TikTok is a unique social media platform that entertains billions of users and, at the same time, provides content creators with a chance to earn money. The platform functions as a place for its users to create, share and discover short-form videos. 

Each short-form video is usually between 15 – 60 seconds in length (with select users being allowed to upload up to 3 minutes) and could be on any topic. The TikTok app boasts up to three billion downloads, making it one of the top social networks, together with the likes of Facebook and Instagram.

TikTok's popularity has made it a great arena for businesses looking to use social media marketing to reach new audiences and increase brand loyalty and awareness. There are different ways to advertise your business on TikTok; however, this article will only focus on one of the best ways to use TikTok as a marketing platform, which is TikTok influencer marketing.

Taking advantage of Tiktok influencer marketing gives your business access to an enormous audience and growth potential, especially if your business targets Generation Z and Millennials.

If you're new to the idea of using TikTok for your marketing needs, precisely when it comes to influencer marketing, don't worry; we'll walk you through it. 

Why is TikTok a Good Platform for Influencer Marketing

TikTok is an exciting mobile app that brings out the fun and creativity in content creators while at the same time providing Tiktok users with their desired content fast. The platform uses a special TikTok algorithm to ensure that user-generated content gets to the right audience. For this reason, users mostly enjoy every TikTok video displayed in their feed, thereby making marketing very effective.  

What's more, numerous TikTok influencers are available to leverage the various benefits the platform offers to both businesses and consumers. Most of them have as many as millions of influencers followers and always seem to connect with TikTok users in various unique ways.

Thus, partnering with creators for influencer campaigns can give brands the chance to witness enormous growth, especially when working with influencers in specific niches. 

That's not all that makes TikTok a fantastic place for influencer marketing—here are a few other benefits the platform offers:

• The engagement rate on TikTok is high. Statistics show that the average TikTok post attracts an 18% engagement rate, which is significantly higher than most other social media platforms. 
• TikTok influencers usually have an authentic connection with their followers, making it likely that audiences would trust the brands and products they choose to share.
• It's easy for a video to go viral on TikTok due to the platform's unique algorithm. Since performance statistics don't impact whether influencer content goes viral or not, you could raise brand awareness by simply creating a video with strategic hashtags or trending audio.

How do I Choose the Right Influencers for My Business?

Before you get to hop in on TikTok influencer marketing, you'll need to find the right influencers to work with first. If you want to get your name out there on TikTok and build a loyal following, you must choose the right influencer to partner with. 

It's never easy at first because of the different factors you have to consider and a large number of influencers available. Luckily, we have some tips to help you develop your strategy and make your hunt for the right influencer significantly less stressful.

1. Your Audience Matters

It's easy to get lost on TikTok because of its huge user base. For this reason, you should know who your target audience is before you can start your marketing journey on TikTok. You should know:

• The brands your target customers engage with
• The type of influencers they follow
• Some specific problems they have and how you can solve them
• The basic demographics of your target audience
• Their challenges, common traits, goals, and pain points

Once you have a deep understanding of who your target audience is, it'll be easier to find an influencer that resonates with your brand.

Don't just assume that the influencer with the highest followers will help you achieve your marketing desires. You'll need to make careful research on which TikTok creator will create the most relevant engagement and influence buying decisions.

2. Know Your Campaign Goals

If your reason for marketing on social media is not clear enough, you might find it hard to get the right influencer for your business. Is your focus on brand awareness? Or do you want to boost your ROI and sales and convert? 

Whatever it is, make sure it's clear in your mind. Your campaign's main goal will have a large influence on your strategies for influencer marketing on TikTok.

3. Keep Your Sales Funnel in Mind

Knowing what you want for your sales funnel is another step that has a large impact on the kind of influencer you choose for your business. Additionally, there are five creator categories:

• Mega (more than 1,000,000 followers)
• Macro (500,000 to 1,000,000 followers)
• Mid-tier (50,000 to 500,000 followers)
• Micro (10,000 to 50,000 followers)
• Nano (1,000 to 10,000 followers)

Think about how you can gain and retain audiences by following the AIDA strategy. Here's what your marketing funnel should look like:

• Awareness

  Introducing your brand to and attracting your target audience should be your priority. So, you should work with mega and macro-influencers for this purpose. You can also work towards increasing your brand's visibility.

