The affiliate marketing model is low-risk. You only pay when you make sales, and as you make sales, you build brand awareness.
But choosing the right platform for this approach is often a struggle for many brands, even if, in most cases, the answer is right under their nose.
Right now, the best option for this strategy is TikTok, which stands out among social media platforms as a highly effective channel for affiliate campaigns. And if you already market on TikTok, this model might just be the thing you need to improve your bottom line.
Keep reading to learn why.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work on TikTok?
Source: DepositPhotos
There are three points in the affiliate marketing chain on TikTok.
The first starts with you, the brand. You'll need to find and contract TikTok creators suitable for your campaign.
These creators will produce engaging TikTok videos to showcase your product or service and include a call to action encouraging viewers to click on the affiliate link in their TikTok bio.
The platform only allows business TikTok accounts to include clickable links in their bio. Check this before onboarding affiliates.
The final point of the affiliate marketing chain is the consumers. After creators add affiliate links to their profiles, consumers shop through those unique links and start earning commissions.
Creators will essentially redirect traffic to your site using their influence.
How to Set Up Your TikTok Affiliate Program in Four Steps
1. Develop Your Affiliate Offers
Determine the products you want to promote with your affiliate marketing strategy and set a commission you can afford to pay for each sale. You can determine how much to pay according to your profit margin for each product.
Good advice? Market products with a higher profit margin so you can offer attractive commissions.
2. Determine How to Get TikTok Affiliate Marketers
When you've decided on your affiliate offer, the next step is to recruit affiliates. See how below:
Source Affiliates Yourself
You can find affiliates yourself using specific affiliate marketing software like Shopify Collabs. The software has a pool of creators that can promote your products.
Alternatively, you can contact creators or run paid ads to reach those interested in becoming your TikTok affiliate marketing partners.
Save Time, Join an Affiliate Network
Joining an affiliate network or agency is an easier way to get affiliates. These third-party service providers source and manage your affiliate program while you focus on other effective business activities.
You can also collaborate with an agency that works with a network of qualified affiliates and big publishers in the affiliate space. Instead of spending valuable time looking for the right affiliates, an agency can handle every bit of the process for you.
3. Recruit and Induct TikTok Creators
If you decide to collaborate with an affiliate marketing service provider, you don't have to worry about this step.
However, if you're handling everything yourself, your next step would be to recruit affiliates. You can do this through sponsored posts. You'll also need to analyze influencers’ profiles to find creators best suited to your brand.
Ensure that each creator you choose has a TikTok business account so that they can add a link to their bio. Next, you'll need to create a landing page with an affiliate-specific URL and preferred software, like Affiliatly, so each can generate their affiliate links.
Another method is to provide unique coupon codes for each creator. The coupon code/affiliate link helps you track the number of sales coming from each creator in your affiliate program.
4. Manage Your Affiliate Marketers
An affiliate marketing service provider will provide progress reports on your affiliate program. If you have any reservations about the management, they will fix them promptly.
Nevertheless, you can use affiliate marketing software, like the ones mentioned earlier, to manage your affiliate program without a service provider. These software programs provide an overview of your affiliates' performance.
If your affiliates are underperforming, provide affiliate marketing resources to help them, evaluate your products and offerings, or work with new creators that represent your brand better.
How to Track Your TikTok Affiliate Program Performance
Source: AuthorityHacker
The dedicated URLs for your affiliates make tracking the performance of your affiliate program on TikTok easy. Affiliate marketing tools like Affiliatly and Shopify Collabs organize your affiliates, their payouts, and the revenue they generate.
These tools also provide insights into which affiliates are driving the most activity, allowing you to reward and encourage them with bonuses.
Why Choose TikTok for Affiliate Marketing?
Running an affiliate program on TikTok helps brands increase sales while building brand awareness. Creators leverage TikTok features to promote the affiliate products to the large and engaged audience on the platform. Other than the size of the TikTok audience available, here are more reasons why TikTok works well for affiliate marketing:
Viral Potential
TikTok has a large user base of over 2 billion people, dominated mainly by young people who are receptive to creative videos. This creates room for organic growth.
The TikTok algorithm also favors engaging content. It'll push top-performing videos to more users, regardless of whether they follow you or not.
Affiliates who make relatable videos to promote products can quickly reach thousands or even millions of TikTok users, boosting conversions and sales for the brand.
Trends and Challenges
TikTok is driven by viral trends, where popular challenges and music spread across the platform. People participating in the challenge get many views within the challenge period.
Affiliates can incorporate products into relevant trends to reach more eyeballs, resulting in higher visibility for the brand.
High Conversion Rate
TikTok has one of the highest conversion rates among other platforms. One reason is the short video format, which compels creators to quickly highlight a product's features and benefits.
The demographic of people using the platform also influences the conversion rate. The younger generation, particularly Gen Z, is known to buy more online. So, when an affiliate creates authentic, relatable content, users are more likely to trust their recommendations and buy.
Best Practices for Your TikTok Affiliate Program
To maximize the effectiveness of your affiliate program on TikTok, follow these best practices:
Choose the Right Affiliates
Select affiliates whose content and audience align with your brand and target audience. Also, ensure their style and tone match your brand image. Then, evaluate their engagement rates.
Rather than their following, focus on their video views and other engagement metrics like video likes and comments. Engaged audiences are more likely to convert.
Educate Your Affiliates
Your affiliates must first understand your product—its features, benefits, shortcomings, and other relevant details—to create authentic promotional videos.
You can provide samples to help them get a personal experience of the product. This will help them create relatable content.
Provide Support
Provide a marketing handbook for your affiliates. The handbook should contain an effective content strategy that can help affiliates reach more people. Remind them to add relevant hashtags to each video description and post about their TikTok stories, host lives, and so on. They can also promote your products on their other social media accounts.
Host occasional virtual marketing workshops. Remember that if your affiliates win, you win, too. The moment you onboard them, they become your brand army.
Offer Incentives
During the onboarding process, inform your affiliates of bonuses they can get for different milestones. This will help them stay focused and work harder to smash goals quickly.
Monitor and Adapt
Monitor your affiliate marketing program to identify top-performing affiliates and measure your ROI. Affiliate marketing software makes the process seamless. A much easier method is to hand over the entire affiliate program to a specialized affiliate marketing agency from start to finish.
Wrapping Up
TikTok affiliate marketing is an effective form of marketing to achieve two marketing goals simultaneously—sales and brand awareness. But running an effective affiliate program is time-consuming and especially draining if you're new to it.
So, consider your resources carefully before jumping into this strategy, and don’t be afraid to bring in some outside help. You might need some investment upfront, but the rewards can be worth it if you leverage this platform right.
