How To Create Successful Partnerships With Tik Tok Influencers

Cooper Scott | June 10, 2022 at 8:30 AM

A Quick Guide To Partnering With Tik Tokers

As a brand, you have probably thought about finding influencers to partner with on social media platforms. But how do you go about finding the perfect influencer to create a partnership that will be mutually beneficial?

Finding the right influencer for your brand can feel very overwhelming, which is why this brief guide on how to begin working with the best influencer for your brand will be your new holy grail. In this blog, Hollywood Branded shares how to find, create, and develop mutually beneficial partnerships with influencers on Tik Tok.

How to create successful partnerships with Tik Tok influencers

What Makes Effective Partnerships

Partnering with influencers has become a necessity for any brand in today's world. The marketing potential of online content creators is as infinite as the number of potential likes they can get. However, knowing how to find the right influencers for a brand can be challenging. Furthermore, it isn't easy to know who the right influencers are. Social Media advertising is a new and complicated field. Tik Tok especially can be one of the hardest platforms to navigate & predict. With so many influencers to pick from on Tik Tok, how can a brand pick? This post will take you through the steps and processes of creating mutually beneficial relationships on Tik Tok. Some of the key aspects to creating a successful partnership are knowing yourself as a brand, knowing your influencer well, and producing content that feels natural.

Knowing Your Brand

The first step in creating a successful partnership with an influencer on Tik Tok is understanding your market position and brand identity. Start by running a SWOT analysis to determine your strengths and weaknesses. For those unfamiliar with a SWOT analysis, it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You can analyze your company based on these four aspects to understand your brand better. Through this, you can find out what market segments you have opportunities in and where you should focus your efforts. Some important things to learn are; the demographic of who uses your product, your company values, and what target audience will best receive your product. Narrowing down your target audience will allow you to choose an influencer based on their unique audience. I like to compare finding a good influencer to dating. You'll never find a good match if you don't understand yourself first. Remember to not only focus on what you think your brand identity is but how the general public feels about it as well. Once you know your customers' demographics and your brand's identity, you can move forward with finding influencers who share your values.

SWOT Analysis

Finding The Right Influencers

Now that you strongly understand your own identity as a company, it is time to find an influencer to partner with. The best partnerships form naturally, so the first place to look for influencers is the people who already use your service/product. Look through your tagged photos and hashtags to find people already posting about your brand. If some of these people have small or decent followings, then endorse them and ask them to continue to post about it. A great example was how Charli D’Amelio was already posting with Dunkin Doughnuts before they became official partners. This is an excellent strategy because a content creator's audience will notice if they start supporting a brand out of nowhere. This feels unnatural and feels like a forced ad. The most important part of social media advertising is not making it feel like an ad, but I will discuss that later. When influencers become sponsored by a product they already endorsed, it doesn't feel like an ad. It feels natural. Once you've found people posting about your product, it is time to expand your reach. When searching around to find big influencers to promote your brand try not to get caught up in the numbers. Although large followings are nice, often small, niche creators have more engagement from their audience. This also plays into finding the right influencer. Although large followings are nice, you should focus more on finding a good fit. This is why you need to get to know your potential partner. Go into finding influencers as you would hiring a new employee. Brands can be dangerously casual about choosing influencers, even though it is like creating a company extension. This is where the old saying quality over quantity comes into play. You'll want to find influencers with good engagement relative to their following. You'll also want to see creators whose following shares demographics with your target audiences. Don't just pick popular creators. Pick creators that are good fits with your brand.

Dunkin Donuts Charli DAmelio partnership

Producing Content That Feels Natural

Once you've found an influencer with whom you share values and a target audience, there's only one thing left, create the content! When making the content, the brand should be as hands-off as possible. After all, you chose this creator for a reason, and we should let them do what they do best. Allow the creator to use their usual style; you picked them for a reason. When it comes to Tik Tok, brand partnerships can be complex. Tik Tok is such a fast-paced app that people will swipe away as soon as they realize they are watching an ad. That means the best way to promote a brand on Tik Tok is to avoid traditional advertising. A strange rule to follow when creating advertisement content for Tik Tok is to avoid being too professional. It sounds odd. Usually, advertisements shoot to be as professional and high quality as possible. On Tik Tok, any video with high production value or someone listing all the great things about a product will get skipped in a second. This is why you go about advertising on Tik Tok trying to disguise the ad. I have caught myself watching a video almost all the way through before I realized it was an ad. This increases the chance of the video going viral. One main goal of social media advertising is to reach as many people as possible, so increasing the chance of viability is a must. This is why you give freedom to your creator. Often, Product placement can be better than product endorsement. Platforms like Youtube are suitable for product endorsement. People can make review videos about how good their product is or do a 20-second ad about how great a company is. On Tik Tok, people don't have the attention span to deal with it. That's why product placement is so essential on Tik Tok. If you want an influencer to promote a water bottle, don't have them sit and talk about how great it is. Have them make a viral video where the bottle happens to be in it. When it comes to content creation, trust the creator, they know what their audience wants more than anyone else.

Content Creators - once you find a partner in a content creator, let them do thing! allow your brand to speak for itself.

In Review

When choosing a potential Tik Tok influencer to partner with, there is a lot to consider. It is an important decision; therefore, there should be a lot to consider. Next time your company considers expanding into Tik Tok, here are some things to consider. You cant choose a partner unless you know yourself. Having someone represent you to a large following means they must know what they represent. Before trying to expand, you must understand the identity of your brand. When choosing an influencer, don't just look at numbers! Although large followings are tempting, a good fit will be more successful for both parties in the long run. Focus on creating natural partnerships. Lastly, let the influencer do what they do best, create! Don't try to micromanage the content or focus too much on the product/brand. Remember one of the most important things, don't make it feel like an Ad!