Background

This document aims to combine with the launch of the new version of Creator Connect, to dismantle the whole process of sellers looking for creators to cooperate with, and explain each step in the process in detail. Based on past experience and analysis results, we provide data indicators and suggestions, to help sellers enter into cooperations with creators more efficiently.

Step 1: Why do you want to cooperate with creators?

Determine your reason for finding creators to cooperate with your business and then adopt different strategies to find creators according to your marketing goals. Generally speaking, the objectives of creator cooperations fall into 2 broad categories:

• Brand promotion: Use the influence of creators to help promote your brand, and build brand image and awareness among buyers. With this goal in mind, sellers generally have a healthy marketing budget to cover, among other things, the following scenarios:
  • Release of new products and product testing
  • Large promotions such as shopping festivals

Sales promotion: Increase product sales through cooperations with creators, focus on profit margins and ROI. Sellers with this goal generally have a limited budget, and need to carefully measure channel costs such as product costs and creator commissions.

Step 2: Creator filtering and selection

Creator filtering and selection can be completed on Creator Connect. Creator Connect is a platform provided by TikTok Shop for sellers to establish connections and start cooperations with creators. It aims to reduce the cost of seller-creator communication and improve the efficiency of matching.

• Click the link to begin searching for creators on Creator Connect: https://affiliate.tiktok.com/connection/creator

Main key indicators

Main category

• The main category refers to the industry to which the main product category of the creator belongs.
• You can customise and filter the categories that match your main category on the Creator Connect Recommendation page.
  • If you select a main category, you will only see creators who have generated GMV in that category. If you choose more than one category, you will see creators who have generated GMV in at least one of the selected categories.

Note: In order to ensure the user experience, we have aggregated the categories. You can select a more specific category by hovering over the category name.

Number of followers

• You can filter by the number of followers a creator has on the Recommendation page.
• 1–5K, 5–10K, 10–50K, 50–100K, and more than 100K are used as the grading standards for the number of followers. You can filter the number of followers according to your product needs:
  • For brand promotion goals: Generally speaking, the larger the number of a creator's followers, the better the promotion effect. According to past experience, if a creator with more than 100,000 followers is selected, it is more likely that the expected promotion goals will be met.

For sales promotion goals: It is recommended that you choose the appropriate number of followers according to your targeted customers, price band and other factors. Generally speaking, for better results, select creators with more than 10,000 followers.

Follower demographics

Follower age

• Follower age filter: You can filter creators based on the age group that makes up their highest proportion of followers. For example, if you select 18-24 years old, you will be shown the creators with the highest proportion of followers between 18 and 24 years old.
• Proportion of 18+ followers: According to past data analysis and research results, 18+ users are often the main drivers of e-commerce shopping, so the ratio of 18+ followers is also an indicator that we recommend you pay attention to. You can also see audience demographics on the Creator Details page, which includes audience age distribution for your reference.

Follower gender

• Follower gender filter: Allows sellers to screen creators based on the gender of the majority of their followers. For example, when you select females, you will see creators with the highest percentage of female followers.
• Follower gender ratio: Select different follower gender ratios for different categories. In the categories of beauty, clothing, home furnishings, and so on, we found that female users are the largest customer group. You can also find out the gender ratio of the audience of a creator through the audience demographics section of the Creator Details page.

Creator response rate

• High response filter: Allows you to filter out creators who view and reply to messages faster.
• According to past research, sellers generally tend to affiliate with creators who are highly motivated to respond, so the High Response filter helps you to locate creators with higher response rates more efficiently.

Creator content production output

Frequent posts filter: Allows you to filter out creators who have posted a large number of short videos or LIVEs.According to past survey results, sellers attach great importance to the quantity of content posted by creators. With the Frequent Posts filter, you can discover creators with a higher number of posts, and easily start a dialogue with them.

Creator sample fulfillment

• Timely compliance filter: Allows you to filter out creators whose sample fulfillment rate is much higher than the average level.
• We understand that in the process of cooperating with creators, a large number of sellers are concerned about the sample fulfillment of creators. This kind of information directly affects the decision-making of sellers to provide samples to creators, so we also provide you with a Timely Compliance filter. You can directly filter out creators whose fulfillment rate is much higher than the average by selecting this filter, and provide them with samples to support posting.

Other important indicators

Creator promotion efficiency

• After being authorised by the creator, you can view a creator's GPM on the Creator Details page. Short video GPM and LIVE GPM are defined as the sales generated per 1,000 impressions of the shopping cart in the short video and LIVE over the past 30 days. Generally speaking, higher GPM can be understood as a higher efficiency of promoting products. GPM represents the overall conversion efficiency of the entire conversion link from product impressions, to product clicks, order placement and payment.

For the GPM indicator, as specific sales volume is related to the unit price of the products promoted by the creators, it is recommended that you judge the GPM indicator based on information such as the unit price of the corresponding category.

Creator engagement

• Creator engagement is defined as the cumulative amount of content posted by a creator over the past 30 days, including all LIVE and short videos. You can get this data through the Creator Details page.

Content popularity

• You can judge the popularity of the content produced by a creator through the number of views on the creator's short videos and LIVEs (UV) on the Creator Connect Recommendation page and Creator Details page.

Content interaction level

Interaction level can be judged by the average number of likes and comments on a creator's content. This data can also be found on the Creator Details page. This indicator is especially important for brand promotion and can assist in judging the interaction of consumers with marketing content and content likeability.

Number of products

• You can view the number of products associated with a creator on the Creator Details page. It is defined as the number of products that a creator has promoted through short videos, LIVEs or showcases over the past 28 days.

We hope the above indicators can help you to appraise and connect with creators who you are interested in cooperating with more efficiently. These indicators not only focus on the existing sales performance of creators, but also on the engagement and content interaction performance of creators, so as to help you find the creators best suited to your goals.

Step 3: Contact creators

Direct messaging tool for sellers and creators

• After finding the creators you want to work with, you can communicate more detailed information about your intentions, products, commissions, samples, and so on. You can see messages sent by creators here, and respond and answer accordingly. You can establish contact with creators directly through this tool, improving communication efficiency.
• For more details, refer to: https://seller-th.tiktok.com/university/course?learning_id=272&content_id=30874&identity=1

Step 4: Trading and Settlement

After confirming an affiliation with a creator, clarify the products and commission rates through targeted plans, and send them to the creator so that they can add products to showcase and promote. We currently offer 2 methods for creating targeted plans and sending them to creators:

Method 1：Creator Connect > Creator Details > Send targeted plan

You can click the Send targeted plan button on the Creator Details page of the creator you cooperate with to send the targeted plan to the creator directly. The creator will then be added to the Targeted Plan Creation page.

Method 2：Plan > Targeted Plan > New Targeted Plan

You can save the username or User ID of the creators you intend to cooperate with, go to the Affiliate homepage Plan > Targeted Plan > New Targeted Plan to create a plan and select the creators. Currently, you can add no more than 30 creators to one targeted plan.