The Complete Guide to TikTok Influencer Marketing (With 3 Examples & No Dancing!)
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#TikTokMadeMeBuyIt is a phrase that seems to be on everyone’s lips. So let’s talk TikTok.
Over 6 in 10 TikTok users use the platform for shopping inspiration, and 71.8% say they’re inclined to buy when stumbling on an interesting product, according to a survey by Bazaarvoice.
Then it’s no surprise marketers love it. TikTok has already overtaken Facebook when it comes to influencer marketing spending. It’ll surpass YouTube by 2024 as well.
But brands often shy away from TikTok because of the seemingly complex algorithm, dominance of a younger demographic, and not knowing how TikTok influencer marketing works.
In this article, you’ll learn:
Before we begin, you must evaluate if your brand even needs to be on TikTok. Sure, it’s the new hot thing — but it’s not for everyone.
You shouldn’t be on TikTok simply to be on TikTok. Diving into a new platform with one billion monthly active users sounds tempting, but starting your TikTok account without examining if it’s the right channel for you can do more harm than good.
Why? You waste precious employee resources, marketing budget, and dampen creator partnerships if you don’t do TikTok right. Worse, you risk harming your brand image by publishing unhelpful content. That’s not an opportunity cost worth risking.
Rather than pumping out videos that fall flat, start on TikTok with a strategy and an understanding of how the platform works.
Here are a few questions that’ll help you evaluate if you should try to build a presence on TikTok or give it a pass:
Everyone’s nieces and nephews are on TikTok and it’s no wonder why. Gen Z and millennials dominate the platform. Out of TikTok’s global audience, 24% are women between 18-24 years of age, and 18% are males of the same age group. In contrast, just 3.7% of women and 3% of men in the age group of 45-54 use TikTok.
To serve a Gen Z or millennial audience, you should consider leveraging TikTok. But you might put your efforts to better use elsewhere if your target customers are Boomers or Gen X.
⚠️ Note: There are always exceptions to the rule — older demographics aren’t generally active on TikTok, but your specific target audience might be. For example, CVS Pharmacy partners with creators like @grandma_droniak to promote their prescription service and gain hundreds of thousands of views on their videos.
Consider running a quick customer survey to verify where your customers hang out. You can also lurk on the platform and see if your competitors are gaining good traction on it (it doesn’t mean you should be on the channel, but it’s a sign that TikTok might be worth testing).
Since TikTok is a visual platform, B2C brands certainly have it easier. It might be harder to deliver value through video if you’re a service-based business. But it’s not impossible. SEO tool, Semrush, hires comedians to make jokes about weird Google searches regarding the corporate lifestyle.
And they’re not shooting a dart in the dark: Their study showed humor is one of the top-performing genres on TikTok. So, Semrush uses comedy as a strategic way to highlight the value of their product.
Remember, TikTok isn’t like every other social media platform. Their mantra is, “Don’t make ads, make TikToks,” — meaning being salesy and corporate-sounding won’t fly on this channel.
The great thing about TikTok is you don’t need fancy production equipment to succeed. The aesthetic is real and mainly unfiltered, so you can always test the waters by making a few videos yourself. This will help you understand the platform.
As you start to grow though, it becomes crucial to have someone to manage your TikTok influencer marketing campaigns. Evaluate if you have the time, money, and staffing to come up with clever and engaging video ideas for your audience and run creator partnerships. And if you do, examine further if TikTok is giving you opportunities not already present on your existing channels.
46% of brands use TikTok for influencer marketing. If your marketing plan is to expand into the influencer marketing ecosystem, being on TikTok is a no-brainer.
And we'd argue TikTok is superior to other social media platforms for influencer marketing. Why?
⚠️ Note: We don’t recommend you to start partnering with creators right off the bat. If you have zero experience with TikTok, join and get a feel of the platform first. Create a few posts with your brand account to understand how your content is received. Try things for yourself before bringing influencer partnerships into the picture.
Clearly, TikTok can make a home for both — the hot new e-commerce store and the serious insurance company.
