By Brianne Garrett

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 …read more