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Ivan
Welcome to TikTok Shop Insiders podcast, your source for actionable news, trends and strategies. If you want to build a thriving brand or Creator presence on TikTok shop, this is your essential listen. Let's get started. All right. Hey, everyone. Welcome to TikTok Shop Insiders podcast, your source for the latest news and strategies for TikTok shop. I am your host, Ivan. Welcome back, everybody. How you doing? All right, so for today's episode, I received a kind of interesting email. I've actually received a couple, but a brand, kind of a brand owner reached out with like a handful of questions, maybe like a dozen questions of, you know, what's my services, what do I do, kind of how we separate ourselves. And just a bunch of questions on TikTok shop, and I thought, you know, as I was answering them, wow, this would be a pretty great podcast topic. You know, I'm sure if he has questions, you, the listeners might have questions. It goes into, you know, the agency details as well as, you know, strategy details. So, yeah, figure I'd just kind of share with you what those answers to those questions were. So, yeah, up first, I just want to give a thank you. I don't know, I think post ban there's been a lot of kind of resurgence, I guess, if you will, in interest on TikTok shop. So a lot of people reaching out, saying that the podcast has been super helpful for them and kind of growing their business. So, yeah, I think this is pretty awesome. I think I've always, maybe not always wanted to be kind of a podcast host, but I definitely have a knack for emerging kind of platforms and kind of staying ahead of the curve a little bit. And, you know, this is a great avenue for sharing my thoughts and what I've learned. And I've had a lot of great conversations with a lot of like, smart people. So this is a way of me kind of giving back. So, yeah, I just want to say thank you to the listeners. You know, if you could give me a review, that'd be super helpful. I know it kind of new to this podcast space, but, you know, I know it helps with like, downloads and being available in searches. So definitely appreciate the review. If you can take a second just to kind of give me what your thoughts are. So appreciate that. Yeah, I some very cool things. Kind of personally just want to give you an update on my side. But this week we have a trip to Disneyland coming. So able to take our kids to Disneyland and it's a staff development day for, for our school and so kind of my, my wife and I always try to do something on those staff development days because typically it's least crowded of all the days. Right. So we'll be going to Disneyland this upcoming weekend and then kind of approaching spring here in San Diego. It's gotten quite, not quite nice. It's been raining kind of a little bit. But this next week should be pretty awesome. So looking forward to that. And then kind of like on the business side of things or professional side, had really amazing kind of cool things happen the last couple weeks. Had a conversation with the head of Google shops or the. The head of YouTube shops and yeah, it's pretty cool. Like just to see what they have in store, you know, definitely on their agenda of kind of growing the. The program. The way I look at it is TikTok shop. TikTok has eyeballs and a. A large affiliate community and a large seller community. Google has a large, you know, viewership right there. I don't know what the exact numbers are, but there's a lot of people watching YouTube and YouTube shorts and there's not a lot of sellers there. There's not a lot of affiliates there. So that's a great opportunity. Right? I don't know, I guess most of you maybe not be familiar, but the backend of YouTube is a little bit raw. It's not as simple as searching for affiliates and signing them on and all that. YouTube is a little bit different in that the affiliate has to find your product and create a video on. Right. You can't reach out to affiliates, et cetera. So if you want me to do a deeper dive on YouTube, I can. But yeah, I had a conversation with the head of YouTube shops and she was kind of picking my brain on what she. How she could grow the program, et cetera. So that was super exciting to kind of see that growth. And yeah, I love that. It's kind of like what I'm all about. I also saw a beta for Facebook shops and their affiliated program that resembles TikTok shop a lot more. Oh, another thing with YouTube shops is you click a link and it goes to the websites.com page. Right. So brand.com it'll go there and you check out through there. With TikTok and Facebook, they have a in app product page where you can buy from that product page. Right. So it doesn't take you outside of the app, which is great. Right. Streamlined, higher conversion rates, etc. So Facebook and TikTok obviously have those features and I think that's why Facebook's a little behind in their release of this Facebook Shops, or at least a widespread release of it just because they want to, you know, have a lot of bugs when you create an in app purchase kind of functionality. So yeah, yeah, I saw the beta for Facebook Shop, but it's exactly how you'd see it on TikTok where there's an affiliate, they make a video selling the product. They have a very, very. At the moment, it's a very, very, very small button. We have to click some ellipses to get around it. But you click the button, it goes to a product page within the app and you can buy within the app. So yeah, it's kind of on. It's knocking on the door. We'll be here soon, I imagine. I don't know