The Ultimate TikTok Influencer Marketing Guide for 2022

Since entering the international market, TikTok has become the right platform for working with influencers. With tools like the TikTok Creator Marketplace, brands can easily find influencers to promote their products or services.

Content on TikTok has the potential to reach millions of users, but working with Influencers here requires a higher level of strategic planning compared to Instagram.

What is a TikTok influencer?

The definition of a TikTok influencer is no different from that of influencers on other social media platforms. In broad terms, an Influencer is a person who has an influence on other people’s opinions. They normally have a charismatic personality and a channel they use to produce content their target audience finds engaging. So much so, in fact, that this engagement can be monetized.

An influencer’s audience looks up to them, enjoys what they have to offer, and listens to their recommendations. So it’s hardly surprising that brands want to use this influence to promote their products and services and raise brand awareness.

Every attempt to classify TikTok influencers is rather contingent but there are at least two main criteria they are defined by:

• Niche. More often than not, brands look for influencers based on their niche that defines their target audience. It’s worth noting that the majority of TikTok users are people under the age of 30. This means that the platform is interesting to brands to want to sell to young audiences. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t find influencers who would speak to your target audience.
• Follower count. One of the main factors in choosing an opinion leader. TikTok audiences are much more engaged than on any other social media platform. This means that if an influencer with a large following promotes your products in their videos, chances are their audience will notice that.
  How does TikTok influencer marketing work?

The first thing that comes to your mind is how is TikTok different from Facebook or Instagram?

There are many social media platforms, all of them offering the same type of advertising models and having significant engagement. Facebook and Instagram were also in high demand when they went viral, and the same is the case with TikTok, right?

If you think so, you’re wrong, especially when it comes to the role of influencer marketing on TikTok. Most social platforms offer something new and create new trends, but TikTok has done something that has never been done before.

TikTok’s Influencer marketing model is all about engaging and convincing audiences to participate in the same challenge, not just consuming content.

The best way to understand this is to compare it to Instagram or Facebook, where influencer marketing is all about showing product images or discussing a product with a specific offer attached.

TikTok, on the other hand, takes engagement and participation in something to a whole new level with a model that convinces other content creators and subscribers to join a viral campaign in the form of a dance challenge, a cooking challenge, or a funny face challenge. This appeals to young audiences and increases the chances of content distribution.

TikTok has mastered the art of creating viral trends that take brand ROI to a new level that cannot be compared with any other platform.

The service doesn’t announce the launch of advertising formats and users and advertisers often learn about their appearance by chance. Until recently, the platform didn’t have any ads at all. The platform is focusing on audience recruitment and retention but with the launch of its ad unit, brands have a variety of ways to promote their products and services to their target audiences:

• Brands organically integrated with content (think product placement).
• Vertical video ads with call-to-action buttons.
• In-feed video ads.
• Branded filters and masks.
• Hashtags: brands create their own hashtags and launch themed challenges with Influencers.

The goal of sponsored partnerships on this site is to collaborate with one creator and then engage other TikTok creators and regular users. The first TikToker launches a video with a hashtag and that way initiates an avalanche of content built in the form of a challenge or a contest.

When an Influencer’s audience actively participates in a promoted challenge, it becomes a sub-entity of marketing, distributing that content to its own audience. No other platform has a structure for creating viral activity like TikTok. At the same time, traffic from TikTok can be redirected to the site and have a direct impact on sales.

Why use TikTok influencers to promote your brand?

With TikTok’s average engagement rate surpassing Instagram, brands are beginning to prioritize the platform as a valuable tool for building their own brand loyalty. Some of the world’s most popular brands, such as Chipotle, Calvin Klein, and Levi’s, are using TikTok to drive viral activity. While brands are succeeding in publishing native content on the platform, they are also interested in partnering with popular creators.

With its unparalleled reach, TikTok can be a powerful way to not only increase your brand awareness but also to convert users into customers through new e-commerce features. As with all Influencer marketing campaigns, it’s important to build constructive relationships with authors and include them in the campaign process. No one understands their audience better than the creators themselves. And this is especially true for the fast-growing TikTok.

The majority of popular TikTokers are established YouTube and Instagram creators who already have experience creating content. They understand their audience, respond quickly to the dynamics of user sentiment on the platform, and master new tools. The experience of the creators also facilitates interaction when negotiating commercial partnership terms. At the same time, prices for advertising integrations on TikTok are still lower than on Instagram and many times lower than on YouTube.

