The TikTok Creator Marketplace (TCM) is a powerful tool for both creators and marketers. As the name implies, the Creator Marketplace is built to connect creators with brands, and with a better understanding of how the marketplace works, marketers can leverage the tools available to create impactful and high-quality content.
The best way to be successful in influencer marketing is to harness the power of all technologies available to you. By learning more about the creator marketplace brands can ensure the content they create on TikTok will be instrumental in achieving their goals. If you think your brand could be better in any way marketing on TikTok, the Creator Marketplace just might be your secret sauce.
Follow along for everything you need to know about the TikTok Creator Marketplace.
What is the TikTok Creator Marketplace?
The TikTok Creator Marketplace is the official partnership platform to connect creators and brands on TikTok. Within the Creator Marketplace, brands can partner with creators on both paid and reward-based campaigns.
As the influencer marketing industry continues to grow, we see more capabilities that social platforms have given creators to monetize their influence and content. The Creator Marketplace is TikTok’s answer to creator monetization. Similar to the economic trend of “consumers holding power” in modern digital transactions, creators now hold the power in the social platforms they choose to create content on. As creators hold more control over where they distribute their content, social platforms have had to provide more reasons for influencers to stay on their networks, like TikTok’s Creator Marketplace.
How Does the Creator Marketplace Work?
Through enrolling in the Creator Marketplace, brands gain access to a diverse array of TikTok creators who can create content for their products or services. Once a brand creates an account, it can view the Creator Marketplace homepage and sift through creators by region, topic, number of followers, number of views, reach or even audience region. One of the most difficult parts of influencer marketing is finding influencers that align with your brand’s voice, tone, and values and the Creator Marketplace aims to make this process significantly easier.
The TikTok Creator Marketplace Benefits
Influencer discovery
By participating in the Creator Marketplace, the arduous search process of finding the right influencers is made drastically less time-consuming.
Budgets
Another benefit to the Marketplace is that brands can find creators with advertising rates that fit their budgets. Marketers are often disappointed to search for potential influencer partners only to learn their compensation rates exceed what is possible in their campaign.
Create organic content for your brand’s product or service
One of the best ways to increase your presence and relevance on TikTok is to create organic content through creator partnerships. The Creator Marketplace gives brands the capabilities to create organic campaigns with shorter turnaround times and with partners that align best with the brand’s voice tone and values.
Sharing with a creator’s followers
As the bullet title implies, your branded content will be shared with the creator’s audience. Through the use of the Creator Marketplace, brands can find influencers with audiences that best fit their target market. It would be a shame to create partnered content only to have those followers uninterested in your brand or products. Ensure your content is going to the right eyeballs.
Drive engagement and sales through posts
One of the biggest draws of TikTok for brands is the high levels of engagement consumers participate in on the platform. In using the Creator Marketplace, brands will have a better understanding of what engagement rates they are likely to see based on the creators they partner with. This will not only be good for benchmarking KPIs but also focusing on creators with high levels of engagement, which gives content a better chance of driving sales or conversions.
1 billion active users at your disposal
1 billion active users is a giant in social media platform terms. With a global presence, TikTok provides the opportunity for brands to achieve extensive reach in their content. As the platform grows, the Creator Marketplace grows in tandem. Given the potential any piece of content can go viral, creator content made with brands has the potential to perform in ways that drastically exceed campaign expectations.
Simple UI and UX
The Creator Marketplace gives brands everything they need to find great creators to partner with. With a simple yet informative user interface (UI) and user experience (UX), marketers can find the right influencers for their campaigns with little training and onboarding. While some influencer teams may require additional support from influencer marketing platforms, many brands will find value in the simplicity of the Creator Marketplace.
Access first-party data through API
The TikTok Creator Marketplace gives brands access to first-party information through the offered Application Programming Interface (API). First-party data is empirically validated, and a source of great power for any brand online. This could be the information that informs strategic decisions on your influencer teams or gives your brand an edge over the competition on TikTok.
How Can Brands Join the TikTok Creator Marketplace?
Joining the TCM is easy and will only take a few minutes of your time. If you already have a TikTok Ads Manager account, you can use that to log in to the TCM, if not, follow along for the easy process of joining the TCM.
In creating an account you will need the following information like your name, business email address, and phone number. Then your account will need to be verified through the link TikTok will send you.
After verification, your profile can be customized. You can customize the profile picture with your company logo, link to your brand’s alternative social media accounts, or even provide a brief description of your brand. Once you’ve completed all the customization you want you can begin to browse the TCM to find influencers that align with your target audience as well as the voice, tone, and values of your brand.
When you finally find the perfect influencers, shoot them a message on the TCM about partnering with your brand and the conversation begins! You will also have the ability to follow them on TikTok and engage with their content through likes and comments.
What Are the TikTok Creator Marketplace Requirements for Influencers?
Some brands might be cautious about the TCM and that makes sense. If anyone can join the TCM, what is the value for brands trying to find creators that can connect with their target audience?
Fortunately, not just any creator can join the TCM. There are certain requirements for creators to join the TCM because TikTok wants to provide brands with a database of creators that hold influence and can provide impactful content for campaigns.
