3 seconds of the video, we should also try our best to capture the user and increase the CTR by asking some questions, creating suspense or surprise points.

The longest content in the Douyin information flow may not exceed 1 minute and 30 seconds (usually within one minute), so it is particularly important to show users some memory points and interest points in detail within 1 minute and 30 seconds to guide user conversion.

What I recommend here is to conduct a small traffic test to find a content strategy that suits your product. For example, the L'Oreal mask that went viral a few days ago was launched on a large scale after a combination of testing of functional points (hydrating, nourishing, foaming, etc.) + promotional strategies (foaming experiment testing, KOL live broadcasting, knowledge content promotion) + crowd targeting (low-end, mid-end, and high-end). The most suitable launch strategy for this product was found.

For Tik Tok users, usually some novel points will not have too bad effects, but this also varies from product to product. For example, some novel products describe a fascinating plot which users prefer, some e-commerce products are more effective when they directly state some interest points, and some online service products do not even need any preparation and directly talk about the product functions which is simpler, more direct and effective.

As the saying goes, the best strategy is the one that suits your product. Before launching a large-scale campaign, the first thing we should do is to test out the content strategy, targeting strategy, etc. that suits your product on the Douyin platform.

2.5 Landing Page

The last important conversion point is the landing page.

If the most important role of video content is to provide users with memory points or interest points, then the most important role of the landing page is to deepen these memory points and interest points , and give users a reason to download in order to meet their corresponding needs.

Therefore, it is particularly important to create different landing pages for different video content.

First of all, the landing page should further follow up on some of the points mentioned in the video. For example, if your video talks about how xx function can help you better xx, then your landing page should focus on what xx function in my product is and how it can better help you meet your needs.

Of course, it is not enough to just do this. In addition to deepening the memory point or interest point, the landing page should also display more and deeper content about the product or cognition as much as possible.

For C-end products, selling product functions is not as good as selling user perception. If your product can be packaged as xx level and exclusive to xx people (to be consistent with the previous targeted population), then don’t say that we also have xx function. Selling perception and selling product categories have a better conversion rate than selling product functions.

For the B-side, selling solutions is better than selling product features. The principle is the same. Of course, if your product does not have any unique cognition or unique solution concept to sell, then we still have to go back to the product function itself and cover multiple product functional points to provide a complete and high-quality introduction.

The landing page is not finished yet. Users need a motivation to go from recognizing your content to actually clicking that conversion button.

This motivation can be a benefit point (hook) promised by the product to the user after the conversion is completed, or it can be a loss-averse call to action slogan (for example, if you don’t download now, you will lose xx), or it can simply be a highlighted conversion button with a layout of patterns on it to guide the user’s actions (such as a highlighted >>/-> symbol and a button layout with a red background and prominent copy).

Having said that, the five elements of Douyin information flow delivery have basically been explained. But for a company's investment, the above is just the beginning. Users are coming, but how many of them are real users, how is their retention, and how is their payment? These are all issues we must consider.

Therefore, establishing a user value evaluation system for Douyin has become a key issue that every company must consider . Only by dynamically adjusting plans based on this system and continuously adjusting models to acquire high-value users can a healthy delivery strategy be achieved. Since the assessments and focus are different in different companies and at different stages, I will not describe them in detail.

Finally, I would like to share with you some tips on how to distribute Douyin information flow.

3. Optimization

The first point is that if you have some plans to increase the volume in your account, you can consider copying some of the elements in it to create new videos for release, which can also reach a certain scale. Although Douyin materials also have a corresponding decline period, compared to Kuaishou's decline within a few days, it is still no problem for at least two weeks.

The second point is to pay attention to the impact of holidays or important time nodes. For example, when you encounter a super S-level event like Double Eleven, JD.com and Alibaba are both competing for the market's volume. At this time, you need to prepare more plans in advance to launch new products during this time period to try to hedge against the impact of the market.

In addition, if you are a big customer with a large advertising budget, you can consider signing an annual contract with Douyin, which can help you save a lot of money and get some traffic support. At the same time, you can also find some professional third-party companies to cooperate in video production. These companies will produce high-quality videos for you for free.

(The TikTok platform will provide rebates to these video companies based on their consumption, so advertisers can enjoy these services for free without spending any money. However, this method usually has certain requirements for advertisers' consumption, at least 200,000 per day, so it is more suitable for some large advertisers)

The fourth point is about the time period for delivery. For Douyin, 10 am to 12 pm and 8 pm to 12 pm are usually the times with larger volumes. You can prioritize volume and then reduce costs later. At the same time, if you have extremely strict requirements on costs, you can also choose to suspend delivery between 12:00 and 6:00 in the evening to prevent the problem of high costs on the day due to uncontrollable costs in the evening.

The fifth point is that the Douyin backend provides us with a plan diagnosis function , which is quite effective in diagnosing some plans with poor quality (usually the system will say that it is difficult to increase the volume of the plan because of poor creative quality and poor clicks), but for some high-potential plans, how to continue to increase exposure usually only gives one way: increase prices.

In my experience, if you want to increase the exposure of some high-potential plans, you can first try to expand the exposure by expanding interest targeting, population targeting and other conditions; if your targeting is already very broad, then you can try to copy the core elements of these plans to create new plans to launch, or if you have Android, copy it to iOS for launch; if you have iOS, copy it to Android for launch.

The sixth point is that if your information flow is delivered through an agent, then the management of the agent will inevitably be involved. When it comes to choosing an agent , those that have experience in launching your competitors’ or related products are definitely the first choice, as this can save you a lot of communication costs. At the same time, the strength of the agency itself, the speed of early material production, rebate policy, etc. are also factors that must be considered.

Because some large agency companies are often divided into many teams internally. So sometimes, even if you choose a very experienced agency, the team that directly connects with you may only have a limited understanding of this area. Therefore, in the early communication process with the agent, you must directly point out that you need an experienced team (such as your competitors) to serve you.

At the same time, in the process of agent management, it is necessary to establish an assessment mechanism of survival of the fittest and introduce competition and incentives. Agents who are unable to produce materials and increase sales in a timely manner will be eliminated, while agents who have consistently increased sales and updated materials in a timely manner will be encouraged. A consumption gradient climbing mechanism is also established so that all agents can see the benefits they can gain from doing well, as well as the ranking warnings when they do not do well.

Of course, as Party A, we also have to do relevant support work. After all, the product is ours, and no one else knows our product better than us. Therefore, timely communicating the video direction, timely reviewing the video content and giving modification suggestions are things we must do well.

The above is the full content of this article. As a relatively new delivery method, Douyin information flow contains many strategies that we need to explore. Toutiao itself is also constantly optimizing its algorithms based on actual conditions. In my opinion, this is something that requires constant learning and summary, but it is also very valuable.

Author: Wang Yuting

Source: Bird Brother Notes (niaoge8)