How to Use TikTok Influencer Marketing to Drive Sales

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing strategy that involves working with influential creators or public figures to promote a brand’s products or services. 

These influencers have a large following on social media or other online platforms, and their endorsement can help to increase brand awareness and digital sales. 

Influencer marketing can be a powerful tool for reaching a specific target audience, as the endorsement of a trusted influencer can be more effective than traditional advertising. 

A brand often initiates TikTok influencer marketing campaigns, which are coordinated efforts to produce marketing material about a company that TikTok creators distribute to their followers.

Why Work With Influencers and Not Celebrities? 

When it comes to marketing, influencer content has become an increasingly popular choice for brands and businesses that want to reach a larger audience. 

While celebrities have been traditionally used for marketing purposes, influencer-generated content can offer several advantages that make them more attractive for brand promotion campaigns.

Influencers are often preferred over celebrities for a few reasons:

• Influencers have a more real and intimate relationship with their social media following, making their recommendations more genuine and reliable.
• Influencers are frequently perceived as more relatable and down-to-earth than superstars, making their material more desirable to their fans.
• Influencers are less expensive than celebrities since they have a smaller following and hence charge less for sponsored material.
• Influencers are frequently specialized in a specific specialty or issue, making them more relevant and effective at marketing specific sorts of products or services.
• Influencers have a more targeted following on social channels, which can help their material reach a more specialized target audience.
• Influencers are frequently more adaptable and receptive to cooperation than celebrity figures, making it easier to collaborate with them on a marketing project.

Why Include TikTok Influencers in Your Marketing Strategy?

TikTok influencers are rocking the platform and becoming real idols for millions of TikTok users. 

Leveraging their social capital is an excellent TikTok strategy for your online brand, and here are the reasons why:

1. They have high engagement metrics
2. They offer credibility
3. They create a popular content form

1. They Have High Engagement Metrics

TikTok influencers have the highest engagement metrics across various social media platforms. 

For example, TikTok micro-influencers have engagement rates of around 18%, compared to 4% for Instagram influencers and 1.6% for YouTube influencers. TikTok mega-influencers have engagement rates of 5%, while Instagram and YouTube influencers show only 1.2% and 0.4% respectively. 

It means more people will discover and interact with your content through a TikTok influencer than on any other platform.

2. They Offer Credibility

People trust TikTok influencers when it comes to buying decisions. 

More than 60% of consumers rely on influencer messages and recommendations when they choose what to buy. Think about a popular hashtag #TikTokmademebuyit, for example. Influencers can put your brand on the map and encourage people to shop with you.

3. They Create a Popular Content Form

Influencers leverage the most popular content format on the Internet. 

Short videos and user-generated content (UGC) are the most trending social media content types online. If you find relevant influencers, they will prioritize this content to make converting your ideal customer easier.

How to Use a TikTok Influencer Marketing Campaign to Boost Your Sales: 7 Best Tips

How do you establish a solid workflow for launching an effective TikTok influencer marketing campaign? What is the best way to find the right influencer to promote your online brand? These questions may be puzzling especially if you’re only starting to explore the power of TikTok.

To make the most of your collaboration with TikTok influencers, implement these seven simple tips:

1. Determine your marketing objectives
2. Consider your campaign budget
3. Decide on the duration of the TikTok influencer marketing campaign
4. Think about your target audience
5. Choose the format of your TikTok influencer marketing collaboration
6. Hop on the hottest TikTok trends
7. Always track your TikTok influencer marketing campaign performance

1. Determine Your Marketing Objectives

When designing a TikTok influencer campaign, it is important to determine your marketing objectives so that you can create a campaign that is aligned with your goals. 

Some examples of marketing objectives for a TikTok influencer campaign might include:

• Increasing brand awareness: You could use TikTok influencer marketing to generate more brand awareness for your business on the platform.
• Driving website traffic: You could use TikTok influencer marketing to drive traffic from the social media app to your website, where users can learn more about your brand and products.
• Generating leads: You could use TikTok influencer marketing to generate leads by encouraging TikTok users to sign up for your email list or redeem a discount code.
• Boosting sales: You could use TikTok influencer marketing to drive sales of your products or services by promoting them to TikTok users.
• Improving customer credibility: You could use TikTok creators to improve customer brand trust by engaging with TikTok users and building a relationship with them.

By determining your marketing objectives upfront, you can create more effective and targeted TikTok influencer campaigns.

2. Consider Your Campaign Budget 

Your budget is a key factor in building your TikTok influencer marketing campaign. So, make sure to do your research and determine how much money you can allocate for the campaign. 

Keep in mind that it’s not only about the compensation for the chosen influencer. You might also need to use a TikTok influencer agency or campaign tracking software. 

3. Decide on the Duration of the TikTok Influencer Marketing Campaign

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the optimal duration of your influencer campaigns. It will depend on your goals, budget, and the format of the campaign. 

However, allocate at least 2–3 weeks for your influencer collaboration. It allows the TikTok creators to come up with enough content for your online brand to pique the audience’s interest and engage users. 

4. Think About Your Target Audience

When it comes to choosing a TikTok influencer, you need to make sure you’re picking the best person for the job. Your first instinct might be to go with an influencer with an impressive follower count. However, that’s not nearly as important as a number of other factors: 

• Consider the influencer’s niche: Say, you’re an online fitness brand. It will make much more sense to go with an influencer from a fitness and wellness niche than with a generic lifestyle influencer;
• The influencer’s engagement rates: How many likes and comments (relative to the number of followers) does the influencer get? The higher the engagement, the more page visits and conversions you’re likely to generate from the collaboration;
• The influencer’s preferred content type: Are they normally sharing comedic sketches? Lifestyle insights? Lip sync viral videos? When finding the right influcencers, think of what kind of content format would resonate with your ideal customer persona based on their demographics and behaviors.

