Video: Peak Prep Unpacked: Holiday Tactics for TikTok Success | Duration: 3312s | Summary: Peak Prep Unpacked: Holiday Tactics for TikTok Success

Transcript for "Peak Prep Unpacked: Holiday Tactics for TikTok Success": Alright. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Peak Prep Unpacked, holiday TikToks for TikTok shop success. Before we get things started, I'm gonna give everyone a couple of minutes to hop on, see if there's an engagement in the chat. Okay. Hi. Welcome. Good to see everyone so excited to be here. My name is Meg. I'm a senior partner manager here at ShipBob. I'm joined today by unsociable, Grow, Trendsetters and Avenue Z. Give everyone a couple more minutes and then I'm gonna let the speakers introduce themselves. So let's see. We have some more folks joining. And shout out where you're calling in from in the chat. We've got quite a ride array of cool. Yeah. Toronto, Ontario. Awesome. Ben is coming in from Scotland. We got okay. Kansas City, Missouri. Yep. Jake's in KCMO. LA. It wouldn't be a TikTok webinar if there wasn't someone from LA joining. Toronto. Oh, strong Canadian representation. Awesome. Cool. Okay. So we can get started. I will let the speakers introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about their company. Ben from Insociable, I'm gonna have you go first. Okay. Thank you very much for having me on one of these again, Meg. It was a blast last time. So, appreciate the time, and it's an honor to be on with so many amazing, people involved with Tech Talk. So, yeah, thanks. Just as a kinda brief backstory to, like, my crazy journey into the world of Tech Talk, I used to run a content marketing business before we were unsociable. And when Tech Talk became a thing and everyone was using it, all my team were like, Ben, you need to try this thing. Like, it's amazing. It'll totally blow your mind. So, eventually, I succumb to peer pressure, and I download the app. And within 5 minutes, I knew I love Mexican food. I knew which soccer team I supported. I knew I love pro wrestling, and I was just totally mind blown by this app. So I was like, okay. I need to do something with this. So we started making content for ourselves on Sociable as a business because we thought we need to promote for ourselves before we can make it to brands. So that's what we did. That blew up. I ended up as a character on the page called Grumpy's Scotch Boss, and I became Bubba thing on TikTok. And from there, just went on, like, in a windy journey towards TikTok shop, ended up becoming one of the top rate partners in the UK, and then we launched in the US earlier last year. So that's in a nutshell. Crazy journey, but a pleasure to be here. Thanks. Thanks, Ben. Yeah. We're so happy to have you here. David from Avenue z. I'll let you go next. Yeah. Sure. Thanks. Again, also a pleasure to be here. This is my first one of these, but it's it's quite exciting because I love the topic so much. I'm, Dave Carchato from Avenue z. I'm a cofounder, and, actually, I lead our analytics practice as well. So I have a long history as a CTO building code, writing code for ad tech systems. And so now at Avenue z, what we do is we really focus on 2 things. One is revenue, and the other is reputation. So, ultimately, we're doing one of those two things for every customer that we have. On the reputation side, we think about how we're gonna get people in the Wall Street Journal. And from a revenue side, we think about how we're gonna grow ecommerce sales across all social channels, particularly social commerce and TikTok. So happy to talk about all the different topics and all the different things we do. But I'm happy also to be digging into TikTok, which is absolutely, the sort of most, I'd say, exciting opportunity in social commerce we've had in a long time. Thanks, David. Yeah. So happy to have you here. And then Jake from Trendsetters. How's it going, everyone? Thanks so much for having me. I'm just the idiot in charge here at Trendsetters. Looked my way into cofounding or founding this business. We've been referred to by, other folks as the TikTok grandparents, which I just don't know if I like that or not, but it probably accurately illustrates our relationship with platform. Amanda, one of our partners in the business, she was big time on Muscial. Ly. I happen to just luck my way again going to high school with her, brought her into the business. She's built out our influencer team from 0. I, at the time, was early in the days of, social media, you know, selling Snapchat and then Musically. And then as that evolved into TikTok, we've been a TikTok agency since as soon as it was kind of a thing. So, you know, we've got a large sizable gen z team. Fives are always good. Based here in Kansas City. Got some folks all across the country and overseas. And, yeah, excited to dig into it today. Yeah. Thanks, Jake. And then finally, Ryan from Grove to round things out. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Excited to be here. I am the director of TikTok shop and affiliate at Grow. Grow is a full scale digital agency, creative, anything you can imagine we can service. Roots come from SEO, for the agency itself, then we've been expanding a lot over the last few years as, you know, interest deems it relevant, and TikTok is definitely the interest, that we're seeing in in all the brands that we're talking with. So my background is more on the affiliate side traditionally. That's what I was brought into to build and scale here as a as a channel. And, the way that we approach TikTok is it is eating into that affiliate ecosystem because it's so much easier to to run a TikTok page than it is to to run a blog like people used to. So, the way that we approach referral and partnership marketing very much leans into TikTok and, you know, we're we've spent a lot of time and energy figuring this one out and, you know, excited to share our learnings. Yeah. Thanks, Ryan. We get a ton of questions from our brands about affiliate and affiliate management, so really looking forward to kinda diving into that topic specifically. Let's get started with our first question. You know, high level, what are the anticipated trends brands should be aware of for the upcoming TikTok holiday promotions, and how can brands leverage these trends to boost their shop's visibility? And then if we wanna just go based on the order of introductions too. So, Ben, if you wanna kick things off. Sure. That's no problem. I think, all of my peers here will probably agree that one of the biggest trends that the platform is pushing at the moment is towards live shopping. That's because it's been such a huge thing on, which is the Chinese equivalent of TikTok. That's a few years ahead of the UK and the US version, TikTok shop. So live shopping isn't coming. It's here. We've seen the record for most GMV generated on a live continue and it's gonna be a huge thing and probably the biggest trend to take to keep your eye on and invest in on the