Brittany Garlin January 4, 2022 As marketers start to craft their 2022 marketing strategy, brands should consider the benefits of collaborating with social media influencers on TikTok. Previously, the app was thought to be only for Gen Z or a younger demographic. For brands with a target audience outside this age range, there was no real motive to jump on the TikTok bandwagon — until now.
A new forecast has dubbed TikTok as the world’s third-largest social network, just behind Facebook and Instagram. In its inaugural forecast on TikTok’s global install base, Insider Intelligence — the firm previously known as eMarketer — predicts that TikTok will reach 755.0 million monthly users in 2022, after seeing 59.8% growth in 2020, followed by 40.8% growth in 2021.
Collaborating with content creators is a key strategic tactic used in digital marketing for 2022. More brands are discovering the benefits of utilizing influencers to promote their products and services to a defined audience. TikTok has been seeing massive growth of the past few years and has an increasing popularity among people across a wide range of age groups, demographics, ethnicity, and socio-economic backgrounds. With it’s latest feature, TikTok Creator Marketplace, the app is finding new ways to bring creators and brands together.
What Is TikTok Creator Marketplace?
TikTok introduced the TikTok Creator Marketplace or TCM in late 2019 to help facilitate collaboration between content creators and brands by making the Creator Marketplace API available to external developers or outside developers. This means that marketers will now be able to integrate TikTok creator content and inputs directly into brand platforms.
TikTok has provided brands and marketers with a platform to search for registered content creators for collaborative inputs into digital marketing campaigns. This move benefits TikTok, the content creators, and brands with constructing TikTok influencer marketing campaigns. The TikTok creator marketplace provides a stage that showcases creators’ profiles with relevant data like the number of comments, likes, and shares. Marketers can use this data to collaborate with innovative video and audio creators for paid digital marketing campaigns.
Earlier, most influencer marketing platforms were not highly reliable about influencer data. This data would have to be confirmed, collated, and sent to brands by the influencers (which would not always be 100% accurate or real-time), and revenue would be bypassed outside the social media app. The influencer platforms would charge a commission or a fee for each influencer marketing campaign.
With their new in-house marketplace, TikTok could profit substantially (they are currently not charging a percentage or a commission). They also provide marketers with data, analytics, direct access, essential campaign tools, and communication tools without marketers having to reach out to external and third-party platforms.
TikTok Statistics for Marketers
When considering the benefits for marketers and brands, the TikTok creator marketplace collaboration is an extremely useful tool. Since TikTok is available in more than 150 countries and has been downloaded more than 200 million times in the United States alone, marketers need to up their game with their TikTok strategies for larger market shares.
- Monthly Active Users: TikTok has more than 1 billion active monthly users, with 700 million monthly active users last year. TikTok managed to scale and grow despite the rocky year due to the Covid-19 global pandemic.
- Monthly Minutes: U.S. TikTok users spend nearly 858 minutes per month on the app. This figure has consistently increased month on month.
- Revenue: TikTok revenue was said to cross $ 500 million in the United States in 2020.
- Popularity: In August 2020, TikTok was downloaded more than 360 million times in Southeast Asia, with 22.2 million users in Indonesia, 3.3 million in South Korea, and 12.6 million in Japan.
- Global Internet Penetration: More than 18% of global internet users between the ages of 15 to 65 years, which shows the record number of users on TikTok and the average reach that TikTok can achieve for marketers.
- TikTok Rating: TikTok had 88% positive reviews in 2020, and most users were extremely happy with the platform. Marketers can use this positive association to increase brand reputation and recognition.
- TikTok’s Valuation: TikTok had a valuation of $ 50 billion in 2020.
- Languages: TikTok is available in more than 75 languages worldwide, increasing the user reach exponentially. Marketers needing global expansion, brand recognition, higher conversion rates, and viewership need to factor the language assimilation into their digital marketing strategies.
Benefits of TikTok Creator Marketplace for Marketers
Marketing growth expert and Hall of Fame keynote speaker Jay Baer shared his opinion on what trends marketers can expect to see for 2021 and beyond. According to Baer, “we are at the place now where we are trying to move the needle with thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Oftentimes, the way to move that needle is through influencer marketing as opposed to cold emails, display ads, or any other type of content you may have.”
Now is the time for brands to tap into the power of influence from creators on TikTok through their Creator Marketplace. TikTok’s API for their in-house influencer marketplace now allows partners to get real-time access to first-party campaign data. Marketers can now find TikTok influencer personalities and collaboratively track and create campaigns.
The new API of the TikTok Creator Marketplace (TCM) allows marketers to extract data like growth trends, best-performing videos, audience demographics, user behavior, and campaign responses. It is now easy to view relevant data like comments, shares, likes, views, and more.
Once marketers sign up on the app to use TCM, the dashboard has several options and prompts:
- Creator search based on campaign requirements
- Detailed analytics of content creators
- Contact creators about campaigns and conditions for participation
- Collaboration on influencer marketing campaigns
How to Find The Right Creators Through TikTok Creator Marketplace Filters
- Country or Region: This is the location where the creator publishes content and/or resides.
