Andrew Maff 00:00
There's something to think about when it comes to Tiktok. It is not impossible to sell a high ticket item on Tiktok, but it is very difficult.
Narrator 00:11
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I am your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of Bluetuskr, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies. Get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce Industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.
Andrew Maff 00:26
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I'm going to be talking to you about what tends to be a bit of a very interesting topic that a lot of brands are referring to as social commerce. If you're not familiar with this, this is really just selling product on social media, that's about it, but we're calling it social commerce to make it fancy. Isn't that nice? So here's the thing, there's a lot of stuff to consider with this. It's really starting to come from the Tiktok age, because Tiktok shop has done a really good job at taking over market share from marketplaces pretty much like Amazon, and so it's becoming more and more of an interesting place to open up to. And a lot of brands, especially Amazon brands, are finding it very interesting to sell product on things like Tiktok shop, because it doesn't require them to have their own brand website. They can just start doing social media on Tiktok and essentially just sending people to Tiktok shop and then fulfilling it from there. So it makes life a lot easier. Here's the thing I want to talk about, regarding social commerce, because a lot of brands jump into it thinking that, okay, I'm just going to launch some stuff on, let's say, Tiktok or Instagram, and it's going to be extremely successful, just like anything else. It takes a lot of testing and a lot of work to get that done correctly. So there are ways you can ease into it, right, like it's not that complicated in terms of being able to ease into it, because really what you can do is, let's say you're a brand on Amazon. You want to start testing Tiktok you launch a Tiktok profile, you put your product all loaded up in Tiktok shop, and then you start working with Instagram. Instagram, sorry, you start working with influencers to start peddling your product and giving them a some type of commission for selling your product. They send people to Tiktok shop. Purchase happens, one and done. Here's the thing that's not always as easy, right? So there are a lot of people on Tiktok that are really open to selling almost anything, and same thing on Instagram, right? There's a ton of Instagram shop does well, but it tends to do well through, like advertising. It's not fantastic through just kind of traditional, I guess we would call social commerce, of leveraging different influencers and things like that. But it does have its pros and its cons. On the Tiktok side, what's really interesting is you're seeing a lot of growth there. You're seeing a lot of improvement there, but you're also seeing a lot of brands that just go there, start trying it, and get upset when it doesn't work. There's something to think about when it comes to Tiktok. It is not impossible to sell a high ticket item on Tiktok, but it is very difficult. Tiktok, even though is obviously gotten to a really good size, and it is not just kids anymore. It is still a younger audience. And so the obviously, the income isn't exactly huge. And so to be selling something that is 100 plus dollars, hundreds of dollars, 1000s of dollars, makes it a little bit more difficult to sell anything below $30 becomes a lot easier, but that also kind of depends on the product, right? Needs to be very differentiated. It needs to clearly showcase either why this product exists, if there's nothing else like it, or why it's so different from its competition. So I want to talk a little bit about kind of the the way to do this, right? So it's not, as I mentioned, it is possible. You just launch it on Tiktok shop, work with some influencers, start having them push the product, and you're all set. But to do it correctly requires using the entire platform. And this goes not just for Tiktok. It goes for Instagram, Facebook, if you're still doing that. So let's look at it like this, right your there's a book, actually, that I have here with me called it's from Gary Vee. Don't judge me. I forgot how many jabs. It's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, I think is what it's called. There's like, four or five jabs. Essentially, what it's about is it's a book from it. Honestly, it might be a decade old at this point, but it's still very relevant on how to sell on social media. And really what it talks about is you're providing value, you're providing entertainment, you're being interesting in any way, shape or form. And then the right hook is that's when you sell. That concept has not changed, so it's a little bit different now in how you do it, and honestly, to me, it's almost like all jabs and then your right hooks are a little bit different. So I want you to think of it like this. Your social media profile is like a TV channel, right? And your social media profile is the show. Your job is to bring in a relevant audience, entertain them, educate. Them, scare them, make them feel good, make them cry, do whatever you got to do based on the show that you want to put on, and that's what you're doing, and that's it. All you're trying to do is bring in a like minded audience to your social media profile. So what you're really attempting to do here is build out this community of people that always want to come to your profile to see what's going on. What are you posting about? Is it fun? Is it funny? Is it entertaining? Is it educational? Doesn't matter whatever you're doing to attract people to your profile. Now, I know a lot of people think like, Yeah, but I got to make money. How do I sell on this? It is, if you've run any paid ads in your life, you know damn well it is significantly easier to get a better ROAs through retargeting efforts, right? And retargeting does not always mean, oh, it's past purchasers and yeah, that's how you're getting credit. No, no, I'm talking about people that have already been a little bit educated in your product line. That's why, from people who visit your website and then leave, they've already shown more interest just by visiting your website. They learned about your product line, they left and that's why you're just continuing to educate them and incentivize them to purchase you're doing the same thing on social media. So on Instagram, Tiktok doesn't matter. You have the ability to retarget your followers. You have the ability to retarget people that have engaged with you. You have the ability to retarget people that have watched a certain amount of your videos, so these are people that are showing