The key to winning on TikTok is aligning with the platform’s content trends, both from an individual creator and a brand perspective. TikTok video clips have their own feel, their own style, and understanding this is key to gaining big reach and resonance in the app.
For brands, that means research, and spending time in the app – or alternatively, you can also collaborate with established creators and utilize their platform knowledge to help maximize your messaging and appeal.
Which can be a hugely valuable approach, as shown in TikTok’s latest study into campaign effectiveness through collaboration with creators.
Taking a deeper look into how brands are seeing success with their TikTok efforts, the platform examined over 2,800 brand campaigns to glean new insight into how partnerships with creators help to improve results.
You can read TikTok’s full report here, but in this post, we’ll take a look at some of the key notes.
First off, TikTok found that ads created for TikTok in partnership with creators see higher recall, and longer view rates.
As you can see here, repurposed content – i.e. content not created for TikTok specifically – performed the worst in the study, while TikTok-specific campaigns, and campaigns formulated with established creators, saw much stronger response.
Ads created in partnership with TikTok creators also saw longer view rates, with 6-second views increasing by 91% versus non-creator partnerships. That underlines the importance of linking into in-app trends and viewer behaviors – if it looks and feels more native to TikTok, and comes from the creative core of the app, via creators who know and live that approach, it’s more likely to see stronger response from TikTok viewers.
That’s also reflected in TikTok’s consumer response data, in relation to creator partnership ads.
The data also shows that ads made in collaboration with creators see higher engagement rates for most formats.
Creator campaigns also drive stronger brand recognition, while showing the product in use also helps to drive engagement.
“Creator Beauty content is especially effective at promoting brand recognition. Beauty content saw the strongest aided and unaided brand recall from the TikTok-specific branded content when collaborating with creators.”
And another worthy note – TikTok’s research also found that beauty ads which show the product in use and utilize comedic elements “drive a significant uplift in watching the ad to the end”.
These are some key notes for your TikTok campaigns, both in terms of the value of collaborating with creators and utilizing different elements in your clips.
Of course, TikTok also benefits from facilitating creator partnerships, with its Creator Marketplace essentially working to provide another revenue stream for creators, which, ideally, will keep them posting to TikTok, as opposed to shifting to other platforms instead.
That means TikTok has an ulterior motive in promoting the value of such partnerships. But the stats don’t lie, and anyone who’s ever used TikTok will know that creating native-looking, platform-aligned clips will drive better results – as the more ad-like a video is in your feed, the easier it is to quickly skip and continue on your way.
Great creative, aligned with platform trends, drives better response, and partnering with creators is a key avenue towards this.
You can read TikTok’s full ‘Importance of TikTok Creators’ report here.
