How to Source TikTok Shop Creators: Discovery & Outreach Guide

Sourcing creators is the first order of business when building a successful affiliate program, no matter what platform you’re using. Without creators, you don’t have partnerships. And without partnerships, there’s no content to reach your audience.

TikTok Shop collaborations are distinct from regular TikTok partnerships, which are designed to boost overall product and brand awareness. TikTok Shop creator content is geared toward one outcome; conversions. So, what you’re looking for in a successful creator will differ than what we’ve already explored in our TikTok Sourcing chapter.

But discovering and sourcing TikTok Shop creators for your affiliate program is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to building your brand’s presence. If you don’t already have robust brand awareness on TikTok Shop, creators may be reluctant to partner with you—a classic catch-22.

On TikTok, this is often referred to as the “cold start problem”. But don’t worry; there are ways to combat this!

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To start, focus on your organic content creation efforts

If your brand doesn’t have a consistent posting schedule on TikTok, it will be very difficult to get the attention of creators.

Why? Because even though you have active influencer programs on other channels, TikTok creators have no way to assess what your brand is like to work with.

By building out a steady organic schedule on TikTok Shop and seeing what resonates, you can start to identify creators who align with your brand and are most likely to drive success for your affiliate program:

“If your product can cut it on this platform, that's when you can begin to navigate what niche your product falls into and what affiliates or influencers would be interested in promoting that product.”

- Amanda Young, Senior TikTok Shop Specialist at Zeroto1.

Let’s say you’re a skincare brand. Skincare enthusiasts are your primary audience, but there’s going to be a lot of crossover with other audiences who share similar interests. For example, hormone health, clean beauty, and wellness. This opens up a much larger field of relevant TikTok Shop creators that your brand could partner with.

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How to identify quality creators on TikTok Shop

TikTok Shop affiliates shouldn’t just align with your brand; they need to have a proven track record of driving engagement and sales. So, what does a high-performing creator look like on TikTok Shop?

TikTok Shop offers robust performance insights into individual TikTok Shop creators. But some numbers matter much more than others. Here’s what Micah Whitehead at Zeroto1, a leading TikTok Shop agency, had to say about their creator sourcing strategy:

“We're looking for creators that are likely to do the job well, which is like 5 to 10,000 followers, high activation rate of content posted, and then have previously made content for other brands.”

- Micah Whitehead, CEO and Co-Founder of Zeroto1.

While there will be differences in engagement and audience size depending on your niche, this provides a useful shorthand to assess creators. Additionally, Dan from 456 Growth emphasizes the importance of not taking north star metrics like GMV at face value:

”Look at the granularities and understand what was GMV driven from paid versus organic. Was it one video partnership, or was it 30 that drove the GMV? Was it a high AOV or was it a low AOV? Was it a video that person posted six months ago versus in that current month? All of those variables determine a successful creator.”

- Dan Albert, Co-Founder and Partner at 456 Growth.

(We dive more into GMV in our Measuring TIkTok Shop Performance chapter!)

Honing on these indicators will help you to identify creators who are not only experienced at producing content for brands, but are also the most likely to drive long-term revenue. This means you can start to niche down in your sourcing strategy and develop your own set of filters.

Aside from traditional measures like engagement rate and posting cadence, TikTok Shop has another metric of note which isn’t found on other social platforms, known as “content completion rate.”

“Content completion rate” is how often they create content based on the products they receive. You want to see creators that generate content for more than 80% of the products they receive.”

- Pontus, Product Lead at Superfiliate.

Product seeding is an expensive undertaking, especially for smaller brands. If you’re committing to a seeding campaign, you want to select creators who offer high odds of creating content based on their experience with your product.

In other words, if you’re seeding to creators with a large profile but receiving no content, that inventory is going to waste. They might not have the largest following or the most views, but a creator who actually posts content means that your product is making inroads into the platform and building familiarity with audiences.

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Discover creators with Superfiliate via TikTok’s Creator Marketplace

Building a profile of a successful affiliate is one thing; actually discovering suitable creators is another. Swiping manually through TikTok looking for appropriate creators simply isn’t possible if you’re going to achieve the volume necessary to grow your brand on TikTok Shop:

“There's probably around 750,000 registered TikTok shop affiliates. Imagine every brand out there is going after those same 750,000. You need to essentially reach as many of those people as you can, assuming they're somewhat loosely tied to the target demographic of your brand.”