platform coming up. Sure. So I'll go next. I think look, there's a there's a lot of cool things that TikTok's rolling out so often. It's hard to keep up sometimes. But, for me, I think one of the most important changes is the fact that right now, paid is everything. It's mandatory. And ultimately, it was not that long ago that organic content was so king. It was, you know, creating FOMO amongst brands. You had to really do a good job organic. Then you before you can even start thinking about other things, you had to get that engagement, then viral affiliate, etcetera. But now you need to pay for amplification or you need to use something like GMD Max. That's like the new, version of Meta's advantage in shopping campaigns and same as, like, Google's Pmax. So to be successful, I think really recently, you need to invest in paid media. Yeah. I think trend wise, there's, there's a lot to cover from a, like, a lever perspective, like, livestream affiliate. I don't think you need, me to tell you any of that. Like, just do the things that other people are doing well on TikTok shop. Like, the those are the obvious ones. What I think TikTok shop gets us maybe a little bit further away from is, like, actual platform trends. Like, who are the hot rising influencers culturally? What are the things happening like in the world that are then becoming micro audiences inside of TikTok? Obviously, with the name trendsetters, it's a blessing and a curse. We spend a lot of time thinking about trends. And for us, it's always about reverse engineering consumer trends into marketing trends, irregardless of season. You know, so like Beyonce drops a country album, sweet, we have a hat brand, immediately, how do we start doing like this country girl, new vibe for the summer? That was like a big thing for us. And then influencer popping off, sweet. How do we go collab with them while they're hitting their peak fame to launch like a custom product for them? So we're always thinking about the comment section of your TikTok page or pages and the top influencers in your category and letting the comment section, like, tell you where to go trend wise. Yeah. For us, I think, it's gonna be more indicative of broader promotional strategy and how brands are approaching their discounting for for the season. I think what we're seeing is a lot of brands are expecting to start a lot earlier, not only because Black Friday and and Cyber Monday and the whole holiday period has been shifting earlier and earlier each year, but also the the testing nature of TikTok shop, being able to identify creators that can drive awareness, the creators that can drive conversions. I think a lot of our brands are looking at leaning into TikTok specific promotions that might not be widely available on-site and using, you know, a nuanced creator strategy to create moments of urgency and not have to wait for everything to happen on that one weekend. So I think just being able to diversify the the moments that you have between October November and use it as more of a prospecting funnel to then drive conversions throughout the entire period. Great. Thanks, everyone. Next question. TikTok is an amazing tool to both drive discovery and lower acquisition costs. Especially as we enter the busy holiday season, what are the some of the best practices to make sure you're reaching the right audience on TikTok? This is a question that we get a lot. You know? Is it is it better to go broad, or is it better to go sort of targeted? And what are the best practices around that strategy? Yeah. I think it's a great question. It's a tough one to answer because it really does depend on the size of the brand, and how much budget you've got to play with. I think that building on the point that Jake made in the last instance, like, you need to tap into the trends that are happening on the platform at the time and realize, like, who your audience is that's going to be purchasing those trends and then just drilling really deep into those. Like, I'll give you an example of one that's trended at the minute, hyaluronic acid. We have a brand that's doing that. It's huge at the moment. There's a very specific type of consumer that's most likely to consume this. So dive really deep into that for if you're a brand like that. But if you're a massive skincare brand with a massive range, then you might look at it and approach it very differently. So I think that you need to think of these facts. Think about where you're at in market, what's your product range like, and then you can think about, okay, like, are are there different audiences that I should be looking at, or am I drilling really deep into 1 audience? So I I think for us, because I I do think about when I think about social commerce and just going back to that comment about the size of the brand, size of the brand, the number of channels that you're on, I do think you need to think about that holistically. You really need to be everywhere. But sticking purely to TikTok, you know, there's a lot that you can do within the toolset. Ultimately, there's targeting tools that you can take advantage of. They're they're improving every single day. You can do things now, like uploading custom audiences. You can upload email custom audiences. Like, for example, from Klaviyo, I think the integration is even real time now. It's not just about text and CSV files. You can do lookalike lookalike audiences. Ultimately, you wanna capitalize on their shopping features by using shops, using products, product links, things like that, dynamic ads, creating seamless and entertaining shopping experiences, reducing the friction, things of that sort. And then, of course, understanding any type of seasonal trends. Right? Monitoring and engaging, holiday specific trends, music, hashtags, challenges. There's just so much, and you really gotta remember, about the entertainment aspect of of the work that you're doing. And I should say sort of the entertainment specifically that your community is looking for. Yeah. I'd love to know in in the chat for anyone listening in, does anyone here have more than one TikTok page for their brands? And if it's not active, doesn't count. Or if you're just holding the handle, it doesn't count. Like, I'd love to know because organic social on TikTok was the reason why you got into TikTok years ago. That's why in 2020, we convinced a lot of enterprise corporate brands to jump on there, some Gen Z and so on. And, like, that was the reason why whether you're a creator or a brand, you would get in there. And we've kind of moved away from that. And I think it's important to understand that the For You page algorithm that has now become the case for every social platform, by the way. It does an incredible job at reaching niche specific micro markets. If you wanna reach 25 year old guys in the Midwest interested in fishing like me, you you can go do that. It's really easy to do that just through organic. But if you're trying to go mass market, that's