How to create effective TikTok branded content (for brands and creators)

TikTok has exploded onto the scene, becoming more than just a social media platform—it’s a cultural phenomenon. Yet, as organic reach becomes more elusive, brands are looking to TikTok branded content as a way to truly connect with their audience.

This guide will show you everything you need to know about TikTok branded content. It’ll show you how it works with influencer marketing and how to measure its return on investment.

What is TikTok branded content?

Branded content on TikTok is a form of advertising where brands collaborate with creators to produce content that seamlessly integrates the brand’s message or product. Unlike traditional TikTok ads, branded content feels more natural and less intrusive, often appearing as a genuine recommendation from the creator.

TikTok requires creators to use the “Branded Content” toggle when posting sponsored content. This makes the video clear to viewers that it is a paid partnership. This is important for building trust with your audience and following advertising rules.

TikTok branded content can take several forms, including:

• Paid promotions: Where a creator is compensated with money or free products to feature a brand.
• Gifted products: Where a brand sends a creator a product for free with the expectation that they’ll feature it in the creator’s content.
• Affiliate marketing: Where a creator earns a commission on sales made through a unique link or code.
• Brand ambassadorships: Where the creator has an ongoing relationship with a brand and regularly features the brand’s products in their content.

These win-win scenarios allow brands to tap into the creator’s engaged audience and benefit from their creativity and authenticity, while creators get paid for their work and gain exposure to new audiences.

How to create TikTok branded content as a brand

For brands and creators alike, navigating the nuances of successful branded content on TikTok requires a delicate balance of authenticity, creativity and strategy. Here’s a breakdown of how both parties can ensure their collaborations resonate with the TikTok audience and deliver results.

Here are some tips to help you create branded content that resonates with TikTok users and achieves your business goals:

• Know your audience: It’s crucial to understand who your target audience is on TikTok before you start creating content. What kind of content do they engage with? What are their interests and pain points? Once you have a good grasp of your audience, you can tailor your content to their needs and interests.
• Choose the right creator: This is arguably the most important step. Don’t just focus on follower count; look for creators whose audience interests align with your brand and whose content style matches your brand identity. This is pivotal in ensuring your content breaks through the noise and resonates. Analyze creators’ engagement rates, audience demographics and content quality to ensure a good match.

Sprout Social Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger) simplifies the process of finding the perfect influencer for your brand. Affinity, our proprietary AI algorithm, analyzes millions of data points to identify creators with audiences genuinely interested in your brand or industry, ensuring authentic partnerships that resonate with your target audience.

You can analyze creators’ audience demographics, engagement rates and content performance to ensure alignment with your target audience. The platform also enables you to filter creators by niche, location or even specific keywords, so you can find influencers who truly match your brand’s identity and goals.

But we don’t stop there. Sprout Influencer Marketing empowers you to go beyond surface-level metrics like follower count and dive deep into the data to understand the true impact of your influencer collaborations.

Go beyond vanity metrics and prove the value of your influencer marketing strategy with detailed reports and actionable insights. Drive meaningful engagement, maximize your campaign ROI and achieve your business objectives with Sprout Social Influencer Marketing. Schedule a demo to understand more about how it can optimize your TikTok influencer marketing.

• Prioritize authenticity: When creating TikTok branded content, it’s important to remember to prioritize authenticity. TikTok users value authenticity above all else. Encourage creators to integrate your product or message naturally within their content style. Avoid overly scripted or forced promotions that scream “advertisement.” Trust the creator’s expertise in understanding what their audience enjoys.
• Give creative freedom: While providing a clear brief outlining your campaign goals and key messages is essential, allow creators the freedom to execute the content in their own style. They know their audience best and can present your brand in a way that feels organic and engaging.
• Embrace TikTok trends: TikTok is driven by trends—sounds, challenges, filters and formats that quickly gain popularity. Encourage creators to leverage relevant TikTok trends to increase the visibility and shareability of the branded content. Jumping on a trending sound or challenge can significantly boost organic reach.
• Disclose the partnership clearly: Transparency is key on TikTok. Ensure the creator clearly discloses the partnership with your brand using tools like TikTok’s branded content toggle and clear hashtags like #ad or #sponsored. This builds trust with the audience and ensures compliance with advertising guidelines.
• Set measurable goals and track performance: Define your campaign goals upfront—whether it’s brand awareness, website traffic or sales. Track key metrics like views, engagement, hashtag usage and website clicks to measure the success of your campaign. This data will inform future collaborations and help you refine your TikTok marketing strategy.
• Leverage Spark Ads for amplification: Spark Ads allow brands to amplify organic content created by creators. By sponsoring a creator’s post that features your brand, you can extend its reach to a wider audience and boost engagement. This strategy combines the authenticity of creator content with the power of paid advertising, maximizing your campaign’s impact. For a marketer, Spark Ads significantly outperform standard ad creative. Ensure the chosen creator’s post aligns with your brand and resonates with your target audience for optimal results.

