4 Creative Strategies to Thrive on TikTok During the Holidays

During the end-of-year sales season, TikTok provides a huge opportunity to connect with and convert holiday shoppers. 

TikTok is a major destination for both discovering and purchasing products during the holidays. In fact, half of TikTok users turn to their For You pages to inspire their holiday and sales shopping decisions. 

To seize this opportunity and maximize holiday performance, TikTok marketers need the right creative. Having relevant, engaging, and entertaining creative is your key to success on TikTok. For this reason, it needs to be the top priority when it comes to your holiday campaigns. You can do everything else right, but if your creative falls flat, so too will your campaigns. 

In this article, you’ll find four creative strategies that will help set you up for success: (1) Optimizing for TikTok; (2) Remixing existing content; (3) Diversifying your creative; and (4) Tapping into trends and communities. 

Let’s dive in.

1. Optimize creative for TikTok

This first point is less of a strategy and more of a reminder to make sure that all of your creative is optimized by following TikTok best practices. 

Make sure you’re nailing the basics:

• Vertical (9:16) video ratio

• Lo-fi production techniques (learn more)

• Duration more than 10 seconds

• Smart use of audio and voice-over

• Design with TikTok safe zones in mind

• Use a visual hook to grab attention in the first couple of seconds

Not following these basic TikTok best practices will result in lower-performing ads. This is something you never want, especially during the holidays when you need your campaigns firing on all cylinders. 

2. Remix existing content

By the time the holiday season rolls around, you’ll be sitting on a rich bank of content that’s been produced throughout the year. This content can be remixed to produce your holiday creative in a more efficient way, while at the same time extracting more value from assets you’ve already invested in.  

You can remix pretty much anything. From basic product shots and key visuals, through to organic posts and long-form video. That being said, there are two types of assets that you should give priority to when remixing for TikTok: creator content and user-generated content (UGC). 

Creator content and UGC will help in driving higher engagement as they will give your ad a greater sense of authenticity. At the same time, it also helps integrate your creative more seamlessly among organic TikTok content.  

Tip: If you don’t have any creator content at the ready, you can discover creators to collaborate with via the TikTok Creator Marketplace. After collaborating, you can then remix the content you receive within your creative.

Holiday remixing techniques

When remixing for the holidays, it’s important to incorporate techniques that tie your creative to the holiday/sale that you’re promoting. This can be done in the following two ways:

• Festive feel: Give your creative the festive feel by incorporating relevant holiday visuals in the form of emojis, stickers, effects, and animations.

• Showcase the sale: Ensure your sales offering stands out by giving it a prominent place within your creative. Consider using bold text, banners, and repeated text to drive home your offering.

3. Tap into trends & communities

Trends and communities should be one of the places where you draw inspiration for your TikTok creative. This is especially the case during the holiday season, when community-driven trends see a hive of activity across the platform. 

Tap into this activity by tying your creative to holiday-themed trends such as #holidayhaul or #giftguide.

By referencing trends and communities within your creative it means you’re adding your brand's voice to the conversation playing out on the platform. This is what TikTok is all about. Trying to cut through the noise won’t work – being part of the noise does. 

By taking a more conversational and community-driven strategy, you’ll increase relevance and therefore boost engagement. 

Tip: Keep track of what’s trending by visiting the TikTok Creative Center. There you’ll be able to see the hashtags, creators, songs, and videos that are currently trending. 

Creative agility

Chances are that during the holiday season, new trends and communities will arrive on the scene. These can’t be predicted, so you’ve gotta be agile. The remixing approach helps a lot with this as it allows you to quickly turn around new creative when it’s needed. 

4. Diversify your creative

To give your campaigns the best shot at resonating with the right audience across TikTok, you need to run a diverse set of creative variants.  

There’s no simple rule for knowing what will resonate, and with whom. The only way to find out is to test a bunch of different creative approaches, see what’s performing well, and then adapt and refine your campaigns based on these learnings. 

This is especially important when you begin your campaigns with broad targeting (recommended by TikTok). Running a high amount of volume and variety with your creative will allow for better optimization and learnings when it comes to the algorithm choosing which creative to serve to which audiences. 

Within your TikTok holiday campaigns, you’ll likely have multiple Ad Groups. Within each group, aim to include 3–5 different creative assets. You can diversify your creative by creating variants based on visuals, messaging, and format – or why not all three! 

Thrive on TikTok with top-tier holiday creative, delivered by Shuttlerock

If you’re looking for a TikTok creative partner to help you execute these strategies, Shuttlerock has you covered. As experts in all things TikTok, our design team will give you the gift of top-tier creative this holiday season.

To learn more, you can visit www.shuttlerock.com/tiktok. Alternatively, feel free to contact our team or request a demo of our creative solution.