where it actually hurts you. Think about for a protein powder brand, if you're trying to go mass market, some of your customers are gonna be older, some are gonna be guys, interested in a guy working out, girls working out. Like, so showing a bodybuilder doing heavy deadlifts, girl that's 19 years old in college probably doesn't wanna see how this jack dude is deadlifting £650. But inversely, someone like me that would love to be able to do that, probably never will be, would love to see that. But then when you post a big booty glute workout, here's how to get your hamstrings rocking for this summer, I could care less. I'm gonna neglect my legs like most guys do in the gym. So really lean into organic social. Don't be afraid to create 3, 5, 7, 10 different TikTok pages custom to each target audience you wanna go after. Yeah. I think along those lines, there there's not one approach that's gonna work in any given time, and I think, you know, TikTok shop and these, like, creator campaigns also need to be thought of in, like, a campaign mindset. You know, just specifically related to how we're approaching, the holiday period, there's going to be the creators that are gonna be great for driving awareness, prospecting, you know, a little bit more niche that are gonna get your brand in front of, the right people, but, you know, might not be the the best converting creators where there's also going to people that are a little bit broader, but are great at making those conversion commerce focused, you know, videos and content and and hosting live streams that they're gonna be able to get people over the line. So thinking of it in the campaign mindset and activating the right creators at the right time, and not focusing so much on just your niche, but, you know, how you can activate these different groups, to broaden your reach without diluting your message. I'm gonna go off script for a little for one question. Just jumping off Ben's point about hyaluronic acid. Any trends you're seeing consumer side that you're excited about going into the holiday season, actually, like products that are being launched, new verticals that are coming up? I'm just kinda curious. We, you know, this is open to the open to discussion. Something that I'll probably get most ecommerce brands pretty excited about is on TikTok shop, like, bundling and boxes, really works well. And, obviously, it solves an issue for most brands and that if your AOV is pretty low, you're struggling. So that's a welcome trend for a lot of brands, and there's lots of creative things that you can do to get a product viral by pairing different items from your product set together. Yeah. Over here, we're working on trying to do, you know, across multiple brands at a higher level on TikTok shop, doing holiday bundles with a little bit of this and a little bit of that, exclusive to the TikTok shop platform. I think doing things exclusive to TikTok shop is always beneficial and in holiday season could be even more so because you could just bundle up the, you know, 3 of the top brands and like the snack candy category. And now you got a perfect holiday gift that everyone would go crazy about. And, and you could do this, rinse and repeat for so many things, but that's, I think the uniqueness of the platform that, like, you're never gonna see that necessarily on Amazon. And you're not gonna see that on the brand's webs Shopify site. It's a little too complicated to do. It's like an easy lift in TikTok shop that that I think a lot of brands could do. Cool. Yeah. Fantastic. Ryan or David, anything to add before next question? I would have jumped in and doubled down on Ben's point as well. Bundling is gonna be massive. You know, just be able to get those card sizes up and and capitalize on the moment when people are kind of looking to spend money versus spending as a reaction to content, and along with Jake as well. Yeah. I I think, I think we kinda covered it. Fantastic. Alright. What strategy should brands use to optimize their TikTok shop? Oh, sorry. Already I have already gotten that one. Question 4. How should brands be optimizing ad spend for TikTok holiday campaigns? What metrics should they focus on to make sure budget is spent effectively? Sorry about that. I think, I think I'll let other guys drive on the data side of things, and I'll just start, like, top level. It's gonna be all about those creators that you work with. It's how you brief them. It's how you work with them. It's how you incentivize them. Because at the end of the day, the most important thing when you're running ads is the creative. And I'm sure most people would agree with me on that front. So the better creative that you can get from affiliates on the platform, it's just gonna have a knock on effect on everything else and make those key metrics much much easier to maintain. So that that's what I would prioritize first and foremost, if I was a brand. Yeah. I would, you know, there's an easy way to do this, right, with GMV Max. Right? You can prioritize. You can set your ROAS, and you can you can get all your targets, and that'll manage all your organic and create all your ads and everything. So I think that's sort of the most obvious way about how you can start achieving goals through paid ads. But if you're not thinking about that and maybe you don't wanna pay it because, ultimately, you you start to pay for everything. Right? You start even, like, sort of those that organic work gets counted within your ad spend. So there's a real impact on your sales and your revenue when that happens. But if you have the talent, if you have the team, if you have the agency, then, you know, I would say that you focus on your high intent audiences. You know, to me, that's always something that is important no matter what channel you're on. Or focus on that. Focus on inverting the marketing funnel, so to speak, using email, using things, like paid ads as well as email and sort of uploading it and sort of constantly inching people forward, making sure you're using performance metrics like ROAS and CPA, cost of acquisition, CTR, the the obvious ones, the ones everyone knows. And I think that also in testing and iterating, AD tests, different different ad creatives, targeting options, all that stuff. I think that all those things that we've known is that's really important. It's still important now. But I do think that there is a really nice option for us in the form of g d f GBMX. Yeah. I think when it comes to the paid media component, and I'm really beating its death here. But, like, on the organic side of things, both organic content you're publishing out to ideally multiple TikTok pages, as well as affiliates. For years as someone who's, like, worked in the social game, irregardless of what we would do from a brand awareness building perspective, the question was always the same. It was like, what attribution did you actually drive? And anyone that's been in marketing forever knows tracking attribution