exact dates, but yeah, Google Shops, YouTube Shops and Facebook Shops are on the horizon. Along those notes. It came to my attention that maybe some of my audience here on TikTok shop insiders isn't familiar with the other pod have going, which is affiliate Academy HQ. So it's a. It's a podcast centered around affiliates, right? And so when I started this podcast, I wanted to help sellers, right? That's my background being an Amazon seller. I help brands selling on Amazon. So I was like, okay, well, let me help brand selling on TikTok shop. And that's why I created this podcast. During my time last year of, you know, TikTok shop insiders, I became, it became very clear that there needs to be an affiliate podcast. There needs to be cultivation and education around being a better affiliate. And so that's what I did, you know, with the success of this podcast being kind of so easy for me and so successful, I was like, well, let me make a podcast around affiliates and how we can get their story and more importantly, like, what works for them, what strategies that they use so that other affiliates who are learning can kind of get a head start or at least get that push that they need to make those first couple sales. So you could check out Affiliate Academy HQ podcast. I'll have a link in the show notes below. But yeah, check that out as well. It's. I'll be in. I basically interview the top 1% of TikTok Shop affiliates and get their story, their strategy, what works for them so that I could share it with my audience and then hopefully, you know, they can become a better, better affiliates, and then all that goes to a free community where, you know, they could learn how to be better affiliates. Right? We'll have education pieces, we'll have weekly Calls, feedback on their videos, et cetera. So creating a community, a free for affiliates so that they could become better affiliates. So yeah, it came to my attention that people weren't aware of that. But yeah, I guess that's my fault. I didn't kind of talk about it on this podcast. But yeah, check it out. Affiliate Academy hq. But yeah, pretty awesome. There's some, there's a, there's a girl. I've had maybe 30 or 40 interviews now. There's house moms, there's college students, you know, course creators, et cetera on how to be better affiliates. But some of their stories are crazy, right? They've made. The one I interviewed yesterday just crossed a million dollars in GMV generated and she goes into her strategy on how she did it. Or there's this one college student who I don't know what her GMV generated but I know she's made 500,000 in affiliate commissions which is crazy as a college student it's like life changing. So all those stories@affiliatecademyhq.com Cool. Up next is the news. TikTok shop expands to Germany, France and Italy. And so ye, that's just kind of, we knew that was coming and kind of news in the news cycle right now of expanding to these different countries. And I had first talked with someone actually starting conversations of people who are interested in expanding in those countries. Right. I've, I've had agency conversations of hey, I have a, you know, Facebook agency or Amazon agency in these countries. How can I expand with TikTok shop? And so yeah, that's pretty cool. Like it's just the start of it. I always say it's just the start of the tip of the iceberg for TikTok shop. And that includes international. So very excited about that. I think a timeline that I have that I've seen is April or the rollout of Germany, France and Italy. TikTok shop. So someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but that's kind of what I saw. Another one is TikTok becomes the first non gaming app to surpass $6 billion in revenue. So yeah, 6 billion in revenue. Like I think other like there's games and apps out there that you know, killed it out there but TikTok shop, TikTok 6 billion in revenue. So that's, that's pretty, that's pretty awesome. Up next is a update from TikTok about GMV and kind of like takeaways and suggested ways to operate within GMV. Within GMV. Max on TikTok so this is a email that they gave out, but I thought it was noteworthy here just to kind of share with you guys that are running GMB campaigns, right? So some of the items here are like, if you have a low budget spending, like what do you do? And they say to it's likely due to a high ROI target. So you want to reduce that ROI target for better spend, right? And then you see how that performance goes. And then if you know the, the, the thing you want to optimize for is spend. So you lower that ROI target, get that spend going, and then you can increase that ROI target and see how it performs, right? But gotta tackle one thing at a time. And so if you're low budget, you're kind of not getting it, not not getting that spend and lower the ROI target. Another to another thing you can do to increase spend is adding more creative, right? The more creative you have, the more options that GMV Max has to choose from. And then likely you could kind of increase your spend that way as well. So that's something they have ROI and performance adjustments. So if your ROI is above 120%, you want to increase your budget to normalize it, right? So you're getting great ROI. Increase your budget if your ROI is below 80%, you know, you want to wait to two to three days if you recently adjusted it, and then optimize your pricing and creatives, right? So adjust pricing, adjust creatives, like I said before, add or remove some that you don't, don't think are working and then kind of reanalyze as it, as it goes. But you know, essentially