TikTok

How to choose the right influencers for your business

Understand your audience

Before you can start marketing on TikTok, you need to have a deep understanding of who your target audience is. Who are you trying to get in front of? Who’s most likely to love your content and engage with your brand? Who will convert into a customer eventually? Building out buyer personas for your brand can help.

Make sure you know:

• Which brands they engage with (both competitors and non-competitors);
• What types of influencers they already follow;
• Basic demographics;
• Common traits, goals, challenges, and pain points;
• How you can help solve a specific problem they face.

Have clear goals in mind

Why do you want to market on social media? What are you looking to put into the process and get out of it? Do you want to focus on building brand awareness? Do you want to test new products or services? Are you hoping to convert and boost sales and ROI? Your top goals will impact your influencer marketing strategies.

Consider your budget

Your budget will, of course, play a huge role in which influencers you work with and what types of campaigns you run.

Factors that affect TikTok influencer prices will include:

• Their reach
• Their engagement rate
• Your goals and expectations
• How much effort you require of them
• Ad placement
• Agency fees (if applicable)
• The number and type of posts

TikTok influencer prices can range anywhere from $5 to $10,000 per post.

Choose your Influencers carefully

Here are some extra pro tips to keep in mind while “shopping” for relevant influencers for your business.

• The influencer’s audience and content should align with your brand and values.
• Your target audience should already engage with and trust the influencer.
• Their content should get high engagement consistently.
• Their content should directly or indirectly correlate with your business or niche.
• The influencer should be a thought leader in your industry (or in a closely related industry).
• Being active on platforms outside of TikTok can be a good sign.

How to carry out your Influencer marketing strategy on TikTok

How to Find TikTok Influencers

Google It

It’s an obvious answer, but we have to say it: just google it first. Try starting broad and then narrowing down once you have a feel for who’s out there. For example, you could search for “top TikTok influencers,” and then narrow it down by niche or vertical, as in “top TikTok fashion influencers.”

Search for hashtags

Hashtags are an essential part of TikTok; almost every post has them. Simply searching for hashtags in your industry or niche can lead you to content creators that would align well with your brand. When you find a TikTok influencer who uses a hashtag your business relates to, it’s likely that influencer’s followers are interested in the hashtag, too. Keep a list of relevant and trending hashtags to look up. Note which ones point you in the right direction (and which ones are duds) to refine your search as you go. Things move quickly in the world of TikTok, so leverage the app’s Discover feature to stay on top of trending hashtags. Once you find an influencer who matches your goals, reach out to them. If they don’t provide contact info in the platform, do a little extra searching to find them outside of it. (Remember, “outside” of TikTok includes other influencer-focused platforms like Instagram, where anyone can now share links in Stories.)

Identify existing Influencer sponsored content on TikTok

Similar to using the Discover page search functionalities, you can search for video content that’s tagged with #ad to identify sponsored content on the platform. This technique enables brands to quickly locate existing influencer content to decide if those influencers would be worth reaching out to about collaboration opportunities.

Cross-check known Influencers on other social media platforms

Lastly, it’s not a bad idea to check on the influencers you already know from other popular social platforms, like Instagram and YouTube. Influencers of all sizes commonly boast a strong cross-channel presence, meaning if they’re excelling on Instagram and YouTube, they may also have a growing TikTok fanbase. While not always the case, it’s worth checking in on the influencers you’ve heard of or already worked with on other platforms.

Research areas of interest

What’s your ideal influencer interested in? Are they all about exercise and healthy eating, or are they passionate about traveling on a budget? Finding influencers who match your main industry can be as easy as searching like you would for hashtags. Try searching a variety of terms related to your vertical or brand, as content creators may not use the exact keyword you’re used to. It may also help to dig a little deeper to look into an influencer’s bio to find out what they’re truly interested in. And don’t forget that they are likely active on other social media platforms, too. Cross-referencing their TikTok bio with their Instagram or Facebook profile may give you insights you would have missed if you looked at TikTok alone.

Check out the competition

What are similar brands doing on TikTok, and who are they working with? Checking out your competition is an easy way to find the content and creators that are already resonating with your target audience. You can search for a brand both to find out who shows up in their videos (or tags them in theirs), and to see related brands and influencers in TikTok’s suggested accounts. Whether or not you want to work with the exact same influencers as a rival is up to you. Once you know who they are, though, you can use that information to find similar influencers — ones who aren’t already tied to a competitor.