• Consideration

  Once you've gotten some attraction, next comes engagement. Working with mid-tier influencers would be the best option. In this stage of the funnel, you're not looking for an enormous audience base, rather you should filter out your audience to people who are interested in what you offer.

• Decision and Action

  For this stage, your sights should be on people who have passed through the first two stages. So, they should know your brand, and the kind of product and service your offer. The next step would be convincing them to convert or take an action. For this reason, you should work with micro and nano-influencers so you can get access to niche audiences.

4. Your Budget is Important

Budgets are quite important when it comes to your TikTok influencer campaigns. It determines what influencers you'll work with and the type of marketing campaigns you can run. The price of a TikTok creator can be as low as $5 or as high as $10,000 per post. Some of the factors that determine the cost of a TikTok influencer include:

• The influencer's engagement rate
• The amount of effort you require from them
• Type and number of posts
• Reach 
• Your goals and expectations
• Ad placement

5. Carefully Select Your Creators

While hunting for relevant influencers, keep in mind that the influencer's audience and content must resonate with your values and brand—if you want to see good results. Also, your prospective influencers should have consistent and high engagement levels and create content that is either directly or indirectly in sync with your business or niche.

Also, don't forget that your target audience should already trust and engage with the influencer, otherwise it might be hard to get your brand recognized. 

How to Find Influencers on TikTok?

Once you know the type of influencer you need for your business, you can start your search. When searching for influencer partners on TikTok, find creatives whose brand identity matches the brand's image. 

The high customization capabilities of TikTok create the potential opportunity for influencers to emerge in almost any sector. It has massive impacts on the market. No matter what industry you operate in, there is a chance for you to develop a presence to reach your target audience.

Moving forward, here are three ways to find influencers on TikTok. 

1. TikTok Discover

TikTok has a discovery page where you make searches using industry trends or specific keywords. You can also find a potential influencer for your business on this page. 

Additionally, you can search top TikTok videos, sounds, suggested accounts, and trending hashtags. To access TikTok discover page, just click on the discover option at the bottom of the app.

2. Google Search

It's also possible to find popular influencers through a simple Google search. All you have to do is type in your specific keyword, like "fashion design" and add "TikTok influencer" to bring out the results you're looking for.

3. TikTok Influencer Networking Platforms

If none of the above methods work for you, you can try using TikTok influencer network platforms. These platforms are made with one purpose in mind; connecting businesses with TikTok influencers. 

Here are four of these platforms you can use to hunt influencers:

• Fanbytes

Fanbytes is a platform that connects brands to influencers across different social media channels, TikTok included. The platform also allows you to check out the bios of TikTok influencers that may interest you. It also has tools to create TikTok influencer marketing campaigns.

• Julius

Julius (a.k.a. Julius with Hypr or JuliusWorks) connects brands to popular TikTok influencers by adding filters that make it easier to run through their database of over one hundred thousand influencers.

• Upfluence

Upfluence offers an enormous database of over one million influencers, including TikTok influencers. It also features keyword searching that makes it easier to find what you need for your TikTok influencer marketing campaign. 

• InfluenceGrid

InfluenceGrid makes TikTok influencer marketing easier by showing you some of the top TikTok influencers and also displays important information like the number of followers, views, country, and engagement rates.

Partnering With Influencers on TikTok

After figuring out what influencers fit your brand, the next step is partnering with them. Don't just rush in for a deal or blindly state your terms.

There are some rules to follow when partnering with an influencer to make sure you're only getting authentic sponsored content. Make sure you reflect this clearly in your Influencer contract.

So, here are some tips to help you make a solid influencer contract:

• Creative Freedom

Make sure your TikTok creators have the freedom to create videos like regular content. You can try to bend things a little, but avoid dominating their creative process and voice too much.

Removing the creative freedom of influencers would only stifle them, making them release content that won't sit well with their audience. Let them do what they do best.

• Ownership Clause

Though you're in a partnership with your influencer, avoid resharing or repurposing their content without permission. For every campaign, you should state clearly that you have intentions to reuse influencer-generated content for marketing purposes. Don't forget to also state the duration of content ownership.

• Clear Deadlines

For your deliverables, ensure you clearly set deadlines so your campaign can run according to plan. You should state the campaign's duration, deadlines for delivering content to be approved, and the dates and time for sharing the sponsored content.

