TikTok Influencer Marketing: A Guide To Help You Get Started

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A Guide to Getting Started with Influencers on TikTok

As of 2022, the social media app, TikTok, had been downloaded across the globe a total of 2.6 billion times, making it one of the most popular social media platforms in the world today. This popularity has made TikTok prime real estate for companies looking to reach new customers and grow their brand awareness through social media marketing. While there are a variety of ways to leverage TikTok as a marketing platform, TikTok influencer marketing is one of the most promising. In this article, we'll cover everything you need to know about how to create a TikTok influencer marketing campaign that will deliver a high ROI, including how TikTok works, how to choose the right TikTok creators to partner with, and how to measure the success of your TikTok sponsorship campaign.

What Is TikTok?

TikTok is a short-form video-sharing platform that allows users to create videos no longer than three minutes in duration and share them with their followers. With 689 million active users, TikTok currently ranks as the world's 7th most popular social media platform, only ranking behind massive social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

How Does TikTok Work?

TikTok allows users to post short-form videos that are set to music, original audio creations, or fun soundbites. TikTok also provides special effects, filters, and editing tools within the app that enable anyone to tap into their creative spirit.As for how the app determines which videos are shown to which users, there’s a variety of things that can influence the TikTok algorithm, including what hashtags you use, your location, music snips, and even some of the TikToks that you’ve liked months ago. Similar to other platforms, the TikTok algorithm serves TikTok users with the posts they engage with. For example, if there’s a specific account they interact with a lot, they’re more likely to see content from it. Liking, commenting, and engaging content can only increase visibility and trends offer the option to gain traction and potentially become trending.

You may find yourself spending a bit of time on your For You page. According to TikTok, “The system recommends content by ranking videos based on a combination of factors — starting from interests you express as a new user and adjusting for things you indicate you’re not interested in, too.”

Who Uses TikTok?

TikTok is an especially popular app among millennials and Gen Z users, with 81% of the app's users being under the age of 39 and 63% of the app's users being under the age of 29. This makes TikTok an excellent platform for any company that wishes to target the millennial or Gen Z demographics. However, it is important not to underestimate the prevalence of other age groups on the platform, as TikTok is a massively popular platform with users across every age demographic.

How Do Brands Advertise on TikTok?

TikTok offers companies a variety of different ways to reach new audiences. If you would like to make TikTok videos a part of your marketing strategy and engage with the app's 689 million active users, here are the avenues that you will have available:

Top view ads: Top view ads show up at the top of a user's feed when they first log in to the app. They are full-screen videos with audio that can be up to sixty seconds in length and autoplay without the user having to click on them first.
In-feed ads: In-feed ads are videos that are displayed within a user's feed as they scroll through their "For You Page." These ads tend to be more affordable than top view ads that are automatically played at the top of a user's feed, but they are also easier for users to skip past.
Branded hashtag ads: Branded hashtag ads entail creating "hashtag challenges" for your brand where users or influencers create videos that feature your brand's product in some form then post the videos under a defined hashtag that you create. Other users are then able to search this hashtag or click on it in order to find other videos that are posted under the same hashtag challenges.
Branded effect ads: Branded effect ads allow brands to create their own custom filters on TikTok. Users can then add this filter to their videos, promoting your brand along the way.
Brand takeover ads: Brand takeover ads occupy the most premium ad space on the platform and are automatically shown to users as soon as they log in to the app. Brand takeover ads completely take over a user's screen for a few seconds before transitioning to an in-feed video. This ensures that TikTok users are guaranteed to see at least the first few seconds of your ad before they are able to skip over it.

What Does a Creative Brief Look Like for TikTok?

It’s important that everyone is aligned prior to the kickoff of a campaign. That being said, you never want to control too much of the creator’s content. There’s a reason you hired them (reminder: it’s because they are creative) so let them do their thing! Ensure that you outline the do’s and don’ts thoroughly in the brief. Just like anything else, creators don’t know what you don’t share with them. They may know your brand inside and out, but that doesn’t mean they know what you are looking for as a brand.