Convinced your brand needs to be on TikTok? Here’s what you need to know to start building your own TikTok house!
Running a successful influencer marketing program on TikTok is no cakewalk. Here’s how to strategize, plan, and execute it in six steps:
What do you want to accomplish at the end of this TikTok influencer marketing campaign? Clearly laying out your goals for TikTok influencer marketing will help you determine what key performance indicators (KPIs) you should set to measure success. And with your KPIs in place, you can set up specific processes to achieve them.
Set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based) influencer marketing goals. For instance, if your goal is to kickstart your TikTok influencer marketing program, convert it to a SMART goal:
⚡Pro-tip: Ensure external factors in your business are aligned to help you accomplish your TikTok influencer marketing goals.
Let’s say your objective with TikTok influencer marketing is to boost website traffic. To achieve this, ensure other factors in your business are prepared to meet this goal.
For example, does your website work properly? Is your site load speed perfect? Can customers easily check out all your different products? If not, resolving these issues is a prerequisite before you formalize your TikTok influencer marketing goals.
Once your SMART goals are in order, determine your KPIs. How will you track progress? Which are the exact metrics you will look for and present in your marketing report to stakeholders? What numbers will help you measure success?
To continue our previous example, if you want to boost website traffic through TikTok, your KPI might be to increase website traffic by 40% by the end of the year through TikTok influencer marketing.
Next, assign key metrics to your KPIs. For example, to determine how much of your website traffic is coming through TikTok influencers, you can share personalized links with your creators and track how many website visits are attributed to them.
If you want a more in-depth tutorial on how to set influencer marketing KPIs, check our influencer marketing KPI guide with examples and 30 metrics for inspiration.
Setting up a process to reach your goal will be straightforward from here. For example, for our “kickstarting TikTok influencer marketing” objective, here’s the rough process to follow:
The big obstacle for most brands in the above process? Finding the right TikTok influencers.
One thing that can make or break your TikTok influencer marketing is finding the right TikTok influencers.
In Modash's TikTok influencer database, there are a whopping 96 million influencers on TikTok. With so many fish in the sea, how do you find an influencer who fits your brand like a glove? Here are three ways:
#1: TikTok Creator Marketplace
You can search for influencers and contact them directly on TikTok through their creator marketplace. The account gives you an insight into an influencer’s engagement metrics, audience demographics, and more.
Log in from your TikTok Ads Manager account, if you have one. If not, creating an account is a straightforward process — enter your business email address & other necessary information, verify your email, wait for TikTok’s approval, customize your profile with brand logo & other parameters, and start contacting influencers.
But TikTok’s creator marketplace comes with major drawbacks:
#2: Hashtags
Search TikTok for relevant hashtags in your brand, and you’ll see trending videos of influencers. For example, if you’re a skincare brand, search for #skincare on TikTok and check out influencers in the niche.
The con of this process is it's manually cumbersome. Not to mention, you’d still have to shortlist influencers and vet them by checking their engagement metrics & content quality.
#3: Use an influencer marketing tool
An TikTok influencer search platform like Modash helps you overcome the limitations of the other methods.
You don’t have to do the heavy lifting of finding TikTok influencers manually since the platform already has an extensive database of 200M+ creators.
Even better: Add your demographic criteria like age, gender, location, engagement rate, and more to filter a list of influencers who meet those qualifications perfectly.
The best part? Analyzing the profile of TikTok influencers is easy. If you already have an influencer in mind, search for their username. If not, choose any from the database and get an inside scoop on their audience, engagement rate, recent posts, and more.
Choose whichever method rocks your boat and shortlist TikTok influencers to reach out to. But it’s not as simple as DMing, “Hey, want to partner with our brand?” because influencers don’t partner with every company that comes their way. The first message should make a positive impression.
Pro tip: if you're on a budget, you can use the free TikTok engagement rate calculator tool as a minimum solution for influencer vetting initially.
Outreaching to influencers is the place many marketers get stuck. And we get it: It can be frustrating to hunt for a TikTok email, prepare a pitch, and ultimately get ignored. It doesn’t have to be that hard.