what I'm getting here is if your numbers, your KPIs aren't where it is, then, you know, tweak a few things. I would suggest budget is a great place as well as pricing and adding creatives. So yeah, I think that's really it. To summarize, the GMV Max performance Guide, there's probably more. We have a podcast out about GMV Max and if you have questions, go ahead and email me and visit the group. We can kind of get your answers there. And now to the main part of the podcast where I mentioned earlier received an email from a potential client with it was a bunch of questions. I think it was like 15 questions. And yeah, I just kind of have them all here and I'll just do my best to answer in the podcast. So I'm gonna get my sip of coffee in my best dad ever mug. Actually, funny story. So me being a dad of three, the Only thing I want for Father's Day, every Father's Day is a mug with our last year's pictures from it. So me and the kids, me and my wife and my kids, all the places we've been, kind of dinners, etc, so like random pictures of us on a mug. So my idea is having, you know, 20 plus years of mugs on Father's Day. So I made it easy for my wife, it's easy for her to do. And yeah, now I have, every year on Father's Day I get a mug with all my pictures on it. So, yeah, it's one thing I cherish. And one day I'm gonna have a case full of mugs that I'm not gonna know what to do with, but I'll look at them every day and be happy. So, okay, first question here in the in that I received is, do we have requirements for us to work together? I would say yes, there are requirements. When I very first started the agency, mostly I would accept most clients. And I think that was because I didn't have a great idea of what would succeed on TikTok shop. Being a year and a half in now, I have a pretty good idea of what type of brands, what type of products will succeed on TikTok shop. Like, what are the requirements needed? Right. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot of factors that go into place, but I could kind of take a look at a brand and see if it'll be good at least my expert opinion, right? So pricing is a big one. How is your competition's pricing compared to your pricing, inventory amounts? Right. If you're, if you're a small brand and you only have a couple hundred inventory pieces of inventory to send out as samples, like that's not a great candidate for success, right? Some of the brands I'm working with now, they're like, I'll send as many units of inventory as you need, 5,000amonth if you want. So like you can succeed with 100, but no, also you're competing with brands that want to send 5,5000amonth. So that's one thing. And I bring up pricing and competition and your pricing of your competitors. Because, okay, let's say the use case of, okay, you get some videos created, you get a viral video, right? Let's say you're a skin cream, like a moisturizer, right? You get a viral video, you get a hundred thousands of views, you get some sales, right? And. But your product is like $50. Well, now TikTok knows that that User is, wants moisturizer and they watch the moisturizer video. Well, now that, now as you know as a TikTok user, you're going to get other moisturizers, right? And so if your moisturizer is $50 and competitors are, you know, $20, $25, they're more likely to buy that cheaper product. Right. You know, there are exceptions to the rule, of course, but I guess general, generally the cheaper product will kind of convey that sale or will get that sale on TikTok shop. Right. Maybe moisturize. Good example. But like a charging cable, right. It's pretty commoditized and you know, you're not necessarily going to buy a 15, $20 charging cable when there's some on TikTok shop for like $9 or even $5. Right. So pricing as it compares to competitors is super important. Right. They're TikTok is a price sensitive shopper. So you want to make sure that that's in line as you evaluate your product for TikTok shop. How many creators do we have? So we have hundreds, I think a couple hundreds. In our Discord community we have a 50,000 email list of creators. So we have high value creators, like over 100k GMV. And then yeah, so we just have a bunch of creators from the relationships we've worked in the past. So great performing creators in our network that we can reach out to. We have a new brand that we're onboarding and we just reach out to our community and say, hey, who is interested in this really cool brand? It's a nine figure brand and so everyone knows who they are, so all of them are interested. Right. So it's a, it's a great resource that we have on, on this side to have these creators in our network. Additionally, you know, we have bots and automation. So we use Yuka to do the outreach. We have our internal list, we have our email list, we do some manual outreach to competitors, creators, et cetera. So I think creators isn't really the name of the game anymore. The number of creators, it's the quality of creators that you can amass. Right. And a way of doing that is starting with a wide pool. Right? So we just have the widest net possible through these emails, through these Discord groups and bots and automation. And then we now have a wide pool to select the higher value creators from. Right. So that's kind of my creator strategy and how we pick creators for our brands. How many brands do we work with? Dozens of brands. Right now my calendar is Full with potential, you know, sales calls I guess if you will, brands interested in getting on TikTok but dozens of brands. How much GMV do we generate? So we're working with brands in the