TikTok’s popularity cannot be overstated. With a billion users in over 150 countries, it has become one of the biggest social media apps on the planet. With TikTok being such a great app, it also carries a lot of potential for brands and businesses seeking unique marketing opportunities.
TikTok influencers are growing resources for brands and will continue to offer an innovative opportunity for promotional partnerships for the foreseeable future. TikTok is also a hugely popular app with younger users, meaning that marketers and promotional teams can more easily reach some of the most converted marketing ages spanning the early 20s to early 30s. TikTok data indicates that 60% of its users are Gen Z users, which is a demographic full of potential.
But when it comes to finding the right TikTok influencers for your brand, where do you begin? We’re here to help you out with this.
What is TikTok?
TikTok is a video-sharing app that began as Musical.ly, but has grown since its rebrand to become one of the four most prominent social media apps on the web. The app initially gained popularity for sharing lip-syncing videos but now generates thousands of viral videos that trend not only on TikTok but other platforms.
Large communities have also grown and thrived on the platform, with dedicated TikTok personalities raising revenue with highly engaged, motivated audiences. While the app is mainly mobile-based, users and visitors can still experience the app on the web. The platform also provides creative tools to users, resulting in innovative talent gaining traction among users.
TikTok is now an app where you can experience everything from short explainers to viral sketches to classic lip-syncs. It is an app that offers excellent potential to any brand that can find users to sponsor. With half a billion dollars in revenue from the US alone in 2020, much money travels between TikTok users.
How Big is TikTok?
The TikTok app, since 2018, has been installed 3 billion times and, according to TikTok statistics, has a billion active users every month. Despite being a more recent app, TikTok keeps up with other social platforms such as Instagram, with 1.4 billion users, and Snapchat, with 750 million users.
As TikTok has expanded, so has its functionality, growing far beyond the original 15-second video limit to now being able to do several minutes of video, resulting in far more content flexibility.
The explosive growth of TikTok can be explained by its ease of use and user culture. It also helps that many celebrities have embraced the app through paid partnerships. However, the main driver of growth is not outside celebrities embracing the platform but rather influential creators within the platform.
Between celebrity endorsement, viral videos, and power users, the TikTok platform has much going on.
How Can TikTok Help Your Business?
Yoru business and brand can leverage TikTok in several ways. While we’ll focus on influencers in just a bit, it is essential to note some standard options that pair well with influencer marketing. Given that TikTok users open the app eight times a day on average, there are plenty of opportunities to get your brand on the platform.
Creating Content
TikTok is primarily an entertainment platform, so you must make entertaining content for your brand to leverage the platform’s strengths. However, creating entertaining content as a brand can be challenging, as many attempts may need to be more authentic.
That said, this is a potent marketing tool if your brand has a presence on TikTok and can make entertaining and engaging content.
Hashtag Challenges
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Hashtag challenges have been a thing on TikTok since the platform started growing, and hashtag challenges continue to be a significant part of the identity of TikTok. If your brand can utilize a hashtag challenge, that can pay off a great deal.
Hashtag challenges can be viral and generate a lot of content. As the hashtag spreads, more users can get caught up in creating videos for the hashtag, and as long as the hashtag is used, it can lead back to the origin point: your brand. Leveraging the community by boosting and sharing content within the hashtag further puts your brand in the spotlight.
Ad Buys
Performing traditional ad buys on TikTok is also viable for promoting a brand or business. However, the key with ad buys is to make ads that fit with the culture and aesthetic of the platform rather than just sticking to any traditional television ad on TikTok.
As with other marking methods on the platform, your success here depends on understanding how the platform works. Before paying money for some ads, research what is trending and what the currently popular TikTok videos are, then shape your ads around those themes.
Partnering with Influencers
One of the most efficient ways to promote your brand or business is to leave that to those who are already experts on the platform. Partnering with influencers allows you to provide vetted users with materials and copy they can package and relay to their dedicated audience.
Partnership content can come in many forms as well. For example, product reviews and unboxes are popular video types on TikTok. You can even coordinate with influencers to push a hashtag challenge. Giving them access to behind-the-scenes demos or visits can generate content promoting your brand to their followers.
One of the best sources comes directly from TikTok, known as The TikTok Creator Marketplace. Consider this your first stop. Partnerships have proven lucrative, such as users like Addison Rae making $5 million through TikTok alone.
6 Tips for Finding TikTok Influencers
When it’s time to search people on TikTok, there are many alternatives beyond TikTok itself. Here are some essential tips for finding the right TikTok influencer for your brand. 