So, how do you contact an influencer? There are four ways: email, Direct Message (DM) on TikTok or on a secondary platform, or commenting on their videos.
We recommend using a combination of all three methods. For example, you can begin your outreach via email, follow up there once, then move channels and follow up on TikTok DMs. (Note: on TikTok you can only DM if you’re mutual followers). If you still don’t get their attention, comment on their latest video.
Searching for the contact details of TikTok creators one by one can quickly take up so much of your time, you’ll never activate them. A better alternative is to let Modash do all that work for you automatically. Shortlist your influencers and then in one click you can export their contact details in bulk.
The next step is preparing your pitch. Five tips to improve your response rate:
1. Stand out from the crowd: Influencers receive hundreds of emails, DMs, and comments every day. How does your notification stand out? Pay extra attention to your subject line, first DM, and comment. They should be catchy and enticing enough to be opened and personalized enough to get a response.
2. Be human: TikTok is all about authentic content. Then it’s no surprise TikTok influencers run away from robotic and stuffy messages. No matter how you contact influencers, highlight something that shows there are humans behind your brand. Give your message a personal touch — like how their story resonates with your brand values or how you admire their undying love for Billy Joel.
3. Get straight to the point: TikTok influencers are busy business owners. Don’t ramble or do small-talk in your message — you only get one shot at making a good first impression.
4. Provide value: TikTok influencers, especially the good ones, are in high demand. The best ones truly care about living up to their audience’s trust and won’t partner with any brand that can’t provide value to their community. So, it becomes crucial to mention how your product is useful for the influencer’s audience in your outreach. Does your company solve a significant pain point? Do your brand values and mission align with the influencer’s values? Does your product save time or minimize effort for the influencer’s followers?
While you’re at it, also highlight why the influencer you’re messaging is the perfect fit for your brand — maybe their tone of voice is perfectly aligned to your brand, or perhaps their audience demographics perfectly overlap with yours.
5. Follow-up: An underrated tip in outreaching to influencers is following up with them. Creators get occupied — maybe your DMs got lost, perhaps your email landed in spam, or they might just read your message & forget to respond. We recommend following up at least five times on the initial outreach within two weeks.
To help you get started, check our free influencer outreach templates. You just have to copy-paste and start recruiting.
The next piece of the puzzle is keeping track of how many influencers you’ve contacted, when you need to follow up with them, and remembering details about your interaction.
It gets more complicated if you’re a team working together on influencer outreach and need accountability & visibility of who your coworkers are communicating with. The solution? Make a list on Modash, add notes, track status, and collaborate with your team members easily under one roof.
It’s not easy to ask an influencer to promote your product, but when done right, it can act as the rocket fuel for your growth. If you need more help, our influencer outreach guide shares more tips on automation, delegation, and scaling your outreach game.
Your TikTok influencer marketing is only just beginning. One thing that helps your campaigns run like a well-oiled machine is keeping logistics in place.
You’ll need to do administrative tasks in your influencer partnerships two times: before the collaboration begins and during the collaboration.
Before you start partnering with a creator, ensure these three things are in place:
1. Influencer contract
A solid contract protects both you and the influencer — you get on the same page about the expectation of both parties, the deal is formalized, and you always have something to refer to in case of disagreements. Your contract should include:
Contracts are those boring, but essential aspects of your TikTok influencer marketing program. Want to avoid the draining process of drafting your own contract? Check our eight different contract templates customized to your payment model.
2. Influencer brief
Getting the kind of content you want from TikTok influencers is impossible if you don’t lay out clear guidelines for them. At the same time, you don’t want your rules to be so stringent that they restrict the creative freedom of the influencer.
Influencer briefs help you reach the sweet spot of receiving the videos you want with minimal back & forth. They also ensure influencers unleash their creativity to connect with target customers. What should your briefs include?
Learn more: Influencer Briefing: 7 Things To Include (+Free Template & Examples)
3. Influencer payment
Work out the logistics of paying influencers in-house. Get the accounting team on board to expect creator invoices and ensure the payment methods are set up.
