Invisalign captured leads on TikTok before ever asking for them. The brand built a Smile Quiz directly into its ad, letting users gauge whether the product fit them — and nearly a third more people completed the form, at a lower cost per lead. The campaign moved past the vanity KPI of "people liked it" and built an actual pipeline.

Anny Havercroft, TikTok's global head of product marketing communications and industry enablement, wants more marketers to work this way. "I'm helping advertisers learn how to turn TikTok into a demand engine," she says of her role. She has spent nearly five years building TikTok's B2B lead gen playbook, first across APAC and now globally, and has identified common patterns — and common missed opportunities.

Four Opportunities That Turn Campaigns Into Demand-Gen Drivers

1. Focus on Readiness, Not Reach

TikTok counts more than a billion monthly users, and treating that number as the whole pitch is tempting. "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: how far someone watches a video, a like or share, or what product they search for by name. Invisalign's Smile Quiz generated its own signal, using a card-layout quiz users completed without leaving TikTok. The results: a 28% higher form submission rate, an 11% lower cost per acquisition, and a 133% higher landing page load-and-finish rate, meaning far fewer people abandoned the quiz partway through.

Pro tip: Build in mechanisms like quizzes, qualifying questions, and deep-funnel tracking to identify who is actually ready to become a customer.

2. Leverage More Than One Content Format

TikTok describes the customer journey as "watch it, love it, want it" — discovery, consideration, and action within a single experience. Havercroft advises against forcing users down a rigid, linear path or building for a single lead-gen format.

Businesses can capture leads through their own website with pixels and APIs, or through TikTok's native instant forms, which create a self-contained in-app experience like Invisalign's quiz. For pre-qualification or consultations, messaging ads and call ads are options. Advertisers unsure which format performs best can use TikTok's built-in test-and-learn solution, which runs multiple formats simultaneously and surfaces the winner.

Format also depends on funnel stage:

• TopView video ads appear when users first open the app. They generate demand early, which makes mid-funnel formats more efficient because prospects arrive already primed.
• Consideration ads target the middle of the funnel, identifying audiences based on prior interactions with a brand or category.
• Commerce tools like catalog ads and TikTok Shop close the loop for advertisers selling online.

Spot Pet Insurance, a leading U.S. online pet insurer, used this range to its advantage. Instead of optimizing only for form submissions, it tracked quote requests and completed payments — following leads all the way to purchase. The result: 23% more qualified leads and a 19% lower cost per lead.

Pro tip: Match the ad format to the funnel stage.

3. Take the Time to Nurture Leads

Havercroft compares letting leads go cold to a 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."

Toyota Germany built its TikTok lead-gen strategy around the full car-buying journey — online browsing, video watching, and eventually booking a test drive — and 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.

This is where TikTok's integration with HubSpot matters. Data syncs in both directions: campaign-level insights flow into HubSpot, and HubSpot's lifecycle data flows back to help TikTok optimize toward audiences most likely to convert, not just 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: Route every lead into a nurture program based on where it sits in the customer lifecycle.

4. Treat 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. Because creator content reads as organic rather than promotional, it tends to earn engagement that actually converts.

Gana Energia, a Spanish energy provider, tested this. Alongside brand-produced assets explaining energy cost management and provider switching, it sourced creator-led content through TikTok One, then ran an A/B test and scaled the winner. The creator-led content won. The campaign drove a 632% increase in total lead volume and cut cost per lead by 64.5%.

Havercroft's advice for brands intimidated by creator partnerships: "Brief them as you would a creative partner" — give clear context on the business problem and campaign objective, and trust creators to translate the message for their own audience. She adds that the strongest creator-led lead gen campaigns pair authenticity with a clear call to action, and 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.

A Five-Step Framework for TikTok Lead Gen

Havercroft recommends this framework for any brand building a TikTok lead-gen strategy from scratch:

1. Start with a clear business outcome. Define what a qualified lead looks like, then settle on a campaign objective, formats, and optimization settings.
2. Build a real creative supply. Combine brand assets, authorized creator content, and TikTok One collaborations to test what performs best.
3. Establish high-quality signals. Connect pixels, APIs, and CRM platforms like HubSpot so the campaign optimizes against genuinely qualified leads.
4. Follow platform best practices. Set daily budgets, keep creative fresh, and combine AI-powered automation with human expertise.
5. Measure, analyze, and scale. Continuously review performance reports and shift spend toward what's working.

TikTok's Smart+ automates much of the optimization work that used to require manual testing, notes Havercroft, freeing marketers to focus on creative and strategy rather than spreadsheet-level campaign management.

The Common Thread: A Clean CRM Connection

A thread runs through all four missed opportunities: a clean connection between campaign data and a brand's CRM. HubSpot's native TikTok integration lets marketers sync, manage, and measure TikTok ads and organic content inside Marketing Hub, targeting audiences by lifecycle stage, deal history, and purchase behavior. Users can also schedule and publish organic TikTok content alongside other channels, with Breeze AI generating captions, managing comments, and building unified campaign reports.

Campaign-level insights sync with HubSpot automatically, and lifecycle data feeds back into TikTok's optimization. Advertisers don't choose between platform-native signals and their own customer data — information flows both ways, so teams can run campaigns that drive real results.

Source: HubSpot Marketing Blog (https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/running-tiktok-campaigns-with-impact) / Source: ads.tiktok.com (https://ads.tiktok.com/business/en/inspiration/invisalign-smile-quiz-lead-generation)