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Seek out Influencer Marketplaces
One way to get a jump-start on finding the right TikTok collaborator for your brand or product is to utilize existing services. Many indexes allow you to find popular TikTok users and TikTok users who are ready to take the next step into their careers with sponsored content. Influencer Marketplaces can be an excellent first step into understanding the scale of TikTok and how many options you have.
TikTok has about 1 billion monthly active users, many of whom are power users with large followings. That is a large number of people to sort through. In that case, looking at influencer marketplaces to get an idea of your options would make sense.
Search by Location
Did you know that TikTok has around 80 million active users in the United States per month? That is a lot of users in a large region, and within that number, there are certainly breakdowns of smaller, more focused locations. If your brand or business is regional, it becomes vital to factor in a TikTok user’s location when looking for branding partnerships.
One way to look at this is that because a TikTok user may have a million subscribers, they may not be an ideal choice if most subscribers are out of your business area. How would marketing to users in New York pay off if you own a pizza chain in California, right? In this case, when looking at your TikTok partnership options, be sure to consider the regions of their followers.
Search by Bio
A TikTok user can craft a bio for their account that provides a sense of their personality, style, and areas of interest. The bio blurb is one of the most important ways a TikTok user can convey their goals and potential audience. Remember to read their bios when looking for a TikTok user to sponsor.
For example, a TikTok user may be in a particularly relevant industry or group you may want to contact for marketing purposes. Say that your brand creates materials for educators; in that case, education-focused TikTok users will likely have something along those lines written in their bio. Beyond that, the bio may also indicate the critical hashtags that they may use.
Search by Hashtags
Hashtags are one of how content is discovered on TikTok, and because of this, it is essential to utilize hashtags when seeking out your potential TikTok partners. Understanding the use and effectiveness of hashtags by potential marketing partners should be an element of your vetting process.
Hashtag usage is essential if your brand is in a specific niche. If your potential TikTok influencer partner operates within that niche, that can provide your marketing a huge advantage with their audience. As you scout for influencers, search by relevant hashtags to let you know how well they already operate within your target market.
Search by Follower Count
Follower counts are vital to a TikTok influencer’s value for a business arrangement. The larger the follower count, your marketing can reach the more unique individuals regarding your brand. While, in a general sense, a more extensive follower base seems sound, it can also be a misdirection.
For example, you may partner with a TikTok influencer with two million followers, but that can be a wasted effort if those followers do not match the niche of your marketing plans.
On the other hand, a smaller, more niche TikTok influencer can provide benefits. These individuals are called micro-influencers because their follower count ranges between 10,000 and 100,000. They are successful marketing partners because while their audience is smaller, their engagement is much stronger.
Search by Engagement
One consideration when looking for a TikTok influencer is their engagement rate and how it might benefit your brand. An engagement rate is a measurement of their interaction level, and from the outside perspective, it might take a lot of work to determine when scouting for influencers.
When scouting for potential influencer partnerships, check their average engagement rate on their posts to get a sense of their viability. Generally speaking, you should look for an engagement rate on posts by your potential TikTok users between 1% and 5%. Engagement is best calculated with a formula: TikTok likes + TikTok comments + TikTok shares, all divided by the number of followers.
A great example of engagement success comes from the case study of Jennifer Lopez. Jennifer Lopez posted one video on Twitter and TikTok. Her Twitter video, sent to 45 million followers, only raised 2 million views. Her TikTok video, sent out to 5 million followers, racked up an incredible 71 million views.
These percentages seem small, but remember, the larger the audience a user has, the more they have to engage proportionally to keep up that level of engagement.
Your TikTok Campaign
Your TikTok influencer campaign will vary quite a bit due to your audience, influencer’s following, and brand. What is most important to note, though, is that working with an influencer is more like a partnership than an ad buy. In a genuine sense, you are paying that influencer on TikTok to serve as a brand ambassador; their likeness and videos will be associated with what you do.
Vetting your potential influencer is critical to the success of your TikTok campaign, and you should take this seriously. However, with these elements working in concert, partnering with a TikTok influencer can be a game-changer in appealing to the specific markets you are after, especially as TikTok is a relatively newer platform. TikTok is undervalued, given its current growth, which means it is valuable for innovative marketing through influencers.
Using TikTok to Boost Your Business
As can be seen, TikTok is a wildly popular social media app with great potential for businesses and brands to market themselves. While there are traditional means to sell on TikTok, such as ads, it is apparent that the most effective options are innovative and creator-centric.
TikTok is a platform where engagement is created through personality and working within the app’s specific culture. In that sense, it may be best to partner with people who have already successfully leveraged the app. These sponsored partnerships through TikTok influencers offer a tremendous amount of marketing potential your brand can explore.