• Specific Deliverables

You'll need to properly explain your visions to your influencer. That is, communicating the visual/audio elements, talking points, and formats of the talking points. this ensures you run a smooth TikTok influencer marketing campaign and also avoid disappointments.

• Exclusivity Clause

Make sure you create a time frame that prevents your influencers from working with the competition. If you don't define these terms, it might drop the influencer's content impact and trust.

• Brand Messaging Directives

Always state the main goals of your brand and the message you want to convey. This would prevent influencers from going off the brand messaging or creating a campaign without clear objectives.

• FTC Disclosure

Ensure your TikTok creators clearly show the sponsorship so their content complies with the FTC guidelines. The #ad is usually enough for this, or you can make it them disclose through verbal means.

How to Measure Success on TikTok?

As with any advertising strategy, you would want to be able to measure the Return of Investment of partnering with a TikTok influencer.

While it is not easy, there are a couple of ways to do so:

1. On Your Tiktok Profile

If your goal with using Tiktok influencers is to gain viewers and followers in your own Tiktok page, then you can gauge your success through views and follower count. The analytics on TikTok takes this a step further by showing the weekly and monthly growth, information about who is watching your videos, and even total playtime. 

And the best part is that it's easy to check your analytics to see how successful you are on TikTok. All you have to do is go to your profile—if you're using TikTok on mobile devices, go to settings and privacy, click on account, and select the creator tools tabs. There, you can select analytics and view all the metrics of your content. 

If you're using the desktop version, simply login to TikTok and move to your profile picture. Then, choose view analytics. Additionally, you can download your analytics data, but this feature is only available on desktop versions.

2. On Your Website

If your goal is to gain more website traffic, then you can of course check the success of this type of advertising by checking how much traffic you gain from Tiktok Influencer Marketing, especially if you give each influencer a unique link.

Influencers with high follower counts are allowed by Tiktok to place clickable shortened links on their profiles. If you use a tracking system, you can create a unique link which will allow you to monitor the clicks and conversions (or sales) from a specific source.

The Downsides of Using Tiktok Influencers

While there are many upsides to using TikTok influencers, there are also a few downsides that should be considered. 

The first downside is the cost.

TikTok influencer marketing is not as cheap as other marketing strategies and can be quite expensive, especially when working with high-profile influencers. While you can work with influencers that are within your budget, this also means you are limiting your reach. 

The second downside is your inability to properly target the audience.

The influencer's followers may be spot on when it comes to age bracket, but not geographic location. Or the followers' interest may fall under your target market but not the age bracket.

While you can filter the influencers, finding the person or page that embodies your target audience is not that easy.

The third downside is that measuring success can be complicated.

From both the measuring techniques mentioned above, you can easily see that influencer marketing can be a bit hard to track and monitor for ROI, especially if you are also advertising in other ways.

The fourth downside is that results may not be immediate.

Since TikTok influencer marketing is relatively new, there are still some kinks that need to be ironed out. One of these is the lack of immediate results.

This means that you can't expect to see an influx of traffic or followers immediately after launching a campaign. It may take a while before you see any significant changes, so it's important to have patience and keep track of your progress.

But these downsides to running na influencer marketing campaign can easily be solved by running Tiktok ads instead of just working with influencers.

The influencer strategy is best for brands that value long-term relationships with their customers, especially when building loyalty among their core base. 

Wrapping Up

Some TikTok Creators can achieve fame overnight, while it can take years or months to achieve the same feats on other social networks like Instagram. It takes longer on such social platforms because the content is only shown to the followers of the creator.

TikTok is different and trendy. And trending entertaining content is the secret behind the best performing content in TikTok influencer marketing. Staying on top of what's trending has been a constant ache to brands because of how trends change every day. This is why influencer marketing campaigns are important as it helps brands keep up with the trends while finding new followers.

It is a great place to get brand recognition, gain traction, and even drive more sales. It doesn't matter how small or big your business is; you can make TikTok work for you by employing the right strategies.

Finally, TikTok marketing gives every brand a chance to be discovered and heard. The platform is recognized in over one hundred and fifty countries and supports up to seventy-five languages.

You can get everything you need for a successful marketing campaign from TikTok. So, if you're new to the concept of social media marketing or just want to try a new platform for your brand's marketing strategy, TikTok is a great place to start.

If you want to start running TikTok ads, Brax can help. Brax is an all-in-one solution for managing marketing campaigns across different social media networks and native advertising platforms. Sign-up for a free trial today.