eight figure range and then as well as onboarded brands. I think we onboarded them four or five months ago and got them from zero GMV to 100k a month in GNV. So kind of yeah, we, we work with brands in the 8 figure range like tens of 10 million plus and then as well as onboarded two brands just recently and got them from zero to 100k and then this latest kind of wave of clients that we onboarded. Super excited about them. Great. Like I said, a nine figure brand that's just starting on TikTok shop. So excited about that one and then an eight figure brand that we just started. So yeah, super excited. That's, you know, the question is how much GMV do we generate? And yeah, we kind of see it all but that's some examples. What brands do we work with? Mostly cpg. So consumer product goods, consumer packaged goods. So what we've gravitated towards is more beauty products and you know we haven't had. We have like teas and makeup, cosmetics etc but really I think for me it's not necessarily the category specific but more so like TikTok shop strategy will work across multiple products. Right. So yeah, I think mostly you know, consumer packaged goods is what we, what we go with or what we kind of gravitate towards. Yeah. So what do we charge for a brand to work with us? So we operate on a flat fee plus commission and that's been pretty good so far. We also are introducing a flat fee only tier. So with the growth of affiliate Academy HQ and we have a bunch of affiliates ready to make videos and kind of geared up and learning how to make better videos. We have a plan to get brands onboarded and you know, no, just have. We will connect the brand with the affiliate and kind of make the connection there and operate on a affiliate retainer model only. Damn. So I'm gonna. All the way to 21. Hey, edit this part out all the way to 21 minutes. All right. All right. So what do you guys charge for me to work with you? So we charge a flat fee plus commission and the range differs for every brand. Right. You have, you know, we need more affiliate managers to operate bigger brands and. Damn it. I'm just going to not answer this question. Yeah, I'm just going to. Let's remove this. I'm going to 2130. Okay, so one of the questions. So up next, do you, or up next, do your content creators work on retainers? So yes, they do work on content creators, but part of our process is finding creators and then asking them for a retainer fee. So, you know, typically when you ask for a retainer model from an affiliate, they'll give you a very high price. I've seen like $3,000 for one video. And if they want, you know, 10 videos, it's like $30,000. Like that is legit. Like, I have seen that. Right? So if you ask affiliate outright, you know, what's your flat fee? They're going to give something outrageous, right? And so what we like to do, get a little creative. You know, retainers are great, right? Because you have one product cost and they make multiple videos. And so you can essentially offset those product costs that you would send to a lot of creators into one creator in a flat fee. Right. And so what we like to do is send out our initial set of outreach, right? Through bots, automation, our internal network, in our discord group emails, etc. Once they start to make the videos and once we start to get, once we start to get sales numbers and conversion rate numbers, etcetera, we will now mark those higher performers to ask if they want to have a flat fee for more videos made. Right? So we'll give you $500 for 50 videos or $300 for 30 videos. Right. Most of them will decline, but those that do accept that that's a great value, right? $300 for 30 videos is a great value, right? So it's really a widespread ask of affiliates, and then you get affiliates that make videos, and of those that make videos, you pick out the ones that have great performing, like they get sales or get a lot of sales. Well, now you ask them to make more videos, right? So one, they're proven to make good videos to they're proven that they get sales. Well, then let's have them make more. Right? And so Instead of sending 10 different affiliates, 10 different products, you can now send one affiliate, one product, right? So your product costs and shipping costs are lower and then they get that flat fee to make more videos, right? So yes, we do ask our affiliates to work on retainers, but that's not the first step. We do it after we've already reached out to them and kind of, and they've proven themselves to be a good creator. Can you set your own commission rates for affiliates? Yes. So you have open plan and you have targeted plans and then open plans, what anyone can get and then targeted plan typically is it's a higher commission for these affiliates that you want in your network. Do you provide any marketing or promotional guidelines for your content creators or do you let them do what they want? So great question. We do provide them with what we call internally as brand briefs and that holds pretty much product information, any USPs unique selling points for the product as well as, you know, examples of videos that have sold well or if you haven't sold any at all. We have our competitors videos in there. But yeah, we like to give as much information as possible to the affiliates so that they can use it in their videos. What I've gathered from talking with dozens of affiliates is that I would say like half of them use it and half of them don't, but it's always good to give it to them so that they have it if they need it, right? So the answer to the question is yes, we give them marketing material. A big part