With searchability features and frictionless retail, TikTok Shop offers brands an opportunity for quick exposure and customer acquisition. And within this multi-billion dollar marketplace, 80% falls into the health and beauty categories, proving to be a game-changer for health and wellness brands.
The webinar, led by Trenton Romph, marketing director, at Pattern, with help from Loren Israelsen, president and founder of UNPA, and Vicki Lin, marketing communications director at GOED, covered everything from the TikTok Shop opportunity to shop operations to content to affiliate management. Here are the top seven takeaways that brands should know.
1. TikTok is the new Google
TikTok has quickly become the go-to search engine for Gen Z and millennial users. The search feature in TikTok makes finding videos related to their interests easy, and the comment section also has a search bar related to the video’s content, providing users with more relevant information.
“People now prefer TikTok as their search engine over google or any other platform, so for Gen Z, they’ll literally go to TikTok instead of google to search …. and I gotta tell you, I kind of see why," Romph said.
“If you want to see what are the best restaurants in Toronto and you look at Google, you’re immediately going into the game of ‘Oh there’s these Google reviews, and I don’t know how many of them are actually legit, and I don’t know if like somebody just paid to get a bunch of these reviews,’ but if you type that into TikTok, you’re going to have just video after video of somebody giving you their list, or they’re actually at the restaurant trying it. It’s just a totally different experience. I think it’s actually very legit in my opinion.”
2. TikTok users have buying power
“A lot of people come to us and say ‘isn’t it all like, teenagers, and they don’t have any money?’” Romph said.
The platform’s primary users may not have a job or money, but their parents do. Gen Zers (ages 12 to 27) make up nearly half of all TikTok users, according to Search Logistics. Approximately 45% of TikTok users recommend brands or products they discovered on the platform to their parents, something Romph said is why Pattern thinks about TikTok as the biggest platform for word of mouth marketing that exists.
“A lot of people immediately say TikTok shop users are too young, they don’t have buying power, but data from TikTok shows this is the demographic of people that have actually bought on TikTok shop,” he said.
“So 53% of users are aged 25 through 44. The average household income is $119K. Immediately right there, I would be hard pressed to find a brand where your ideal customer profile (ICP) doesn’t fit in that age range, and these people have buying power, so it’s not a waste to try to sell to this audience.”
3. Getting products listed is ‘really painful’
TikTok Shop has a Seller Center similar to Amazon’s Seller Central that allows users to run an ecommerce business on TikTok. It provides solutions for customer service and engagement, seller growth and education, performance analysis, policy updates and more.
Romph noted that one of the biggest mistakes new sellers make is underestimating the amount of work that goes into selling on TikTok Shop:
“They just think ‘well, I can just attach this to the way I’m doing things on Amazon’ and it’s not that way. This is a full marketplace with unique operations, problems and strategies.
“There are very strict rules on how fast things need to be shipped. You have to keep your shop health score up, or you’ll get penalized or even removed off the platform. And then product listings have their whole own thing. And especially in this category of health space, I promise you when you go to onboard or anyone that has onboarded, getting product listings live is going to be a pain. Whether the copy is making too hard of a claim, or you haven’t actually uploaded the right requirements for that type of product… It has not been easy for brands to just go live on TikTok Shop. It’s been really painful.”
4. TikTok Shop sellers need 1K videos/month
When it comes to content creation, Romph said the suggested metrics from TikTok is not for the faint of heart: 1K videos per month, including 90 brand videos, affiliate videos and a weekly brand live stream.
“Anyone that’s a social media manager or a content person or even in marketing at all, as soon as I show them these numbers…they feel so overwhelmed by this,” he added. “So a thousand videos per month, that’s a combination of two to three brand videos per day, which is already a lot, plus affiliate videos.
“So, we’re talking 90 brand videos a month, and then the rest is all affiliate or other content creators, 910. That’s a huge motion to just make that go every single month. And if that wasn’t enough, they would like you to do one brand live stream per week. That alone, just telling someone, hey, do you want to be the face of the brand for two hours and answer questions and demo things and have people jump in the comments and sometimes maybe make fun of you a little bit or just ask really hard questions? That’s scary, just in and of itself.
“So, these are not easy things. So don’t think like, ‘hey, we want to get on TikTok shop. Oh, our social media person is TikTok savvy’ and just throw them at it. They’re not going to hit these numbers, and they’re not even going to be able to do the op stuff. So it’s like building this new role inside companies that nobody’s really totally figured out or fitting into yet.”
5. TikTok is listening
One of the most fascinating aspects of the live streams on TikTok according to Romph is that the platform seems to listen to every word uttered. For example, Romph explained that if someone is selling different products during a live stream, the audience will change based on what’s being talked about. When discussing a paddleboard, for instance, more male viewers who like that topic tune in.
“As soon as I start talking about makeup, those all drop off and all of a sudden women are starting to enter,” he said.
“It’s like immediately the algorithm knows, hey, they’re talking about mascara. Switch this and recommend it to women. And then once we go to camping, it immediately shifts back.”
Additionally, live streamers sometimes get warnings for making statements that sound like gambling, since TikTok has strict rules against it, he said. The platform seems to monitor conversations closely to enforce these types of rules.
6. Targeted collabs
TikTok’s messaging center within the affiliate center for managing products in the marketplace is where brands can connect with influencers. For targeted collaborations, sellers can invite specific creators instead of posting in the marketplace. Sellers can select creators, set up the product and commission and attach an invite.
“And in the invite, you can write whatever you want,” he said. “That’s where people are doing, like, ‘hey, we’d love to have you do this. We would love your content x, y, z. Here’s how we want you to talk about our product. Here’s a link to like assets you can use, et cetera. Oh, and by the way, we’re doing this giveaway where we’ll buy you a condo if you sell a ton.' So you can totally tailor that invite thing as much as you want.”
Romph added that this is also where brands can provide influencers with guidelines, messaging and coaching.
7. Forget followers. Are you a crazy baller QVC salesperson?
TikTok affiliates face a variety of challenges when promoting products. Affiliates have to meet strict criteria, such as having enough followers and adhering to content guidelines, to become approved. Once approved, affiliates can access a product marketplace where they can see top-selling items, reviews and inventory levels.
“You can filter through creators based on how many followers they have, gender, I think locations in there, but the one that’s very, very interesting that hasn’t really surfaced for influencer marketing in the past is you can actually filter by how much gross merchandise revenue (GMV) an affiliate has sold,” Romph said.
“So instead of being like, oh, they have 500,000 followers and their engagement rate on content is 10%, you can actually be like, no, this person knows how to sell. They’re not really like a celebrity influencer—they’re a crazy baller QVC salesperson that decided to go on TikTok Shop, and they’re amazing at it.”
