How to Build a TikTok Creator Network

Go Viral With the Ultimate TikTok Creator Marketing Playbook

Ever wondered why some brands explode overnight while others struggle to gain traction? The secret often lies in mastering Gen Z creator marketing. After building an entire creator network from the ground up, we've cracked the code on what works and what doesn't.

As a consumer app founder or social mededia markter, you have probably heard about apps like rizzGPT, Cal AI or Liftoff. What seems to be a viral hit popping up over night is often a dedicated and highly orchestrated viral marketing campaing involving 100s of gen z content creators on TikTok, Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts.

In this guide we'll break down how to bootstrapp your own TikTok creator network and how to scale it globally.

Why Gen Z Student Creators are Changing the Game

In todays world dominated by high screentimes, most consumers are overstimulated with direct display ads and are less likely to engage with most common types of ads. Especially with gen Z and even younger generations, CTRs are dropping constantly. At the same time, these consumers are the most attractive for brands and consumer products that target social virality. And this is something marketers can leverage.

The new meta of 2025 is leveraging gen z's native content creation skills and feeling for how the for-you-page algorithms of TikTok, Shorts and Reels work to achieve viral reach and drive overall CPM down. Gen Z and student creators understand their audience's language, preferences, and pain points in ways traditional marketing never could. This hekps to consistently deliver higher engagement rates and more genuine connections than their millennial counterparts. But here's the catch: working with them requires a completely different approach.

Finding the Right Creators: Beyond Follower Count

Depending on your product, business model, stage and vertical the ideal creator profile to partner can vastly differ. To identify the right creators best fitting your needs to set up and execute a succesful viral marketing campaign, you need to define the following criterias first:

Campaign Budget and Target Outcome

The higher the follower count, the more expensive the creator. This rule of thumb usually holds true for many platforms. If you outreach to professional creators, you will most likely always get offers starting at $100-$500 with no cap to the top. However, on TikTok follower count is not the metric to look for than searching for fitting creators. For defining your absolute budget, you need to understand your goals. Do you want to focus on increasing your reach? Are you planning to create brand value? Or is the goal more on direct user acquisition and converison to paying customers? How about creating organic virality?

And of course you need to know your budget in general. For most teams that are just getting started, working with established creators is out of budget. Other questions you may ask yourself are about the payments terms. Can you afford to pay the creator upfront? How much risk are you willing to take? For instance, smaller creators might accept performance based compensation that heavily reduces your risk to lose on your marketing spend.

Last but not least, you should have a good understanding on the efective CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions) and CPI (cost-per-install) you are willing to pay.

Views and Engagement: The Real Performance Indicators

If you only look at the views of a creator, you might get fooled. Either by content that gets shown to an unrelated audience and thus drives low engeagement or actual fake engagement.

To prevent this, check their average and median views. Are outliers skewing the numbers? What's the floor for their non-viral content? In addition, track the overall engagement rate. Therefore, devide the total of all engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares, bookmarks, etc.) by the total number of views.

Also, understand that comments matter more than likes. They're conversion drivers and algorithm boosters. Positive sentiment in comment sections often translates to better outcome and return for your marketing spend.

Video Quality and Conversion: Where Magic Happens

Its hard to say how effective a creators content is when it comes to its conversion before working together. A high overall engagement rate gives a first indication that the content resonates with the audience.

From our epxerience working with highly converting creators, the best content pieces come without any agressive CTA. If you want to avoid one thing at all costs, than it's that the content feels like random ad.

The best content incorporates your product naturally without highlighting it. The hook and format should create a strong feeling of fomo in your audience without even having to mention your product. The more natural it blends into the format and storytelling of the video and creator, the better the conversion will be.

Finding the Right TikTok Creators for Your Campaign

The FYP Strategy

The easiest start point and fastest way to find creators for your product is your very own For-Your-Page. Just set up a new TikTok account and immediately seach for a few keywords in your niche. Then, start engaging with content that you feel would be perfect for your own creator campaign as well. After some time spend on scrolling and engagement, the algorithm will show you only content and creators in this vertical. Chances are high that you will find your first creators this way. Often, they already work with other companies in the same vertical.

Hashtag Mining

While going through your FYP searching for creators, you might notice that many of them are already quite bif and might be already out of your budget. This means you have to dig deeper. Identify more exotic keywords and sub-trends in your niche to also find smaller creators that might be still under the radar of most brands and thus, be more likely to charge lower rates. Often, you might even identify profiles that have never worked with other brands before and you are their first touchpoint with paid content collaborations. This gives you a great opportunity to get a good deal and utilize undiscovered talents.

The Secret Relationship Building Hack

Here's something most marketers miss entirely: warm up creator relationships before pitching. This is especially effective if you try to crack the outreach to creators that are missing a direct content email in their bio. Many marketers struggle with super low response rates when dming creators directly on TikTok. But there is a way this can still work.

Start liking and commenting on their content weeks before reaching out. Show genuine interest in their work. When you finally send the collaboration proposal via DM, you're not a random to them and there is a signigicantly higher chance of getting a response.

Non-US Creators can Have higher ROI

Because of the United States being the most attractive consumer market for most products and apps, US-based creators also charge the highest rates. Further, its quite competetitve to get into collaborations with highly-sought after creators. Thus, we would recomment to also check for non US-based English speaking creators and markets.