through organic social is nearly impossible. With TikTok shop, we're able to now get data. It's really accessible to on every single organic video that we tag with a product. What traffic did that drive to shop? How many views? All the things that you would typically only be able to get through running ads, you can get organically on your content and affiliate content. And so if you think about it now, we can, in theory, know what is going to perform well in an advertising environment before we actually put dollars behind it. Now, of course, you wanna test as many ad creatives. We also have to measure that against the test budget that's gonna go into that. So for us, everything from a paid media perspective starts in organic, and we look at what does well from a reach traffic and conversion perspective in organic whether on page or with affiliates, and then run that into the advertising lane. And the one caveat I'll add for affiliates where it can be difficult activating those Spark ads, make that a part of the outreach process. So you kind of see the Spark ad, ideally build a incentive program behind that that that I can share more about. But the the component that I think is most missed is give those affiliates content examples and give them specific promos and messaging that you know works well in an advertising environment. So that way the video that they're creating is the most apt for performance and those spark ad environments. That's just something we'll see that there can be like a misnomer or gap. Like, just because it does well affiliate wise doesn't mean it'll do well ad wise because they're reaching their audience. So their lingo phrasing terminology is gonna work well for that. I would just think about, having organic still be the the main component of what you then look at putting media spend behind. Yeah. I'd I'd double down on Jake's point there. I think volume of creative and leaning into the affiliate side, is is gonna be key. Creative fatigue's faster on TikTok than any other platform. So you need to make sure that your your ads team has, enough to move through, so that you don't start seeing your CPAs climb and you you lose efficiency and you spend. But I also think, yeah, working with those creators to, you know, vary the the type of content that you're seeing. Thing everyone can pretty much tell what a UDC ad looks like at this point within about a second and a half, and people can just instinctively swipe off of it. But the content that micro creators are creating right now, is able to capture attention better and can perform really well when given the the appropriate visibility. So being able to efficiently and effectively boost, the visibility of those micro creators can vary your message up and, make sure that your paid team has enough to to get you through the season. Thanks, Ryan. Yeah. The natural segue to the next question. How can brands effectively collaborate with influencers or creators to enhance holiday campaigns, and what should they look for in a potential partner? This is a really, really common question that we get. Yeah. I think there's a ton of different methodologies here and so many techniques that you can use. I think I mean, I'll let the guys cover some other stuff, but I I think that we've touched upon, like, a clear brief for the affiliate, which is one of the most important things that you can do. And, actually, they probably value that way more than you would think, because of a lot of the time, probably most brands on the platform are sending out samples to affiliates and not briefing them. And those guys, they just don't know what to post. So if you can guide them in a really clear, constructive way where they know that, like, this message works, this is what I can talk about, this is what sells, then they'll really value that. They'll value the partnership more, and then you've got yourself a much better creative for the most part. So I think that there's loads of different techniques you can do to get more affiliates on board. There's tech. There's events. There's, like, an endless list of things, but I think that that's, like, the key fundamental is, how you brief those affiliates that are are starting to work with you. That's a great point. And and beyond the brief, you know, there's a there's an aspect to, obviously, the the the affiliates, the authenticity, and how they resonate with your audience. You need to think about, obviously, which of those affiliates are gonna be followed naturally by your customers, and you should seek them out. There has to be that affinity. There has to be you don't wanna create a relationship or have a post or content from an affiliate, obviously, where there might be some friction for any number of reasons. And, unfortunately, there's a lot of vetting that should be done before you bring on an affiliate to send to send, to create any content on your behalf. And that's why it's so important to work with an agency. The other thing is have a long term relationship with those with those affiliates. And if you don't have it, then have an agency that has a long term relationship because it's gonna be much more reliable. Because we've all heard nightmare stories about affiliates that don't post anything. I think we've seen an average, if you don't know an affiliate and you send them something, a sample, it's about 70 5% of them or so, are gonna post something. So, you know, it's still 25% loss unless you have a long term relationship, and then those numbers are far better. I think the other big thing about working with an agency or specifically a certified partner is that you have access as an as a certified partner, and we are a certified partner, we have access to senior resources at TikTok. And so we're able to escalate issues. We're able to actually get a dialogue with people overlark, you know, in real time. Hey. My client was, you know, pulled for this reason. You know, their SKUs were pulled for this reason. There's products on TikTok, a lot of them that are in prohibited categories that you need to be invited to. Not a lot of, you know, creators and sellers know that. There are certain products that seem fairly benign, but you need to be invited before you can get those SKUs approved. And so, agencies, certified partners are able to be a sounding board for you directly to ByteDance, And I think that's one of the biggest, advantages to working with 1. Yeah. Just really quickly. I wanna double down on that point for those listening for brands. It's really, really kind of a new back channel gets open to you. If you work with an agency, it's really, really important that you have that partner who becomes sort of your additional layer of support when it comes to navigating TikTok's requirements or getting in touch with TikTok if you need it. So many of our ShipBob brands have, you know, tried to use tried to get into TikTok without the help of an agency and now have since engaged an agency and have seen night and day