TikTok Influencer Marketing: An Ultimate Guide

The whole idea behind influencer marketing is to choose people your target buyer personas find appealing. To sell your products and services with influencers, you want to find those opinion leaders on social media who have an impact on your target audience and persuade them to buy things you sell.

If your target audience is mostly young people, you should consider TikTok to search for your relevant influencers.

To master TikTok marketing, find tips to gain more followers and figure out the reasons why you should consider, check out our previous posts on the subject.

Why you should leverage influencer marketing on Tiktok

As with any other aspect of social media marketing, you don’t want to come across too salesy with influencers on TikTok, either. The thing is that the core audience of TikTok is Gen Zers, and it isn’t easy to persuade them to buy your products if you push them.

And, as you would do on Instagram or YouTube, you should choose TikTok influencers who are relevant to your target audience.

Users spend around 52 minutes a day on TikTok, according to Mediakix, and open the app on average eight times per day. Compared to Facebook (4.7), Instagram (3.1), and Snapchat (1.6), TikTok average session durations are considerably longer at 9.7 minutes.

TikTok advertising is rather pricey, so teaming up with influencers might be a cheaper and effective way to boost your brand awareness and sales on TikTok.

Among all other forms of marketing on TikTok, influencer marketing proves to be the most effective, so you won’t need to worry about building a loyal follower base with your own content to use it for sales later.

All you need to do is to find the right influencers and creators on TikTok, come up with a creative idea for your sponsored video that will be of interest to their audience and let the influencers do their job!

As with much influencer marketing, you should pay close attention to metrics relating to engagement and awareness.

Tip: watch our recent Combin webinar dedicated to TikTok influencer marketing.

How TikTok is different from Instagram and YouTube

TikTok vs Instagram

Compared to social Instagram, TikTok focuses on short videos — not static pre-edited and polished posts, long-form videos, Stories, or diary-like captions that Instagram is known (and loved) for. People use hashtags to navigate, and the ‘For You’ page to discover new content far better than the Instagram’s ‘Discover’ page ever did.

TikTok creators are provided with loads of features to express their ideas: advanced filters and masks, AR, ability to make duets, challenges, and other audio-visual effects make TikTok a rabbit hole of an app where users flip through an endless stream of quirky, cringeworthy, yet addictive content.

TikTok is more of a lifestyle thing, meanwhile, on Instagram, everyone tries to share their best life. Yet, the latter now has a TikTok competitor called Reels which is also a short-video app, but within Instagram, not a standalone service.

TikTok vs YouTube

While YouTube places itself as the leading video platform, it has not won the short-form video market yet. TikTok has, providing creators with ways to upload many videos without a ton of production assistance. While YouTube may have a constant flow of long-form, high-quality, related content, TikTok is full of video content that enables users to view, engage with, and create content at a much higher rate.

How to find the right influencers on TikTok

The channels you use for influencer marketing on social media don’t matter this much. What really matters is if the influencers you team up with match your target personas and your brand values.

But what even more important is that you’re sure your target audience actually uses TikTok. Also, think through the content your audience will like: TikTok is evolving month by month with various creators joining the platform, thus making the content uploaded there more diverse. So you need to come up with ideas of videos your target audience is potentially interested in.

Based on the content, you then want to find proper influencers who will deliver your brand message clearly. You can do so on influencer marketing platforms like Upfluence or Fanbytes.

But remember that you shouldn’t simply choose TikTok influencers with a large follower base; what more important is their relevance to your customers and values.

Once you have selected suitable influencers, you will need to contact them for the collaboration.

Another actionable way is to search for TikTok influencers on Google or even TikTok itself. Head to the TikTok Discover page, explore relevant hashtags and sounds and check creators posting their content with those hashtags and sounds. With the hashtag #ad, you will be able to find influencer sponsored content on the platform.

Check if influencers on Instagram or YouTube have their TikTok accounts and offer them to collaborate with you if they are relevant to your brand.

Tip: you can also find relevant influencers on other social media platforms, including Instagram, with tools like Combin Growth. Combin Growth will also help you boost your Instagram marketing, find your ideal target audience, detect the audience of your competitors and track your performance insights.

How to leverage TikTok influencer marketing

Understand TikTok’s platform

If TikTok remains a mystery for you, don’t dive in without researching to determine if your brand is ready to launch a campaign there. As you’re reading this guide, we’d also recommend you read our other pieces on TikTok marketing, including an ultimate guide on the TikTok marketing and TikTok algorithm hacked.

Define TikTok marketing goals

Determine what your primary goal is for your on TikTok marketing, think through the possible outcomes and define which key performance indicators you’d use to measure the campaign’s success.

Research TikTok creators

Thoroughly research the TikTok influencers you want to collaborate with. Do not partner with a TikTok creator looking back merely on vanity metrics (e.g. followers and likes); do your due diligence to ensure they’re a perfect match instead.

And let them express their creativity in their own way! Native TikTok creators know the platform and their audience better than you do, so you should trust them providing them only with some general guidelines.

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