With the popularity of word-of-mouth referrals, TikTok influencer marketing has its place nowadays. If you work with influencers, that’s a great start to itself. But with over 100,000 TikTok influencers active in the US alone, it takes time and effort to choose the right ones for your marketing campaign.
That’s why it’s important to make sure your marketing efforts pay off. In this post, you’ll find out top strategies to maximize TikTok influencer marketing, backed up with real-life examples.
Top strategies to maximize TikTok influencer marketing
1. Check out influencers’ media kits before partnering
Thousands of brands leverage influencer partnerships to connect with audiences. However, before finalizing a collaboration, it’s important to review the influencer’s media kit thoroughly. Having a solid following on TikTok doesn’t mean that the selected influencer can help you achieve your business goals. Relevance and engagement matter.
To secure collaborations with brands, TikTok influencers and creators often have influencer kits that include all the relevant information that helps brands understand audience demographics, engagement rates, past successes, and popular post formats.
Let’s take Lauren Soyung Lin, a TikTok influencer with 252k followers, for example. To secure brand collaborations, she has created a 9-page media kit that includes important information that can help brand marketers make the right decisions: her bio, TikTok following size, audience analytics, previous case studies, and prices.
Although many marketers ignore evaluating influencer media kits, paying close attention to these assets is the first step towards maximizing TikTok influencer efforts, as it allows you to partner with the right TikTok influencers who resonate with your brand and your audience.
2. Make good use of influencer management platforms
Influencer management platforms help you streamline your influencer marketing efforts: find and vet the right influencers, close on campaign terms, deliver briefs, discuss assets under production, take care of payments, and measure the ROI of your campaign in one place. Some influencer management platforms also have in-app analytics that even help to measure brand awareness lift.
With the right management platform, it’s easier to work with TikTok influencers and streamline campaign operations scalably.
For example, take Olly Wellness. When this healthcare products brand wanted to jump on the bandwagon and test TikTok content, the company had no experience, so they needed a trusted influencer management platform to take care of TikTok influencer campaigns from A to Z. Olly turned to Popular Pays and made good use of its TikTok integration to run a campaign targeting a wider audience in new and engaging ways.
The platform helped Olly discover the right TikTok creators, develop assets, and measure performance. Not only did the campaign result in significant reach, but it also helped to generate content for repurposing on other social media channels.
Overall, the campaign yielded 13 creative concepts, an 18.5% average engagement rate, and over 1 million video views.
3. Collaborate with smaller TikTok influencers
Big wig influencers are great for reaching millions of audiences quickly. However, smaller TikTok influencers can often have higher engagement rates and a more targeted following suited to your brand, which can more effectively help you make money on TikTok.
This is because they tend to form closer, more personal connections with their audiences, which leads to increased trust. Your TikTok influencer marketing strategy should therefore include influencers who talk and post about themes and topics closely related to our brand.
Take, for example, the collaboration between nano-influencer Alexandra Petram and the watch and jewelry brand Daniel Wellington.
Alexandra is a lifestyle influencer with an ardent but small following of 1400 people who has become a brand ambassador for the company. Not only does Alexandra promote Daniel Wellington’s products, but she also offers personalized discount codes to influence consumer intent among her followers.
The video below, with 32.9K likes, illustrates how smaller influencers can drive outsized results.
To find relevant TikTok micro and nano influencers for your brand, you can rely on social media monitoring tools to analyze brand mentions and get in touch with people who already spread the word about your company on social media. These people are more likely to be interested in collaborating with you.
According to recent stats on TikTok marketing, 68% of TikTok users love watching someone else’s videos, and 62% want to learn more about featured brands. This means you can affect consumer intent, especially if you know how to provoke impulse buying.
Set up different discount codes or affiliate links for each influencer in your marketing campaign. This way, when audiences make purchases or follow through on desired behaviors, you can track which influencers drove those actions.
Look at Bella Anya on TikTok. This fitness and health influencer has 278.2K TikTok followers and a total of 7 million likes.
The link in Bella’s TikTok bio leads to a micro website with useful and engaging content like her Amazon and other storefronts, coaching tools, long-form review videos, and discount codes for various products.
Brands partnering with Bella can track how many purchases were made by people directed to their products and services from Bella’s TikTok, helping them measure the success of campaigns with her.
5. Keep track of influencer campaign performance
To maximize your TikTok marketing efforts, you need to monitor the performance of your influencer campaigns. While affiliate link tracking can certainly help, TikTok analytics can give you further valuable insights based on views, likes, shares, comments, and clicks. You can do this manually within your TikTok account or export data from TikTok using a tool like Coupler.io.
