TikTok Influencer Marketing: How Brands Succeed With Creators

With 1.59 billion active users per month, TikTok has ushered in a new era where consumers increasingly spend their time watching short-form videos and influencer content. This has changed the world of consumer engagement as we know it. As brands continue to embrace TikTok for business, they know TikTok influencer marketing is the leading strategy to get their foot in the short-form channel door. Now more than ever, brands are empowered to partner with creators to make content that hits the ‘For You’ page. But how do you do it in a way that fits your brand and feels authentic? Let’s discuss. 

TikTok influencer marketing involves brands partnering with influencers to promote or sell products or services, usually through short-form video. TikTok influencer marketing is an obvious choice for brands because TikTok creators can achieve fame overnight, while it can take months or even years for influencers to build up a strong following on other platforms. Trendy, entertaining content is the secret to success in TikTok influencer marketing, with one of the biggest challenges for brands being to stay on top of TikTok trends, as it shifts regularly. Influencer campaigns are important, not just for finding new followers, but also as a source of knowledge in the content creation process.

TikTok is a channel primed for organic content. However, it also has an option to boost campaigns with branded content, SEO strategies specifically for TikTok and various types of paid ads that serve as a greater avenue for creating brand awareness and community involvement. TikTok influencers and creators naturally become a big part of brands' strategies by participating in branded hashtag challenges or promoting new launches across both profiles. 

If it wasn’t already obvious, the benefits of TikTok influencer marketing are clear. It’s no longer an optional tactic but instead one that will help you stand out from the pack. TikTok influencer marketing also helps brands: 

• Gain access to new audiences and communities: TikTok’s discoverability, linked with influencers, allows brands to reach a number of potential customers they never would have otherwise. 
• Experience expanded engagement: Once you reach new TikTok audiences through influencers, you will inherently see an increase in your overall engagement, impressions, likes and followers. Especially if the creator you’re partnering with is the perfect fit. 
• See an increased chance of virality: The For You Page (FYP) is almost entirely algorithm-driven, which means that even small brands can reach large audiences through viral, influencer-led content. 
• Offer enhanced authenticity: TikTok influencers are so popular because of the authenticity they bring to the platform. Partnering with creators that align with your brand shows authenticity and relatability are at the forefront of your strategy. 

When finding influencer partners on TikTok, it’s important to find creators who align well with your brand image. TikTok’s level of deep customization has allowed influencers to emerge in every niche, industry and vertical you can think of. This has huge implications for marketers, as no matter what industry you’re in, there is an opportunity to develop a presence and tap into top TikTok influencers that resonate with your target audience. Here is how to find them:

1. Determine Your Niche

Determining your niche is key to finding the right influencers for your brand partnerships. There are millions of influencers at the ready, but you want to make sure they align and fit these focus areas in a way that benefits both parties. We suggest having a couple of different segments to consider to help fully round out your strategy. 

2. Search Specific Topics and Hashtags

Once your niche is determined, create a set of topics, keywords and hashtags that apply to your specific category. Use this list to regularly search and see which creators are talking about the things that relate to your brand and could be a good fit for a potential partnership. This method is highly effective because you get an idea of how a creator uses and performs on TikTok right away. 

4. Check Out Your Competitors

Seeing which creators your competitors are using is beneficial for several reasons. Obviously, you’re not going to try and use the exact same influencers for your campaign or strategy. Still, you can use your competitor's partnerships as a general ‘vibe check’ to see what types of creators they’re partnering with, who they’re associated with and what they’re posting about.

5. Work With An Agency

Agencies are always a really solid option if you’re not having any luck finding TikTok influencers through the above methods. Though they can be expensive, it’s literally their job to source creators based on the parameters you set. You can also rest easy knowing these creators have likely already been vetted, and you’re getting exactly what you’re paying for. 

6. Invest in an Influencer Marketing Tool

An alternative to working with an agency and keeping the work in-house is utilizing a TikTok influencer marketing tool. A great influencer marketing tool helps you source influencers and creators based on your requirements, manages outreach, facilitates communication and tracks ROI and performance. Influencer and creator management platforms allow brands to manage every element of their TikTok influencer marketing strategy in one place. 