of this actually as well is if you're a brand, you want to include as many accolades of your brand, of your sales as possible, right? So number one seller badge on Amazon or 10,000 five star reviews on your website or sold out 20 times or you know, acquired by, you know, P and G, whatever it may be to stick out in the affiliate's head. That's why you want to include in there as well, right? Because you're going to get all these brands, you know, from all over the place that don't have any accolades so you want to stick out as much as possible. How do you vet and select creators to promote your brand? So couple characteristics that you can see in the back end, some of the ones that kind of we operate by, and I think pretty much everyone does as well is you know, fulfillment rate. Like if it's, if they get a product and they make a video and they have a high fulfillment rate, AKA they make the video for it, great. You know, if they have a low fulfillment rate, aka they, you know, make a video of one out of, you know, 10 products they get, that's not a great candidate, right? GMV, obviously the higher the better. But you know, are they proven to make a sale? Right. More than zero is better than zero, right? Because if they have zero gmv, then you probably don't want them or at least not yet. So I look at that and then also like take a look at their content, double click on their profile, see if they kind of check the boxes of what you think would sell for your brand. Can I choose which creators to promote my brand? Yes, of course. Yeah, definitely. You have the final say, right? So you, you'll get 100 applicants, say I'm interested. Yes. Then you double click on their profile. Well, they don't match with our target affiliate and you don't have to accept them. Do we run meta ads as well? So no, we don't. We're a TikTok shop focused agency or social commerce now with YouTube shops and Facebook shops on the horizon. So we do not run meta ads, but we have a lot of great connections with meta agencies and if you have that need, we can get that for you as well. So no meta ads, but you know, we can, we can refer you. Can you guys repurpose videos that creators make for TikTok and Meta? Yes, for sure. That's definitely a huge part of this game. Right. So on TikTok you get a viral video, 10 million views. Now you can ask that creator, hey, can we use this on Facebook? And when you put it on Facebook, it's essentially now a retargeting campaign for those people who have seen your video on TikTok. Now you have a ad on Meta on YouTube that they get, you know, see your product again. Right. So definitely a, a part of the process for us is getting those permissions to use on other channels. Is it a month to month contract and can I cancel anytime? So yeah, it is a month to month contract. I just asked for 30 days in advance of notice. But we definitely, you know, and the way I look at that, it's like if you don't like how we work and you're not happy with how we communicate, then definitely you can bow out. I just, you know, going into the agency space, I didn't want to be, you know, hey, no, you're locked in for six months. You have to be with us for six months. Like that's the worst thing in the world. And fortunately, like, I mean, not even fortunately, but no one's ever asked for early out of our agreements. Right. I think I've heard nothing but great feedback on onboarding and you guys are responsive and all that stuff. So that's really my aim. It's like I want to, you know, I'm month to month because I want to show you that I'm putting out the value and there's no reason for you to kind of exit us, exit from the relationship. So. But we do suggest a four month kind of timeline to see if it works. Right. So month one is kind of onboarding starting the process, creating the brand briefs, starting communication with affiliates and sending out the inventory. Month two is you get those inventory. You get the inventory turning into videos, right? The affiliates have 14 days to make a video on your product. And then about a month or two. So month two and three of kind of continuing that process of sampling, but also letting the videos marinate. We're noticing more and more that once a video is made, it's not going to get a sale right away. Right. It kind of has to live in TikTok's algorithm. It kind of needs to make the connections of the affiliate of the product to, you know, who the potential buyer is. So it takes longer and longer. Right. And back in the day, when we first started, you would see a video pop off in the first couple weeks, but now it's taking longer and longer. Right? There are exceptions, of course, but kind of generally and kind of on average, you're going to see a video take longer to pop off. So, you know, month one's kind of set up, start outreach, start the sending out. Month two. Month three is making the videos and it marinating. Month four, you'll start to see those kind of videos turn into sales, turn into sessions and conversion rates kind of data. And so that's kind of rough timeline of what we're looking at now. So, yeah, that concludes it for the questions that I received. I hope that was helpful. I don't know quite sure if it was or not, but yeah. Any other questions or topics that you want me to cover on this podcast? Definitely shoot me a line, join the group and comment below. Yeah, if you could go ahead and leave me a review for TikTok Shop Insiders. I love doing this stuff, but it'd be great to hear some feedback. So that wraps it up for today's episode. Thank you everyone for listening and catch you next time. See you.