There are many ways to pay influencers — you can pay them per post, practice influencer gifting and pay via products, or give them a fixed compensation.
We recommend a performance-based pay — paying influencers a cut when they get their audience to perform a desired action. For example, you pay influencers $XX for every sale that comes through their personalized promo code. Why do we recommend this method? It’s infinitely scalable, has an easy-to-measure ROI, and ensures you get a bang for your buck.
With your contract, brief, and payment method ready in place, you’re ready to dive head-first into your TikTok influencer collaboration.
You can run four types of collaboration with influencers:
1. Paid partnership
These are branded videos influencers create for your brand. They have a “paid partnership” tag — allowing watchers to know your company sponsored the video.
They are one of the most straightforward ways to collaborate with an influencer. There’s no landing page attached to the post —so, these posts are best for boosting brand awareness and becoming top-of-mind for your customers.
How can an influencer mark branded content? While posting the video, they choose More options, select Branded content and ads, and toggle the Branded content button on.
You can also link a post to a campaign and tag the brand account.
⚠️ Remember: When an influencer marks your content as branded, TikTok automatically adds the mandatory #ad hashtag on the post. Depending on the guidelines in your country, it might be enough, but be sure to double-check if you also need to follow any other rules.
2. Spark Ads
Spark Ads boost turn native influencer posts into ads. Think of it like influencer whitelisting — using an influencer’s already live post as an ad after receiving their authorization. They’re labeled Sponsored and have a customizable CTA like “Shop now” or “Learn more. ”
Users who click on “Shop now” are taken to your desired landing page. If they click on the creator’s profile, 60% of the screen still shows your webpage, and the remaining shows the influencer’s profile.
Spark Ads are native to the feed and look authentic to TikTok’s platform. Then it’s no wonder they have a 142% higher engagement rate and a 43% higher conversion rate than traditional ads.
Watch this video to learn how to convert a creator video into a Spark Ad.
3. Discount codes
In this method, influencers add their personalized discount codes in the caption of the TikTok video where they talk about your products.
The only thing you need to remember here is to ensure the discount code isn’t buried in the caption. If possible, it’s also good practice to highlight that there’s a unique discount code in the caption of the TikTok video.
4. Link in bio
Influencers write a caption with instructions to avail a discount with their unique link — which is available in their bio.
This method is perfect if you use unique landing pages for each influencer or UTM links to attribute website traffic to individual creators. Influencers can add one link in their bio and redirect their audience to it.
Creators often use Linktree, Snipfeed, or other link-in-bio makers since it allows them to add multiple links, helping them add details of all their collaborations and resources in one place.
Influencers can also use the link-in-bio method to share their discount code — writing a caption along the lines of “head to my bio for the discount code.” It helps customers get a direct link to your website instead of manually searching for your website on Google first and then applying the discount code.
While there are four types of influencer partnerships, you can always mix and match between them. For example, you could sponsor a TikTok video (paid partnership) and also offer a unique promo code (discount) in one post.
Once you have strategized how to collaborate with influencers, the next bit is tracking all the content they produce.
Confused about which metrics you need to measure for determining TikTok influencer marketing success? It differs campaign by campaign and goal by goal.
We recommend keeping things simple and picking one or two things to track if you're just starting out. Once you get past the learning curve and get the hang of TikTok creator partnerships, you can add more metrics to the mix.
⚠️ Remember: Don’t expect data to show progress immediately. Influencer marketing is a long game. It might take some time to deliver tangible results, but the payoff has a compounding effect that makes the channel worth pursuing.
Here are three ways you can track influencer performance on TikTok:
1. Promo codes
Share personalized promo codes with TikTok creators that unlock a special discount for their audience. The best part of this method? It makes things real simple to track — you can directly attribute any sales metric like average order value (AOV) or amount of sales to an influencer.
2. UTM tags on your links:
Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is a simple code that can be attached to any website attributing it to a particular source. Basically, it gives unique links to your TikTok influencers so you can measure how many visitors come through them from the backend.
It’s easy to compare data for different campaigns, different creators, and different channels using this method. Campaign URL builder can help you create a customized link for each creator.
