TikTok's New HubSpot Integration: What It Means for Lead Gen

We’ve been on the offline conversion tracking (OCT) bandwagon for a while now – the practice helps us train bidding algorithms to find and engage higher-quality users who offer better return on ad spend. And there’s a new platform entering the OCT game: TikTok.

Not known best for its B2B/lead gen capabilities, TikTok recently announced a new CRM partnership with HubSpot to help advertisers improve tracking and nurturing of leads coming from its platform. For marketers who use HubSpot, this has several critical benefits:

• Improved organization and nurturing of leads in a single CRM
• No-code integration (TikTok claims it takes 10 minutes) that connects lead data into HubSpot and minimizes effort spent on downloading and uploading leads from platforms
• Better understanding of results and improved optimization toward down-funnel actions
• $200 ad credit for advertisers who integrate their HubSpot CRM

Essentially, this partnership gives TikTok’s HubSpot-based advertisers the same core capabilities as they’d find on Google/Meta/LinkedIn, including no-code integration, automatic lead syncing, ad deployment, and reporting. 

TikTok Ad Formats and What You Need to Know About Them

The significance for B2B marketers – and TikTok

This partnership will create opportunities for TikTok to gain new advertising customers who already use and love HubSpot – specifically, they’ll gain new customers who measure and optimize toward full pipeline metrics. 

If a HubSpot user is not achieving success with Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts and wants to optimize towards lower-funnel metrics and/or sync leads from native lead forms, they may find this update appealing. The appeal of this update will depend on whether TikTok can bolster it by providing targeting options that align with the client's ICP. 

With 1 in 3 users discovering new products through video, and 90% of users engaging, TikTok has the foundation to be a powerful source for lead generation. (Note: TikTok considers “engagement” as the total number of video views, profile views, likes, comments, and shares. The engagement rate is then calculated by the percentage of likes, comments, and shares on a post divided by the number of video views.)

Best practices for TikTok lead gen: tracking and forms

For best tracking results and insights, we recommend utilizing UTM parameters within the custom (hidden) fields, the destination URL, and the privacy policy link. 

As far as constructing the lead gen forms themselves, TikTok is generous with the types of question options available:

• ​Custom Question categories:
  • ​Short Answer
  • ​Multiple Choice
  • ​Appointment Scheduling
  • Conditional Answer
• ​Personal Information fields:
  • ​Phone Number
  • ​Email
  • ​Address
  • ​Country
  • ​Province/State
  • ​City
  • ​Name
  • ​First Name
  • ​Last Name
  • ​Gender

Users can add up to 10 custom questions, whereas LinkedIn only allows you three. That doesn’t mean you should necessarily add all of these questions; there’s plenty of research that shows conversions drop off as fields are added. But if you can make a business case for using more questions, you have the ability on TikTok forms.

As with most releases that promise to make advertising platforms more viable, we’ll be in testing mode at JDM. If you’re curious to hear how the TikTok HubSpot integration is playing out in our client campaigns, drop us a note!