difference in terms of TikTok usability, predictability, understanding the platform, and making sure that their account is always in good standing. So something to think about. Yeah. It's kind of just Meg's your point. It's like an unfortunate reality of the platform. I can assure you all here, we would rather you just be able to get the support you need. Like, I know we're incentivized to tell you you need agency, but, like, trust me, you kind of need some some insider baseball. You know when it comes to the affiliate side, one of the things we've intentionally done as we built our influencer team, all the girls on our influencer team are all former influencers. They were former full time influencers. That's what they did. We convinced them to come over to the business side and the reason for that it's all about understanding it from that perspective. Now in terms of tactically what that looks like a lot of that comes down to communication and messaging and just even, like, tonality and phrasing. Far too often, you have older corporate guy sending a message to 19 year old girl, which in any other context we'd be like, this is kind of weird, like there's DM ing them on TikTok. This is kind of odd. And and so the lingo and like the messaging, it doesn't resonate with these people. And so a lot of it comes down to messaging communication. I think though in terms of how you can activate, it's thinking beyond just the affiliate program, which is great. Certainly retention. One of the things we found a lot of success with is doing custom incentive programs for all of our top affiliates that will get them looped into doing cash prizes. We've even flown out some of our top creators to the HQ of one of our top brands before. And it's something we'd love to continue doing. I also think, getting back to paid influencer promotions, even if that is for your top affiliates, like, we'd all love to keep them just an affiliate game, but actually putting money upfront can really change that relationship dynamic in a unique way. And then I think the final component, that that we've really pushed for is getting to exclusive affiliate partnerships. If you have a creator earning more than $10,000 a month through commissions for you, like, you you probably have employees not getting paid that much. And so in all likelihood, like, let's put them on payroll indirectly. Let's get them exclusive to our brand. Let's really bring them into the fold. Let's get them producing content that we can use organically. Let's really tighten it that relationship, because I think once you have your base of affiliate, you know, really running and driving sales, you don't even necessarily need to add more affiliates. You can just continue to grow that, nest egg you have and improve it month over month. And before you know it, you'll you'll be able to do some amazing things. Yeah. I think, having a a clear funnel to move affiliates through is also, you know, an interesting approach. You know, you can really broaden and go micro work with, you know, larger creators, but volume is clearly key to, getting these, like, affiliate programs off the ground, but that doesn't mean that you need to stay broad and wide with your outreach. When you recognize partners that are doing well, usually qualify as for, you know, let's get some spark codes going. Let's test out your content that takes you to that second stage of the relationship. If that consistently performs well, if they're creating multiple videos, if their their live streams are effective, then, you know, you can kind of move them into, these different tiers of partners that you can reactivate for different moments, for your brand. So, I kind of jumps on to to Jake's point there about making sure that you're you're developing those relationships and having those close connections versus just being the brand, with the logo that's messaging, you know, anyone over a certain amount of followers. There has to be that content fit and there has to be that, that one to one connection if you're gonna take a relationship to the next level. Follow-up question on that, and this is for everyone. How do you how do you find that strategy scales? So obviously, you know, being a logo that's messaging a ton of affiliates is is a way to kind of get volume through the door. How do you kind of marry the, you know, like, having the interaction be very tailored to the influencer to the creator versus making sure that you're getting your brand out there to as many influencers and creators as you can. Just curious to hear your strategies behind that. Yeah. We use, like, a combination. So we have always on recruitment. So we're we're constantly recruiting new affiliates and some of them are some of them don't. Then we have, like, one to one relationships with some. Then we have pockets of affiliate group chats where we may run a competition on this chat, may run a competition on this chat. We also may, like, launch a new product with this pocket of affiliates because we think it will work well. And then we have I think Jake made a good point about you've kinda got, like, this nest egg, all of that, analogy. You do like, once you've built up a really robust affiliate network, then it's really easy to create narratives on TikTok. You almost can start to control the trends if you want to say to like, if you have 200 really committed devoted affiliates that make really good content for you and have generated money from you in the past, and you offer them, a exclusive product or a new product launch, send it out to them. You give them a really compelling commission offer and some ad spend behind the videos. They love that because they they know. They've learned. Like, if they work with you, they get these things. They tend to love the brands. So they like the idea of promoting, like, a new product or a special offer, and it's easy to just activate that and send things nuclear. Oh, that's awesome. Great example. Yeah. I think from a scale perspective, the only like, there are efficiencies to be had, but the real way you scale it is caffeine, you know, maybe a stronger drink at night. There there's just there's things when it comes to building relationships with influencers, that I don't think, like, are incredibly scalable if you wanna do it right. Like, what you know, we we've given access to affiliates to book calls with our influencer team to talk about the strategies of not just them as an affiliate, but, like, what they should do for that brand. And we'll take time to send selfie videos for anyone that sells over $1,000 worth of product and thank them for their hard work and try to get them recommitted to the brand for the next month. Like those are just unscalable 15, 30 minute, 30 second little selfie video things that they don't necessarily go away. So you can build efficiency. But I think at the at the end of the day, if you have, any amount of people that are advocating for your brand that aren't getting paid upfront