Since TikTok is the fastest-growing social media channel, new influencers emerge constantly. Brands should keep a regular pulse on these creators. To find influencers, keep checking your ‘For You’ page to identify future partnerships.

Though it can seem daunting at first, creating a TikTok influencer marketing strategy is easier than it looks. Follow these nine simple steps to build out a plan that really works. 

Step 1: Ideate for a Campaign

When working with a creator on TikTok, it’s important to have a social media campaign or an idea for what you want to partner with them on. This can be a singular campaign or post to launch a new product or a more long-standing partnership that could span weeks or months and multiple posts. 

Step 2: Set Goals

Like with any good project or campaign, you must have some sort of benchmark or goal you want to hit to measure success. If this is your first campaign working with a TikTok influencer, be sure to research how this type of content typically performs to set proper goals. If you have worked with creators in the past, you can use your performance from these campaigns to help inform what goals you’ll want to meet. Use this time to also set your overall budget for the campaign. 

Step 3: Choose the Creators You Want To Partner With

Now for the fun part: choosing the creator you want to work with on your campaign. Be sure to find someone who embodies your brand's values and morals. You want to foster a partnership that makes sense and leaves your brand's followers and the influencer energized and excited. 

Note: Steps 2 and 3 can work interchangeably if you have a creator in mind for whom you want to build a campaign or project.  

Step 4: Outreach 

Once you’ve chosen the creator(s) you want to partner with, it’s time to do outreach. This is one of the most daunting parts of TikTok influencer marketing because you may get denied or worse, left on read. Make sure your first message is quick, to the point and has a great call-to-action that the creator won’t be able to resist. Because you may not hear back from the influencer of your choice, we recommend having a few backup options just in case. 

Step 5: Meet With the Creator

So, your creator is on board — that’s great! We recommend setting up a time to go over the TikTok campaign's logistics and expectations. This is an easy way to ensure both parties are on the same page, questions can be answered, and overall, it reduces the amount of time you spend going back and forth in the DMs or over email. 

Step 6: Iron Out the Logistics

Next, it’s time to work out the logistics of your campaign. This includes the amount of TikTok content you will want, what it will feature, how long it must be and so on. Here is also when you will finalize things like compensation, confidentiality, approvals and more. 

Step 7: Create and Review the Content

Now it’s time to move into content creation. This may be handled entirely by the TikTok creator or developed collaboratively between your brand and the creator. Once the content has been produced and edited, the next step is the approval process. This ensures the final product aligns with expectations and is fully ready for launch.  

Step 8: Launch the Campaign

Launch day shouldn’t be stressful. By now, all of your content should be lined up and ready to go. All you have to do is hit ‘publish’ or let a social media scheduling tool auto-publish for you; the heavy lifting is done. Now it’s time to sit back, watch the engagement role in and connect with your audience in real time. 

Step 9: Track the Success 

Tracking success is key to understanding what really works with your TikTok influencer marketing strategy. Start taking stock immediately once your campaign goes live to see how consumers are reacting, what’s resonating and most importantly, if you’re seeing a good ROI on your collaboration. Continue to monitor performance for days and weeks to come to get a holistic view of performance that can then inform your influencer strategy on TikTok moving forward. 

As with any new social initiative, establishing goals is crucial to optimizing performance. However, one of the challenges with TikTok is that posts can gain traction months or years after posting, making optimization difficult. TikTok performance relies on staying on beat with top trends and creating relevant content quickly. Brands that can create a trend are consequently several steps ahead of the game when it comes to getting content in front of potential customers. Influencers are a fantastic way to kickstart a trend, and are likely to be knowledgeable about what kinds of trends will perform.

When looking at the influencer marketing lifecycle, Creator Marketplace makes sourcing TikTok influencers much more streamlined than other channels. However, there’s no clear-cut best practice for integrating influencers into your TikTok strategy. Instead, savvy brands are leveraging some or all of the following tactics or coming up with new ways to work with creators.

There are a few ways to leverage influencers as part of your overall TikTok strategy:

1. Paid Partnerships

TikTok is a channel that heavily values unpolished, authentic content, so leveraging influencers can provide a canvas for less curated content. Using influencers for ads stops the scroll because viewers recognize the face of a content creator they already know and love.

