Every brand is eager to find a home for itself on TikTok. TikTok recently surpassed 1 billion active users, and the app is increasingly reshaping how—and where—e-commerce happens.
Hashtags like #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt have catapulted small brands to viral new heights. The best way for a brand to start on the social media platform is to work with established content creators.
But while anyone can pull up the names of a few big-name TikTok influencers, many brands are instead opting to work with smaller creators who have tapped into niche audiences.
According to a recent study from Upfluencer, the influencers with the highest engagement rates often have the most niche audiences.
While mega influencers with 1m+ followers on TikTok have an engagement rate of 5%, micro-influencers with under 15k followers saw 18% engagement on average.
That means spreading your content and marketing across several smaller influencers versus spending big on one or two influencers has its upsides. To find those influencers, brands should turn to the TikTok Creator Marketplace.
At its most basic, the TikTok Creator Marketplace (TCM) is a large, searchable database of creators. However, it's also like TikTok's own influencer marketing platform.
Through the Creator Marketplace, businesses can:
Currently, over 10,000 creators are listed in the marketplace, which is sure to rise in the coming months. In September 2021, the Creator Marketplace exited beta, making it accessible to many more influencers and brands.
The Creator Marketplace offers a few different services:
Through the creator discovery tool, brands can filter influencers by region, topic ("Transportation & Vehicle" or "Fashion," for instance), reach, average views, and the region of their audience.
There's also an "e-commerce anchor" button, which lets brands narrow down influencers that have access to TikTok's in-beta shoppable features.
Once brands have a manageable list of creators they'd like to collaborate with, businesses can click over to a creator's profile and invite them to work on branded content. Brands can forge partnerships and even offer sponsorships once they find their ideal creator.
This tool helps bring that initial contact with an influencer in the Creator Marketplace into a full-blown influencer marketing campaign.
The Campaign Management feature lets brands review the post before it goes up. Creators upload their sponsored video into the "Create & review" feature, and the brand gives their final approval.
Once both sides agree, the creator posts it, and brands pay them for their work through the Creator Marketplace dashboard.
The most basic version of the Creator Marketplace offers brands a campaign reporting tool that provides metrics around who is watching each creator-driven video, including the gender and age breakdown of who is watching it, plus the number of video views over time.
That is important because, without the Creator Marketplace, brands wouldn't access metrics on a short-form video posted by someone else.
For now, TikTok is offering a small number of marketing companies access to much more sophisticated data through its Creator Marketplace API beta test.
The API includes more detailed first-party data like audience demographics, insights about growth trends, best-performing videos, engagement, and more.
Captiv8, one of the marketing agencies with access to the API, said that using the Creator Marketplace increased purchase intent by 7% above their average campaign.
The fashion tech company Wanna, which uses augmented reality to let people virtually try on shoes, partnered with multiple small creators through the TikTok Creator Marketplace.
Wanna chose only creators who have between 50,000 and 100,000 views per video to keep it small.
In total, Wanna drove 15 million views across all videos, and the videos had an engagement rate of 16%. The company also attributed 75,000 new app installs to its TikTok Creator Marketplace campaign.
Brands that run campaigns on TikTok should make sure they are ready for customer inquiries. Brands need to be ready to support the demand associated with running a campaign through the TikTok Creator Marketplace.
Chatdesk Teams provides knowledgeable customer support teams who respond to customers in the TikTok comments—in real-time—ensuring that curious viewers can convert into paying customers. Schedule a demo here to see it in action.