Before Invisalign ever captured a lead on TikTok, it generated pre-qualified interest with a Smile Quiz built right into the ad. The payoff: nearly a third more people finished the form, at a lower cost per lead. The campaign aimed and succeeded at going far beyond the vanity KPI of “people liked it.” It created an actual pipeline.
Anny Havercroft, TikTok’s global head of product marketing communications and industry enablement, wants more marketers to think this way.
“I’m helping advertisers learn how to turn TikTok into a demand engine,” she says of her role. TikTok is a place to be discovered, but it’s also an opportunity to close the funnel, whether you’re running a B2C campaign like Invisalign’s or building B2B demand, and whether your leads land in a spreadsheet or sync straight into HubSpot.
Havercroft has spent nearly five years building TikTok’s B2B lead gen playbook, first across APAC, and now globally. Over the years, she’s seen common patterns emerge across lead generation strategies. Here are the most impactful opportunities marketers may miss.
Opportunities That Transform Ordinary Campaigns Into Demand-gen Drivers
1. Focusing on Readiness Instead of Reach
TikTok has more than a billion monthly users, and it’s tempting to treat that number as the whole pitch. “It can be very easy to think about it as a reach play when you’re generating demand,” says Havercroft, “but actually it is about the quality of our community and how the engagement of our audiences actually turns into some really well-qualified leads.”
That quality comes down to signals, not impressions. A signal can be anything from how far someone watches a video, to a like or a share, to what product or category they search for by name. “That’s what we’re seeing — brands and businesses that can read the signals generate those quality leads through the actions our communities are doing on an everyday basis,” she says.
Invisalign took this idea a step further and designed a campaign that generated its own signal. With its Smile Quiz, rather than asking people to fill out a form cold, the brand built a card-layout quiz directly into its ad — something that people could complete without ever leaving TikTok.
The quiz let interested users answer a few questions to determine if Invisalign was actually right for them, effectively pre-qualifying leads. The result was a 28% higher form submission rate and an 11% lower cost per acquisition than previous campaigns. The quiz also had a 133% higher landing page load-and-finish rate, meaning far fewer people abandoned the quiz partway through.
Pro tip: Start building in mechanisms, like quizzes, qualifying questions, and deep-funnel tracking. These checkpoints tell you who’s actually ready to become a customer.
2. Leveraging More Than One TikTok Content Format
TikTok describes the customer journey as “watch it, love it, want it,” reflecting how discovery, consideration, and action can happen seamlessly within a single experience. The goal is to create a seamless user experience. To keep the process frictionless, marketers should avoid forcing users down a rigid, linear path. Instead of building for a single lead-gen format, Havercroft suggests that teams leverage TikTok’s wide range of tools built for different points in the buyer journey.
At the most basic level, businesses can capture leads through their own website, using pixels and APIs to track conversions. Or, they do it through TikTok’s native instant forms, which create a self-contained, in-app experience like Invisalign’s quiz.
For businesses that need to pre-qualify or offer a consultation before a lead is truly warm, there are also messaging ads and call ads. And, for advertisers who aren’t sure which format will perform best, TikTok offers a built-in test-and-learn solution that runs multiple formats simultaneously and surfaces the winner.
Format also depends on where in the funnel a brand is trying to play.
- TopView video ads are shown when users first open the app. These ads sit at the top of the funnel, but Havercroft says it does double duty: By generating demand early, it makes mid-funnel formats more efficient, since prospects arrive at a consideration ad already primed.
- Consideration ads target the middle of the funnel. They identify audiences based on how they’ve already interacted with a brand or category.
- At the bottom of the funnel, commerce tools like catalog ads and TikTok Shop close the loop entirely for advertisers selling online.
Spot Pet Insurance, one of the leading online pet insurers in the U.S., used this range to its advantage. Instead of optimizing just for form submissions, it tracked quote requests and completed payments — following leads all the way to purchase. The result qA 23% more qualified leads and a 19% lower cost per lead.
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Pro tip: Match the ad format to the funnel stage.
3. Taking the Time to Nurture Leads
Havercroft compares letting leads go cold to a modern dating faux pas. “You’re out there, you’ve got someone’s number… and you are ghosted,” she says. “It is a baffling conundrum why people generate leads and let them go cold.”
