Strategies for TikTok Shop Creator Collaborations

Collaborations fuel TikTok Shop affiliate programs. A collaboration is when creators partner with sellers to promote a product in exchange for commission on sales. Collaborations can be used for new product launches, holiday promotions, tailored campaigns, or to increase the general discoverability of your product on the platform.

But there’s a lot more to successful TikTok Shop collaborations than blasting creators with an invite and hoping for the best. When creators are receiving literally thousands of invites per day to participate in collaborations, you need to make a partnership opportunity really worth their while.

In this chapter, we’re diving into the different TikTok Shop collaborations you can leverage—and how you can sweeten the deal so that creators choose your affiliate program over competitors!

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Open and target collaborations on TikTok Shop explained

When working with creators on TikTok Shop, brands have two types of collaborations to choose from: Open Collaborations and Target Collaborations.

(There’s also one bonus collaboration offered up by Micah Whitehead at Zeroto1—keep on reading! 👀)

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Open collaborations

Open collaborations allow a broad range of creators to view opportunities to promote a brand’s products. These collabs fall into two subtypes: fully open collaborations, where any eligible creator can join with no approvals, and collaborations where the brand first needs to approve a creator’s request to showcase that product.

As Dan at 456 Growth explains, the goal of open TikTok Shop collaborations to manage the large-scale recruitment of creators and to grow awareness and reach on the platform:

“Open [collaborations] is that waterfall impact; it's letting organic, early stage GMV driver creators engage with your brand. The ones that can become loyalists and evangelists for your product.“

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

Open collaborations facilitate wide-reaching campaigns, especially if you allow eligible creators to join without approval to maximize participation. This flexibility ensures that brands can amplify a product and build virality.

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Target collaborations

Target collaborations are invite-only and only visible to the creators you have selected to participate. Unlike an open collaboration, targeted collabs are designed to help brands activate certain audience segments:

“For example, I have a list of 500 creators that I work with generally and I want to invite 50 of them as my better audience for the product I'm launching in a very specific campaign that’s not discoverable to the masses.”

- Oliver Silzer, Partnerships and Business Development TikTok Shop.

Hand-picking influencers has obvious advantages for more expensive or niche campaigns; you want your messaging to be brand-aligned and consistent across partnerships, and more control over how products are being presented and talked about. Target collaborations facilitate this very effectively, but require more upfront management by the influencer marketer.

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How Superfiliate streamlines TikTok Shop target collaborations

Managing a steady supply of targeted collaborations is a huge time drain for an influencer marketer, especially during peak holiday periods, where you’re likely to have numerous collaborations happening at once.

Thanks to Superfiliate’s TikTok Shop integration, you can bulk invite up to 400 creators at once to a target collaboration and fully customize your outreach.

The best part? You can automate the daily sending of target collaboration invites with our Autopilot feature! Set eligibility criteria based on follower count, sales generated, product category, and the Autopilot will send invites to creators who meet this profile. You can also track the effectiveness of your outreach by monitoring the number of invitations sent, acceptance rates, and the overall growth of your affiliate program.

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A third collaboration type?

Micah Whitehead at Zeroto1 believes there’s another collaboration tier that is rapidly emerging on TikTok Shop: The VIP collaboration.

A VIP collaboration represents a partnership with just one or two creators that’s highly exclusive in nature. This could be a creator with extremely high GMV, or a celebrity collaborator with high face value. In most cases, this will involve an upfront payment in addition to commission on sales:

“It’s almost like a loss leader, someone you want to help build your hype cycle. You're not looking to make money off this person; you're just looking to have them be involved and create a lot of content for you because it's going to help raise all other efforts.”

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

Unless you’re a brand with an exceptionally high budget, VIP collaborations are going to be infrequent and very carefully selected for maximum impact. But as competition for creators increases, VIP collaborations offer a way for brands to differentiate their affiliate programs.

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Which is better: An open or target TikTok Shop collaboration?

Open and targeted collaborations have different strengths and use cases. As Oliver at TikTok explains, the best option is determined by who your brand is trying to reach:

“If you’re setting up a private targeted plan and you're reaching out to people who've never heard of your brand, how is that going to resonate in terms of their desire to lean in? Using an open plan in that case is a better strategy because all different types of creators can come test your product, talk about it and build awareness for that.”

- Oliver Silzer, Partnerships and Business Development TikTok Shop.

