Original media post: https://letschuhai.com/globalstar-tiktok-marketing
Why Creator Marketing Matters
The global influencer marketing market was projected to reach $13.8 billion in 2021. While still relatively small compared with the more than $450 billion global digital advertising market, creator marketing offers brands an alternative way to reach consumers as traditional paid acquisition becomes increasingly competitive, advertising restrictions become more sophisticated, and platforms move toward greater automation.
For Global Star, creator marketing enables Chinese brands expanding overseas to communicate directly with international consumers in a more localized and authentic way, strengthening brand awareness and influence.
Founded in 2020, Global Star had teams across Vancouver, London, Beijing, and Shanghai, focusing on content marketing and creator campaigns for brands entering the North American market. Its core services included social media KOL campaigns and content production, serving brands such as PatPat, Urban Revivo, Florasis, and Ecovacs across fashion, beauty, and consumer electronics.
Building a Strong Creator Network
At the time, Global Star had:
- 116 exclusively contracted North American creators, with audiences ranging from 300K to 7M+
- 5,000+ contracted international creators
- 50,000+ creators and KOCs in deeper collaborations
- Coverage across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other major platforms
From Creator Selection to Localized Execution
How should brands build a creator marketing strategy—and measure its impact?
Global Star’s approach was to first understand each brand’s objectives, whether focused on reach, ROI, CPR, or other performance metrics, and then develop a tailored campaign strategy.
Creators were selected through Global Star’s proprietary creator database and refined through human expertise and market knowledge. Global Star’s China and overseas teams worked together throughout the process, from creator selection and content production to campaign execution, ensuring content was properly localized for each market.
Solving the Challenges of Overseas Creator Marketing
Creator marketing involves many variables. Common challenges in overseas markets included low creator response rates, opaque pricing, and inefficient campaign execution.
William Ren, Founder & CEO of Global Star, identified the company’s overseas professional teams as a key advantage. By directly contracting and negotiating with international creators, Global Star achieved approximately a 90% creator outreach rate, while securing 10–50% negotiation savings with creators under deeper commercial partnerships.
At the time, Global Star reported that its monthly revenue had grown nearly 100× since January, with revenue generated primarily through campaign commissions, service fees, and content production. The company was also expanding into livestream commerce.
TikTok: An Early-Mover Opportunity
According to the Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2021, 68% of surveyed brands used Instagram for influencer marketing, followed by TikTok at 45%.
TikTok was already becoming a major growth channel in Global Star’s campaigns, particularly for reaching Gen Z audiences.
William believed brands were rapidly increasing their TikTok investment, but cautioned that it was still early to evaluate the platform purely through ROI. In North America, TikTok’s shopping features were still developing, and the conversion journey was not yet fully established.
However, TikTok offered a significant advantage: lower traffic costs and more affordable reach compared with other platforms.
Global Star observed that a CPR above 1% on TikTok was already considered a strong result at the time. Brands were also beginning to evaluate creator campaigns through broader signals, including website traffic and growth in Google searches.
As TikTok’s commercial infrastructure matured and conversion capabilities improved, Global Star believed brands that established an early presence could gain a meaningful advantage.
Human Expertise Meets Automation
As more companies developed integrated creator marketing platforms to match brands with creators and evaluate campaign performance, the industry began moving toward greater automation.
The Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2021 showed a divided market: 56% believed influencer marketing could be automated, while 44% disagreed.
William’s view was that creator marketing remained a highly people-driven business and would be difficult to replace through automation in the short term. However, he also recognized that automation would inevitably become a major direction for the industry’s future.
For Global Star, the long-term opportunity was clear: combine local market expertise and human relationships with technology to make global creator marketing more efficient, scalable, and measurable.