Havercroft praises Toyota Germany for dating to marry. Prospective car buyers move through a long journey that looks like online browsing, watching videos, and eventually booking a test drive — and each stage calls for different content. Rather than ghosting, it built its TikTok lead-gen strategy around that journey. Then, the team fed every lead into its existing CRM nurture programs rather than treating TikTok as a standalone channel. The result was a 38% decrease in cost per acquisition.
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This is when the integration between TikTok and HubSpot shines. It syncs data in both directions: Campaign-level insights from TikTok flow into HubSpot, and HubSpot’s own customer lifecycle data flows back to help TikTok optimize toward the audiences most likely to convert, not just the audiences most likely to click.
“That is what a great handoff looks like,” Havercroft says, “that loop that kind of feeds the two parts of those systems.”
Pro tip: Plan for relationships, routing every lead into a nurture program based on where it sits in the customer lifecycle.
4. Recognizing Creator-led Growth as a Lead Gen Lever
“Creators are really the superpower and the hero of our community,” says Havercroft. Yet, some marketers reach for them last. That’s a missed opportunity. Creators provide “relevancy and connectivity to our audiences,” according to Havercroft. Because creator content reads as organic rather than promotional, it tends to earn the kind of engagement that actually converts.
Gana Energia, an energy provider based in Spain, succeeded in testing this theory. The brand wanted to educate its audience on managing energy costs and switching providers. In addition to brand-produced assets explaining the basics, it sourced creator-led content through TikTok One.
Gana Energia then ran an A/B test between the two approaches, scaling whichever format and messaging drove the strongest results. The creator-led content won. The campaign as a whole drove a 632% increase in total lead volume and cut cost per lead by 64.5%.
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Havercroft’s advice for brands intimidated by creator partnerships: “Brief them as you would a creative partner,” she says. That means giving them clear context about the business problem and campaign objective, trusting them to translate that message in a way that’s native to their own audience.
Havercroft also notes that the strongest creator-led lead gen campaigns pair authenticity with a clear call to action. Routes like affiliate incentives give engagement somewhere concrete to go.
Pro tip: Brief creators on the business objective, give them creative flexibility, and test their content directly against brand-produced assets.
Putting It All Together: A 5-step Framework
The four opportunities above can level up marketing campaigns. Building them into your marketing can help your team build good habits from the start. Here’s the five-step framework Havercroft recommends for any brand building a TikTok lead-gen strategy from scratch:
- Start with a clear business outcome. Define what a qualified lead looks like from the outset. Then, marketers can settle on a campaign objective, pick the right formats, and optimize settings.
- Build a real creative supply. Savvy marketers build campaigns that combine brand assets, authorized creator content, and TikTok One collaborations with creators. A diverse creative mix allows teams to test different formats and see what performs best.
- Establish high-quality signals. Connect pixels, APIs, and CRM platforms like HubSpot so the campaign is optimizing against genuinely qualified leads.
- Follow platform best practices. Set daily budgets and keep creative fresh. Then, combine AI-powered automation with human expertise to drive better results while reducing manual effort.
- Measure, analyze, and scale. Continuously review performance reports and shift spend toward what’s actually working.
TikTok’s Smart+ automates much of the optimization work that used to require manual testing, notes Havercroft. Marketers can now focus on creative and strategy rather than tedious, spreadsheet-level campaign management.
How TikTok and HubSpot Native Ad Integration Can Help
HubSpot’s native TikTok integration lets you sync, manage, and measure both TikTok ads and organic content directly inside Marketing Hub. That means campaigns aren’t starting from scratch. Marketers can target audiences based on lifecycle stage, deal history, and purchase behavior.
Beyond ads, you can schedule and publish organic TikTok content alongside every other channel. Users also get access to Breeze AI, which can generate captions, manage comments, and build unified campaign reports.
Earning Attention on TikTok
There’s a thread running through these missed opportunities, and it points to one underlying need: a clean connection between campaign data and a brand’s CRM.
HubSpot’s TikTok integration is designed to help marketers understand what ads are working. Campaign-level insights sync with HubSpot automatically, and HubSpot’s lifecycle and nurture data feeds back into TikTok’s optimization. Advertisers aren’t choosing between platform-native signals and their own customer data.
Information flows both ways, so teams can run campaigns that drive real results.
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