to do so, you should be willing to to jump into the fire for them and do anything and everything to make sure that they're set up to succeed. I'll jump in there as well. So one of the things that we've been successful with is, we've we've established a creator network where we have we've been curating the community. And so we tend to have really deep relationships with some affiliates, especially the ones that, you know, we do a lot of fashion and luxury, do a lot of cosmetics. So we spend, we spend a lot of time with people who've been successful for us in those channels. And, having Discord channels, making sure that we're engaging with them, making sure they kinda always remember who we are so they can prioritize relationships with us. You know, that's been that's been a really great model for us. Also, we we use a product, that helps our clients probably more than the affiliate, but we use a product called Refundnel. And that allows us to sort of manage all that UGC and get all that intellectual property rights so that we can package it up and we can start using it in other places. So I think I think it's just a matter of being proactive, building relationships, and having the right productivity tools to sort of lower the friction between the relationships between, you know, the affiliates and influencers and the agencies. Yeah. I love the call out of productivity and modularity. The idea that you can recombinate something for TikTok, put it elsewhere, you know, working efficiently for the brand and and kind of standardizing the brand voice across channels. And that's critical. That's one of the best things about UGC, right, is that you can use it in other places. If you're not, you really are coming up short. Yeah. Okay. And then how can brands balance holiday promotions with their overall TikTok content strategy to avoid coming off as too obviously sales focused? So obviously, you know, we're going into the holiday season. TikTok's gonna be running specific promotions for Black Friday, Saturday, Monday, for Christmas, for the holidays. How does a brand kind of how do we see that continuity of brand content, and brand development, product development? How do we marry that with just it obviously being the holidays and it being all about sales and volume. Yeah. I think you can be, really strategic and selective about the products that you choose to push. We do one of the largest consumer appliance brands in the world on the platform, and, most of the range won't won't be going on any significant offer. We'll be trying different tactics with that, and it might require, like, more more paid media behind that. But, if you're retaining the brand damage, then sometimes that's just necessary. And then there are other areas where you might look at your range. You may go, okay. Like, that stuff is still popular, but it isn't isn't, like, our hero products. So this is something that we can do a deeper discount on. It's still, like, a very giftable item. And then something that's probably come up a lot as a theme today, but I think is super useful in this area is exclusivity to the platform. So, if you can create exclusivity on a product that doesn't necessarily need to be priced, then you can drive fire alley. So there's a few tactics you can think of. There's probably plenty other stuff that the guys can cover as well. And quick question on that. Do you know insider baseball, do you know if TikTok's doing anything to, influence or sort of incentivize brands to have TikTok exclusivity on TikTok Shop? I think it depends on the brand. There there's, there's nothing I know of that's like a set campaign for this, but, yeah, we've we've had, like, a key account manager, give us incentives for brands to do certain things in the past. So, like, if you got a big name, then you can go you can pretty much go and ask for whatever you want. If you've got a big enough name, sometimes you get those, sometimes you don't. Yeah. And that's true for not just TikTok. Right? Yeah. Definitely. There may genuinely be a campaign that I don't know of as well. Maybe the guys have heard something that I haven't. So I think, for us, it's, really, you gotta remember why TikTok started in the 1st place. Right? It was really meant it was always about commerce and entertainment, and they were the first to do that really successfully, I think, better than anyone else. And so it's important to remember about that entertainment aspect. You know, I love the salesy question quite frankly because at the end of the day, we're there to sell and, also, many people are there to buy. You know, we did an analysis last year of, like, the 2 greatest audience pools, and one of them was people who saw things over, 12 months ago about about 12 months ago. So a year ago, within a roll calendar year. And then people who saw things with that within the the last 30 days. And so what that what does that mean? That means those people have saw things a year ago, became familiar with the brand, and ultimately, they waited till the price was right to actually strike and buy. So people are there to buy. And then the last group was people that, again, saw something, impulse buy, they moved, they capitalized. And so people are there to buy things, but you have to you have to remember that you you there's an entertainment aspect to it. You should be generally plugged into your community. You should be hosting challenges. You should be doing live stuff. You should be responding to comments just about the organic stuff earlier. Right? There's a lot of work that should go in and you shouldn't just show up on Black Friday and expect that you're gonna sell a lot of products. You have to curate. You have to weave your product into interaction subtly. You have to think about, you know, value based holiday related tips. Do your do it yourself projects. There's a lot of ways you can talk to people and and drum up that sort of engagement so that when that adds in there, you know, it doesn't come across as too salesy, and, ultimately, it's it's highly relevant. Yeah. And and to David's point there, I so much of it comes back to community development. What do the followers look like? What are the people actually seeing that content that that they're viewing? What is the relationship between them and the brand? And we've always seen tremendous success on the platform with brands that have established communities. And it's not just like you have to have 1 or 2,000,000 followers. Like, you could have just 15,000 followers that are really active and loyal to the brands, in which case they'll be your biggest advocates for any sales and promotion. And I think, you know, like, TikTok uses the the phrase for their advertising pitch, don't make ads, make TikToks. And it's totally true. And what we see happening way too much is people are taking their marketing from other social platforms and applying those, historical insights and even content creation to this platform. And if you're not