With TikTok using influencers is your best bet to gaining new customers and reaching larger audiences to promote your services.
This is one of the best strategies you can use to gain exposure and reach millions and millions of new customers. And the good news is that it’s a good fit for any type of business, from the really small (ones like your regular ice cream shop next door) to really big brands (like Mercedes and Bosh).
In this lesson, we’ll discuss the process of reaching influencers and the specifics of this type of interaction.
The best way to do it…
Before we get started, just a short note on how you can get the most of your campaign. To cover a full spectrum of needs, try combining the use of influencers with ad campaigns – it’s your best bet overall!
To make this happen there are 2 steps to follow:
- First, reach out to the influencers and get them to create the clips
- Then use the clips in your TikTok ad campaigns
So, you see how these two work together to help you reach a wider audience and meet your complex marketing needs.
Attention: People using this hybrid approach usually reach 2-3 times better ROI.
In the next lesson, you’ll get the full info on how to run the ads campaign, so in this one will focus on the influencer part.
Finding influencers
There are 3 main ways to do it, depending on your budget and your time constraints.
1. The less expensive method – DM
The less expensive method is to directly message the influencers. You’ll need to identify the influencers that are relevant to your niche or product, and then contact them each 1 by 1, sending them direct messages. As you can imagine this is rather time-consuming, although the cheaper method of running this type of project.
The good news is it’ll teach you a ton about the outreach process and you’ll get a lot of insight from behind the scenes of running such campaigns.
How to do it
It’s rather simple. You need to go to your TikTok app and then to your Discovery tab. Type in #YourNiche (so, if your niche is fitness, then you would simply type in #Fitness). Then you look up people that are posting content that’s relevant to your niche and would fit your brand’s image. You’d then simply contact them asking for a promotion.
Of course, you need to find people that are very active and also have a good number of followers. Don’t contact any that don’t post at least once every 2 days and have at least 10K followers. A good thing to do is inquire about their audience and demographics. They have this information in their analytics section and you need to know if their audience is a good fit for your product, depending on their location and other such parameters.
2. The popular method – Using an influencer platform
It’s a good choice for running your campaigns because it streamlines part of the process. You’ll find a plethora of such platforms ranging from simple ones (that help you do simple searches to find specific accounts and filter them by followers count and such other parameters) to more advanced platforms (that offer a good basis for managing the entire process).
The more advanced ones will offer you a great platform for managing your whole campaigns from inside the account itself – but, for a price. They offer you a way to pay the influencers and, well… anything you’d need for running a full/complex campaign.
How to do it
Upon a short Google search for “TikTok influencer platform,” you’ll find a huge list of such platforms. Choose which to use depending on your specific needs for the location, budget, demographics, and so on…
Two platforms we regularly use and can recommend are Upfluence and Heartbeat. Also, note that most of these platforms are paid, so you need to add that cost to your budget.
3. More expensive, less time-consuming method – Using an agency
This is at the other end of the spectrum and it’s very expensive. Its advantages are simple: most of the process is done by the agents or someone from the agency, so you won’t need to do (almost) anything.
They run the search, do the outreach and recommendations, and also negotiate the contract. So, it may be the case that this is the best option for a lot of people that have time constraints and prefer to focus on other marketing tasks.
It’s also a good idea if you are just starting out, because the agency has the expertise that’s needed to conduct such campaigns. They know what content performs better, they know how to analyze the data, read the analytics and demographics parameters, they know the niches and how to approach the promotion.
Usually, agencies offer a very good return on investment. So, although being the most expensive method of reaching out to influencers, hiring an agency may be your best bet if you’ve got the necessary budget.
How to do it
Again, finding such agencies is a matter of a simple Google search. It’s hard to recommend a specific company because your needs and goals may be at the other end of the spectrum (compared to other companies). So, upon doing a simple search and taking into consideration your specific parameters you’ll surely find a great agency to work with. We’ve worked with Fanbytes and got a pretty good ROI. Check them out, they may be a good choice for too!
To conclude
Running influencer campaigns is an amazing strategy, no doubt about it! You’ll get so much more out of it if you merge it with a campaign of TikTok ads.
So, as discussed, after the influencer creates your clip and promotes it on his channel, you could also use it to run TikTok ads and reach a larger audience.
There are 3 main ways to find influencers and we’ve covered that in detail above…
Running influencer campaigns is one of the most lucrative marketing approaches on TikTok and this is the best time to get started.
