TikTok is the king of social media in 2022, leaving big names in the game like Facebook and Twitter shaking in terror, and with over 1 billion users worldwide, they are here to stay. It has also become one of the best platforms to get many brands to interact with their audience. Why? Because it will help bring the numbers up. Before jumping into it with strategies and techniques to stand out, you need to know many things to make affiliate marketing work for you in the TikTok world.
So here we will give you the tools and techniques, the do’s and don’t, to triumph with the hottest trends. This is a must-read if you are an affiliate marketer to start monetizing successfully on TikTok. Let’s make your brand go viral with this guide! Keep reading to learn how to use TikTok for affiliate marketing.
What Is Up With TikTok?
TikTok came from the ashes of other apps similar to Twitter’s Vine and Musical.ly, which didn’t last long and failed to capture the attention that TikTok has. It was created in China in 2016 as a platform that lets users create all kinds of videos to share with friends and everyone else. Today, the platform has over 1 billion active users every month and counting, making it one of the fast-growing social media platforms in the history of the internet and one of the most popular. There is no wonder why so many people in the affiliate marketing world want to get ahead and get a piece of the TikTok pie.
So far, the app has over 4 billion users, with 40% of them aged between 10 to 19. However, the number of adults increases every day, with a 46% increase from 2021. Not only that, but most users spend an hour in the app, and over half of them open the app over twice per day. Even if the app is right now with a niche audience that focuses more on videos about memes, pranks, dancing, pets, beauty products, life hacks, etc., but slowly is getting more niches the more people use it.
An increased amount of niches brings more opportunities for many brands to use TikTok for their business. It’s a great platform to create a relationship with their audience that, in the long run, will turn into sales without being so direct. But to engage with your target audience, you will need content that will bring value and creatively get your audience’s attention.
Affiliate Marketing Targets A Younger Generation
Since TikTok is such a young platform compared with the big names like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which have been in the market for over ten years, it has a more youthful audience which can bring other types of challenges when doing affiliate marketing. It is not bad, but if you’ve been working with an older audience for a long time, you need to be more creative and with a different vision than the one you had with older platforms. In other words: try not to fall into what Gen Z perceive as “boomer” things. It’s a good challenge to have to get your creative juices flowing. Even if the older generation joins TikTok, the younger generation is king.
How To Make Affiliate Marketing Work Successfully On TikTok?
It might sound like it might be more complicated, but in reality, it’s not. Affiliate marketing on TikTok is very similar to any other than you’ve worked in before. But you need to remember the parties involved in affiliate marketing for it to work. Just remember that TikTok is merely another platform to work on and make the best out of it.
The parties you need to keep an eye on and work with are:
- The Merchant or Product Creator: This is your client, the company that decided that Affiliate marketing was right for them. It can either be a product retailer or a manufacturer looking to sell what they offer. They are also the ones that will provide a unique code for each affiliate marketer to share somewhere in the video or a link on the TikTok profile page.
- The Affiliate Marketer (That means you!): The person who has direct contact with the client to be the link to marketing their products to the consumers. In this case, the method used to make this work is making TikTok videos.
- The Consumer: In this case, the users will consume your affiliate marketer videos on TikTok. These are the people that will make you or break you.
The Importance Of Organic Reach
The exciting thing about TikTok is how much free organic traffic you can receive without doing anything. That means that you can be in the eyes of millions of users with the potential to follow you with not much hassle. There are some options to get that organic reach:
- Adding a link to a URL in your profile
- promoting a code or URL in your videos
- Redirecting traffic to another social profile
- adding an affiliate URL in your video’s descriptions
Having that URL go directly to the product you are marketing is the best way to have a return on investment and profit. It will make all the parts very happy, so it is essential to have that discount coupon code. That goes double if it’s easy to remember the code or even a dedicated referral URL for their affiliate program.
Since sometimes it can be a bit tricky to add links to videos on TikTok, it’s better to give the account an upgrade to a business account so that you can add links to your profile with no problems. In the case of having more than one link you want to share, you can also use services like LinkTree, where you can add all the links on one page without having to upgrade to a business account on TikTok; all you have to do is add the URL in the description box. This method can be a bit of a hassle to the users since they have to copy and paste the URL into a browser, but it’s often seen with many influencers.
Paid Advertising
Even though unpaid, organic content can work to some extent, the only downfall is that most of it won’t go to your target audience. This is why it is also essential to also work on investing in paid advertising to see even better results. Since TikTok is still working on implementing better advertising options, its native advertising program is unavailable in many countries. Thus, not all campaigns will be public everywhere, which might be a problem even if your ad receives approval.
TikTok offers a few options on how to run your ad campaigns:
- The Hashtag Challenge: This campaign is an excellent way to interact with your audience by encouraging them to do a specific activity while using a hashtag that goes with your brand.
- Brand Takeover: It’s an ad that plays automatically as soon as the user opens the app. It also takes over the whole screen.
- In-feed videos: Some of the most common ones in which these paid ads appear on the user’s feed as they are scrolling. It is very similar to what you will see on other social media platforms.
The other problem is that it’s costly to do video ads on TikTok. For example, if you want to do a ‘hashtag challenge,’ get ready to pay around $150,000! If you don’t work on a Brand takeover video, get prepared to pay more than $20,000. If that’s too out of budget for your campaign, other options can work for your needs.
Final Tips And Tricks
You only have a few seconds to capture someone’s attention on TikTok, especially to a younger generation with a shorter attention span than any other, especially in this fast-moving world. If you want a very successful TikTok affiliate marketing campaign, there are a few things that you should keep in mind. This will work even better if you already have users engaging in your videos, either organically or by paying. Still, even if you are starting your campaign, it is always important to know the following:
- Always create content that will tickle TikTok’s algorithm in your favor; thankfully, we have an idea that will make TikTok prioritize your content.
- Remember to make your videos short.
- Have a grip on popular hashtags.
- Use trending audio and moments to dominate the space.
- Prioritize a niche or subculture that is part of your target audience
- Put the most essential element in the first few seconds of the video.
- Make catchy captions that can engage your audience while being relevant.
If your TikTok account is reasonably recent and doesn’t have too many followers or views, sometimes it’s better to wait before trying to monetize. Why? Because relying on organic traffic works perfectly initially. However, if you want faster results, and have the budget for it, doing paid advertising is the way to go.
It is not impossible having a successful affiliate marketing campaign on TikTok; it’s all about knowing how the culture works in this trendy new social media environment and going with it. Using the right hashtags and having great content that goes to the point is the key to achieving your objectives in every campaign that you set in mind.
