No doubt by now you’ve read about the benefits of influencer marketing, particularly when it comes to generating brand awareness and acquiring qualified leads.
Your ROI when working with social media influencers can increase by 11%, with businesses making an average $6.50 per $1 spent on influencer marketing. The majority of digital marketers (51%) claim that they’ve received higher-quality leads after working with the right influencer, and 31% of US- and Europe-based consumers claimed to have made a purchase based on an influencer’s recommendation.
The playing field for influencers has only broadened with the introduction of more social channels for them to dominate. One such platform? TikTok.
As the most downloaded app on the App Store as of 2018, TikTok is recognized universally as the social media platform to watch out for in 2020, especially when targeting younger demographics.
Before we move on with some tips for a successful TikTok influencer marketing campaign, it’s important to understand the key challenges that will inform the way you develop your strategy:
Knowing your goal and setting concrete targets will help you determine the kind of campaign to run as well as the type of influencer that is best aligned to help you execute your campaign.
Why do you want to use TikTok as a marketing platform? Is it to push awareness for new products or services? Is it to convert more sales? Based on your goal, the strategy around your influencer marketing campaign will differ drastically.
For example, if your goal is to drive sales, you may want to focus on niche influencers who are less prominent (and thus have less social proof), but more aligned with a hyper-specific target demographic.
Knowing your audience sits at the heart of any effective influencer marketing strategy, regardless of the platform you are on. Knowing your audience goes far beyond age and location – absolutely crucial things to take into account are other brands they engage with and the type of influencers they engage with.
You can create a buyer persona to help you identify these important characteristics about your audience while keeping all the information in one handy place. The goal of this buyer persona is to create actionable pictures of the common traits, goals, and even problems your audience has.
This is obviously the most critical element of any influencer campaign. Don’t choose to work with just any influencer with views and likes – as mentioned earlier, less prominent influencers with less social proof often provide a much better ROI if their content and audience aligns well with your brand.
An influencer marketing platform can help you in this area by making it easier to find the right influencers and also to better measure the results of their campaigns.
Here are a few things you should be looking at when you’re deciding on which influencers to tap for your TikTok campaign:
For example, a gaming personality who only gets high engagement rates for content posted about a specific video game has less influence compared to a personality who gets steady engagement across multiple games.
To help you in your search, you’ll want to invest in the right influencer identification tool. You can easily find the right influencers, track their relevance to your brand, and see their engagement rates at a glance.
TikTok is a space for video creators to show off their creative side, so understand how TikTok operates and fits into the lives of users. For example, several AI effects are often a key part of producing videos, and being familiar with these functions can help you see the appeal of the app for its audience.
Jumping off the previous point, because TikTok values creativity, it’s important to give influencers creative license to help execute your campaign.
You ought to have a playbook to guide their messaging and perhaps give inspiration, but this playbook shouldn’t be restrictive or else influencers will come off as inauthentic or will refuse to work with you.
To encourage influencers to keep promoting your brand in the long-term, you might want to consider paying them via commission instead of a one-time fee. This can become a passive income stream for the influencers and can assure you that quality influencers are constantly starting conversations about your brand.
Social media platforms often come under fire for a myriad of privacy concerns. It’s best to stay on top of these consumer data and privacy issues by informing influencers of important guidelines to remember when promoting your brand.
These guidelines include making several disclosures and disclaimers clear in their content or profiles. You’ll want to include these FTC guidelines in your influencer marketing playbook so you don’t get in trouble.
Besides, TikTok has long had questions and concerns raised about the way it manages and shares consumer data. While experts suggest that these concerns won’t drastically hurt the platform’s performance, particularly for brands and advertisers, it’s still in your best interest to implement your own FTC-compliant practices.
Are you convinced TikTok is the next best thing for your brand? Be sure you make the most of your influencer marketing strategy by following the tips above to create an effective, high-converting TikTok marketing campaign.
Start reaching out to these influencers on TikTok, set those targets and goals, and keep experimenting to see your brand image explode.