TikTok is revolutionizing digital marketing as we know it.
Move over 20-minute sponsored videos on YouTube and witty image ads on Facebook disguised as funny memes, TikTok marketing is here to stay!
The widespread appeal of TikTok largely has to do with its simplicity. They discovered what social media users love and engage with the most—short video clips—and the entire platform is driven by that specific type of content.
There are no alternative forms of content such as text posts or images.
Any content creator or marketer who makes an entertaining 15-60 second video on TikTok has the potential to go viral and reach hundreds of millions of users.
Brilliant, if you ask me!
“Hold on a minute. What is this ‘Tick Tock’ thing you are talking about?”
Okay, if you are a Gen X or a Millennial affiliate marketer, or anyone over the age of 25 who is not very good at keeping up with social media trends, here are a few quick facts about TikTok to bring you up to speed before we move forward 😉
What is Tiktok?
It is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms that feature short-form videos created by its users.
How many active users are in TikTok?
There are over a billion monthly active users (Jan 2022) in TikTok, with each user spending an average of 850 minutes per month engaging with the content on the app.
How popular is TikTok?
TikTok is available in over 140 countries, and it is in the top 10 most popular list in over 120 of them. It also has the highest social media engagement rates per post, easily surpassing similar visual social media platforms such as YouTube or Instagram.
So, you can see why TikTok is quite a big deal when it comes to all kinds of digital marketing efforts. However, if you are worried thinking that only teenagers use the app (which may not be your primary target audience), you’d be surprised to see how diverse the userbase of TikTok has become during the short five or so years this fun little app has been around!
According to Statista, here are some statistics on the distribution of TikTok users in the United States as of 2021:
- Age 10-19 (25%)
- 20-29 (22.4%)
- 30-39 (21.7%)
- 40-49 (20.3%)
- 50+ (11%).
Therefore, TikTok is a great platform for all your affiliate marketing efforts regardless of the age of your ideal target audience.
Affiliate Marketing on TikTok
With the worldwide lockdowns in 2020, the number of TikTok users shot up with more diversity in the user demographics. This led the platform to introduce TikTok Business Accounts, which opened it up as a possible content distribution channel for affiliate marketers.
Here are a few features that come with Business Accounts that you do not get with personal TikTok accounts.
- Contact button
- Clickable link in your Bio
- Analytics
- Swipe Up feature
- API access
- Creator studio
To start with affiliate marketing on TikTok, your first step should be to create a TikTok Business Account.
Then, you can add your affiliate links to the bio section in your profile, and simply add a #LinkinBio notice to your TikTok videos. It also helps to vocally tell your viewers to click the link in your bio to purchase the product or the service you are promoting. 😉
What if you are doing affiliate marketing like a pro and you have multiple offers?
If you have more than one link to promote, there are third-party social media marketing tools such as CPV Lab Pro which allow you to share more than one link specially designed for scenarios such as Instagram or TikTok business accounts that allow you to add only one clickable link in the bio.
Organic Content
Authenticity is one of the key features that TikTok users are attracted to. They prefer to get “back to school make-up tips” from an actual high schooler who is going back to school rather than from a cosmetics company.
For this reason, it does not take a massive advertising budget (as is the case for Facebook) or professional video editing skills (hello YouTube!) to become popular on TikTok.
As long as you provide entertaining or helpful content to your target audience, you will be able to make a decent following in no time. This is particularly important for affiliate marketers like you who recommend products for niche audiences but also for marketing agencies, promoting your clients products.
Paid Advertising
If you have an advertising budget for an affiliate marketing campaign on TikTok or if you maybe are a marketing agency, then you can also use their paid advertising campaigns.
The cost for these campaigns is more towards the higher end when compared to other social media platforms.
However, it also means that there are fewer advertisements out there, which elevates the quality and the reach of your ad campaign.
Here are a few types of ads that you can run on TikTok and their pricing:
- Brand Takeover ($50,000/day)
- In-feed ($10/impression with a minimum of 600 impressions prepaid)
- Hashtag Challenge ($150,000/week)
- Branded filter/lenses ($80,000/day)
How to Track Your Conversions on TikTok?
Whether you run an organic or a paid marketing campaign, it is important that you have a proper mechanism to track your results. You need as much data you can gather about your visitors and conversions in order to make your campaigns efficient with great ROIs.
For this, you need an ad tracker that provides detailed reports and ways to maximize the value of the data that you can gather during a campaign. With the right ad tracker, you can gain more information about your target audience, track leads, manage multiple campaigns, get revenue and usage data to optimize your profits, find where your most profitable visitors live, and much more. This is where the CPV Lab Pro affiliate marketing tracker comes in.
CPV Lab Pro is a digital conversion tracker that is integrated with all the major Affiliate Networks and Traffic Sources (including TikTok 😉), making it incredibly easy for you to use it in your TikTok marketing campaigns. Simply choose TikTok as the traffic network that you want to use for your campaign and CPV Lab Pro will configure the rest and synchronize the conversions with TikTok so you can have accurate data.
As the superstar TikTok Khaby would point out in his hilarious way with an exaggerated shrug, why do TikTok affiliate marketing the hard way when you can use CPV Lab Pro?!