To run a successful TikTok influencer marketing campaign you first need to familiarize yourself with the platform. Even though it is one of the newer influencer platforms out there, TikTok has a lot to offer to brands and Influencers in terms of boosting awareness and connecting with a young audience— TikTok boasts a staggering 689 million active monthly users, 62% of which are below the age of 29. For new brands with products aimed at Gen Z and young millennials, TikTok is a great platform for you to make your mark!
So, now that you’ve decided to run a TikTok influencer marketing campaign, where do you start?
How to Run a TikTok Influencer Marketing Campaign
Due to the innately creative nature of the platform, many brands are finding success through running influencer campaigns on TikTok. Because the platform hosts so many content creators and videos are quick to go viral, TikTok is a breeding ground for micro-influencers unlike on any other social platform. To top it all off, the engagement rates for Influencers on TikTok is higher than Instagram, with some TikTok Influencers seeing up to 18% engagement (we typically use 5% as a benchmark on TikTok) compared to 3.86% on Instagram.
Source: @jumpropejimmy on TikTok
The most successful TikTok influencers, like Jimmy Reynolds aka @jumpropejimmy are content creators who double as experts of their craft. When you partner with an Influencer like him— who creates all of their own content within a niche that makes them unique— you are partnering with someone who truly is authentic. You’ll need to partner with the right Influencers for your brand in order to create a campaign that really makes an impact on the platform. To get started, follow these steps.
1. Establish your campaign goals.
Regardless of your platform, all marketing campaigns need goals. Otherwise, you’ll be left at the end of the campaign with a ton of collected data and insights but no lens through which to analyze it all. Additionally, your campaign goals will affect which Influencers you choose to partner with on your campaign.
Whether the goal of your campaign is to improve brand awareness or sell products, setting clearly defined goals for your campaign will influence everything about the content you produce and allow you to continuously tailor the campaign in order to reach these goals.
TikTok Influencer Campaign Goals
- Boost your brand awareness
- Connect with a new demographic
- Increase conversion rates
- Increasing exposure
- Increase customer engagement across platforms
- Gain customer insights by monitoring engagement patterns
2. Choosing Influencers for your campaign + outlining the contract.
Before you start shopping around for the best Influencer for the activation, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the strengths and weaknesses of each Influencer tier. Once you choose which tier of Influencer would be the best fit for your campaign you’ll have a jumping off point in your search for the perfect Influencer. To find an Influencer to partner with on TikTok you can either scroll through the platform yourself, looking for Influencers who are producing content that is aligned with your brand voice and values or you can utilize the resources of an Influencer marketplace.
Since TikTok’s algorithm tailors content based on time watching, you can quickly surface the niche Influencers who might work with your brand.
The TikTok Influencer Vetting Process
If you decide to search for TikTok Influencers on your own, you’ll want to vet each Influencer before you proceed with partnering with them. An easy way to vet Influencer is to monitor their:
- Follower growth
- Follower authenticity
- Engagement levels
- Shares, comments, and impressions
Once you’ve identified a collection of Influencers to potentially partner with, finish your Influencer vetting process by analyzing their past partnerships as well as anything that they may be known for, both positively and negatively. Do they have a history of branded content with high engagement rates? If so, you can proceed with reaching out to your Influencers of choice and begin planting seeds for your partnership.
Using TikTok Influencer Marketplace
If going at the Influencer vetting process alone seems like more work than you’d like, you can always connect with Influencer through an Influencer marketplace. Influencer marketplaces are a great tool for brands who have multiple campaign niches or who are looking for several brand partners for their upcoming campaign, to reach a wider audience.
Due to their experience, the best marketplaces excel at connecting brands with Influencers who share the same values and who have a follower base of your target audience. Another perk of using a marketplace is that all of the Influencers have already been vetted, so you know you are partnering with legitimate Influencers.
To choose the best marketplace to work with, look for one that:
- Has experience connecting Influencers from your chosen platform
- Has subscription prices that fit into your budget
- That hosts Influencers with fees that also fit into your budget
- Has a proven track record of successful partnerships
Creating a TikTok Influencer Campaign Contract
Partnering with an Influencer isn’t as simple as negotiating how many posts they’ll publish, sending over brand guidelines, and syncing up with them after the content has been posted. At the start, you’ll create a detailed contract between brand and Influencer that includes things like:
- The length of the engagement
- The expected number of posts and/or brand mentions
- Who owns the content
- Whether the brand will contribute paid ad spend to the campaign
- Advertiser content usage
- Exclusivity terms
- And more campaign-specific contract clause
Since brands and Influencers alike need to protect and maintain their image, contracts help to keep both parties safe and start the project off with transparency and shared responsibility.