creating natively to the platform, it doesn't matter what you're you're gonna do. It's gonna come across Salesy and it's not going to work well, and it's certainly not gonna live up to the potential that that it could. So I think it comes back to TikTok's go to saying, which is don't make ads, make TikToks. And if you stick in that line of of insights, being that it's consumer driven platform first, you're gonna avoid any issues that come across as you potentially being salesy. Yeah. To that point, I think the the affiliate relationships are gonna be key because of their inclination towards authenticity, helps you, you know, support the the content farm for the paid media, but, also, you can kind of segment your strategy here. And, you know, even if you are running sales, you don't need to have every creator talking about, a specific sale. You can have people that are talking about the value props to your brand that are covering product talking points that are, you know, just generally having fun with the brand and not have every piece of content related to your brand focused on it's on sale right now. I mean, that requires you to have a decent enough network of creators that you can activate here because if you only have 20 people that are talking about it, then you might wanna make the most of those. But if you have a developed community where you can activate segments of it to cover different talking points, you know, helps diversify the the content that your customers are seeing. Great. Yeah. Diversity of content is really important. Right? There's continuity of content and brand voice, but if there's diversity too, then you can kind of it's kind of hard to place you as a brand. So a lot of that variety can help. And I'd love to hear, and I'm sure everyone in the audience would love to hear about any exciting campaigns you have coming up for the holidays and some of the strategies. I know, obviously, we're that would be a sneak peek. We're very much in q four planning mode, but I'm sure you've got some exciting things on your docket. So we'd love to know kind of any any insight you can give us. We just won the, generally, I don't mean this as a brag. I'm just giving some context. We just won the live streaming partner awards in the UK. So the reason that we did that is we've been trying some crazy stuff with lives of late, and I think that live shopping is gonna be huge in the UK and the US, particularly in November, and particularly on that weekend that we're all really excited for. So what we're doing is building up longer lives to get audiences to adjust to them and also running, we're kinda calling them mini showcase lives. It's like our own little thing, where the lives are a lot more in-depth, and we're trying some different tactics on the lives to basically build up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, where we run these huge weekend long lives for brands. We recently done a 24 hour live where we give away Taylor Swift tickets at the end of it. So that one was pretty crazy. It was up for 23 hours of it. So I don't think we'll be doing that again, but we're definitely trying some crazy longer live type stuff. That should be pretty exciting for the brands that we're working with. That was gonna be my follow-up question was what the record for your longest live. 24 hours is crazy. So you were up for 23 of the 24? Yeah. I went for a nap on this Saturday afternoon. But it was it was a lot of fun. So it's one of the biggest cosmetics brands in the UK. Yeah. I don't think we'll be there in 24 hours again, but maybe, like, a sneaky 14 hours or something. Yeah. Very cool. You know, I'm gonna piggyback a little bit on that live theme because I think it is absolutely the most exciting. Also, what we're doing is we're really doubling down on working with, doing campaigns that encourage users to share their holiday experiences with the product. So we're, again, sort of trying to mobilize and activate and build a fan base and build a following. And so that whole collaborative approach, it sort of moves us beyond the just, well, this is organic and this is affiliate. Hey. You know? And so we're really thinking about it as an integrated offering and sort of mobilizing those affiliates, the buyers as affiliates. We do a lot of stuff now we're planning for, what we did last year. And this year, we're looking for, like, TikTok deep challenges, holiday themes, invite participation, things like that, interactive content like polls, QA. So anytime we can really get in there and just move it beyond, it's gonna just be this or it's just gonna just be this and then make it a holistic campaign. That's quite exciting. Obviously, live is probably the biggest thing that's coming around right now. Ultimately, TikTok does wanna grow live, but they don't want live shopping to be full of live. They want live TV to be there. They want it to be live entertainment. They wanna grow live shopping, but they don't want live shopping to be sort of everything that is live. And so, I think that there's good opportunities for even awareness, with live, and we're exploring those opportunities with some of our clients. So it's August 21st right now. Yesterday, we wheeled in, to our content house, which is one of our studios. It's a house stage for film and content. We we wheeled in all of our Thanksgiving fall aesthetic decorations for the house. So it currently looks like, you know, grandma's Thanksgiving in there at the moment. And so as we get ahead on all the content, the livestream things of this nature, livestreams are gonna be a little tricky because we're gonna wait for those windows to do it. But things we're building in advance, we're all set up for, you know, that window. And then I think by about mid September, it'll look like Santa's workshop in there, in terms of all the things. And one of the things we're trying to do is reverse engineer the why of purchases content. It's one thing to talk about a holiday sale and promotion or Black Friday cyber cyber Monday sale and promotion. It's another thing to show it, to show a little kid opening up a holiday gift. These are the things that you can get ahead of and actually build. Maybe you have it from years previous, but if you could create uniquely for this year, that's the time to do it. So that's certainly one of the things I think myself and I'm sure my neighbors are very excited for for me to have my my holiday lights up here, in in mid September. Are you are you dressing up as Santa Claus in a life, Jake? Oh, I'll do whatever it takes. You know, if if it's Santa, you know, I got a Norwegian last name, and so one of the things I always had in my house growing up was these really weird Christmas decorations that are, like, from Norse, culture. And it'll it's like a 2 it looks like a 250 year old man. So we got a bunch of those weird ones too. So we're ready to get all sorts of niche up in here. Well, I've still got my Santa suit from last year, because I went on a couple of live dresses Santa, so I can win. