When it comes to what is the most popular overseas social media marketing right now, TikTok is definitely inseparable. As a star of overseas social media and social platforms, TikTok has achieved impressive growth since its launch in 2016, setting a record as the most downloaded social media application in the world.
Currently, TikTok has been downloaded more than 3 billion times and has more than 1 billion active users. As a platform rooted in content, TikTok also uses unique algorithms and diversified market segments to allow brands to take advantage of it, carry out product promotion activities, and gain visibility and traffic. More and more global expansion cross-border companies have begun celebrity marketing based on the TikTok platform. If you are one of them, the following points must not be ignored.
#01 TikTok celebrity marketing can better gain customer trust
Across the entire TikTok platform, 34% of users purchased products due to influencer marketing. It’s also a smart move for businesses to allocate a large portion of their marketing budget to IGC (influencer generated content).
By partnering with influencers for advertising, brands can successfully avoid the feeling of being too pushy. Many brands will establish official main accounts for product promotion or placement, but their content effects are often not as influential as those of celebrities, and their content participation is not as high as that of IGC content. Unlike official accounts, celebrities have social recognition and user trust, and their marketing power will be stronger.
#02 A small budget can go viral
TikTok’s recommendation algorithm determines that it pays more attention to high-quality, highly relevant content. The number of followers is not used as the only reference, so many lesser-known TikTok creators also have the opportunity to create viral content. Product manager Irina Weisfeiler once said: TikTok prioritizes the content itself, not the number of fans, which means that any brand and personal content is likely to be discovered and pushed to a larger traffic pool.
This is also why the TikTok platform can create so many celebrities. For enterprises, they can match business-related celebrities and achieve large-scale communication through diversified content marketing of celebrity groups.
#03 How to mine TikTok celebrities more efficiently
TikTok celebrity marketing does not mean big budgets and top anchors. Sometimes small influencers can even help companies achieve better results while controlling budgets. Let’s talk about how to mine celebrities more efficiently:
First, clarify TikTok celebrity user portraits and corporate audiences
Enterprises need to clarify whether target customers are active on the TikTok platform. More than 60% of TikTok platform users are under 35 years old, and 54% are women. As the platform develops, users are becoming more diverse. Although Gen Z and Millennials are the fastest-growing user groups, other people of different age groups and professions are also joining. For enterprises, they need to evaluate the activity of the target audience before deciding on the marketing strategy of the TikTok platform.
Second, explore content in subdivided areas
After establishing the target customers on the TikTok platform, the company needs to have a deep understanding of the target customers' hobbies and locate segmented areas. These segments are mainly circles of enthusiasts with similar interests. Finding the circles where target customers are located and reaching them can help companies quickly screen out highly relevant potential customers. For example, maternal and infant brands cooperate with parenting bloggers, and camera brands cooperate with digital bloggers.
If an enterprise is not familiar with market segments, it can find relevant content through these two methods: use the "Discover" function, click the "Discover" tab at the bottom of TikTok, browse related topic tags, and understand the content that customers care about;
Use the "Search" function, enter business keywords, find "Hashtags" under the keywords, and view the contents of these tag lists.
Third, look for popular people in niche areas
Enterprises don’t need to rush to find the top celebrities in the hot search list, but should focus on those celebrity groups who are also interested in cooperating with your brand. In fact, TikTok’s platform mechanism also determines that anyone can become a celebrity, and anyone has the opportunity to create a hit. You can find suitable influencer groups through the following channels:
- Google search: Enter a hashtag related to your brand or industry to discover some popular content creators;
- Use tags: Based on the relevant tags found above, click to view the popular videos in this category. At the same time, you can follow these related tags so that videos with these tags will appear on your "Recommended for You" page, making it easy to discover other celebrities in the same field in the future.
- TikTok Creator Market: There are also many celebrity marketing analysis tools on the market. Companies using these platforms can also find suitable celebrities for marketing. Product manager Weisfeiler pointed out that there are currently about 14,000 high-quality content creators in more than 17 countries and regions, and companies can find suitable celebrities through filters in different dimensions.
Once you find a suitable candidate, you can communicate with them directly on the platform and send them product information through the store. You can also use social tools such as WhatsApp to contact customers and gradually advance the cooperation details.
Fourth, carry out "back-up" on celebrities
Before cooperating with celebrities, companies must conduct background checks to ensure that the celebrity’s content, fan base and reputation are consistent with the corporate image. These surveys include: whether the interaction with the master's content is positive, the number of likes, comments and reposts, whether the audience targets match, whether the values are consistent with the brand, etc.
Enterprises not only need to back-check this information, but also need to record and classify it. Record corresponding information and labels for each influencer to form a customer portrait, and achieve targeted output during further communication.