2. Product Reviews

Product reviews are one of the most common types of influencer content shared on TikTok organically, but can easily transfer into a paid relationship as well. For example, an influencer could start by asking a question and encourage their audience to stitch the video with a response. Reviews could be shared on either or both pages.

3. As a Content Creation Funnel

Instead of creating content themselves, some brands are solely choosing paid partnerships with influencers for in-feed content. This means the majority of the brand's timeline is made up of content produced by influencers featuring the brand, each piece following that influencer’s style. Rather than being sold to in a traditional sense, modern consumers like it when their favorite influencers “co-create” with brands. Leveraging influencers as part of your organic strategy brings humor and a sense of accessibility as compared to more curated posts.

Many, if not all, brands use influencer marketing on TikTok in some capacity, but are they all doing it to the best of their ability? We narrowed it down to three of our favorite brands leveraging TikTok influencer marketing right now. 

CB2

Home brand CB2 uses influencer marketing as a core part of its TikTok strategy. The brand understands it’s more important than ever to showcase its products in real living spaces with real people. Because of this, CB2 puts a deep investment into UGC, allowing them to not only source content from real users but also find influencers who are already passionate about their living spaces and owners of products from the brand.

Free People

Free People is a prime example of a brand that uses influencer marketing on TikTok to drive ROI. The contemporary fashion brand takes the guesswork out of influencer marketing and uses Dashboards to inform which strategies work. The brand has learned that partnering with micro-influencers leads to high engagement from smaller, more loyal communities. 

Rare Beauty

With the help of Dash Social’s Entertainment Score, Rare Beauty is able to pinpoint exactly what types of content are resonating and spoiler alert: it’s influencer content. The brand leverages creators from its community to share content ranging from makeup tutorials to wellness tips. Rare Beauty uses influencers to engage, entertain and educate TikTok users on a daily basis. 

As of 2025, 61% of marketers use TikTok for influencer marketing. Brands know that ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to, or better than, that from other marketing initiatives. In many ways, influencers and TikTok are the intersection of a desire for less curated content from brands. In contrast to the editorial-style static imagery of the past, modern consumers demand content that isn’t overproduced or gimmicky. 

In order to drive ROI from TikTok influencer marketing, you can leverage Dash Social's TikTok Link in Bio solution to create a standalone URL that you can customize for your feed. Strategic brands are linking out to their LikeShop galleries, which allow you to link your e-commerce platform directly to your TikTok profile. From there, tap into influencer and creator management tools to streamline workflows, measure influencer ROI and more. Balance data and creativity to turn TikTok’s fresh, always expanding audience into customers with shoppable profile pages tailored to match your TikTok feed.

How many followers do you need to be an influencer on TikTok?

There is no set number of followers one requires to be an influencer. One of the most exciting things about influencers is that they aren’t necessarily dependent on follower numbers. Engagement is a huge factor when it comes to TikTok influencer marketing. This means an influencer could have an extremely small following, but their engagement rate is high. This can work in favor of brands that align with these smaller influencers. 

What should I look for in a TikTok influencer?

The most important thing a brand can look for in an influencer is someone who genuinely aligns with brand values and who you think will enjoy your product or service. 

How do I get influencers to promote my product?

The best way to do this is to offer a product that is honest in how it’s advertised, solves some sort of problem, and of course, relates to the influencer you are looking to have promote your product. We recommend searching your product on TikTok to see if there are users out there already making videos about your product and loving it.

How much do influencers make on TikTok?

TikTok influencer prices range depending on how many followers they have. For TikTok nano influencers (100-100K followers) and micro influencers (1K - 10K followers), their average Influencer rates are: 

• 1K - 5K followers: $180.85 per post
• 5K - 9.9K followers: $241 per post

Aspirational Influencers have slightly higher rates, on average, these are: 

• 10K - 14.9K followers: $283.33 per post
• 15K - 19.9K followers: $550 per post
• 20K - 24.9K followers: $880 per post
• 250K - 999K followers: $972.20 per post
• 1M - 1.9M followers: $2,658.33 per post
• 2M - 2.9M followers: $2,750 per post
• 3M - 3.9M followers: $3,093.06 per post
• 4M - 4.9M followers: $3,436.11 per post
• 5M+ followers: $4,372.22 per post