Every brand recognizes that marketing on TikTok is one of the best ways to expand their reach, increase engagement and create more positive brand associations with their target audience. But what’s the process to succeed on TikTok?
Sure, you’ll want to collaborate with influencers to tap into relevant, highly engaged followers. Partnering with the right creator is easier these days, thanks to the many TikTok influencer platforms available on the market, but you’ll also need a clear campaign strategy that includes messaging, goals and key metrics as part of your creative brief. Then, you’ll want to monitor campaign performance, analyze the results from each pice of content, and make adjustments as necessary.
All this might sound confusing and daunting. But we’re here to help! Here are the 4 steps to follow when running a TikTok influencer campaign.
1. Create your strategy
Any marketing activity starts with the right strategy. Here are some elements for you to consider in this step.
Define your marketing goals
Set realistic and measurable goals to reach with your TikTok influencer campaign. For instance, let’s say your brand is launching a new fizzy drink, and you decide to go for a TikTok campaign to promote it.
Some of the goals here could be to…
- Create initial demand for the drink and increase brand awareness before it hits the market, as measured by a brand awareness survey taken pre and post campaign.
- Generate excitement for a launch event and secure 100 bookings for it from social media referrals two weeks before the launch.
- Increase sales by 30% by the end of the promotion period.
It might help to use the “SMART” method when setting your objectives – it stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. This will ensure you set goals the right way, leaving no room for ambiguity or things getting lost in translation. Pick at least a few goals, but no need to come up with a long list which will be hard to track later down the line.
Carry out a marketing audit
Once you’ve set your campaign goals, assess what’s already been tried in the past and how it went. Analyze your brand’s previous marketing activities on TikTok – how creators were picked, how the campaign was managed, and what the results were. Make a list of what you learned from these experiments, and think about how you could implement those learnings in your next TikTok influencer campaign.
Conduct market research
Clearly, you need to keep a close eye on your competition.
Campaign types evolve based on new trends that can pop up at any time on TikTok. See what worked well for your competitors, and you might be able to replicate their success. You don’t always need to start from a blank page; don’t hesitate to re-use what’s been proven to work in your niche!
Identify your target audience
This is the first step to inform the type of influencers you can work with.
Basics include location, age and gender, but you need to dig deeper for a fuller understanding of your target audience. What kind of content do they normally engage with? Are they drawn towards purely fun and entertaining content, or also informational content that teaches them something useful? Do they take part in challenges? Do they follow specific hashtags?
Those are all questions you need to ask yourself before determining what type of campaign to run.
Set a budget
Now is the time to take budget into consideration. What amount are you willing to spend on your TikTok influencer campaign? This will impact which influencers you should be looking for: will you stick to micro or nano influencers, or perhaps be able to afford mega or even celebrity influencers, if they’d be best suited to hit the goals you’ve defined earlier?
All this depends on your budget, so you need to have a number in mind before going any further.
Clarify your constraints
The last step in creating a strategy is to lay out the constraints that will structure your campaign.
Considering the target audience and budget, you need to think about your deliverables at this stage. How many influencers will you use as part of the campaign? How many pieces of content do you need per creator? Will you use cross-channel promotion, if the selected creators have an established audience across multiple channels? Will you expect creators to add a link in bio on their page for a set period of time?
Once you have all the above figured out, you can move on to the next stage: finding the right partner to execute your strategy.
2. Find the right influencers
Now, this is where the real work starts. Even if you have everything prepared and a clear strategy, you still need to find the perfect match to deliver it.
The right TikTok influencer can take your brand to the next level and, in some cases, surpass your expectations. On the other hand, get this step wrong and you’re setting yourself up for failure, which could lead to a waste of funds or worse, reputational damage which may be hard to recover from.
Here’s how to identify the right influencer, build a relationship with them, and set up their influencer contract correctly.
Define your “perfect influencer” criteria
You know your product best, and you now have an in-depth understanding of your audience, which drives the kind of influencer you’ll need on the campaign.
There’s no magic solution to find the perfect fit for your TikTok influencer campaign. However, you can narrow down your options by deciding what the “perfect influencer” would look like for your specific goals.
Will it be a highly creative person who can come up with out-of-the-box content to promote your product? Is it a nano influencer who can mention your brand or product in passing, without making your brand the main topic of the content? Do you need someone who can seamlessly integrate your product in their videos without disrupting the viewer experience, because the target audience dislikes overt ads on TikTok?
Being clear on this will help you sift through the immense volume of TikTok influencers you could choose from. If you need more help on this step, check out our article on ways to choose influencers for your brand.
Prepare your campaign guidelines
As a brand, you’ll have specific guidelines that need to be followed for a consistent brand image, messaging and tone of voice across all marketing activities and channels.
This could include a defined color scheme, specific visual assets or key takeaways to communicate which set your brand apart and shape its identity. Influencers will need clear guidelines to ensure the content stays on brand, and also protects your brand from any mishaps.
