The success of your TikTok influencer marketing campaign depends on finding the right creators. That’s why brands need to invest ample time to build their own influencer database on TikTok where you must add the best creators whose content aligns with your brand voice and relates to the needs of your target audience. Needless to say, it’s time and resource intensive.
That’s where creator search platforms come in handy. They supply you with authentic information about creators so that you can add them to your database and partner with the best creators for your marketing campaigns.
In this article, we’ll share some of the top tips for finding the best TikTok creators for your next influencer marketing campaigns.
Introduction to TikTok Influencer Databases
A TikTok influencer database is necessary if you’re a marketer who regularly runs TikTok marketing campaigns. It helps you to manage your creator relationship at scale. Having your own influencer database also helps you have all the relevant creators' data and engagement metrics at your fingertips without juggling multiple apps/platforms.
For example, with InsightIQ, you can discover the best creators for TikTok from 450 million profiles using advanced filters to refine your match criteria.
Rise and Importance of Tiktok as an Influencer Platform
TikTok is one of the fastest-growing youth-focused social media platforms. Launched in 2016, the app garnered 656 million global users in 2021. As of July 2024, the most-followed TikTok creator had 162.6 million subscribers.
With millions of users, a melting pot of creativity, and the potential to create viral content, TikTok has become a goldmine for both creators and marketers. Its unique ability to create short-form video content resonates with the younger generation, the platform's major audience base. With its other interesting features, like adding peppy music, editing tools, filters, etc., TikTok allows brands and creators to create unique viral content.
TikTok's marketing effectiveness is unparalleled compared to the other social media platforms. The algorithm focuses on engagement rather than followers, thus ensuring a better organic reach than other platforms.
Seeing the influence of TikTok, brands realized how influencer marketing can skyrocket their business. While big brands already have their presence known, many startups and small and medium-sized businesses partnered with suitable influencers on TikTok. Big brands joined the bandwagon, too.
Here are some examples of brands launched in TikTok and saw massive success.
Duolingo
Duolingo’s iconic mascot, ‘The Owl,’ was brought to life using Gen Z humor and a distinct personality. The #mascottok set a new brand voice on TikTok. Today, the brand boasts 12.1 million followers and counting, showing the power of the platform in creating organic reach through engaging and relevant content.
Scrub Daddy
Scrub Daddy's marketing team has decoded the platform's pulse and created bizarre and niche content that’s in sync with the platform’s vibe. The team uses trending background scores and humor while highlighting the USPs of their products. Their captivating content is a testament that even everyday products can hook the audience when delivered right.
Red Bull
The brand is a pioneer in creating viral content on TikTok. With more than 13 million followers, it showcases stunts and skills to hook its audience. The brand also creates engaging challenges and hashtags to keep the audience pepped up.
TikTok Influencer Categories
Mega influencers
Influencers who have over one million followers. Popular celebrities belong to this group. They usually garner tons of engagement on their content.
Macro influencers
This category of influencers has followers between 500 K - 1 million. Thought leaders and sports personalities belong to this group.
Mid-tier influencers
This category of influencers has 50K- 500 K followers.
Micro-influencers
They have 10-50K followers and good content engagement.
Nano-influencers
They have the best engagement compared to any other influencer category, although they have 1K-10 K followers.
Ways to Build TikTok Influencer Databases
Building your databases is a great way to get started if you want to set up TikTok influencer marketing as your primary marketing channel. That way, you can reach out to the right influencer whenever you need to, keep all the influencer information in one place, track their performances, and more. But building databases from scratch is no easy job. Here’s how you can get started.
Manually search for influencers
Just open TikTiok and start searching for influencers based on your shortlisted hashtags, trending topics, type of content, or even name ( if you already know the influencer you want to work with).
Although it may sound simple, it's resource intensive. You need someone to search for it manually, go through every profile in detail, analyze their content and engagement, and find their audience demographics to understand if that suits your brand requirements.
Doing a quick Google search can also help you find a lot of TikTok influencers. However, you need to spend time analyzing all the profiles. Moreover, Google will mostly show you the results of influencers who have recently gone viral, which means you can miss out on many micro social media influencers who may be more relevant to your brand.
Finding the right tool
InsightIQ is the perfect AI-based solution that lets you search TikTok influencers from 450+ profiles using the platform’s advanced filters to refine your list for the best possible matches. From micro influences to celebrities, you can find the best match in no time as the tool updates its own database every two weeks. The tool shows each influencer with all the important data points with its 50+ filters. You can access normalized data from hundreds of sources through a single platform without compromising speed or any risk of data discrepancies.
The platform constantly updates its database and claims to add 15,000 influencers daily. Apart from TikTok, the platform also has data of creators from other platforms like YouTube and Instagram. So, if cross-platform marketing is in your mind, you will benefit from this platform.
Here’s a detailed list of other platforms that you may find useful for finding TikTok micro-influencers.
Find the best suitable hashtags
Researching hashtags is a great way to find the right influencer for your brand. With a deep dive into hashtag research, you can curate top profiles and see who they engage with and the trending challenges. Searching for hashtags also lets you discover not just the top influencers with large audiences but many micro-influencers who are posting consistently good content with a highly engaged community.
Search on other platforms
Not many people do, but looking for influencers on other channels, such as Instagram, is a great idea. IG is a great alternative channel for finding relevant influencers. In fact, having influencers present and active on both channels is great news if you’re looking for cross-channel promotion for your brand.
Look into your competitors
Have a competitor who you think has already cracked TikTok influencer marketing? Tap into their profiles secretly. There are many TikTok analytics platforms where you can look into and analyze competitor’s profiles. Regularly analyzing competitor profiles will help you identify top-notch influencers for your TikTok influencer database and gather additional information to help you strategize your TikTok influencer marketing campaign.
Partner with influencer agencies
If you’re short of time and need to find the right TikTok influencer for your next campaign, consider working with influencer agencies. They usually have a large database of influencers and can help you find someone quickly. They can even help you create a TikTok influencer campaign for your brand.
However, it has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, if you’re a lean marketing team just starting with your first TikTok influencer marketing campaign or have a limited budget, then partnering with an influencer marketing agency may work well for you. They can help you find the right influencers, manage them, create contracts, and track their campaigns.
However, there are some pitfalls, too.
Influencer agencies mostly tend to work with macro influencers. This can become costly overhead if you want to continue it in the long run.
Using InsightIQ for Building Your TikTok Influencer Database
With InsightIQ, you can find and build your TikTok influencer database from scratch without any hassle. Try InsightIQ’s TikTok engagement rate calculator to determine influencer engagement rate on TikTok and find out how well influencers connect with their audience.
The platform provides detailed analyses of top-performing content and allows you to check the engagement rates for other platforms. You can assess the influencer’s audience demographics, filter real from fake followers, explore affinities, analyze past performance, and visualize engagement.
InsightIQ has a database of more than 450M+ creators whose audience is your target audience. When you collaborate with these creators, you can speak directly to your customers.
InsightIQ lets you analyze all the influencer data, such as their previous sponsored content, for purchase intent signals generated and brand sentiment lift. This information can help you partner with the right TikTok creator to boost your ROAS.
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