You can also opt for making influencers your affiliate partners — especially if you’re opting for performance-based pay. The creator gets a cut every time someone buys your product from their link.
3. Use a monitoring tool:
It’s easy to monitor influencer-generated content when you’re partnering with 5 or 10 creators. But as you scale and partner with 20 or 30 creators for different campaigns using different collaboration methods, it becomes frustrating and impractical to manually keep up with each piece of sponsored content.
The solution? Using an influencer content monitoring tool like Modash. Once you’ve created a campaign inside Modash and told the bots what hashtags & mentions it should track, the content that checks these requirements will be tracked automatically.
What’s more: You can set up alerts for highlighting a post if a crucial hashtag or ad disclosure is missing — making it super simple to spot creators failing to meet your content guidelines.
Modash even goes a step further and also shares individual influencer data and campaign overview — enabling you to see the overarching statistics at a glance.
Your job’s not done yet. Influencer marketing’s success relies on how good your relationships are with your partner creators.
Managing influencer communication becomes harder as you scale. It’s easy to keep things in order when you’re partnering with a handful of creators, but once you start collaborating with 20-30 influencers simultaneously, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks.
Here are three ways you can minimize effort, stay prepared, and keep your creators happy without burning out:
1. Create a landing page with FAQs and processes
It can get frustrating to answer the same questions from influencers over and over again. The solution? Make a landing page for your TikTok influencers answering all the frequently asked questions, laying out your processes, content guidelines, payment methods, and more.
You can also keep things simple and just share a Google Doc file for each campaign with relevant influencers. Still, a landing page offers more benefits — it allows potential influencers to discover you through Google, and you can have some pre-screening questions to qualify influencers and decline applicants who aren’t a good fit.
2. Start an influencer newsletter
Keeping all creators on the same page is challenging, especially as you start to grow. A newsletter helps you share critical announcements in bulk, keep your brand top of mind for your TikTok influencers, and allows you to share tips and advice for creators. You can also include your top-performing posts by other creators for inspiration and incentive.
3. Add a personal touch to the relationship
Influencer marketing is all about people. Sending a gift to an influencer on their birthday, congratulating creators on achieving milestones, and commenting on their TikTok videos are basic, simple human stuff that goes a long way to enhance your influencer relationships.
Read more: How To Manage Influencers: 7 Proven Relationship Management Methods
We strongly recommend building long-term relationships with influencers rather than one-off partnerships. Why?
Now, you have everything you need to begin your TikTok influencer marketing efforts. Wondering what these steps look like in action?
Need some inspiration for your TikTok influencer marketing campaign? Here are three brands who are killing it on the platform:
Vessi is a footwear brand with the USP of selling the world’s first waterproof knit shoes. On TikTok, they’re doing everything right. They do paid partnerships, spark ads, in-feed ads, comment on influencer posts, do duets on their account with user-generated content, and run giveaways.
The results?
Takeaways:
BlendJet is an e-commerce brand with its main product as a portable blender. On TikTok, they’re the lead in running whitelisted ads from influencers’ accounts (spark ads) and hitting the pain point of their customers in every video they make.
Here are the results:
Takeaways:
We’re Not Really Strangers (WNRS) is a mental-health-focused company selling card games. The brand is a pro at inexpensive marketing on TikTok. They create authentic content focused on their ‘vibe’ and are never too salesy on the platform. Users and customers from all over the world also leave reviews on their products on the platform.
The results are wildly impressive:
Takeaways:
If you’re looking for more inspiration, check our in-depth guide on 11 TikTok influencer marketing examples.
With this guide, you’re armed with all the resources and information you need to get TikTok influencer marketing right.
But TikTok influencer marketing can still be frustrating. You need to understand the nuances of the platform, find relevant influencers, and manage relationships — all while dancing to smooth transitions.
The easiest way to reduce your overwhelm? Streamline your processes using an influencer marketing tool like Modash — find the perfect influencers for your brand, analyze their content, and monitor their performance — all in one place.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial today and see for yourself.