#04 Some tips for starting TikTok influencer marketing
1. Establish goal orientation for cooperation.
Before launching celebrity marketing, companies must come with a goal: Is it to increase brand awareness or to directly convert transactions? Generally speaking, if it is to enhance brand awareness, companies can cooperate with top influencers with many fans. If it is to convert transactions, they can choose to cooperate with vertical celebrities who are in line with the target audience. Cooperation indicators generally include: brand awareness, interaction rate, conversion rate, etc.
2. Try different types of video formats.
During the cooperation process, companies need to cooperate with different types of creators and find the best content formats through experiments. These formats include hot videos, challenges, etc., so that diversified content can penetrate into the eyes of all types of customers. Diversified cooperation can not only accumulate enough data for the brand to test and iterate, but also help the brand reach new audiences. Therefore, when carrying out TikTok celebrity marketing activities, it is also crucial to find and combine celebrities with multiple content forms and styles.
3. Flexibly adjust creative content.
Each influencer has its own content characteristics and is more familiar with the operating rules of the platform. When working with them, ensure that the principles of cooperation are accurately conveyed while giving them flexible creative autonomy. TikTok is a flexible content platform. If the brand deprives celebrities of their creative space, loyal fans will feel the content difference, which will undoubtedly affect the company's marketing effect.
#05 How to optimize TikTok influencer marketing efficiency
Influencer marketing is a process with a long cycle, many roles, and complex processes. For enterprises, this process will also spend a lot of manpower and material resources. In this case, companies can combine the celebrity marketing system and management system to improve overall efficiency. The celebrity marketing platform integrates diverse celebrity resources, and the management system realizes celebrity-owned audience pool accumulation, online communication and collaborative management, effectively reducing arduous manual operations.
Combined with overseas owned channel customer management systems like WhatsApp SCRM, companies can achieve:
First, connect with expert groups through social means
Just like the domestic communication link from Douyin to WeChat, the same is true for overseas communication. It’s just that Douyin was replaced by TikTok, and WeChat was replaced by WhatsApp. In fact, many TikTok masters use their WhatsApp accounts in their self-introductions.
Socialization is a characteristic of all people, and WhatsApp communication can lay the foundation for instant interactive communication between both parties. Now, the communication channel for overseas B2B and B2 big C has also moved from email to online social platform.
Second, use WhatsAppowned-channel marketing to deeply develop the value of experts
This is a typical owned-channel marketing scenario. Enterprises can regard the expert group as a big C group. Whether it is distribution, short video live broadcast, or pure product promotion, enterprises need to communicate with the KOL group in a long-term and continuous manner. Combined with a system with owned-channel marketing value, companies can avoid these problems:
Avoid KOL and customer data loss. Whether it is KOL groups or C-side customers who can be transacted, they are valuable data assets for enterprises. The SalesEpochSCRM system is developed based on the original ecosystem of WhatsApp. It not only retains the original value of the social tool, but also retains front-end and back-end customer data on this basis. It can effectively prevent data loss in the event of account loss, ban, personnel resignation, etc., and retain valuable customer data for both sales staff and enterprises.
Avoid insufficient KOL value development. Every KOL celebrity is an individual with distinctive characteristics. Enterprises need to tailor their interactions and combine the talents’ own characteristics with each other in the interactive communication between the two parties. For example, the number of fans, number of video plays, fan structure, number of account fans, etc. mentioned earlier can be used to create portrait tags. When communicating with experts, you can know yourself and the enemy, and fully develop value after understanding the characteristics of the other person. For example, the results of each expert's invitation, order conversion, quantified output, etc. can be used as standards for classification and classification, truly achieving refined management review, allowing enterprises and more potential experts to obtain more valuable results together.
Avoid the high cost and low efficiency of expert screening. If it were not for the blessing of the system, it would definitely be an arduous task for an operator to establish 500 experts in one day. However, as shown in the figure above, batch import + batch communication can save employees a lot of effort, and communication and screening of hundreds or thousands of people is not a problem. When personnel efficiency is high, costs will naturally be low. The vocabulary library and automatic replies that can be used with one click in the system can also add points to efficient interactions.
Avoid disconnection of customer data.On the traffic receiving side, a multi-account matrix layout is always essential. Combined with the registration mechanism of efficient registration and low account suspension probability, and the use of multi-account access diversion mechanism, enterprises can efficiently handle traffic and achieve batch operation management.
As the king of global instant messaging, WhatsApp has become the main platform for business communication in more and more countries and regions. In this communication process, from active development to operational management, companies can use WhatsApp to continuously interact with expert groups to empower the in-depth development of KOL value. Not only TikTok celebrities, but also celebrity groups on other platforms and channels can also use WhatsAppowned-channel operations to accumulate data, fully develop the value of KOL groups, and realize short video live broadcasts or distribution and sales.