How to create TikTok branded content as a creator

As a creator, there are quite a few things to keep in mind to create successful branded content on TikTok. Here are five tips that should cover the bases:

• Understand the brand and campaign: Before agreeing to a partnership, thoroughly research the brand and understand their campaign objectives. Ensure the brand aligns with your values and that you genuinely believe in the product or service you’ll be promoting.
• Maintain your authentic voice: Your audience connects with you for your unique style and personality. While incorporating branded content, stay true to your authentic voice and content format. Avoid drastic changes that might alienate your followers.
• Disclose the partnership transparently: Clearly disclose your partnership with the brand using TikTok’s branded content tools and relevant hashtags. This maintains transparency with your audience and builds trust.
• Get creative with the integration: Think outside the box when integrating the brand’s message into your content. Find creative and engaging ways to showcase the product or service without being overly promotional. Humor, storytelling and demonstrating value tend to work well on TikTok.
• Engage with your audience: Respond to comments and questions about the brand or product. Encourage interaction and foster a dialogue with your audience. This boosts engagement and helps build a stronger connection with your followers.
• Know your worth: As a creator, your time, creativity and audience have value. Don’t undervalue your services. Research industry standards and negotiate fair compensation for your work.

Successful branded content on TikTok benefits both brands and creators. When done right, it feels less like an ad and more like a natural part of the creator’s content. It connects with the audience and helps the brand. By following these tips, brands and creators can use TikTok’s dynamic world to create effective branded content that gets people to interact with them and achieve campaign goals.

Examples of quality TikTok branded content

When done right, TikTok branded content can have a big impact on how people feel about your brand and their purchasing behavior. By working with creators who know how to make great content and understand what their audience likes, brands can create healthy exposure and excitement for their products and services.

Let’s look at some brands that nailed their TikTok branded content campaigns:

Ryanair

Ryanair has established one of the most recognized brand profiles on TikTok. The secret to Ryanair’s triumph is more than quality TikTok branded content.

With a fearless brand of humor that’s just as quick to poke fun at themselves as it is at their customers, Ryanair’s content has inspired a wave of user-generated posts that playfully jab back. They’ve even repurposed customer content to create response posts, further endearing themselves to their audience. They also distinguish themselves with a unique filter that features moving eyes and a talking mouth, which has become their key identifier for their TikTok content.

By sharing UGC from customers, the sponsored content feels natural. But if a viewer is new to the brand, the organic content on Ryanair’s page sets the stage for the paid content. You’ll find that this branded post from Natasha, @tashilouu, blends right in with the countless other posts on Ryanair’s TikTok feed.

Engaging with their audience, consistently offering new and enjoyable content and ensuring their sponsored and organic materials remain user-generated, Ryanair has reaped significant benefits from their TikTok branded content.

Key takeaways

• Make your branded content on TikTok similar to your regular TikTok posts. This will help your audience connect with your brand better.
• Think about if user-generated content works for your brand. Can you respond to user-generated content that mentions your brand? Can your employees help make your content feel more like user-generated content?
• Engage with your audience on TikTok regularly. This is important for both regular and paid posts and will make your branded content more effective.
• Create a unique style and theme for your TikTok content to make it more successful. Can you create a key identifier for your brand in your TikTok posts? What kind of brand message and tone do you want to have that’s different from your competitors?

Chipotle

One of the keys to Chipotle‘s success on TikTok is their ability to identify and partner with creators who genuinely align with their brand. They don’t just go for the biggest names; they seek out creators who have a genuine passion for food and who can authentically connect with Chipotle’s target audience. This sincerity is what makes their sponsored content more of a personal recommendation and less of a traditional ad.

Also, Chipotle understands the importance of giving creators creative freedom. Instead of imposing strict scripts and rules, they empower creators to infuse their own style into campaigns, making the content more organic and relatable to their followers. This approach not only results in more captivating content but also cultivates a stronger bond between the brand and the creators.

A prime example of letting creators have creative freedom is this TikTok post with Will Devane. In collaboration with Chipotle, Will and Jenna created this TikTok post featuring Chipotle’s watermelon limeade drink. He showed the experience of stopping by Chipotle, the moment him and Jenna ideated making it into a slushie and the process of turning the drink into an at-home ice blended recipe.