- Topic: This is used to be able to see what kind of topics they cover, such as food, fashion, sports, or politics.
- Reach: View the creator’s follower count and see the extent of their reach. Marketers can filter through three customizable brackets – 10k to 100k, 100k to 1 million, and 1 million to 10 million.
- Average Views: This is a functional metric for brands’ to understand the history of a creator’s previous content. As more marketers stray away from using follower count as the main representation of an influencer’s reach, this information can help forecast the future performance of a piece of content.
- Ecommerce Anchor Feature: These creators are able to insert a link in their content that directs viewers directly to a brand’s product or external landing page.
Is TikTok Creator Marketplace A Paid Feature For Marketers?
The TikTok Creator Marketplace is not a paid feature, which means it is freely available for all advertisers. TikTok is still sorting and testing different monetization avenues. However, some of the existing ad packages and offerings have a paid feature with their promotion packages.
Monetizing the TCM feature could get dicey for TikTok and could add obstacles to seamless integration between brands and influencers. Brands looking for additional support with their TikTok influencer campaigns can work with leading TikTok agencies, such as HireInfluence.
Why Does First-Party Data Matter, And How Does It Benefit Marketers on TikTok?
Marketers need to collect first-party data to get practical, valuable, and relevant information and insight about audiences and users. First-party data is gathered directly from their own sources like landing pages, websites, and apps. Other methods of first-party data collection are CRM, surveys, and social media.
For marketers, getting direct first-party data is critical for analysis and reporting. It also helps with accurately tracking users to adjust marketing strategies. The TCM feature from TikTok is a prime example of the usability and relevance of first-party data since marketers can get the data directly from TikTok instead of relying on secondary and tertiary sources for data on ad campaigns and influencers video progress and analytics.
First-party data on TikTok can be collected for free and used by marketers based wholly on the video content created to analyze and track progress, reach, and conversion rates. Collecting the first-party data, having ready access to it, and using it helps marketers deliver personalized experiences to users, display relevant content, and create targeted content on TikTok.
Not having access to first-party data directly from TikTok adversely affects the ad campaign. Marketers must rely on third-party data and secondary sources to track active promotional campaigns and video success. Getting first-party data from TCM also helps advertisers save money on purchasing data and then segmenting and analyzing it. The TikTok Creator Marketplace allows marketers direct analysis and access to all first-party data related to their promotional video campaigns with content creators. The in-depth insight that is available is beneficial in the long term.
Benefits of First-Party Data for Marketers on TikTok
1. Create Personalized Experiences
One of the most critical aspects of marketing is ensuring all users have personalized experiences with the brand and its products and services. With first-party data, it becomes easy for marketers on TikTok to segregate users according to target audiences and personas looking to purchase specific products or services. Understanding the need of target users and audiences help marketers ensure that these groups get topic-relevant advertisements and video content to aid in buyer behavior or journey. This process is also called audience targeting and is hugely successful for higher conversion rates and enhancing user journeys.
2. Audience Insight
Getting data directly from TikTok Creator Marketplace helps marketers understand buyer behavior and audience personalities. Understanding user personalities is critical for successful market penetration and cost-effectiveness. User personalities and audience insight help better understand the likes and dislikes of target audiences, demographics, and preferences. It also helps marketers understand users’ buying and purchasing preferences and patterns. First-party data from TCM helps marketers gain valuable insight into audience preferences, their shopping patterns, conversion rates, and buying behaviors.
3. Monetizing Segments
Since TikTok offers valuable data through the TCM, marketers can explore newer revenue streams on the app. The platform provides direct insight and analysis of audience behavior, preferences, likes, dislikes, comments, shares, and views. Using this data, marketers can collaborate with content creators to produce highly targeted videos personalized to audiences and connect with the segmented groups.
Understanding that each audience segment has different needs helps marketers promote highly relevant content across TikTok. Monetizing segments effectively help increase ROI, decrease non-critical audiences, and works towards positive brand associations in the long term.
4. Improve Retargeting Strategy
Since the TCM is pretty new on TikTok, marketers can use the first-party data and analysis for retargeting the influencer marketing strategy. First-party data is used to nurture new leads and audiences and retarget the strategy to gain higher conversion rates, follow-throughs, and clicks.
Marketers on TikTok can easily reach out to newer audiences with insights gained through different channels on the TCM. The popularity and reach of the content help marketers understand the necessity for retargeting strategies to improve the overall brand building.
That’s a Wrap!
TikTok Creator Marketplace allows for excellent brand collaboration opportunities that can benefit both influencers/ creators and businesses. TCM will offer transactions through the platform in the U.S. soon (they are first launching in the U.K.). As of now, creators have to arrange for payment directly from the advertisers. The monetization opportunities are excellent for creators, and the benefits of getting larger market shares and audience attention are great for marketers. The TCM could see TikTok becoming even larger than earlier and creating issues for other social media giants with collaborative partnerships in place.
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