While TikTok had reached “most downloaded app” status by 2018, it wasn’t until 2020 when the social network really became enmeshed in our cultural fabric. TikTok was a major way that people connected during the pandemic as spontaneous bouts of choreography broke out all over the globe. Of course, where there is engagement, there is influencer marketing. But in 2020, the tools for finding influencers on TikTok were few and far between.
At the same time, there were a handful of digital marketers who thought to strike before the proverbial iron got hot. Before she started Ubiquitous, Jess Flack was one of those people. As the senior manager for performance marketing at another startup, she was convinced that she could get much more for her money on TikTok than on Instagram. Absent any suitable tools for TikTok influencer discovery, and remaining thoroughly unimpressed with the agencies she contacted, Flack went old school and conducted her search manually. She spent hours on TikTok (who doesn’t?) finding, negotiating with, and activating more than 200 influencers for her campaign. The TL;DR here is that this strategy worked beyond her expectations, and the success inspired her to go her own way. Ubiquitous, the influencer marketing agency with a TikTok focus, was born.
Fast forward another year: Flack’s agency is crushing it, attracting client after client while building a portfolio of influencers that reliably deliver results. Ubiquitous attracted major clients: Disney, Amazon, Netflix, J.Crew, Target, and more. It’s kind of an insane list of clients, each one a household name. That list serves as social proof for the next big client to say yes, but it also serves as a deterrent for smaller brands that want to advertise on TikTok but don’t know where to start. If you’re a small business with a Shopify storefront, say, you’ll see that list of clients and think, “This agency is too big for me.” And you’d be right, which is why Flack decided to add a self service platform to their offerings.
By early 2022, she hired a Chief Product Officer, Charlie Gann, who led the charge of creating the platform. Taking it slow, the first iteration was for internal use only; as it became more of a daily tool they shared it with clients, who became their beta testers. As they continued to refine the platform and its function, Ubiquitous took the final step in making sure their new creation would be a best-in-class product, forming a partnership with TikTok itself. This gave them API access to more and better data, as well as the access to soon add the 800k influencers registered in the TikTok Marketplace to their own database. This would mix with the 50k or so they’ve already vetted and added to the platform in the course of their agency’s own campaigns. They added Instagram and Youtube to metrics to round out the offering and, with everything in place, Ubiquitous is ready for wider access—and, they hope, to literally live up to its name.
Pricing
True to its intent, Ubiquitous prices itself very competitively, and should be within the budget of just about small business.
- Free Plan, $0/mo — For the smallest of the small, or for someone who wants to try Ubiquitous out, the free plan lets you search creators, but will only show you the first 10 results of that search. You can also run up to 10 brand analyses and track up to 10 URLs each month. These URLs are for the TikTok posts your influencers create; the tracking is to monitor performance.
- Premium Plan, $29/mo — This unlocks it all: unlimited search results, brand analyses, and URLS to track. Also: unlimited campaigns to manage, up to 3 additional team members, and customer support.
Note that the Premium Plan offers a free month if you pay for the whole year up front at $319/year.
The Details
Your first time logging into Ubiquitous will be underwhelming: the main page is a dashboard showing you the metrics on any of the URLs you’re tracking, but as it’s your first time there are no URLs yet. The sea of white is not the best welcome, but it’s also temporary—and uphill from there. What’s great here is that these URLS don’t have to link to your own campaign’s content. Right off the bat, you can enter the public URLs of, say, your competitors’ TikTok content and get some intel as you’re building out your own campaigns. Do this, and then the second time you log in your welcome screen looks like business intelligence, which it is.
As this is just a dashboard, you’re getting an overview of aggregate performance over the time period specified. Not seen in the screenshot, below the graph, is a list of any active campaigns you’re tracking. Each item in the list has the same summary of metrics laid out, and you can click into the campaign to get more information about the financials: the cost of the campaign and as well as the CPM for the whole thing and for each creator that participated.
Creating campaigns is pretty simple, as the campaigns themselves are really just a way to organize all the URLs you’ll be tracking. It’s important to remember that Ubiquitous isn’t an automation tool, rather it’s more about organization and efficiency. If you’re a small shop doing things manually—scrolling endlessly through TikTok and copying and pasting all the data into a spreadsheet—Ubiquitous is going to make your life noticeably easier.
That ease extends to the creator search function: if you were to try and discover influencers in your particular niche on TikTok, you’d have a hell of a time. Keywords only take you so far: the app is designed for you to scroll and discover by chance (read: it’s a time suck). If you were to look at any other platform offering TikTok search, you’d be looking at spending a lot more money. But with Ubiquitous, you’re able to do a fairly targeted search, using category keywords, average views, regions, genders, and a few other criteria. It takes only a few minutes to populate your screen with a narrower field of candidates to choose from. And you’re able to search through YouTube and Instagram, as well.
Because of TikTok’s data restrictions on its API, you’ll only get some basic metrics from the platform, but clicking on a creator in Ubiquitous will bring you to their TikTok feed so you can get an idea of their content’s quality. One feature we’d like to see is the ability to create lists of influencers. As it’s set up now, you’ll still need some external tool to keep track of the influencers you’re interested in. Again, at $29/mo it’s totally reasonable that there are no IRM tools that handle the negotiation/contracts/messaging, etc. Making a button that adds a creator to a list so the user doesn’t have to leave the platform also seems reasonable.
Even with the want of this feature, Ubiquitous is a no-lose proposition for small brands who don’t need to monitor more than 10 influencer posts at a time (it’s free!). The Brand Analysis feature—which gives insights into what other companies are up to with their influencer marketing—is also available at the free level, an option which we were pleasantly surprised by. The premium level, which lifts all restrictions, still fits in all budgets. The campaign monitoring is light years beyond what the platform’s target audience will be used to, eliminating hours of data collation that would have otherwise been necessary.
Conclusion
While still a work in progress, Ubiquitous is still progress for small brands. What they’ve done is worth celebrating: addressing a market need for a segment that’s pretty much left out of the TikTok marketing scene at the moment. And, the platform is still in its infancy—besides no software is ever “complete.” Especially with SaaS, updates are always coming, and we’re excited to see what else Ubiquitous might have in store for the future. That said, we hope they don’t add too many bells and whistles because that could mean price hikes. Even within its minimalism, we do think the market they’re targeting with this will benefit from its use right now, and well into the future.
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