- Jonathan Snow, Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Avenue Z.

The answer? Getting a head start with Superfiliate’s TikTok Shop integration. As a beta partner of TikTok Shop, we enable brands to streamline their affiliate program with creator discovery, communication and performance tracking—all in one place.

Our integration with TikTok’s Creator Marketplace allows you to generate curated lists of relevant creators based on filters such as product category, GMV, and follower count:

Korina Sanchez, Performance Marketing Manager at Chomps, is using our TikTok Shop integration to source creators in combination with independent outreach on other social channels:

“We are using Superfiliate for a few of our brands, leveraging the outreach tool where we can prospect and source via specific filters based on audience or GMV or a product category. Then, we're also leveraging our own outreach when it comes to what we're seeing on other channels.”

- Korina Sanchez, Performance Marketing Manager at Chomps.

Check out Superfiliate’s TikTok integration here.

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Mastering creator outreach on TikTok Shop

You’ve identified a list of creators you want to work with. How do you put your best foot forward and get them excited about the prospect of partnering with you?

Given the increasing competition amongst brands to source creators on TikTok Shop, mass outreach has become a necessity for brands who are looking to scale their affiliate programs. Unless you’re reaching out to thousands of creators per day, you’re not going to get ahead.

How? Bots 🤖

“Creators are flooded with outreaches right now because the bot outreach is a thing. There's a lot of brands hopping on the train. They're not really doing much, but they are mass blasting 2000 people today with some boilerplate offer. So, it's really hard to break through that noise.”

- Micah Whitehead, CEO and Co-Founder of Zeroto1.

Bot outreach is overwhelming not just for brands, but also for creators; if your inbox is being hammered by thousands of invites per day, it’s that much harder to identify which partnership opportunities are worth going after.

In other words, influencer marketers need to do much more with their TikTok Shop outreach if creators are going to sit up and take notice.

What is the gold standard for TikTok Shop creator outreach? Differentiating your brand with messaging that shows creators how your brand is genuinely engaged and interested to work with them.

Micah Whitehead refers to this personalized outreach as the “bar test”:

”They are going to be getting all kinds of fluffy marketing messages that feels like it was written by marketing manager. It needs to feel like was written by their friend. We call it give it the “bar test.” If it doesn't sound like you would be talking to a friend at a bar over a beer, then it's not going to resonate with them.”

- Micah Whitehead, CEO and Co-Founder of Zeroto1.

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Don’t forget to leverage your existing creator relationships

If you’re new to TikTok partnerships, starting from scratch is intimidating. But if you have an established influencer marketing program on another channel, you’re never truly starting from square one.

Rather than immediately jumping into cold outreach, tap into your current network of influencers and affiliates on other platforms. For example, consider syndicating content from creator partnerships on Instagram, rather than focusing only on creators who are TikTok-first.

Not only can this prove more cost-effective; as Oliver at TikTok explains, these established relationships help your brand to build credibility with TikTok Shop creators and solve that stubborn cold start problem:

“If creators see other creators talking about your brand, there becomes this level of trust that they're selling good products, that they're legitimate, and that they do what they say they're going to do.”

- Oliver Silzer, Partnerships and Business Development at TikTok Shop.

Molly’s top tip? Spotlighting which of your existing creators could be successful if you were to bring them to TikTok Shop and support their growth:

“Look at home first. Are you already working with partners like affiliates or creators or agencies that you can basically enable them to be commerce driving? That is a great place to start bringing them on board to the platform and continuing to nurture those relationships. It really limits your timeframe to find new people.”

- Molly O’Bryen, Senior Director of TikTok Shop at Flywheel.

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Discover creators among your existing Superfiliates

It’s also possible that you already have a bunch of TikTok creators amongst your affiliates—and not realize it. This is why our TikTok Shop integration also enables merchants identify TikTok creators amongst their enrolled Superfiliates, as well as flag any creators who have tagged your brand in their content:

Remember: Discovering and sourcing creators on TikTok Shop starts with your own organic presence. Once you’ve nailed finding that fit, you can focus on bringing over established partnerships to help build trust on the platform and lay a foundation for discovering and working with net-new creators.

By focusing on creators with engaged audiences, proven track records of driving sales, and high content completion rates, you can build a powerful network of affiliates. Remember: Keep your outreach as approachable and ‘non-marketer’ as possible!

Let’s move onto the meat of those creator partnerships on TikTok Shop: Collaborations!