Types of TikTok influencer marketing campaigns

To advertise with a popular TikToker, the first thing you need to do is identify your marketing campaign goals. What do you want to achieve as a result of your campaign? This is what defines the type of marketing campaign to choose.

It’s better to make sure that a TikToker you want to partner with knows about these goals. Here are a few marketing campaign types available to brands on TikTok:

1. Brand/company image promotion. In this case, you don’t care so much about sales or audience response because the main goal is raising brand awareness and building a reputation. At this stage, you are building your target audience.
2. Sales. This type is aimed at increasing the interest of the target audience and, as a result, getting new customers and selling your products/services. The most important goal here is to bring users to performing the target action.
3. Building your social platform presence. In this case, all your actions are aimed at increasing your following.
4. Increase in track plays and downloads. A popular influencer promotes a music track or a music video through a challenge and with the help of their following. with a challenge or music video in Tik Tok with the help of influence. As a result, the audio is used by more and more users.
5. Getting TikTokers to advertise your products in their videos.

How to find the right influencer

In order to choose the most effective creator or team of creators, you need to pay attention to the following factors:

1. Number of followers

Owners of mid-level accounts with a number of followers from 100 to 300 thousand outweigh TikTok celebs with a larger audience because for the price of one popular person you can take five mid-level bloggers and get a better quality result.

2. Account activity

Having chosen several people, you need to pay attention to the activity of their accounts: likes and comments under videos should be relevant to the total number of subscribers. In simple words, they have to have a high engagement rate.

Many people consider these two key points and focus only on them, which in most cases leads to poor results of the campaign as a whole. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to additional aspects that are just as impactful:

3. Content

The product you offer should match the theme and concept of the influencer’s profile. For a long time and to this day, the leading trend of the TikTok platform is dancing.

With the help of funny or catchy movements, videos easily and quickly get into the For You feed, which in turn will raise the profile’s metrics and efficiency. No wonder dancing TikTokers are clear favorites for advertisers. are a clear favorite for advertisers.

4. One TikToker is great, a few are awesome

Apart from individual creators, users are interested in watching creator groups. HypeHouses is probably one of the hottest current trends on TikTok. Their main advantage is that video collabs ensure effective promotion because you can reach a collective audience of all HypeHouse’s members.

How to get TikTok influencers to promote your brand

Before you start a TikTok marketing campaign for your brand, there are many things to consider. Here are the essentials so you don’t miss anything important and get more out of your promotions

1. Creating hashtags that go beyond the campaign

The hashtags you create will go a long way toward spreading your content. It’s not just to increase your reach. It’s a guarantee that your message will get across, and more and more people will use these hashtags because of the snowball effect of the trend.

2. Give influencers creative freedom

You may feel the need to instruct them on the type and level of creativity you and your campaign need. This is a common but misguided strategy. Make sure you give them creative freedom because they have more experience with engaging content. What they create on a daily basis will work better than the planned stuff.

3. Check engagement levels

As with Instagram, engagement levels play a significant role. Here’s a list of standard influencer engagement levels on TikTok:

• 0-10 000: 9.38%
• 10 000 – 100 000: 8.43%
• 100 000 – 500 000: 7.23%
• 500 000 – 1 million: 4.88%
• 1 – 5 million: 4.99%
• 5 – 10 million: 3.35%
• over 10 million: 3.07%.

4. Communicate

One of the most important things about partnering with influencers is proper communication. Talk to them, explain what exactly you want from them and what you want to achieve. Answer all of their questions and don’t hesitate to discuss their ideas. No matter what stage your marketing campaign is at, make sure there are no misunderstandings.

How to measure the success of campaigns

Analytics is one of the most important parts of any influencer marketing campaign, even more so with TikTok. The platform takes care of it: just switch to a Pro account and you’ll have access to all the metrics you need to track your success. If you don’t think that’s enough, you can always use one of the many analytics services to track your campaign performance and measure its results.

