By Allen Brown
Developing the potential of TikTok as an advertising channel and how it can be used to generate thousands of leads for your small business as an insurance officer or giant insurance corporation takes time and patience.
About the expert
Mr. Ihnatenko has been in digital marketing since 2015 and has been using social networks for running ads. He’s an internet marketer and an international digital conference speaker. Here’s his method on how to deal with social media ads in 2022 – optimize your advertising budget with the maximum profit.
From 2015 to 2021, the best traffic sources were Facebook ads and Instagram. It was easy to launch it and make it profitable. But things can change.
The Fall of the Facebook Ads
“Everything ends, and the stable Facebook ad performance has met its end. I don’t know the actual reasons, but I am 100% confident that black-haters and those running ads to restricted verticals like gambling, crypto, and weight loss pills made it impossible for everyone to reach Facebook moderators. As a result, Facebook’s ad platform started to ban everyone, even if you’re running white and policy-compliant ads. As a result, I couldn’t spend my budget generating a decent volume of leads.”
Things are getting better in 2022 with this ad network, but still, there’s something better regarding performance and stability.
TikTok Ads – The New Ad Giant
In 2020, I got an email from one of the TikTok managers, asking for their new ad network test. At a glance, it was a nicely made self-service platform, similar to the Facebook user interface. However, after the first week of testing it, I realized it was not a good solution for my needs. It was too early to use it, the local audience was too young, but I used it to target 35+-year-olds. So the Cost Per Lead (CPL) was too high to continue. Also, TikTok offered a limited amount of tools for creating audiences.
I came back to TikTok in July 2021, and I discovered a brand-new ad platform with the possibility to target all the countries’ states and create custom audiences based on users’ behavior. After the first three weeks, I had spent my first $100,000 and got an agent.
Having a Business Manager with a decent credit line and dedicated support helps a lot when you need to maintain significant traffic volumes.
TikTok Ads And Lead Quality
I was naive, thinking that now, having a credit line and offers to promote, I could generate tons of leads – but I faced a cruel reality. I started to get feedback about lead quality from insurance managers, and it appeared the quality was not as good as it should be. So, I used the same concept for creatives as I used with Facebook ads. If you give 10 points to Facebook, estimating its quality of traffic, TikTok will get 7,85 points. Why? Well, TikTok users, in comparison with Facebook users, look for entertainment. They don’t want to leave it by following some external sites and reading long presale articles. So, a TikTok user makes impulsive clicks, finishing the lead form. As a result, you get a low-quality lead who does not pick up the phone.
Then I started to work directly with the TikTok bloggers using TikTok Creators Marketplace. This is the official service where you can find creators who can help with video creatives for your ads. After producing several videos, we managed to get a couple of those, which brought low CPL and excellent lead quality.
If you want your campaigns to be profitable, you need to get a low cost per click and a high click-through rate. So the concept you need to follow for producing video creatives is:
- Start a video with a popular TikTok trend (1-3 secs);
- Describe the users’ common problems (3-6 secs);
- Reveal the solution with a reasonable price/rate (5-8 secs);
Action: You need to tell your user what he has to do to fill out the form and pick up the phone (2-5 secs).
As a result, your video should be 25 sec—up to 1 min. A user will be directed to the third-party site with a form to complete by clicking on that ad.
‘Starts’ stands for the number of users who clicked on ads and opened the site with the form. And “Submitted” is for those who filled out the form and were converted to leads.
As you can see, we generated $21,639 in just one day. The average ROI among affiliates in this niche is 30% to 65%. This is a result of 1 affiliate network-one partner.
You think you, tough boy? This niche will crush your newbie expectations
This niche’s main pitfalls and disadvantages are caps, and it’s a limit for the leads you can generate. You will be continuously limited by your offer provider (advertiser). And it’s fair; an advertiser wants to check your traffic quality first. And traffic quality is based on numerous factors like the lead’s credit score, whether they are a homeowner or not, married or not, how many cars are submitted to be insured, whether states have different rates for payout, etc. It takes several days to get a report about your traffic quality. So it would be best if you produced outstanding creativity to generate great leads to raise your cap. And it won’t happen fast. If you want your quality to be the best, you need to show the most straightforward and honest ads. Don’t try to confuse your potential leads with clickbait videos. As a result, you can get very cheap leads, but such leads won’t pick up the phone or buy insurance. And you won’t get paid for bad leads. It was always a challenge to generate a CPL lower than your payout from an advertiser.
Payout terms can be very long from the very beginning. If you’re a beginner and just started on your own, you will only get a payout for your performance in 30 days. For example, let’s say you ran your ads the whole of January to get your payout at the beginning of March. Then, after weeks or months of collaboration with your advertiser and generating $5,000 a day in revenue, you may get a bi-monthly or weekly payout. Quick payouts are crucial for formatting a proper cash flow for your business.
Huge Potential Offers for Tiktok Ads
Another big challenge while running TikTok ads is picking the right offer. It’s hard to get one that can generate a profit and satisfy the advertiser with traffic quality. Sometimes you can get cheap leads with a 200% ROI, but as a result, an advertiser can’t close deals with those leads.
My recommendation is to focus on verticals like insurance, education, grants, HVAC, housing, and mortgages.
Heavy Value is our company’s name, it’s a team of 2 only people, and we have generated more than $38,000 in revenue a day.
The right offer must be mainstream and exciting to a broad audience. The offer itself must be attractive, offering a reasonable rate for auto insurance or a much lower percentage for leads’ mortgage. And, of course, you need to use the TikTok app to understand what’s trending. I know life will never be the same, be brave.
TikTok Ads For Insurance Agents and Mortgage Officers
I am 100% sure that TikTok ads might be helpful for all insurance agents and mortgage officers looking to get cheap leads. For example, the market cost for a mortgage refinance lead is $70-$100, but you can generate a lead for $25-35. So think about how it can change your efficiency.
In conclusion, I wanted to say that TikTok is one of the best-paid traffic sources for insurance verticals in 2022, being a solid competitor to other traffic sources. So, if you’re buying leads or running paid traffic ads, you need to add TikTok ads to your portfolio.
