We are all aware that the book industry heavily leans on Tiktok. As described in a previous blog book retailers see a significant rise in sales because of Booktok.

The Tiktok algorithm is unpredictable

However, Tiktok has its challenges. The algorithm is very unpredictable, meaning that you will never know how well a video will perform organically. Will it thrive and get millions of views? Or will it get stuck at a few hundred views? You may think that the size of a booktoker’s channel would predict the chances of success, but that is rarely the case. Even booktokers with ten thousands of followers have videos that underperform dramatically.

Creators generally ask to be paid for their efforts, so it’s a bit of a gamble to see any return on investment if you rely on organic reach only. If you’re lucky the video will reach a good number of viewers. If you’re unlucky the video doesn’t do a thing and you just lost money on the project.

Thankfully, there’s a solution called Tiktok SparkAds. It’s a way to guarantee reach for videos. You simply pay Tiktok for your video to be seen by an audience of your choice.

At Bookinfluencers.com we heavily rely on Tiktok SparkAds for the success of the book tours we run. In this blog post we will show you an example of one of our recent tours that included a SparkAds bolt-on.

Fantastic results for the Marriage Toxin campaign using SparkAds

VIZ Media, one of the most comprehensive and innovative companies in the field of manga asked us to run a promotional campaign for their new title Marriage Toxin. We sourced and selected a group of influencers that received a copy of the manga and compensation for their efforts. For our paid promotions, we chose to promote the below video by creator Tanisha (@nishathenerd) with the goal to drive traffic to the VIZ website.

The results were fantastic. The video gained 443,600 views, 2,938 likes, 45 comments and 309 saves. However, the campaign focused on traffic; we wanted to generate as many clicks as possible to the VIZ website. We can’t disclose the budget invested in this video, but we can state that for every dollar there were 13 clicks to the webshop. The CPC (cost per click) was at $0.077.

This CPC is amazing. Let’s make a comparison with some of the other social media websites out there. Various sources will tell you that the CPC for Facebook and Instagram varies between $0.30 and a couple of dollars. On Google Ads most businesses pay between $0.11 and $0.50 per click. In a call with our team last week, Tiktok revealed that a good CPC for traffic campaigns is anywhere between $0.15 and $0.23. This makes the results of the campaign for Marriage Toxin even more astounding. The main reason why the CPC for Marriage Toxin was so low, is the fact that we used User-Generated Content (UGC) for our campaign. Tiktok have confirmed that the CPC for this type of content is usually lower than branded commercial-like content.

Videos by users are more trustworthy than commercials

UGC is a modern marketing tool which utilizes content created and shared by individuals rather than the brand itself. This helps to provide authenticity of user experiences, increasing engagement, trust and community around a product, service or brand. Tanisha’s promotional video is a great example of UGC. It isn’t a slick, branded commercial, but a video by a creator that is trusted by the US manga and anime community. The video doesn’t include pre-made graphics or high-quality film, it’s just the creator sitting in her own house, taping a video on her phone. And although she clearly disclosed that her video was sponsored by VIZ Media; viewers trusted her judgement and visited the VIZ website en masse to check out and possibly buy Marriage Toxin.

We believe combining UGC with Tiktok SparkAds is the best formula for success for publishers and authors in terms of visibility and sales of books. Are you interested in learning more about our services and how we can help you with UGC and Tiktok SparkAds? Email us at contact@bookinfluencers.com