You can share your brand guidelines in the form of a mood board with visual examples, or a simple slide deck or PDF with concise instructions a creator can easily wrap their head around. Ensure everything is clear and to the point, as this is one of the first things the influencer will need.
It’s vital you have this in place before you start looking for your ideal influencer, and before the content production phase starts, in order to avoid costly mistakes or having to get the influencer to re-create parts of or the entirety of their content.
Find influencers and their contact details
There are so many influencers out there, even with pretty strict selection criteria to go by, you might still end up with thousands of options.
There are two ways to execute this part of the process:
- Manually create a spreadsheet with the handles of the TikTok influencers who meet your requirements. Add any other additional links, phone numbers and emails you manage to find directly from their profile or from their agent.
- Use TikTok influencer platforms to automate this as much as possible. Depending on your needs, there are plenty of tools for influencer discovery, such as HypeAuditor, Heepsy, or the TikTok Creator Marketplace. These tools provide advanced filtering and will take the time-consuming task of looking up individual influencers and trying to find out their contact details off your plate.
Influencer outreach
Whether you build your influencer database from the ground up or with the help of a tool, you need to think about the next important step: reaching out to them!
If you do it over the phone, prepare a small script to grab the influencer’s attention. Be ready to describe your product, answer questions (and challenges) and be ready to get turned down. Remember this is likely to happen, and you don’t want to burn any bridges: even if now is not the right time, which could be for a number of reasons, there may still be potential for future collaborations.
If you reach out to creators via email or direct message, come up with several templates, structure your message carefully, and cover as much information as possible succinctly. If you have already gone through this process and know what details influencers usually ask for, add them to your messages to show you’re serious and well-prepared.
In any case, keep an open door and maintain relationships by getting back in touch regularly.
Negotiation
Once you’ve established contact with your chosen influencers and they have expressed interest in working with you, it’s time to negotiate the terms of the campaign or specific promotion.
You need to be professional and approachable, know where you can make compromises and where you need to stand your ground.
Based on your budget, you know what you can afford, so be clear about this from the beginning. But agreeing anything verbally isn’t enough – you need to formalize the terms and conditions of the relationship via an influencer contract.
Create influencer contracts
An influencer contract is a legally-binding document that defines the terms of the relationship, in this case between a creator and the brand they are working with on a specific set of activities.
Having a contract in place protects both parties by clearly setting out the responsibilities of each, the duration of the agreement, and the exact deliverables expected of the creator along with payment terms. The contract holds both parties to account – don’t skip this step!
3. Prepare your TikTok influencer campaign
By now, you have the marketing strategy nailed down, and found the most relevant influencers to partner with. Now is the time to execute the whole package!
Ship products
Organize shipment of any products you need the creators to show in their videos. If you want them to post simultaneously, make sure they receive the products with enough margin to give them time to produce the content.
Agree on the posting date and time
Communicate your schedule to the influencers and agree on the details. To hit the timelines, be clear about the approval process so that content gets reviewed efficiently and the creators know what to expect.
Review drafts and approve posts
Once you receive a draft from your creators, review it promptly. Give them precise feedback and don’t overwhelm them with too many points. Once you’re both happy with the content, it’s time to let your TikTok campaign start.
Take care of the finances
Once the campaign has gone live, or before depending on the terms of your agreement with them, it’s time to settle the fees with the creators.
There are several generally-accepted payment terms brands tend to use, such as paying for the whole campaign at once or per video, within 15, 30 or 45 days from the completion or posting date. This will depend on your cashflow position, and again should be clearly spelt out in the influencer contract.
4. Analyze the results
During your TikTok influencer campaign and once it’s over, you need to carve out time to analyze the results, and compare performance with your target outcomes.
You can ask the TikTok influencer for data on the branded videos, and do some manual analysis on each piece of content. Another option that will make your life easier is to use a campaign management tool. Such tools let you see how your campaign is performing on the go, so you can make any changes while the activity is running, and you can easily manage everything from a central dashboard.
Analyzing the results of your campaign in depth will show you what performed well versus where you could improve for your next TikTok influencer campaign. Time to crunch some numbers!
Conclusion
To set yourself up for success on TikTok, follow these simple steps: establish your marketing strategy, identify the most suitable influencers, reach out to them and agree terms and conditions, prepare and launch your campaign, and then track the results and iterate based on the learnings.
Then, start working on the next campaign. You can re-use elements of your campaign strategy and goals. At this point, you’ll start to grow a useful address book of influencers, you’ll be more skilled at running campaign, and most importantly, you’ll know how to analyze results and act on them. You’re on your way to becoming a TikTok pro!
Need help on your upcoming campaign? Rather than do everything on your own (trial and error and all that), let us do all the hard work for you. Reach out to us at TIKTAL to get started!