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We got just the top floor of the content. There's, like, an attic kind of that's been, but it's furnished. And, there's just nothing but costumes up there. So we love you know, that's probably another thing, integrating brand logo, mascots, I should say, into content, like the Duolingo Al, who we praise as, like, the most genius social media strategy in the world if you really boil down. Like, that strategy was invented in, like, the thirties probably, with the Jolly Green Giants. I think it was one of the first ones. It's just a it's a layup, and it makes things so much more interesting. Like, we're gonna do street team content, but instead of just giving away the product, we're gonna have someone dressed as a bumblebee because it's with a honey beverage. Those are the the easy, simple, fun things that you can do, and I think your creative team will be stoked about all that. Yeah. I'd like to piggyback off of David's point earlier, just about the importance of not only lives, but not viewing all lives as a means for sales, but as an entertainment medium. I'm gonna use a some maybe a semi specific example here just from how I spend my time, but spent a lot of time playing like ultimate team on FIFA and around the holidays. They basically for 2 weeks will, you know, as people are on the platform, they are giving away free, you know, free packs. They're anything, you know, there's a lot of like Flash deals. There's all this urgency that, you know, you know, is happening and the promotion of that period, you know, leading up to it is pretty significant, but it encourages people to, like, spend their time in that environment. And then while they're there when they are primed to purchase and they're aware that things are going to be, you know, in a good position either for for gifting or for purchasing for themselves. You know, you're you're putting the information in front of them. So, like, I think live flash sales, giveaways, little things like that, but also, you know, kind of snuck into generally more entertaining content versus, you know, can I go live for an hour and just talk about the benefits of my product and try to drive sales? So I think that, you know, leaning more into the entertainment nature, of things and being a little more creative about how we're talking about, you know, moving product is is gonna be key. Yeah. TikTok logs should definitely not turn into QVC. 100%. Great. Thank you so much, everyone. I think just kind of maybe final thoughts, anything that we didn't cover, any ideas, things you're excited about getting into the holidays. Everyone in the chat, you know, link out how excited you are to see Jake in a Santa suit. Otherwise yeah. Any final thoughts before we wrap up? I think, I think if you're out there and you're deliberating whether to take on TikTok shop ahead of this holiday season, I think that this is the last year that you'll have as big an opportunity, where the field is very open. And I think the next year, it'll be way more competitive than it is now. So if you're kinda sitting on the fence by the way, not every brand works on the platform as well, so there's there's other things to consider. But if you're sitting on the fence and you do have a good brand and you do have diversity of products, you do have good visuals or good price point or whatever it is that makes your brand, unique, then give a go. There's means to test this platform that are very light touch that don't cost you a lot of money. And I think that if there are brands out there who aren't going to take the opportunity this year, and they're gonna really regret it. So look into things more after you've heard us talk. Obviously, we're all very, very biased. So take what we say with a pinch of salt, do your own digging, but you'll see the success of so many brands. And it's not just, like, budget brands. There there is diversity of product on the platform now that is performing well. I actually nearly got on a LinkedIn feed about this yesterday, so you can check that out as well if you want. But, yeah, I think just keep an open mind and be willing to give it a go because you've seen, you've seen the success that we've talked about, some of the tactics you can employ. And good luck for if you do give it a go. I I wanna add to that really quickly because I think you hit on a really important point about timeliness. You know, this is a really unique time. This is kinda on TikTok, it's kinda like Meta was 5 years ago, maybe even 8 years ago. And so the algorithm is really prioritizing this type of activity. And so it it it will not exist, probably not, as as as abundantly next year. And so you should seize the moment. You should have a store even if you're looking to drive purchases elsewhere because it does it does influence on buying decisions. So I definitely would urge people to sort of get in the game. Yeah. I think on my end to close out, I would say, definitely don't join TikTok shop. It's a horrible platform. You're gonna see a horrible ROAS. It's not the best opportunity we've ever seen. I prefer everyone to stay the hell out. So for the brands we're working within there, our competition stays at next to 0, which is how it is right now. Yeah. Just Instagram shop. Right? That's just do that, you know. Reverse psychology. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. To close out on my side, I I agree. It's it's a unique opportunity, and there is it's a great time to be getting into it because TikTok has so many incentives, for for brands that are really leaning in. So taking the the leap of faith and kind of fully getting involved there is is gonna reap rewards for you. Assuming you have an agency that is honest and will tell you what your brand is gonna work. There's not, like, a a one size fit, but, you know, you gotta have to you have to have the stomach for it, and make sure you're working with the right partner. But there is a lot of opportunity, and it's an exciting time. Alright. Thank you so much, everyone. It looks like we don't have any questions in the chat, and please reach out if you have any questions. Just wanna reiterate reiterate that ShipBob is your fulfillment partner for all things, not only TikTok, but holiday q four fulfillment, both online and retail. Please get in touch if you have any questions. My email is linked in the chat. And then I wanna thank everyone on our panel for joining today. This is super helpful. It is only August 21st, but in KCMO, it's Thanksgiving and Christmas because we are all fully prepped for the holiday season. Yeah. Ecommerce, it's the slow season because everyone's planning and everyone's putting their thing everything together before the big holiday season. So you everyone for taking the time. Hopefully, this is really helpful and informative. Reach out if you have any questions. Thanks, team. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.