How to Use TikTok to Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Program

If you’re a business that’s turned to affiliate partners to promote your brand, one of the biggest questions you have to answer is how to recruit more affiliates. Increasingly, many businesses are turning to social media to fill their ranks, and TikTok, in particular, is positioning itself as a standout recruitment ground for new affiliates.

‌This article will provide you with some insights you’ll need to start boosting your affiliate marketing program using TikTok. It’ll cover the basics on what the premise behind TikTok is, how the platform works, and how you can use it to bring aboard quality partners.

What Is TikTok?

Let’s start with the basics. TikTok is a social media network based on sharing short videos. Once upon a time, it was known as a service called Musical.ly, where tweens and teens would primarily share videos of themselves lip-syncing to popular music. In August 2018, after a Chinese company purchased Musical.ly, all of Musical.ly’s users were folded into the Chinese company’s new venture — TikTok. 

This broadened the scope of those short videos beyond mere lip-syncing, which allowed the app to start gaining a larger following. After adding the ability for users to react to videos and gaining a few celebrity endorsements, the app took off in terms of downloads.

Why Should You Use TikTok?

You should be learning how to get affiliates using Tiktok. Below are some of the reasons to do this.

Popularity and Room for Growth

Today, the popularity of TikTok is massive. It has 689 million international monthly users, with 100 million of those users residing in the United States. The app’s user base grew in almost every major developed country throughout 2020 and is predicted to garner enough social media users to eventually rival Snapchat.

Younger and More Technologically Savvy Crowd

Most of the users on Facebook are 40 and older. On TikTok, nearly half the audience is under the age of 34, and a good number are 25 and under.

This user base has grown up with technology and knows the ins and outs of social media like the back of their hands. When it comes to recruiting affiliates who can make an impact for your brand on social media, there’s no better natural talent pool to pick from.

Visual and Interactive Medium

If your goals are to boost engagement, make a deep connection with potential customers, and drive a high degree of brand awareness and marketing recall among prospects, this is the platform you want.

The combination of TikTok and affiliate marketing could help you achieve some serious ROI, provided you can link up with the right partners to help you target your message. That’s what we’ll be taking a look at next, as we explore some best practices for recruiting through TikTok and strategies for marketing your products.

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How Do You Get Affiliates Using TikTok?

To make an affiliate marketing push on TikTok, you need reliable affiliates. When it comes to this platform, a good deal of content is driven by individual personalities. 

Who You Can Target

Potential affiliates will fall primarily into three categories:

• Macro-Influencers. These are the proverbial “big fish” in the pond. They have a substantial reputation for being knowledgeable within a broad field, and they’ve amassed a sizable audience — more than 100,000 followers. Their followers are engaged and generally respect their opinion about product recommendations.
• Micro-Influencers. Though smaller in scale — fewer than 100,000 followers — micro-influencers hold great sway over small, niche audiences. They often pride themselves on their reputation, and thus they are unlikely to work with brands they deem unsatisfactory. If you’ve got a great product and want to get it in front of die-hard enthusiasts, you can’t ignore the power of the micro-influencer.
• Non-Influencers. For the most part, the non-influencers you’ll want to use for your affiliate program are your existing customers. They may not have a large following, but they do have extremely close friends and family with overlapping interests. People are most likely to purchase a product if someone close to them suggests it. Using non-influencers is still a great way to generate authentic interest for your wares.

You’ll want to bring all three of these potential affiliate types into the fold. If you’ve established healthy word-of-mouth, made some waves with your product, and built a reputation with your affiliate program, you’ll have people coming to you to sign up. 

How to Entice People to Be Affiliates

Your website, blog, and other channels should have links directing interested parties to your affiliate sign-up page. You should also be running ads to start funneling potential TikTokers into your affiliate program. If you’re just starting, though, these won’t account for most of your new partners. It’ll be up to you to reach out and make the first moves. 

Identify potential macro and micro-influencers through TikTok’s Discover & Search features. Filter through the content on TikTok and pinpoint the users who occupy the same space as your business. Evaluate their content, and if you feel like they might be a match for your brand, then it’s now a matter of establishing contact.

Assuming the influencer in question hasn’t restricted who can contact them, you should be able to send a direct message and propose a partnership. You might send them some free products first, ask them to try them out, then ease them into your affiliate program. If it works well, they’ll be likely to tell other influencers in the same space about your program. You can pick up more affiliates from there.

How to Make Finding Affiliates on TikTok an Easier Task

Having to repeat this recruitment process over and over again for new affiliates might get tiresome, however. At some point, it might be prudent to hire an affiliate manager to help you bring in new partners on TikTok. Affiliate managers know the ins and outs of establishing and maintaining business relationships with social media personalities. They’ll be able to help you identify and make contact with potential partners faster than you could on your own.

If you have the right affiliate marketing tools and software, you can use those to help send out invitations to your affiliate program and bring in more partners for your TikTok campaigns. Regardless of how you choose to assemble your team, though, your next step will be identifying the best ways to use them to promote your products on TikTok. Let’s take a closer look at some things you’ll need to keep in mind when it comes to that, shall we?

How Do You Make the Most of Affiliate Recruitment on TikTok?

Remember that TikTok is a video-based platform. Every bit of promotion that affiliates do for your products has to translate well to video as a result. Directing affiliates to make quick reviews, tutorials, and demonstrations is a good idea. These videos are probably the most straightforward ways to get the point across. They’re relatively easy to make. A charismatic partner that does these can help generate a lot of buzz about your products.

The review/how-to format isn’t the only one that will bear fruit. There are also ways for your affiliates to organically weave mentions of your products into their other video content. Just make sure that you keep the following best practices in mind when planning your TikTok affiliate strategy:

• Choose your products wisely. TikTok is a video-centric platform, so the products you choose to have affiliates promote on the network should have some visual appeal. You’ll want to ensure the products you’re promoting play to the TikTok demographic. Do your research to make sure you’re targeting the right crowd.
• Learn how the algorithm works. Make sure your affiliates are producing content that the TikTok algorithm will favor. Videos should be engaging enough for viewers to complete and they should take advantage of appropriate hashtags. Have your affiliate manager put together a list of best practices to distribute to affiliates so they can learn how to maximize their reach.
• Keep an eye on your metrics. Success comes easier when you can measure your performance and adjust it to accelerate progress. Follow your affiliates and their numbers so you can learn what’s working, what isn’t, and how you might adjust your TikTok campaigns in the future.

If you’re new to the TikTok environment, then it will take some adjusting — especially if you’re used to operating your affiliate program through other social media networks. It’s worth the effort, especially if you want to promote products to a younger audience.

What Can TikTok Do for Your Affiliate Program?

TikTok is an increasingly popular social media platform with an audience that skews younger than social media networks like Facebook. Combined with its large user base and its many influencers, this makes it an ideal place to market products through affiliate partners.

When recruiting affiliates for TikTok, you’ll want to diversify with a mixture of macro, micro, and non-influencers. It will take some outreach to get the ball rolling on your recruitment, and it may be worth hiring an affiliate manager to help you with the details.

After assembling your TikTok affiliate marketing team, arm them with the tools and knowledge they’ll need to make an impression and successfully market your products on the platform.

Finally, you’ll also want to ensure that you have robust affiliate marketing software, like LeadDyno — that can help you manage your affiliate onboarding efforts, marketing metrics, and all the other important elements that go into successful campaigns.