Here are the top 5 metrics you need to keep track of:

1. Profile views. This metric is important for brands to understand how interested people are in them. Simply divide the number by 7 to get the average daily number of profile views over the past seven days.
2. Likes, comments, and reposts. These are the most trivial metrics you also track on all other social platforms. They have the same relevance and importance to TikTok and have the same effect on the platform’s algorithm. The higher the number of likes, comments, and reposts, the higher your content ranks in TikTok’s algorithm.
3. Audience demographics. This is important for brands that operate within a certain niche. This metric will give you an idea of the type of content you should be producing.
4. Follower count. This metric clearly indicates the success of your content and campaigns. If the number is going down, you should change your content style immediately, and if it’s increasing, you’re doing everything right.
5. Music. This might sound strange but music is in TikTok’s DNA. Using a professional account, you can find statistics on what music tracks your subscribers have been listening to. This is important for choosing the right style of music for your videos.

Tips for successful TikTok influencer marketing

1. Learn as much as you can about the platform

The last thing you’d want to do is join a social network and look like you don’t know what you’re doing.

To avoid being rejected by TikTok users, you need to learn more about the platform. By learning what type of content works on TikTok and how to interact with others on the platform, your brand can fit naturally into the culture. TikTok is all about fun and visually appealing content.

2. Create fun content

Now that you know that TikTok is all about fun and creativity, it’s time to create interesting, creative content yourself. Creating fun content is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to promote your business on TikTok. Also, one of the biggest advantages of TikTok is that you don’t have to create high-quality videos. Work with influencers to make the most creative short videos to impress your target audience.

3. Launch your branded hashtag

Another way to promote your brand in TikTok is to launch a hashtag and let your influencer partners use it in their videos. The main goal is that you encourage TikTok users to create or recreate content and add your branded hashtag to it. For example, the Guess brand was one of the first companies to launch a hashtag challenge. They encouraged TikTok users to take pictures of themselves wearing Guess’ new denim line with the hashtag #InMyDenim.

4. Track & measure results

How else will you know how is your marketing campaign doing? If you constantly track changes in metrics, you can do some course correction and make sure your campaign is a success.

F.A.Q.

1. Who uses TikTok?

TikTok has a reputation for being popular among teenagers – and for a good reason.

More than a quarter (27%) of users are between the ages of 13 and 17. More than two-thirds (69%) of them are between the ages of 13 and 24.

Here’s a breakdown by age:

• 13-17: 27%
• 18-24: 42%
• 25-34 years old: 16%
• 35-44: 8%
• 45-54: 3%
• Over 55: 4%.

In terms of gender, TikTok has 60% women and 40% men.

What’s important is all of these TikTok users are active.

In the U.S., the average user opens TikTok 8 times a day and spends up to 46 minutes watching videos, while the average time Instagram users spend scrolling through their feeds is 28 minutes a day.

Thanks to the For You feed on TikTok, viewers are drawn into the video content loop, which helps explain the high level of engagement.

So, if you know your target audience is hanging out on TikTok, working with influencers to create fresh, authentic content can be a great option for your brand.

2. Why do brands use TikTok?

The reasons why businesses use TikTok for the promotion of their products or services might be different for different brands. For example:

1. To amplify an advertising campaign. Some brands, when launching an advertising campaign on different channels, just make short versions of their ads and upload them to TikTok.

2. Showcasing products. This approach is often used by stores and showrooms that already have TikTok profiles. Product reviews are sure to be fun, interactive, and short.

3. Viral promotion to increase awareness and loyalty. This goal is most easily achieved with brand challenges and branded hashtags.

4. Increasing the number of subscribers (and therefore the target audience). Video tutorials and how-to videos will help achieve this. Brands brought this brand from Facebook and Instagram, realizing that subscribers need to be given value in addition to quality content and entertainment. That’s why TikTok is already filled with how-to videos.

3. What kind of businesses is TikTok for?

As a social media platform, TikTok is best suited for small and medium-sized businesses that work with retail customers. Users make their own buying decision, and short fun videos can motivate them to buy a particular product at a particular store.

First and foremost, TikTok is for:

• Retail businesses.
• Services. Repair, cleaning, all service businesses that can show a before-and-after or interesting workflow.
• Beauty brands. TikTok has a lot of women under 35, so any beauty brand will find an audience here.
• Marketing agencies. You can offer user cases, free advice, testimonials, and stories of your customers, partners, and employees.
• Educators, coaches, and experts. Psychotherapists, consultants, freelancers, doctors – all of them can develop expert content and convert this social capital into leads.

Conclusion

As a relatively new social media platform, TikTok holds massive potential for businesses that want to expand their customer base and increase sales. The platform’s highly engaged audience is the key to success but this engagement should be used right. Do thorough research to find out what works best for your brand on this platform for short fun videos.