Platforms for finding Influencers on TikTok

Grin

Grin is one of the increasing number of platforms now recognizing the value of TikTok to influencer marketing. Of course, back in 2014, when Grin began, TikTok was still two years away from exploding onto the Chinese market. However, Grin is much more than a discovery platform to find TikTok influencers. It describes itself as integrating with your entire marketing stack – including social platforms, eCommerce solutions, and communications tools. Grin brings everything your team needs for end-to-end influencer marketing into one place. Grin’s primary focus is on providing influencer marketing for eCommerce. You can discover influencers, manage relationships with them, and report and track your ROI. It gives you the tools to search a network of 32 million social media users across every platform (including TikTok) to find the faces who are just right for your brand. From emailing influencers to shipping product to repurposing content, Grin makes the day-to-day management of influencer marketing easy. It also shows you everything from individual metrics to the ROI of your entire influencer program. As Grin connects to all the major eCommerce platforms, you can use it to ship products, know when they arrive, create and manage discount codes, pay influencers commission on sales, and much more, all from within the Grin dashboard. Grin’s influencer audience report shows you a credibility score to indicate how genuine an account’s engagement is, along with other key audience metrics. Its lookalike tool allows you to input your current best influencers and find new creators with similar audiences, engagement, demographics, and reach. If you already have brand champions, you can use Grin to expand your influencer network with more just like them. Its lookalike tool allows you to input your current best influencers and find new creators with similar audiences, engagement, demographics, and reach.

Upfluence

Upfluence wrote about what you need to know about TikTok to market with it in 2019. The post observes that “There’s been a trend to use social media for entertainment purposes, rather than sharing personal updates. TikTok perfectly feeds into that need by giving everybody a space to freely express their creativity.” Upfluence includes a robust influencer search and discovery module. It also provides tools to assist brands with social listening. It ties all this together with tools to allow you to manage your campaigns. Upfluence includes a massive database of more than 1 million influencers, across all the leading social media networks. Obviously, only a small portion of these feature on TikTok and are in TikTok’s main demographics. You can search for influencers using as many keywords as you need. This means that you can drill down through keywords to reduce influencers to manageable numbers. You can filter through audience data to a granular level, placing relative weights on each keyword. Unfortunately, the most detailed data is limited to Instagram, so you can’t yet target TikTok influencers in such a precise fashion – although, you may be able to use your Instagram results to help discover suitable TikTok users if you are searching for terms that would be relevant to the typical TikTok audience.

CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ targets large companies and enterprises; their smallest published clients earn around $100 million annually. The platform’s clients include Disney, Tiffany & Co., Unilever, Dell, and Ralph Lauren. Although CreatorIQ doesn’t specifically mention TikTok on its website, they don’t refer directly to any other social network either. Instead, they simply declare that they have “top social platforms supported.” CreatorIQ integrates directly with social platform APIs and its AI-powered algorithm analyses over 1 billion public social accounts and their content. Their influencer marketing platform also features audience profiles, growth history, and cross-platform content to help you find, assess, and qualify over 15 million creators before adding them to your network. One helpful feature of CreatorIQ is that it includes Google AI image recognition for enriched creator data, including interest and brand affinities to recommend creators. The AI looks at all the discrete parts of any given piece of content—the image, the location, mentions, even emojis—and makes logical inferences relating to a creator’s interests and audience tastes. The AI also vets influencers to ensure their authenticity. It does an excellent job of finding those who game the system with fake followers and bots. It assigns each influencer an “Integrity Quotient,” which can help you discern how authentic an influencer’s audience is. You can then invite your chosen influencers via email to join your network, using a white-labeled, fully customizable portal where they can register and go through an onboarding process. Influencers create an account, fill out any required tax and compliance forms, self-identify their interests, and set up payment options. They connect their social accounts to your portal and authorize CreatorIQ to ingest all their data, giving you access to much more information than public APIs can show you. 