Sample Brand Style Guide To Give TikTok Influencers

Be creative — create meme-style videos or lifestyle videos showcasing (insert product) in whatever fun and quirky way you can think of!
Showcase your own style with TikTok’s trends and effects. Seen a popular trend recently? Find a way to add (insert your brand) into it.
Bring (insert products) to life in a fun, vibrant, and quirky way.
Focus on high-quality, catchy creations that entice viewers to watch all the way through.
If the product packaging is in the video, the logo should be clearly visible.
If (insert product) appears in the video or is used, it should be obvious.
Do not include any identifiable third-party logos or brand markers, music, artwork, architecture, etc unless you have the necessary permissions. If identifiable people are shown in the content you create for this campaign, you warrant that you have their permission to do so and that they understand how the content may be used by the brand.

Partnering With Influencers on TikTok

One of the most effective ways to utilize TikTok as part of your brand's marketing strategy is to partner with TikTok influencers. TikTok influencers are TikTok creators who promote brands or products to their followers, and working with an influencer who has a large and engaged user base of followers is an excellent way to boost your conversions and grow your brand awareness. With that said, though, it is essential to partner with the right influencers who know how to promote products in a way that will lead to high engagement.

How To Find Influencers on TikTok

We’ve made this part easier for you. On From Popular Pays, you can search over 500,000 TikTok influencers quickly and efficiently to discover the platform’s best creative partners using our free search tool! When selecting creators and influencers, pay attention to their content performance. We show a snapshot of this metric on their profile and across their work with you to track content performance over time. Check out this link to learn more about how From Popular Pays can help you find the ideal TikTok creators for your next influencer marketing campaign.

How To Work With Influencers on TikTok Effectively

In addition to choosing the right influencers for your campaign, it is also important to ensure that you are creating the ideal campaign for your brand's goals and carefully communicating those goals to your influencer partners. The three most important things to keep in mind as you go about creating an influencer marketing campaign on TikTok include:

Set Clear Marketing Goals

Setting clear goals for your campaign and communicating those goals to the influencer partners that you are working with is an important first step when designing an influencer marketing campaign. For example, your goal for the campaign may be to drive more conversions for a specific product, or your goal may be to simply boost brand awareness for your company. Whatever the marketing goals for your campaign happen to be, make sure that they are clearly defined and communicated to the influencers that you partner with.

Understand Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is key to the success of any marketing campaign, and influencer marketing is no exception. Defining the demographics of your target audience in addition to their interests, desires, and pain points will enable you to create a campaign that is specifically targeted to engage the TikTok users who are most likely to respond positively to your ads.

Align the Influencer With Your Brand

A big part of choosing the right influencers for your campaign is ensuring that their own brand is aligned with your own. If you are selling cosmetic products, for example, it wouldn't make sense to partner with an influencer who primarily posts TikTok videos about wilderness survival. While this is a pretty obvious example of what not to do when aligning an influencer with your brand, it is nonetheless essential to choose influencers with an audience of followers that aligns with your brand's target audience.

How To Measure Success on TikTok

There are several different benchmarks that you can use to measure the success of your brand's TikTok content, including metrics such as:

Engagement rate: The more people who engage with your TikTok videos either by viewing them, commenting on them, or "liking" them, the more likely it is that your video will be shown to other users. If you would like to create viral videos that will be shown to as many TikTok users as possible, engagement rate is an important metric to pay attention to.
Conversion rate: If your TikTok ads link to a product page or a landing page designed to collect new leads, conversion rate is a great metric to track.
Shares: Shares is a metric that factors into engagement rate, but it's also one that is important enough to track on its own. Each time your TikTok video is shared, the number of users who see it grows exponentially, making a high number of shares a vital goal for any TikTok marketing campaign.

Find Your Next TikTok Influencer on From Popular Pays!

At From Popular Pays, we make it easy to find the ideal influencers for your next TikTok influencer marketing campaign by enabling you to easily discover and vet potential influencer partners via our comprehensive influencer search engine. If you would like to see for yourself how From Popular Pays empowers companies to create highly effective TikTok influencer marketing campaigns, be sure to sign up for a free trial today!