How to Build & Maintain TikTok Shop Creator Relationships

To drive sales and engagement on TikTok Shop over the long-term, the most important things you can do is cultivate strong relationships with members of your affiliate program.

Why? Because sourcing creators for TikTok Shop is only half the battle - the key to building sustainable revenue is keeping them engaged and excited enough to continue creating content for your brand:

"Anyone can get affiliates to post. But having them keep posting is how you're going to compound that affiliate program over time and how you're going to scale it."

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

Before we dive into specific community-building strategies, let’s explore why it’s so critical for influencer marketers to forge those tighter bonds:

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TikTok Shop: The home of “accidental influencers”

We’re used to the professional, polished presence of Instagram influencers and YouTube stars. But how does TikTok compare?

Many successful TikTok creators didn’t join the platform with the intention of becoming influencers. Given how random videos can pop off and go viral on the platform, creators can find themselves racking up thousands of followers virtually overnight.

They have an audience now. But what should they do with it? Dan Albert of the agency 456 Growth has a term for these creators: “Accidental influencers”:

“On TikTok shop, “accidental influencer” really means there's an inundation of these micro influencers and because of that, there's a heavy supply and demand.” Dan Albert, Co-Founder and Partner at 456 Growth.

In an ecosystem with so many emerging creators, it’s even more important that influencer marketers are dedicating time and effort into fostering productive partnerships.

Compared with Instagram and YouTube which boast a savvy creator base, many creators on TikTok Shop know little about creator contracts, working with agencies, or how to tell a legitimate seller from a shady one. Keeping on top of their inbox and their content creation schedule is an ongoing challenge.

If your brand who is willing to show them the ropes, you have a MASSIVE edge in building trust:

“Really understanding that creator and showing them the respect and listening on how they want to partner and what motivates them, I think that's probably the first and foundational aspect of building strong relationships.”

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

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First: Get creators into the right communication channels

Endless DMs, flooded inboxes…outreach on TikTok Shop gets super chaotic, especially in the lead-up to big holiday promotions. As soon as you onboard a creator, get them out of TikTok DMs and onto a channel where your brand is able to own communications and cut through the noise.

Email, WhatsApp, Geneva, Slack, and Discord are some channels which work well for creator communications, though your affiliates will likely have their own preferences. Korina Sanchez, Performance Marketing Manager at Chomps, recommends starting out with email and seeing then what your program responds best to:

“As you continue to build your community, ask for their feedback on the best ways that they prefer to receive updates. You'll get a lot of really great insight on the best ways to communicate with them and make sure that they're getting everything that they need out of the partnership.”

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ALWAYS keep creators in the loop

Communication shouldn’t stop once you’ve gotten a creator set up in your affiliate program. The nature of affiliate means that creators only earn money when purchases are paid (unless they’ve negotiated for a hybrid compensation structure).

So, unless a creator feels like your brand is setting them up success, they have no incentive to engage and drive sales for you. The last thing you want is to develop a ‘zombie’ program where the majority of affiliates are inactive and doing nothing for your brand.

How do you avoid this? By continually offering creators robust reasons to stay engaged.

In the same way a brand needs a refined retention strategy to keep customers, you need apply the same thinking to your affiliate program. Korina Sanchez, Performance Marketing Manager at Chomps, uses email as her primary tool to keep affiliates engaged:

“I like to have a string of emails very similar to a life cycle and retention strategy where you're consistently providing updates, ensuring that partners are aware of the incentives. Any new product launches that might be available, whether it's on your site, exclusively on TikTok shop, maybe it's commission increases for specific campaigns.”

And as Brittany Barnes, Senior Marketing Manager at CLEARSTEM explains, offering advice and tidbits that creators can’t get anywhere else gives your communications genuine value:

“We use WhatsApp, but a lot of brands will use Discord and we will talk to them every single day. We get people's input. We love to give them little secrets and behind the scenes to pull back the curtain for them of what's going on at CLEARSTEM.”

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Set up creators with the right amount of information

Every successful influencer partnership starts with educating creators about your brand and product. Some creators may already be familiar with your brand, especially if they’re active users of your product. However, it’s important to provide all creators with brand and visual guidelines to ensure consistency and quality.

Remember that every creator has a different approach to content creation. As Molly O’Bryen, Senior Director of TikTok Shop at Flywheel explains, some creators love getting a ton of direction and information from the brand, but others may find this overwhelming:

“Sometimes some creators really appreciate a lot of guidance, a lot of product knowledge. So, if you have a great creator with a great following and they just love to get all of that information from you about your product, supply them with the best kind of material that they can ingest. They can create that content in a way that feels authentic to them.”

Remember: TikTok Shop is a platform for selling, so your information and guidelines needs to be geared toward this outcome. Never be shy about telling creators what converts, or how your top affiliates have found success in your program.

According to Oliver at TikTok, this is a major focus for the platform as TikTok Shop works to broker better relationships between creators and sellers:

“One of the big things we've begun to see and want to help both creators and sellers work on together is the actual selling piece. There's a difference between high level talking about a brand, and using different techniques from the creator side that are actually going to help drive consideration or drive purchasing down that funnel.”

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

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Let your creators identify what’s working—and amplify it

When it comes to success on TikTok, it’s creators who are at the coalface. They are the ones experimenting to find out what types of content resonate on the platform, the best way to capitalize on a trend, or entertaining and informative ways to showcase a product.

These are the sorts of experiences influencer marketers should be leveraging as part of their community building efforts. As Jonathan Snow explains, sharing successes and tips for better content helps to build camaraderie and support between creators:

"It becomes a little fan base, a creator community that starts amplifying each other. Everyone there wants to make money. Then you can start setting goals and little giveaways for the top performing creators and try to gamify it a bit."

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

Consider sharing successes strategically with your affiliates to shout out top performers and tactics. Put your creators into group chats together so they can share playbooks and get inspired. CLEARSTEM does this in their WhatsApp to make sure their affiliates feel motivated and supported:

"We're lifting everyone up in our chat, we're also doing fun competitions that everyone participates in. If people have a post that does really well, we'll send it into our chat, and send different tips of what we're finding and noticing."

- Brittany Barnes, Senior Marketing Manager at CLEARSTEM.

Nurturing a community on TikTok Shop requires consistent and dedicated effort, but the payoff in the form of more engaged affiliates and stronger sales is the difference between your storefront thriving or failing.

It starts with taking charge of your creator communications, highlighting successes and top tactics, and investing in providing up-to-date information on promotions or new products to get your affiliates excited to participate.

As Amanda Young, Senior TikTok Shop Specialist at Zeroto1 explains, these are evergreen tactics that will take your business far—no matter how TikTok Shop evolves as a platform:

”Any way to bring and build that community on this platform will help you as a brand and a shop, regardless of what changes with TikTok's algorithms or updates that they're constantly pushing. At the end of the day, your mission and your core of who you are stands out and your affiliates want to buy into that.”

- Amanda Young, Senior TikTok Shop Specialist at Zeroto1.

There’s another incredible tool in your arsenal to build a community; but it requires brands and influencer marketers to get comfortable with putting themselves in front of the camera.

Next stop: TikTok Live!