Brands who have a larger profile on TikTok Shop are more likely to benefit from open collaborations, as they have a higher level of awareness with creators in their vertical. However, a brand who is only just getting started on TikTok Shop will benefit from leaning into targeted collabs initially and putting the time into crafting really compelling outreach.

The main challenge with open collaborations is balancing the ease of participation with quality control over the content. Requiring approval for creators to participate means more oversight, but also more work for influencer marketers to vet each creator.

Because target collaborations are more controlled, which makes them more effective for niche products or verticals where more technical knowledge is required. In this case, vetting creators more closely ensures that participants know how to sell your product effectively.

And as Dan at 456 Growth emphasizes, targeted collaborations typically represent higher value opportunities, so the focus should be on leveraging those experienced, high-performing creators in your program:

“Targeted is really meant for you to reserve for your core army of historically performance-driven and successful creators…to be able to go to them and say look, we have some exclusive campaigns that we're operating and we want to give you insight that these are high commission rate partnerships.”

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

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Combining the best of both worlds

The secret to a successful TikTok Shop strategy? Blending both open AND target collaborations.

Open collaborations cast a wide net to recruit creators and foster that initial awareness and engagement, while targeted collaborations focus on deeper connections with specific influencers that more aggressively drive direct response.

A good way to think of these collaborations is open collaborations as inbound to bring new creators in, while target collaborations serve as an outbound strategy to work with top performers. By combining both collaboration types, brands can create a layered campaign strategy that targets a broader range of creators.

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Rewards and incentives for successful collaborations on TikTok Shop

Now we know what types of collaborations are available for brands to leverage, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty: How can you incentivize successful TikTok Shop creators in your niche to partner with your brand?

Rewards and incentives are range of benefits you can offer creators to encourage them to promote your brand and product. This ranges from upfront cash payments and hybrid commission structures to exclusive freebies, event invitations, or more exclusive collaboration opportunities.

These offer a crucial negotiation lever when agreeing on rates with influencers (for more on this topic, check out our dedicated chapter on negotiation levers in influencer marketing!) But on TikTok Shop, creators play a even more significant role in product discovery and conversions than other platforms.

As competition to partner with top creators heats up, influencer marketers need to stay conscious that influencers are fielding thousands of opportunities each day. As Korina, Performance Marketing Manager at Chomps explains, you need to make it worth their while if your brand is going to stand out—especially when you’re in a competitive product category:

“Something like beauty or supplements, it's super important to maintain a competitive edge, especially in the early stages of where you're trying to attract new partners.”

- Korina Sanchez, Performance Marketing Manager at Chomps.

However, rewards and incentives go a lot deeper than just offering creators the biggest number; it’s also about establishing a baseline of trust and engagement with your brand—especially when sellers on TikTok Shop haven’t always been so diligent in following through on what they’re promising!

Remember: Your best creators aren’t just driving revenue or engagement; they’re offering you a blueprint for success on the platform:

”The top affiliate that is winning these prizes should be able to have discovered a framework that works for your brand that every other affiliate should be able to duplicate and continue showing the success of your brand and your product.”

- Amanda Young, Senior TikTok Shop Specialist at Zeroto1.

However, the right incentive structure for creators is going to differ, depending how established your brand is on TikTok Shop:

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Emerging brands

If you’re new to TikTok Shop and don’t have a track record of partnering with creators, landing collaborations can be a challenge thanks to the “cold start problem”. There’s only one full-proof way to solve this: Be aggressive with your offers.

“There are some limitations as a new seller in being able to reach out to the top creators in the space. So for a relatively low awareness brand, you really need to lean into the incentives and pay for that content upfront. And that could be a fixed fee.”

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

Yes—paying upfront for partnerships is painful on your budget. But until you build enough awareness and credibility for your TikTok Shop presence to stand on its own, this is essential to set yourself up for success.

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Established brands

Once your TikTok Shop has picked up steam, it’s time to switch strategies. Once you’ve established a presence, it’s not necessary to keep offering upfront compensation to every creator. Your brand should have enough clout that you can start getting more creative with incentives:

“It becomes about nourishing your creator relationships. Maybe that looks more like offering them a very special commission, giving them some more free samples, maybe giving them some sort of cash bonus once they reach different sales thresholds.”

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

And that provides us with a neat segue into our next chapter: How to grow and nurture relationships with TikTok Shop creators!

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