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I tried Tik Tok's creators marketplace - my feedback so far

Tik Tok just released their new Creators Marketplace for everyone to try. It's basically where you can find Tik Tok influencers who are willing to promote your product.

I gave it a shot and here's my experience.

Disclosure: I have yet to actually book a "creator", but discussions are starting

1. Creating your company profile

This step is actually more tedious than it needs to be. And it's a bit deceiving because there are 2 steps:

  • the easy one (name, email)
  • the painful one (proof your company exists)

You have to submit a few papers and identification numbers. It's not a bad thing per se, I guess it's to protect influencers from getting spammed by fake companies, but I don't always have these on hand and had to go through a bunch of files to find them.

On the plus side, they approved my account super quickly (like 20min).

2. Searching for influencers

Once you're in, you start by looking for influencers through the quite basic search engine. There are a few categories available, but it lacks granularity.

For indie hackers especially, this isn't great because Tik Tok is not a huge B2B platform (obviously) and the B2B categories are very limited.

The filters are not that amazing either. It was hard for me to know what is a normal amount of "average views per video" for example.

I did however end up finding a few people (guys mostly) who talk about tech a lot, though a majority seem to only publish videos for hardware.

What's cool is you can see 3 videos of each profile you visit, so you quickly get an idea of the kind of content that person creates.

I then saved those profiles I found to a list that I named "Tech dudes".

3. Creating a campaign

A "campaign" is basically a brief of your product that you send to influencers.

It's important that you did step 2 before, because you can't create a campaign if you don't assign it to influencers. You can save it as a draft though, but good luck finding your draft campaigns (took me 10 minutes).

Everything is pretty straightforward, explain what your product does, what your goals are, etc. You can also share assets (images, videos), but actually they don't accept video formats like MP4 (weird).

When you're done, you assign the campaign to a few creators in your list, and press send.

4. Negotiation

Once you send your campaign, you're going to hear back from a few creators who will "accept" it (at least I hope you will).

You can create a short brief at this point and send it to them via the marketplace. I just said "no guidelines: have fun with the product and talk about it whichever way as long as long as it's positive". I think it's important to let influencers be themselves instead of getting them to "fit your brand".

Unfortunately, Tik Tok wants you to take the pricing negotiations outside of the platform. They say it's so that they can't be held accountable for anything that goes on afterwards. It's a bit painful and would make it easier if everything happened in the same place, because most influencers list multiple ways to contact them so you don't know which to pick.

I chose email.

This is where I stopped for the moment. I'm currently talking with a few of these people, and I've gotten offers that vary wildly for similar sized audience. Basically, for now it starts at around $500 and the highest amount I got was for $2.5K.

Interestingly enough, none of them are only on Tik Tok and all the deals that were offered to me also include IG Reels (sometimes a lot more like YT, LinkedIn, etc.).

I need to really deep dive into these people's profiles and metrics to see if it'll be worth it for us. If we're going to spend that kind of money, we need to be confident we'll get ROI.

I'll keep sharing here on IH if and when a deal goes through!

In the meantime, feel free to ask questions!

  1. 2

    Hi Thomas,
    Care to share their follower count? I'm really interested, I want to start promoting on tiktok myself.

  2. 1

    Thank you for sharing!

  3. 1

    Nice overview. Keep us posted!

    1. 2

      Thanks, and thank you for inspiring me to try! Got the idea from your piece of content right here.

      1. 1

        Oh wow, glad to hear that. Really curious if it would work for a B2B-like product (maybe doing an angle like: Popular Tweets can help you make great TikTok videos?)

        1. 1

          I'm really curious about it too, right now I'm not so sure what angle to take. Which is why I'm relying on the creators themselves.

          1. 1

            Have you thought about making your own content?

            1. 1

              Nope 😅

              I'm "pretty good" at written content. I'm not horrible at design.

              What I am terrible at is being good and dynamic in front of a camera.

              But the real reason is you want to capitalize on the creators' reach. I don't want to have a 1% chance of going viral if I create a great video.

              1. 1

                Those are valid points.

                Yea, it takes time to get used to being infront of the camera without being self conscious.

                Although I think it's always a good idea to have some of your own content, that way, if people check out your profile, they can see that you are also offering some value. And some produce might be harder to produce content with than others too.

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