You made your SaaS. Now you want to advertise it on TikTok but you never danced in front of a camera. No worries, you don't always have to. But it's hard.
I'm sharing my learnings over my experiments, myths, wins and failures:
1. TikTok accounts:
- Use personal/creator account types, not business. If you go with business you can't use most of the popular sounds, just some random commercial boring ones.
- Do not buy an account unless you plan on using from the same location/VPN. You'll get 0 views very shortly.
- If you're creating a new account to promote a SaaS, choose a strategy and stick to it, don't experiment with different avatars/templates every 3-4 posts.
2. Views & Algorithm
- "I'm getting 30-200 views, am I shadowbanned?". NO. If you're shadowbanned, you'll get 0 views.
- 90% of cases your content is not that great.
- "But I did it exactly like that video that went viral". No you didn't. I have seen plenty of people claiming that and there's many tiny differences that feel unnecessary but subtly make the popular video actually popular. (e.g. millenial pauses, captions not positioned properly, too big/small)
- 10% of cases your content is actually great. BUT not every great video will go viral. You may get a 5:1 view to like ratio, which is amazing. But that doesn't guarantee you going viral.
- Popular organic tiktok campaigns such as the one Cal AI did, had hundreds of videos basically posting the same thing over and over. Some of them go viral, but they didn't stop posting even when the same format got 1000 views.
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"I got 1,000,000 views but very few conversions"
- That can be true. The type of format you choose matters in regards to conversion.
- From my experience, tutorial type videos do less views BUT get 10x more conversions.
- It can be a screenrecording, or a green screen avatar showing how it works in the background, or you can record your screen with your finger guiding where to click.
- ^ Those videos gets you conversions.
- You may do a funny prank and mention your SaaS mid video, do millions of views but actually get no paid users. Views don't matter as much as the format that gets people interested in your app
3. Content Formats
- Don't spam your app in every slide. You MUST actually post helpful content. Eg.:
- If your SaaS is an expense tracker for example, don't go about mentioning how many features your app has and how it's better than the other apps. Nobody cares about that.
- Present the benefits first e.g.: "I saved $500 last month and I'm going to get my son a PS5 as a gift with that money. *goes to walmart, picks ps5*, *shows phone in hand* "I had no idea I spent $500 on subscriptions I didn't need which I cancelled last month*
- Then slide in your app's name/logo whatever. It must make sense to the viewer after they've seen how your app changed someone's routine. People don't have time to imagine how your app will change their habits.
- If you're promoting a relationship advice app, share a relationship story as a slideshow with 2-3 rows of text for each slide. Slide in your app somewhere in there. But the content has to be related.
- If you don't got ideas: COPY successful ads. Search your competitors on TikTok. What are the top videos doing? Copy them. Not always you have to reinvent the wheel.
4. Content
- Don't start with influencers unless you got a massive budget and know what you're doing.
- You'll find some deals, pay them some $$$, get like 10,000 views, get dissapointed and quit.
- If you're doing a SaaS you most likely can do with simply recording your screen using your phone, and cutting to the most important parts to show off how to achieve whatever your SaaS benefits people.
- The most common format right now in tech is getting some UGC reactions for cheap (e.g $2 for a 3-5 second reaction) and stitching the tutorial afterwards. That gets you dozens of videos easily.
- Pay per view if you can find influencers to agree on that though.
- Set a RPM: $0.5 / $1 / $2 depending on what type of content they do. The more "tutorial-ish" it is, the more you can pay. Set a cap ($200/$500 max payout per video).
- Sounds good on paper but hard to find influencers who agree to that. Though, not impossible
5. Posting
- This can get quite complicated if you look up some fancy guides online.
- Don't start a phone farm. You'll spend a month setting that up and most likely still get shadowbanned
- No need to setup expensive mobile 4g/5g proxies
- If you live outside the country you want to target, a VPN is FINE.
- TikTok KNOWS you're using a VPN. But that's not what gets you banned. Spam patterns are.
- TikTok WILL post to the US algorithm with a simple VPN, even if you created your account in Europe or Asia.
- (spam patterns) What gets you flagged is:
- Posting videos you found on pinterest hoping TikTok won't recognize
- Posting 4 times within 1 hour
- Posting random experiments or content that doesn't relate with one another
- Accessing your account from various phones/VPN's (Careful, VPN itself isn't inherently bad. But choosing random servers everytime will get you flagged at some point).
- More than 3 accounts posting
- Posting straight away on a new account (TikTok will make fun of you by filling your feed with "stuck at 0 views" FYP videos).
- Prepare your content in advance. A week or a month's worth of content. You say you're going to post again tomorrow but you won't.
- Spend a whole day or two creating many videos that will go out for the next month
- Connect to VPN first. Then open tiktok so your algo is refreshed to the country you chose.
- Post daily manually or schedule two (max 3!) posts a day with any scheduler (e.g socialclaw or hootsuite).
- Set scheduling mode to not directly publish, but send it to your drafts
- scheduler sends to your tikTok inbox, you get a notification
- you open the notification (that expires within a few minutes)
- Double check everything is ok and just hit post
6. Link in bio
- TikTok allows you to put a link in bio if you have more than 1,000 followers
- BUT tiktok absolutely hates you for doing it
- That link will open an in app browser
- If you have an affiliate link there, it'll get sanitized
- The in app browser usually doesn't have user's cookies stored
- So when they log in to your saas it'll ask for google sign in, and google sign in or apple isn't saved for the user in the app browser.
- Even if they do sign up, their CC isn't stored in the IAB so it's too much friction for you to get customers.
- User gets lazy and exits the browser, keeps scrolling tiktok.
- Your link in bio becomes worthless
- So what's the solution?
- Vibe code a script that detects when the link is opened from tiktok's in app browser.
- Display an animation that tells users to tap the three dots and select "open link in browser"
- When they do that, they get out of the tiktok's in app browser, to safari/chrome or whatever browser the user has. And when they visit your site they can easily sign up etc because their data is saved in their browser.
