TikTok Influencer Marketing: Complete Guide to Grow your Business

TikTok has exploded in popularity over the last few years, becoming one of the most engaging social platforms and an essential part of any modern digital marketing strategy. With over 1 billion monthly active users, it presents a massive opportunity for brands looking to tap into viral trends and connect with Gen Z consumers.

This is the complete guide to TikTok influencer marketing and how brands can leverage TikTok influencer marketing to drive awareness, engagement, and sales.

What is TikTok Influencer Marketing?

TikTok influencer marketing refers to collaborations between brands and popular TikTok creators to promote products through sponsored content.

It typically works by having TikTok influencers create and share videos featuring or discussing a brand’s products. The goal is to spread awareness and visibility of the brand to the influencer’s large and engaged audience.

There are several common types of TikTok influencer marketing campaigns:

• Hashtag challenges – Influencers kick off viral challenges using branded hashtags for users to participate in
• Giveaways – Influencers give away a brand’s products to their audience
• Affiliate links – Influencers share affiliate links to a brand’s site or products
• Sponsored content – Brands pay influencers to create TikToks showcasing their products

Ultimately, TikTok influencer marketing centers around leveraging popular creators’ creativity, personality, and audience to showcase brands authentically.

Why TikTok Influencer Marketing is Effective

There are several vital reasons why influencers marketing on TikTok can be extremely effective for driving results:

TikTok Engagement Rate

As a platform dominated by Gen Z, TikTok offers access to the coveted youth demographic.

• 41% of TikTok users are between the ages of 16-24
• Users under 30 make up ~80% of its user base

Additionally, TikTok sees incredibly high engagement levels:

• 90% of TikTok users access the app daily

This combination offers invaluable exposure potential.

Influencer Social Media Marketing Drives Brand Awareness

TikTok’s platform lends itself perfectly to catchy, viral content. Funny and entertaining short-form videos can spread like wildfire, generating immense visibility practically overnight.

While brands can create their content, influencer-created videos tend to perform better. With a keen understanding of how to engage their niche audience, influencers have mastered the art of creating viral TikTok marketing hits.

Influencers Build Trust and Drive Sales

Audiences place a significant amount of trust in influencer opinions and recommendations. Their ability to convert followers into customers is unmatched.

• 82% of consumers report they would follow an influencer’s recommendation
• 49% say they’ve purchased something after seeing it promoted by an influencer

Leveraging influencers provides brands with the power of social proof and word-of-mouth marketing.

Significant Influencer Marketing ROI

Influencer marketing campaigns tend to be low-risk with very high reward potential compared to traditional advertisements.

• TikTok influencer marketing delivers up to 11x higher ROI than standard display ads.
• Aerie’s #AerieREAL campaign with Charli D’Amelio led to a 75% increase in quarterly digital sales.

The proof is above: TikTok influencer marketing gets results with the right strategy.

How to Run a TikTok Influencer Campaign

Launching a successful TikTok influencer campaign takes strategic planning and execution across a few key steps:

Set Goals and Budget

As with any marketing initiative, begin by defining your campaign goals and constraints:

• What awareness, engagement, or conversion targets do you hope to achieve?
• What is your available budget based on those targets and projected ROI?

Your goals will dictate the campaign scope and ideal influencer tier. Generally…

• Nano/micro-influencers (under 100k followers) are the most affordable and best for limited budgets.
• Macro-influencers (100k-1M followers) balance budget and broad reach
• Mega/celebrity influencers (over 1M followers) offer immense scale but very high costs

Campaign costs vary significantly by content expectations, with one-off TikToks much cheaper than recurring content packages.

Find the Right Influencers

Not all influencers are created equal. It’s crucial to vet potential partners thoroughly to ensure proper alignment with your brand.

Ideal TikTok influencer marketing partners:

• Cater to your target demographic – similar age, interests, and values as your customers
• Have consistently strong user engagement and feedback
• Produce high-quality, entertaining content that aligns tonally with your brand
• Exhibit an authentic personal brand that fans connect with

Influencer search tools like Tagger, Upfluence, and Grin can assist with mapping the influencer landscape and finding ideal brand fits based on audience demographics and content analysis.

Create a Campaign Brief

Once you’ve established partnerships, provide influencers with a thorough brief of campaign guidelines and expectations:

• Specify campaign messaging, product features/benefits to focus on
• Set content guidelines regarding brand mentions, visuals, etc.
• Outline deliverable specifics: required # posts, video length, image specs
• Define usage rights for reusing/repurposing influencer content
• Share tag lists, designated campaign hashtags, tracking links, promo codes

Giving influencers a clear creative brief allows them to produce on-brand content tailored to campaign goals.

Benefits of Track Performance

Monitoring a slate of success metrics offers invaluable campaign insights:

• Reach and views demonstrate content visibility
• Engagement rate shows audience resonance and word-of-mouth potential
• Link clicks and sales enable direct ROI measurement

Adjusting ongoing efforts based on performance data will maximize overall effectiveness. High-performing content can be repurposed, and lower-performing content can be refined.

Ongoing optimization is vital for influencer marketing success.

Develop Long-Term Relationships

The best brand partnerships extend beyond one-off transactions.

Cultivating an ongoing relationship with influencers builds loyalty and familiarity for both parties, creating a progressively beneficial dynamic over time.

Influencers often enjoy working repeatedly with brands they trust and can creatively integrate. In turn, brands reap the rewards of working with a familiar face whom audiences recognize and associate with the brand.

Mistakes to Avoid

While influencer marketing may seem straightforward, many brands commit easily avoidable mistakes:

Pushing a Brand Message

Forcing blatant sales pitches or corporate taglines into influencer content seldom lands nicely. Followers can sense disingenuous endorsements, causing them to disengage.

Effective influencer content feels organic and emphasizes the influencer’s personal experience. The influencer should dictate creative direction as long as the messaging aligns tonally with the brand.

Overly Stringent Guidelines

Similarly, placing overly rigid requirements around strict product shots, copy inclusions, or visual assets often backfires.

Influencers thrive when given reasonable creative liberty. The goal is to integrate brand mentions into content that resonates with their niche, not turning them into corporate mannequins.

Guidelines should focus on high-level messaging rather than granular administrative details.

No Ongoing Measurement

Failing to track performance adequately squanders optimization opportunities. Brands must monitor analytics not just during campaigns but consistently over time.

Key metrics like best posting days, high-performing creators, and engaging content themes often take time to reveal themselves. Maintaining an ongoing pulse on success indicators enables data-backed refinement.

Trends to Leverage

Capitalizing on trends and viral moments can provide massive visibility. Savvy brands stay tapped into the cultural pulse of leading platforms like TikTok to integrate their messaging into rising tides.

Some ways brands can latch onto trending topics include:

• Launch branded hashtag challenges piggybacking on trending hashtags
• Encourage influencers to incorporate globally popular TikTok sounds into videos
• Ride the momentum of new viral dances, songs, or memes

Layering contextual, of-the-moment relevance makes content more likely to be surfaced by TikTok’s robust recommendation algorithm.

By partnering with the right TikTok influencers, brands can authentically embed their products into the cultural fabric of one of the most creative, experimental, and extraordinary social platforms.

This guide provided a comprehensive blueprint for planning and executing effective TikTok influencer campaigns. This emerging marketing channel offers immense potential to drive brand lift and sales when executed strategically. You can join TikTok creator Marketplace to get started.