Key takeaways

• Identify and partner with creators who genuinely align your their brand and resonate with your target audience.
• Allow flexibility in how campaigns are presented. Empower creators to infuse their own personality and style into sponsored content. This ensures that the content remains authentic and resonates with the creators’ unique followers.
• Build long-term relationships with creators through ongoing engagement and support. Creative freedom for creators places into this. This approach also helps to build long-term relationships with creators, as they feel valued and supported in their creative endeavors. Ongoing engagement and support is key in maintaining these partnerships as well.

These campaigns succeeded because they were creative, authentic and resonated with audiences that align with their brand. They felt less like ads and more like entertaining content that happened to feature a brand. By strategically incorporating influencer collaborations and creative content into your marketing mix, TikTok branded content serves as a powerful tool for strengthening your brand’s presence and driving business growth.

TikTok’s policy for TikTok branded content

TikTok has carefully crafted a branded content policy to maintain consistency, transparency and a positive user experience for sponsored content. By following these guidelines, you can effectively collaborate with influencers and create branded content that resonates with TikTok’s platform and community values. Here’s a breakdown of the essential elements within TikTok’s policy:

Transparency and disclosure: Honesty is key. When creating branded content, it’s important for creators to be transparent about their partnership with a business on TikTok. Whether it’s a paid promotion, product placement or contest, they must have the “Disclose video content” setting on when posting sponsored content to ensure full compliance. Also, it’s important to always use the the proper hashtags to disclose their brand-creator relationship, such as #ad or #sponsored.

Legal compliance: Make sure you follow all applicable laws and regulations, including those related to advertising, data privacy and intellectual property. Misleading or deceptive ads, as well as ads that infringe on the rights of others, are not allowed. Non-compliance with these guidelines can lead to penalties, including account suspension or even a permanent ban.

This blog post provides a general overview of TikTok’s branded content policy. However, these guidelines are subject to change. To ensure you have the most up-to-date information, please refer to the official TikTok Branded Content Policy page and TikTok’s help center article on promoting a brand, product or service on TikTok.

By understanding and following TikTok’s brand guidelines, you can create authentic collaborations with influencers, make impactful branded content and build stronger connections with the TikTok community. These guidelines not only help protect users but also ensure that your content is well-received and effective in achieving your marketing goals.

Measuring TikTok branded content ROI

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of TikTok branded content is essential for brands to assess the success of their marketing campaigns and optimize their strategies. Several key performance indicators (KPIs) can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your TikTok branded content:

Influencer performance: Evaluating the performance of individual influencers is paramount for brands working with multiple content creators. By analyzing influencer marketing metrics such as engagement, reach and conversion rates for each influencer, brands can identify high-performing partnerships and optimize their influencer marketing strategies.

One of the easiest ways to track influencer performance using TikTok’s native analytics is through using Invite Links. When you invite creators to collaborate on a TikTok Creator Marketplace campaign with Invite Links, you get more in-depth first-party metrics than you would have without using them. TikTok Creator Marketplace is a great place to start data tracking if you’re new to TikTok influencer marketing.

Regardless of how deep in the TikTok influencer marketing waters you are, the right tools to measure influencer performance is a really important part of understanding if your TikTok creator partnerships are proving their value.

Sprout Influencer Marketing’s influencer performance analytics can help you manage more creators with ease. It highlights key performers and ensures accountability. It’s analytics provides granular engagement metrics, including video completion rates, helping you understand and report the effectiveness of your collaborative content with TikTok creators.

Not to mention, Sprout Influencer Marketing seamlessly integrates with TikTok Creator Marketplace, so once your creators accept the Invite Links associated with your campaigns, you’ll easily access the content performance data within the Sprout Influencer Marketing dashboard.

Reach and views: By measuring the reach and views of your branded content, you can gain valuable insights into how many users have seen your campaign. A high reach and views count is a good sign that your content is hitting the mark with TikTok’s extensive audience.

Engagement metrics: Metrics such as likes, comments, shares, saves and watch time offer a window into how your audience is interacting with your content. High engagement rates are a good sign that your content is resonating and connecting with your target audience.

Traffic and website conversions: Branded content can be a powerful driver of traffic to your website or specific landing pages if users land on your TikTok profile and click through. By tracking website traffic and conversions (e.g., purchases, sign-ups or lead generation) on bio links with UTM tracking, you can evaluate the direct impact of your TikTok campaigns on your business goals.

By diligently tracking and analyzing these KPIs, brands can develop a thorough understanding of their TikTok branded content campaigns’ performance.

Ready to conquer TikTok?

TikTok branded content offers a way to authentically connect with your audience and achieve social media marketing goals. With its focus on transparency and measurable results, Sprout stands out as an indispensable tool for brands looking to unlock the full potential of TikTok. Take your TikTok branded content campaigns to the next level with Sprout Influencer Marketing and schedule a demo today!