Further, there is tremendous growth potential in other smaller markets such as different countries across Europe, South America and Asia. Here, you might need to be even more cautoius with your creator due diligence. But if you can cut throug the noise you might be able to find creators with increadible reach and egeamgenet but with highly competetive rates.

Negotiating Favorable Terms

Avoid Full Upfront Payments

Many creators demand $100-500 per video upfront with zero performance guarantees. Unless you have solid data on expected returns or you are not focused on the conversion but more the brand value itself that comes with the creator, avoid these deals entirely.

Instead, try to push for a strong performance-based compensation structure. Propose somehting like a 20/80 pre/post delivery splits if pure performance deals aren't possible initially.

This way, you dont cary the fill downside risk of paying a high price and getting a super low performing video with no engagement back.

Understanding Your Numbers

Negotiating attractive terms also requires having a plan about your overall unit economics first. This means you need a solid understanding of your customers average lifetime value (LTV), the customer acquisition cost you are willing to pay (CAC) and if you are an app developer,the cost per install (CPI). Now, you can derive the maximum CPM you can afford to pay to be proditable with your creator campaigns. Now, you can look into the median views your creator achieves, derive the potential CPM and calculate how many installs and conversion you need. From our experience, viral organic campaigns can lead to CPM as low as $0.10. Achieving a CPM of around $1-2 is already quite good compared to more tradiitonal forms of marketing and paid ads.

Highlight Longterm Growth Potential

Many creators will have a tough time to accept performance-based deals as they might not trust you enough to actually pay what you have committed to. They might already made negative experiences with other brands and companies and are less likely to take such risk. Therefore, its important to be as professional as possible then negotiating your terms. This also includes leading the conversation and making sure all formaltiies are taken care of. For deals that exceed just a small experimental scope, make sure to have a proper creator agreement and contract in place to be on the safe side.

Also, try to highlight the potential of your product and its future growth and visualize how the creator can mutualy benefit from this growth and being a representative of your brand.

Creating Content Briefs That Convert

Stay Within Account Theme and Copy Viral Hits

No matter how experienced your creators are, the quality of the delivered content will heavily depend on the quality and level of detail of your content brief and overall instructions. And the less experienced, the more important this becomes. In the best case, you already know precisely what type of hook format and overall content style would like to have. However, try to avoid asking for content that totally contradicts from the established style the creators usually follow for most of the content. In the best case, the requested content blends perfectly into the existing content. This also reduces the risk of the video being less successful than the others from the same creator.

In general, use viral content as references that is not too outdates as the TikTok algorithm constantly changes and a format that used to easily go viral might not do so anymore. If you are bit more experimental, you can also try out new formats and hooks yourself and if succesful, use them as guidance for your creators.

Proactive Quality Monitoring

Make sure to review content before its being published. This way both parties can make sure the content is exactly as requested and there is no room for misinterpretation and bad blood if a video does not perform due to being too far off from the instructions. After a few sucessful videos together, the creator will know exactly what you are looking for and you might be able to skip this step. Most likely you will be monitoring the performance of each individual video anyways and have a good understanding if changes should be made ahead of the next video.

Performance Tracking That Drives Results

We have now set up our first creator campaign across different creators in different regions posting different types of contents and formats. The terms we negotiated seem to be fair and we are already seeing first positive results. However, the real challenges are not in the creation of our TikTok creator network and our first campaign, but in succesfully keeping the campaign profitable and scaling it further. Now, the focus shifts towards building up a system that can track and monitor our creators and campaign while delivering the right insights to make it a success. This means we need to be ablt to recognize once a certain content format starts underperforming, a creator stops following agreed terms and quotas and our overall costs start to exceed out returns leading to a negative ROI. You need to track:

• Track high level performance and engagement metrics: Views, likes, comments, shares, bookmarks, etc.
• Track development of overall engagement metrics
• Track week over week and month over month developments
• Compare different creators and their performance
• Compare different content formats and their performance
• Compare different regions and markets
• Calculate and track the effective CPM and CPI as well as ROAS on organic creator campaigns

This will give us the right insights to not only have a profitable organic creator strategy but even more importantly, to scale it further and thus drive revenue growth and market adoption.

Scaling Your Creator Network & Campaigns - Wrapping it up

• $1K MRR requires one viral hit • $10K MRR needs repeatable viral hooks
• $100K MRR demands scalable, sustainable systems

Track which formats and hooks consistently go viral. Monitor which ones convert best. Maintain clear oversight of CPMs and campaign costs.

Stay agile with trend adoption. The social media landscape shifts constantly. Your system must adapt quickly to new formats and platform changes.

Building Your Creator Empire

Successful Gen Z creator marketing isn't about luck – it's about systems. You need frameworks for discovery, negotiation, content creation, and performance tracking.

Start small and test with micro-creators before investing in expensive partnerships. Build relationships before pitching deals. Focus on performance-based compensation whenever possible.

Most importantly, remember that Gen Z creators are partners, not vendors. Treat them as collaborators in your growth story. The best creator relationships become long-term partnerships that scale with your business.

And ultimately, build up and follow a system that allows you to scale your creator network and campaigns further and further. Usually it rises and falls with the right tooling that supports you and helps with automating this process. With viral.app we are here to help you getting started with your first $1K MRR towards scaling to $100K MRR and beyond. Start today →