• by Colin Kirkland , July 30, 2024

Top-performing brands prioritize creator authenticity, brand alignment, and retention, according to a new TikTok report, which analyzed the brands using creators to generate the highest Earned Media Value (EMV) on the ByteDance-owned platform to better understand which strategies and metrics correlate with success.

In partnership with CreatorIQ, a creator marketing platform, TikTok created a list of brands using creators to generate the highest in-app sales and engagement.

According to the report, the top 100 brands made almost $12 billion in EMV over the past year.

The measurement takes into account the value of a brand’s exposure and engagement through non-paid channels and is calculated by estimating the amount of money that would have been needed to achieve the same results through traditional paid media.

The top-performing brands also generated 286 billion impressions and 12 billion engagements, which TikTok says was mainly driven by over 356 thousand creators across retail, beauty, fashion, sports and gaming, in a total of 1.3 million posts.

“Last year, we saw a 113% increase in TikTok videos being leveraged by brands for creator marketing campaigns,” said Tim Sovay, chief business development and partnerships officer at CreatorIQ. “This investment immediately paid off, leading to double-digit year-over-year EMV growth for brands across verticals on TikTok, which also drove substantial growth for lower funnel outcomes.”

Despite which industry top-performing brands on TikTok are dealing in, the report identified several commonalities integral to each brand's use of the creator economy. For example, the authenticity associated with certain creators was essential to the performance of certain posts, and TikTok users can feel it.

After watching creator content on TikTok, 41% of users agree that it feels authentic, the report states, with 55% of TikTok users saying they are more likely to trust brands when they hear about them from creators, compared to other ads in their feed.

In addition, fourteen of TikTok's top 25 brands represent a creator retention rate over 25%, meaning that at least a quarter of these brands’ creators posted about the brands in consecutive year-long periods.

“Creator retention is key to establishing authenticity,” the report says. “A creator who posts about a brand month after month and year after year is more credible than one who posts about the brand for a few days before moving on.”

TikTok's research shows that a consumer's likelihood of buying a product increases when a creator continually shares their experiences with the product or brand, as ads with a specific creator associated with a brand’s vertical were 1.5 times more likely to hook a user than ads with creators not associated with the vertical.

The top 10 brands in terms of EMV according to CreatorIQ’s measurements include a wide range of brand types, like Amazon, the NBA and NFL, Sephora, Fortnite, Barbie, Target, Bloom Nutrition, Walmart and Apple.<