Coupler.io’s TikTok Analytics dashboard can provide you with key metrics of your account at a glance. You can also see additional insights like best days for posting, viewers’ geography, etc. This dashboard is free to use and easy to set up.
Sort and analyze the data to understand what’s working and what isn’t. Quick access to TikTok analytics data organized in an easily readable manner can also help you make proactive changes and tweaks to modify a campaign while it’s live.
6. Double down on relationships with top-performing influencers
Tracking TikTok analytics consistently will reveal which of your TikTok influencer marketing efforts are paying off the most. Consider pursuing long-term ties with influencers who consistently outperform others in spreading brand awareness or converting audiences into customers.
Charlotte Olivia is a good example here. A lifestyle influencer, Charlotte’s following and reputation steadily grew with each brand she covered and the more experience she gained. Charlotte now does steady paid partnerships with brands like Coach, as seen in the screenshot featuring the Coach Denim Soho Bag.
As influencers get more familiar with your brand and gain footing with their audiences, you will benefit from authentic and engaging marketing content.
7. Repurpose TikTok influencer endorsements
The age-old adage of reduce-reuse-recycle applies to TikTok influencer marketing as well. A good TikTok video marketing campaign takes considerable effort, time, and money. So don’t limit posting those videos to TikTok alone.
In fact, the more you repurpose TikTok influencer endorsements, the more consistent and cohesive your overall social media marketing will be. Bella Poarch’s Skims collaboration video did very well on TikTok.
By posting assets from the same campaign to Instagram, the brand was able to reach a bigger audience while reducing the marketing costs of creating a new, separate post for another social media channel.
The Instagram post received 6,350 likes and got numerous enthusiastic comments and shares.
Why should businesses consider TikTok influencer marketing?
TikTok is all the rage today, especially among a younger, more fashion-loving, and health-savvy audience with high purchasing power. The number of users and daily video posts on the platform are strong indicators of the potential TikTok holds for brands and businesses.
What’s more, TikTok has great sales potential. According to one study, the average user spends 54 minutes a day on the app, 74% of Gen Z users search for information on TikTok, and the platform has 33.3 million social buyers.
So, capitalizing on TikTok influencer marketing is crucial for businesses. It helps you:
- Reach a wider audience: 900 million active users clamor to view engaging content. A big chunk of this group consists of Gen Z members who have a positive attitude toward products and services recommended by the social media personalities they like. So, influencers and brands can tap into this huge user base to extend their reach.
- Increase brand awareness and trust: The point behind influencer marketing is to leverage the position of trust and faith influencers hold among their followers. Collaborating with the right TikTok content creator augments your authenticity and gives you credibility in the eyes of an eager and highly engaged follower base.
- Get more creative: TikTok is an extremely competitive environment, so the more creative you are, the better your chances of success. For example, many popular influencers use AI marketing tools to plan, curate, and optimize their content creation. Often, this results in fascinating content no one has seen before, even starting global trends. This platform and its influencers will push you to think outside the box and come up with unique and relevant content strategies and marketing campaigns.
How do you find success with TikTok influencer marketing efforts?
When TikTok first launched in 2016, many wondered if its rapid rise to social media stardom was just a fad. With a strong focus on creative and funny short-form videos, skeptics saw TikTok’s popularity among younger audiences as an indication that it had little potential for brands.
However, the situation has quickly changed in favor of marketers and brands. Today, TikTok has a huge and engaged user base, and it’s predicted to reach 1.8 billion users by the end of 2024. Social media marketers, meanwhile, see it as the top platform for gaining exposure.
With so many influencers and campaign styles, it can be hard to predict what will work best for your business. It’s often best to match your marketing goals with the calls-to-action present in a given influencer’s content.
For example, if you handle marketing for an airline company seeking to promote cost-effective tickets to remote locations, you could partner with someone who posts about how to become a travel influencer.
Merely partnering with a TikTok content creator is not enough. You need to simplify and optimize the marketing workflow with relevant campaigns based on market research and insights from social listening tools.
You can leverage a robust TikTok analytics dashboard to help you view and organize user data and the performance of each post. You can also plan marketing campaigns in a manner that allows you to reuse and repurpose the content across different social platforms.
By collaborating with the right people and carefully planning your content strategy, your TikTok influencer marketing efforts will start yielding measurable results and progress.