The TCM also raises the question of what qualifies as an influencer on TikTok. While Mavrck understands that every person that touches your brand holds influence, some may be more qualified to help brands achieve their goals than others. It is about finding the right tool for the right job.
Not to objectify influencers, but each kind of influencer is different and can provide different values for brands. That’s why TikTok created some rigid requirements for creators on the TCM, to ensure that each influencer on the Marketplace can create a significant impact on brand campaigns. The creator requirements are as follows:
- Must have a personal TikTok account
- Over 10,000 followers (formerly 100,000)
- Posted at least 3 videos within the last 28 days
- Garnered over 100,000 likes on their posts within the last 28 days
- Must be 18 or older
- Be located in any country of Tiktok’s terms and condition list.
TikTok Creator Next
Additionally, influencers can join TikTok’s Creator Next if they are looking to maximize their earning potential on the app. Creator Next is a portal and monetization program that rewards creators as they grow their communities. Creator Next has less strict barriers to entry with only 1000 followers needed and some access to the creator fund upon acceptance. That being said, Creator Next is more of a stepping stone to the TCM as you will still need to adhere to the TCM requirements (10,000 followers, 100,000 likes) in order to have access to all of Next’s features like the Creator Fund. Next is a great way for creators to get their foot in the door and start monetizing their content with live gifts, video gifts, and tips to grow their following.
How To Work with TikTok Creators
Now that your brand is on the TCM, your next step is working with TikTok creators. Each platform has a different set of rules for creating successful content as well as establishing fruitful relationships with creators and TikTok is no different. By understanding the best practices associated with working with TikTok creators your brand has a higher likelihood of producing high-quality content and successful campaigns.
Have an Explicit Target Audience in Mind
As you search for creators on the TCM, the audience you aim to connect with will guide your selection of creators to partner with. Create a specific persona of the audience you want to target and note how each influencer aligns with that persona. Your persona could contain information like age, gender, location, income level, category, etc. For example, your audience could be males, 18-25 years old, in the U.S., with middle-class incomes who are interested in gaming. Using this persona, your potential influencers should align with some of this demographic information.
Be Direct with Instructions and Guidelines
In the brief sent to influencers, be sure to include information about FTC guidelines to ensure that the content created does not violate any legislative processes. Also include very specific instructions around the style, theme, and voice of the content you want to be created so the influencer has a good understanding of the type of content you are looking for. Make sure you also leave creative freedom in your brief as the creator understands their audience best and what type of content performs well.
Feedback Can Be the Key to Success
Ask for feedback from your creator partners and ask often. As mentioned before, creators know their audience best and what kind of content performs well. Also, Mavrck has found that the best influencer partnerships are long-term relationships rather than one-off campaigns. Feedback helps you develop a better relationship with your creators that will not only lead to better content but also feedback that can help improve your strategy and inform future decisions on your campaigns.
Invest in Your Partnerships
Understand that each creator is going to have a different level of compensation for the content you create. In crafting your budget, know that most influencers will require monetary compensation and that will vary depending on the size of their audience and the amount of content you request. Negotiations with creators are a difficult aspect of influencer marketing, so plan for a significant amount of your budget to be allocated towards the compensation of your creators.
Be Aware of Your KPIs
An influencer marketing campaign is meaningless if it does not accomplish anything for your brand. When planning your campaign, have specific KPI benchmarks laid out that represent a successful campaign. KPIs like impressions, reach, engagement rate, and conversions are all important factors that determine what you have accomplished in your campaign. Be sure to track these metrics during and after the campaign and find influencers who can best contribute to these levels of performance.
Is the TikTok Creator Marketplace Worth It?
For the most part, the TikTok Creator Marketplace is worth it for brands. The TikTok Creator Marketplace can be a valuable tool for brands who are starting out on TikTok and want to create content that has a large impact on their business through creator partnerships. As TikTok is one of the newer social platforms, an understanding of the creators and content is a great first step for any brand looking to get involved in the discourse on the TikTok community. With a simple and easy-to-use interface, the TCM has many benefits for brands and can provide value for marketers looking for success on TikTok.
With that being said, the TCM poses some challenges. An overarching theme in this article has been finding the right tool for the right job. For some marketers, the TCM is the hammer they need to hit the nail of finding the right influencer partners. The issue stems from when that nail starts to become a bit too big. With all influencer programs comes the inevitability of scale. As a program becomes more successful, brands will look to grow and increase their number of activations and the diversity of influencer marketing activities they participate in.
As programs scale, influencer teams will require more technical support than the TCM can provide. While it’s great for brands to get the ball rolling, influencer teams may begin to outgrow the TCM and need additional support across managing multiple campaigns. This is where Mavrck would come in as an influencer marketing platform and official TikTok partner. It only makes sense that as your job gets bigger, you will need more tools to get it done. If you are thinking about taking your influencer programs to the next level, schedule a demo with Mavrck and put our tools to the test.
If you’re looking to learn more about influencer marketing on TikTok, these resources will be valuable in your search:
The Ultimate Guide to: Influencer Marketing on TikTok
