What if I told you that working with TikTok creators on your next social media campaign would lead to a 500% ROI, 45 million (yes, million) video views, and a 68% revenue increase? (And that’s not even during your business’s peak season.)
Well, these were the exact outcomes for the beauty brand Isle of Paradise after partnering with five content creators through the TikTok Creator Marketplace.
From a marketing perspective, this Isle of Paradise case study demonstrates why forming influencer partnerships with TikTok creators is a strategic investment for any and all businesses.
With 689 million monthly TikTok users worldwide, there’s clear potential for target audience overlap. Not only that, but an endorsement by a trusted influencer might be all it takes to start leading their followers down your sales funnel.
But how do you find the right influencers to partner with in the first place?
In this article, we share everything that brands need to know about the TikTok Creator Marketplace (TCM). That way, you can be in the best position to get the ROI, engagement, and conversions you’re looking for in your next paid campaign.
Before focusing on TCM, let’s first take a closer look at influencer marketing and its benefit to brands.
There are four main influencer categories: nano, micro, macro, and mega.
While macro and mega influencers received a lot of attention in the early days of influencer marketing, there’s been a considerable shift toward nano and micro-influencers.
Though macro and mega influencers have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of followers, influencers with smaller audiences (i.e., about 10,000 to 100,000) outperform these groups when it comes to audience engagement.
Micro-influencers, for instance, tend to see 6.7 times more engagement than macro-influencers.
The more engaged an audience is, the more receptive they are to your brand’s messaging and the more likely they are to convert.
A statistic like this tells brands that they don’t have to spend $2,000 to $50,000 on a single social media post. In fact, it’s actually in their best interest that they don’t.
By partnering with micro and nano influencers, you can reduce your influencer marketing spend, afford to work with multiple influencers at once, and still see better campaign results.
This is worth keeping in mind as you develop an influencer marketing strategy for TikTok, or any platform for that matter.
You have options when it comes to forming influencer partnerships, but the question remains: Once you know what you’re looking for, how do you find the right creators to partner with?
For many brands that want to leverage TikTok’s growth to their advantage, the answer is simple: TikTok Creator Marketplace (TCM).
TCM is a platform that brands and content creators use to connect and collaborate on upcoming social media campaigns. It’s a free resource for brands that want to find and work with influencers that their target audience will find most relevant.
When you visit the TCM website, you’ll notice that the resource is designed for easy usability so that brands (like yours) and TikTok influencers can start building partnerships conveniently. With an account, you can discover creators, benefit from in-app marketing tools, and more.
If you’re interested in working with TikTok creators with a specific niche or follower amount, this resource makes it convenient for you to do that.
But, if you’re still on the fence, be sure to check out the case studies on the site after reading the rest of this post.
Here are five key reasons why TCM is a great resource for businesses like yours:
It’s pretty rare to find a resource like TCM that is accessible to brands and influencers at no cost.
To start connecting with TikTok creators, all you need to do is create an account, get approved, and begin your search for influencers that fit your desired criteria (i.e., total reach, engagement rate, topics, etc.).
As of the date this article was published, TikTok doesn’t pocket any of their creators’ earnings or enforce a brand fee — which is the main reason why TCM is such an attractive resource for both sides.
Throughout the process of finding, negotiating, and partnering with influencers, brands are extremely wary of encountering influencer fraud.
You need to be able to trust that the influencers you plan on working with have been vetted and are who they say they are, especially when in-person communication is all but taken off the table.
The good news is that TCM’s creator pool is authenticated and updated on a consistent basis, so you can rest assured that the creators showing up in your search results were invited to join or apply and then approved by TikTok.
Once you’re an approved brand in TCM, you can narrow your influencer search using different filters related to audience demographics, analytics, and more.
This gives you the flexibility to be as specific or non-specific in your search as you want so that you’re sifting through the most relevant options.
So, for example, if you want to partner with a nano influencer that shares beauty content on TikTok and gets x amount of engagement, you can adjust your search to find the best creators that meet this criteria immediately.
After filtering your search and sifting through profile-after-profile, TCM allows you to notify potential partners about your upcoming campaign and invite them to participate.
When influencers get this notification, they have a limited window of time to respond (i.e., 72 hours). From there, they will either connect with you to learn more about the collaboration or decline the opportunity.
If they accept your invitation, you’re able to carry out the entire negotiation process within TCM — which saves you and them the added hassle of jumping from phone call to email to Zoom call, etc.
With TCM, you have complete access to all of the data you need about your campaign’s progress.
This data includes views, audience demographics, and engagement metrics — all of which help you gauge the success of your influencer partner’s content long before the campaign is over.
And because TCM is TikTok’s in-house campaign management platform, you can trust that this data is accurate and updated in real time.
You’re able to track and compare each individual partner’s views, likes, comments, and other analytics in one place.
TCM is a resource that makes it easier on your team to form influencer partnerships that you can track in-platform or through an influencer and social media-specialized agency.
The only downside of TCM is that tracking and capabilities are exclusively limited to TikTok.
To ensure that your entire social media strategy is airtight, it’s worthwhile to work with an agency like Quintly — especially when it comes to tracking analytics across TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms.
(Plus, some expert insight can help you bypass a lot of unnecessary trial and error in the early stages of TikTok marketing.)
Leveraging both of these resources saves you time and gets you the data you need when you need it.