At RhythmInfluence, we’ve been crafting contracts and managing Influencer-brand relationships for over a decade. Take a look at how we approach influencer marketing. →
3. Create your TikTok content strategy.
Just because TikTok is a video-only platform doesn’t mean there isn’t a range of content that can be created on it. Remember, you partnered with your chosen Influencer for a reason— because you connected with their content. Therefore, when determining your TikTok content strategy embrace the creativity of your Influencer partner by including them in the content creation process as much as possible. Gen Z is notorious for being quick to spot inauthentic content. If you run a TikTok campaign with an Influencer that involves them creating branded content that is outside of their classic style, their followers will notice and it could reflect poorly on the Influencer and the featured brand.
Giving TikTok Influencers Creative Freedom
Source: @aileenchristineee on TikTok
For example, when Goldfish partnered with TikTok Influencer Aileen Christine, she didn’t change the style or tone of her playful Tik Tok just because they were suddenly branded content. Instead, Goldfish got out of her way and allowed Aileen to continue making content that spoke to her and her followers.
Create Relevant, Trendy Content
If you were wondering how so many Influencers have found success on TikTok, the answer is simple: the algorithm rewards trend followers. Seemingly every day there is a new viral dance, trending hashtag, or audio clip that is launching TikTok users to viral fame instantaneously. The best part is, brands can benefit from the algorithm too by staying in tune with trends and creating relevant content. When your branded content is part of the next viral craze you’re all but guaranteeing that your content will reach a wider audience.
4. Measure your campaign results.
Once your campaign has run its course it’s time for you to gather and analyze all of your campaign results. Depending on the goals of your campaign, there are a few different ways you can approach your campaign analysis.
The Case for Ongoing TikTok Campaign Reporting
While you will certainly want to report on your campaign analytics at the end of the campaign, for long campaigns you’ll also want to conduct ongoing reporting so that you can tweak your campaign while it’s in progress in order to optimize its impact.
To be proactive about your campaign analysis, don’t wait until it has ended. Instead, check-in on the success of your campaign every week or month (depending on the total length of your campaign) and make adjustments to your content and production schedule as you see fit. Otherwise, you could find yourself at the end of a lackluster campaign wishing you had the opportunity to change it for the better.
Sentiment Analysis for TikTok 101
Another way to gauge the success of your TikTok campaign that is separate from analyzing hard data is to use sentiment analysis. With sentiment analysis, you are analyzing feedback and engagement of your campaign based on the content of comments and reactions of audience members, instead of on the number of followers, likes, or shares.
To conduct sentiment analysis on a TikTok campaign:
- Consolidate all of your consumer feedback to make it easier to analyze in bulk. Including all comments and reviews that relate to your TikTok campaign.
- Based on how you’ve flagged your engagement you should have a thorough understanding of how audiences interacted with your brand during the run of your campaign. Moving forward, use the insights you’ve gained from sentiment analysis to improve your next campaign.
- Analyze your collected data with one of these metrics:
- Intention focused— flagging engagement as either “interested” or “not interested” in your brand.
- Emotion-focused— flagging engagement as “happy” “sad” “satisfied” or “dissatisfied”
- Polarity focused— flagging engagement as “very positive” “positive” “neutral” “negative” and “very negative”
Expanding the Reach of your TikTok Campaign
TikTok campaigns don’t have to start and finish on the platform itself. Many influencer campaigns are taking TikTok content and amplifying its reach to other platforms. For example, after an Influencer creates a post on TikTok, an agency can incorporate a content usage package for the TikTok post to be used on other social platforms. Advertising packages can also include a creator marketplace that helps brands find talent, trending hashtag challenges, and other opportunities for brand exposure.
Above all else, the key to running a successful TikTok influencer campaign lies in your ability to create branded content that stays true to your voice. To get the most out of your next campaign, check out these TikTok Influencer Marketing Best Practices.
Want to know what the results of your TikTok Influencer Campaign mean? Download our guide to influencer marketing analytics and find out!
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