Creator.co

Creator.co began life as an influencer marketplace called Shop and Shout. It later re-branded and expanded the services it offers. As a result, the platform now focuses as much on content creation as it does on distributing that content. However, it has always catered to small and medium-sized businesses and provides considerably more data than many other platforms at their price point. Creator.co offers two distinct types of plans. Their $395/mo Self-Serve plan gives an offering much like many other platforms in this post. Here, you do all the “heavy lifting,” using Creator.co as a tool to find influencers and assist you in your influencer marketing. You can discover and work with up to 250 creators each month in unlimited campaigns at this price. In addition, you can purchase additional blocks of 250 creator contacts. Alternatively, you might prefer Creator.co’s $795/mo Community Driven plan. This is more automated. You create your campaign and let the software take it from there. All you need do is to accept or decline any influencer who applies to take part. All other parts of the campaign occur behind the scenes. No matter which plan you choose, you begin by creating and defining your campaign. Naturally, you should be as specific and detailed as possible. Although most campaigns are fully customized, there are two prefabricated types: the ShoutOut campaign (an exchange of free products for exposure) and Giveaways (influencers drive followers to your profile by running contests for free stuff). If you are on the Self-Serve plan, Creator.co’s Discovery tool allows you to search through a database of 500 million influencers to find those that might best fit with your brand.

Tagger Media

Tagger Media is a multiple award-winning all-in-one Influencer Marketing and Social Listening platform that allows marketers to maximize their strategies and campaign ROI throughout every phase of discovery, planning, analysis, activation, management, and reporting. Tagger works with both agencies and brands; their client roster includes Omnicom, HBOMax, Ketchum, Land Rover, and Rothy’s. With direct relationships with all major social media platforms, Tagger allows its customers to find and connect with the perfect influencers and reach target audiences, setting them up to gain the highest engagement rate and best ROI possible. With Tagger’s end-to-end solution, users can identify TikTok creators, understand audience and content performance, negotiate partnerships, manage the activations and report on campaign KPIs all within the same workflow on the same efficient, data-driven platform. Available in 11+ languages with the capability to make multi-currency on-platform payments, Tagger is a truly global solution that empowers agencies and brands around the world to scale their influencer marketing efforts with efficiency and ease.

#paid

#paid recognizes that influencers are creators first, i.e., they gain their influence due to being good at creating content and, in the process, building an audience. They recognize that successful influencer marketing requires influencers who create exciting content and who make a good fit for a brand. They also believe that micro-influencers are far better value to a brand than celebrity super-stars. Therefore, #paid takes more notice of these somewhat subjective factors than pure numbers like reach. Depending on your size and needs, you can select from four plans (Just Content, Grow, Advanced, and Enterprise). However, #paid sets a starting campaign spend of US$2,500 required when contracting creators. All plans permit unlimited campaigns launched per month, with varying numbers of “handraised” creators per campaign. Handraised creators have already indicated that they are willing and able to participate in influencer campaigns. A hand-raise uses your brief to match you with creators ideal for your campaign. #paid has already pre-qualified handraised creators, and they will only present your brief to creators who reach your target market. Suitable handraised creators then pitch their campaign concepts for your review, suggesting why they believe they make a good fit and what their intended campaign strategy would be. The Grow, Advanced, and Enterprise plans offer you varying numbers of creator whitelisting licenses. Here, you gain the right to use creator content and handles in your Facebook ads. Unfortunately, this does not yet flow through to TikTok, so you shouldn’t consider creator whitelisting levels if you solely intend to market on TikTok. #paid gives you a centralized inbox, helping you stay aligned with every creator on your campaign—this allows you to quickly see when content is ready for approval and when it’ll go live. Of course, nothing goes live until you’re satisfied. So, you can preview the exact look and feel of all posts before the world sees them.

NeoReach

Neoreach is the brainchild of Jesse Leimgruber and Misha Talavera who pitched the idea while still attending Stanford University. They envisaged Neoreach to connect social media influencers with brands directly. The pair was accepted into Stanford’s accelerator program to work on realizing their vision. By 2014, they’d received $1.5 million in seed funding. The key to Neoreach is its discovery engine. It uses an algorithm that mines the social web for data and indexes it for search. There are now over 3 million influencers in the Neoreach database. Neoreach is sophisticated software and as such, targeted at large businesses and enterprises. The pricing levels would generally put it out of reach for most small businesses. Neoreach prides itself on the depth of the data it holds about each influencer. You can refine your searches by a vast range of demographic and psychographic criteria. This means that you should be able to find suitable influencers for virtually every market – including young females who spend much of their time on TikTok. Neoreach uses AI to refine its influencer recommendations, and the more you use Neoreach, the better it will be at finding suitable influencers for you. It is more than just a campaign management tool, however. It contains everything you need to help you manage your entire influencer campaigns.