Once you’ve determined your desired influencer persona, you can go down two roads in your search:

1. Conduct manual TikTok influencer search on the platform. You can use relevant niche and trending hashtags, browse your followers’ lists, or even look at your competitors’ collabs. You can narrow down your search based on location, keywords, and other search filters. Bear in mind that this is a time-consuming process that might divert extra resources from your marketing efforts.
2. Turn to automated TikTok influencer search tools. These tools are essentially databases of vetted TikTok influencers you can choose from. By using a variety of advanced search categories and filters, you can find influencers that meet your demands within seconds. While this software is usually paid, you’ll save lots of valuable time while finding the right influencers for your creative strategy.

5. Choose the Format of Your TikTok Influencer Marketing Collaboration 

Once you’ve found the right TikTok influencer, you can get down to deciding what kind of content you will create to promote your online brand. Your collaboration can take many forms. Work together with your influencer to choose among the types of content that do well on TikTok. 

Here are three types of influencer marketing collaborations you should know as a brand: 

• TikTok hashtag challenges
• TikTok product showcase and review videos
• TikTok profile takeovers

A. TikTok Hashtag Challenges

Start your branded and/or campaign hashtag to engage TikTok users. The influencer will ask their audiences to use this hashtag and create a similar type of video. This is an excellent way to naturally boost your online brand awareness.

For example, the hair care brand K18 is a master of TikTok challenges. The brand collaborates with both micro and macro TikTok influencers to run great brand-boosting initiatives. 

Its recent #k18hairflip hashtag challenge has generated a whopping 11 billion views and made the brand one of the most popular names on TikTok.

Image source

B. TikTok Product Showcase and Review Videos

This is another trending content type TikTok influencers create for their audiences. They give their audience an authentic feel of your product and inspire trust in consumers.

Peach and Lily, an online brand offering Korean skincare, collaborates with many TikTok influencers, including Janae Lockard, to promote its products. Influencers show their followers how to use a product and explain its advantages in a fun, engaging way.

Image source

C. TikTok Profile Takeovers

Another great content idea you can leverage is a profile takeover. Give your influencer access to your branded TikTok account for a day, and they will post on your behalf, attracting their dedicated audiences to your profile. 

A TikTok profile takeover is a creative way to diversify your branded content and showcase your products. Tasty, a popular online brand sharing food recipes and meal ideas, uses TikTok influencer takeovers to spread the word about their website and draw more organic traffic. 

For example, it has partnered with a TikTok influencer Inga Lam and let her stream her own cooking show via the branded TikTok page.

Image source

Remember that you don’t have to stick to one particular content type in your TikTok influencer marketing campaign. It may be a good idea to mix several formats such as a branded hashtag and a social media takeover. The beauty of TikTok is that you can unleash your creativity – TikTok users appreciate authenticity and unique ideas. 

Give the influencer a degree of creative freedom, too. Don’t micromanage or excessively control their work. Remember, it is called collaboration for a reason.

6. Hop on the Hottest TikTok Trends

Going viral with your campaign on TikTok is an art of its own. And one of the ways to maximize the reach and impact of your influencer marketing collab is to follow the TikTok trends. 

Once again, work together with your influencer to determine what trends you can incorporate into your marketing content organically. It can be popular hashtag challenges, trending audio tracks to accompany your video, etc. 

Duolingo is a true star of TikTok marketing. The brand combines the most relevant TikTok trends with hot influencer collaborations to create viral content for its audiences. They use the most popular memes, challenges, and trending background audios in their TikTok posts. 

Duolingo has even managed to gather several major TikTok influencers in one video just to create an entertaining sketch.

Image source

7. Always Track Your TikTok Influencer Marketing Campaign Performance

Don’t forget to conduct proper analytics research to see how well your TikTok influencer marketing campaign is doing. It will help you stay agile and adjust the campaign strategy where necessary. 

On top of that, your influencer will have a clearer vision of what content to focus on to maximize campaign efficiency. 

Establish the key KPIs based on your campaign goals and track the numbers across these parameters. 

With SocialBee, you can easily track all of your key performance indicators (KPIs) such as total audience reach, engagement rate, virality rate, and conversion rate.

Start your 14-day free trial now!

SocialBee provides an advanced set of analytical tools that allow you to measure your campaigns’ performance in real time. It also allows you to segment audiences by demographic information such as age, gender, or even location so you can see which areas are the most successful with each influencer.

The major TikTok influencer marketing KPIs include: 

• Total audience reach: This metric is an immediate reflection of your campaign success. The more people discover your TikTok influencer marketing campaign content, the higher brand awareness, and engagement.
• Engagement rate: How much do TikTok users interact with your campaign content? If this number is consistently high (or, better yet, keeps growing), you can be sure the influencer is doing a great job.
• Virality rate: See how much user-generated content (UGC) is created using the branded hashtag the influencer has been promoting among their audiences. If it’s trending, you’re on the right track with your campaign.
• Conversion rate: This is perhaps the most important metric for your sales success. It indicates how many leads and/or customers came to you via the TikTok traffic.

You can use other KPIs depending on your campaign goals and focus. The most important thing is to learn from the analytical insights and keep improving your influencer collaboration for better results