TikTok's platform has over 750 million users worldwide according to Insider and is now the third largest of the Big Five worldwide social networks. With the hundreds of thousands of creators on TikTok, you can imagine that there are brands taking advantage of the platform to increase sales and awareness. In order to roll out an effective campaign, here are the top 5 things to keep in mind when working with TikTok influencers.
1. Communicate Your Marketing Campaign Goals to Your Influencers
When starting a campaign, you must acknowledge what it is that you want to accomplish with your program and communicate your influencer marketing strategy to the influencers you’re working with. If an influencer is aware of your campaign goals ahead of time, you're able to:
- Guide the influencer on the path to success to create content that aligns with your specific goals
- Save time by decreasing the amount of back-and-forth in the approval process
- Build your relationship with your influencers to run ambassador programs in the future
If both sides are aware of the overall campaign goals, delivering on those goals will become a much smoother and effective process.
2. Know How to Find the Right Influencers for Your Brand
There are hundreds of thousands of influencers across TikTok that your brand can work with. Each influencer has different strengths, so it's about finding what is best for your brand and your campaign plan. Two important things to consider while you’re looking for the perfect match are:
- One size doesn’t usually fit all.
- Depending on your budget and product, different sized influencer channels will produce results in different ways.
- Depending on your budget and product, different sized influencer channels will produce results in different ways.
- Keep in mind your overall campaign goals
- gen video’s 2022 Quarterly Social Commerce Report shows that TikTok’s short-form video format is naturally perfect for products that require a lower amount of product research, but some styles of content are better than others at selling. It’s all about testing out different styles that may work for you and your brand.
You can find these influencers by searching up hashtags and looking at who your TikTok target audience is engaging with, or by utilizing tools that can consolidate and streamline the discovery process for you.
3. Create an Influencer Marketing Brief That Works
TikTok has a creator marketplace where you can reach out to influencers and let them know you want to collaborate with them as well as send proposals, pay an influencer, and negotiate a contract. These tools are fantastic if you have a smaller budget and just want to do some small tests.
Once you’re ready to scale up, you can also use an influencer marketing tool that can do all of this for you. When connecting with your influencers around the campaign brief, you will be able to set video guidelines including key talking points, as well as advise them of words to use or avoid.
Other than that, you’ll want to give your influencers enough creative freedom to let the video be as authentic as possible. Leave it up to the influencer, who already knows their audience, to inform about your product in a way that is engaging for them.
4. Use TikTok Paid Advertising to Promote your Influencer Content
The beauty of social media platforms like TikTok is that there is an entire ad network in place for brands to use for their advertisements. What’s amazing about TikTok’s ads manager specifically is that you can:
- Use their Spark Ads feature to easily create multiple ad units if you have a lot of influencers on your campaign
- Create and optimize towards your specific campaign goals
- Utilize sales tracking links to see which ads are generating the highest ROI
Agorapulse recently did an in-depth webinar that includes a ton of relevant information around both B2C and B2B ad spending on TikTok.
5. Track and Analyze Your Campaign Results
Once the campaign is complete, determine the effectiveness of the campaign by looking at a few important indicators:
- How did you do compared to popular TikTok benchmarks?
- If brands are seeing a median engagement rate of 4.1%, which posts in your campaign were either above or below that? What do you need to change for next time?
- If brands are seeing a median engagement rate of 4.1%, which posts in your campaign were either above or below that? What do you need to change for next time?
- Did these influencers play their part in accomplishing the overall campaign goals?
- Give praise to influencers that went above and beyond, especially if you’re planning on working with them again.
- Give praise to influencers that went above and beyond, especially if you’re planning on working with them again.
- Am I looking at the right metrics?
- Platforms like TikTok don’t naturally showcase sales across major online retailers. If your focus is maximizing sales, make sure you’re not judging your campaign’s effectiveness on platform-provided metrics like clicks or engagements.
gen video has tools that can help your brand keep track of sales per asset, influencer and retailer for products sold online. Take notes of what went right and what went wrong because you can learn for your next campaign.