some type of interest in what you have to say. So now you have to start thinking about your social advertising, like the ads that are being run on your TV channel, right? So you own the channel, and your profile is the show, and your advertising is the advertising. And so this is allowing you to basically bring in people at a low cost without spending money on advertising. At least you're obviously spending money on the content creation and then educating them on a continued basis about the pros and cons of your product. The social commerce side is where not only selling on the social media platform in itself comes into play, but also leveraging the influencers. And that's a different beast, right? This is where it becomes kind of interesting, because now it's a little bit more like it's a little bit almost like other TV channels are telling people to go watch this show. So it's almost like, how would I put this? Similar to if you were watching a show and they were making a ton of references to another TV show, you might start looking into it. Or if, obviously product placement in movies used to happen all the time. People would just kind of push products into certain areas that product paid for that spot, and they would make a little bit of money off it. Now the benefit is you start leveraging these influencers to spread the word for you. Same thing with content creators, except they're not always posting it on their own profiles right now, here's the thing. Here's why this works. When you are running your own TV channel, and you're running your own advertising. It is you own it. It is clear to the user, right? So you are always going to say, we have the best product we this is why you should shop with us, etc. So using someone like a content creator, and using that content in your advertising or an influencer, where they're pushing it on their own to their own audience. The reason this works so well is because, even though the user knows that they've probably been paid to do this, it's still in the back of their head that they wouldn't just do this if they didn't have some belief in the product, right? So the user is still going to do some of their due diligence, but it is allowing them to kind of realize, like, Okay, here's someone else that likes this product, taking it with a grain of salt, but here's someone else who likes the product. And so by someone else spreading this word for you, you don't come off as bias, because they're the ones communicating to their users about how good it is. And then at that point, you then have to look at how else you can use that content. So then it's using that influencers content, not only to post to your own profile, or using it in your advertising, or working with them on a sponsored post and boosting it through there. There's a ton of different directions on it, but there's a sec essentially, there are three different major elements to social commerce, right? You have your organic posts, you have your advertising, and then you have your influencer marketing. The three of these things work together hand in hand, because your influencers are not only going to potentially push your product and try to get people to purchase it, but they're also going to push people to your profile. Now the issue becomes most, most influencers, their job is not to sell. Their job is to get you as many eyeballs as possible. A lot of brands make this mistake of you know, I, I don't want to work with anyone who doesn't bring us sales, and we don't make money on the on the on the post with them.
Narrator 10:00
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Andrew Maff 10:31
That is 100% accurate. However, there are also some nuances that you have to factor in. For example, conversion rate. It's not up to the influencer to fix your website or price point for the product if it's comparative to competitors, or the amount of reviews you have, or anything like that. There's a lot of different things that's outside of their control that sometimes you have to think about, because it actually could be a very successful post with a lot of views and a lot of engagement, but maybe not as many orders. But what you do have to think about is if you're confident that your website's converting, well, then maybe that was just not a great audience. And so those are things that you kind of have to factor in. And there's data that you can look at to try to evaluate those things. But by doing this type of stuff, you also have to factor in the additional KPIs out of the sales that you're getting. Yes, you can factor in brand awareness, but even the amount of people that are coming over to your profile, are now going to engage with your profile. Hopefully they're going to follow you. Hopefully they're going to view some of your videos. And then that's when your retargeting ads start to kick in. So, you know, a lot of brands end up going to these channels, and they immediately go to, you know, if you're doing meta and you want to just swing for the fences and do kind of a throw shit at a wall and see what sticks. You start doing advantage, plus you just put up some creative and hope it works, or you start to do more like interest based targeting. You could still do look alikes. They're not as great as they once were. And so you start going after these certain audiences, and you're doing very top of funnel. You're paying to start educating that consumer, but they're to educate someone to get them to purchase off of seeing that ad one, two or three times is very difficult. There's a standard rule of seven in advertising that's been around for generations, where it's effectively like until someone has seen your brand or your product seven or more times they're not very familiar with it. And that's also not just over the lifetime. That could be within a certain amount of time. It kind of depends on the product, but so you need to show these types of ads to people on a regular basis too, and get them to convert. And so that's when you start factoring in frequency and things like that. But when you have to do these types of things, it's a lot less expensive to educate them ahead of time. So if they're seeing a lot of your organic posts, they're seeing a lot of influencers mention you, they may already be at touch point five or six, so that your seventh time you're touching them is a retargeting ad, and all of a sudden they're converting really well. So there's a lot of different nuances that you have to factor into that. In the social commerce side, there's a whole other beast that you have to think about right. There are dozens of companies now that offer user generated content. And basically, most of them are all very much the same. The pricing might be very different, you know, the way that they work could be kind of different. The quality of creators they have might be in a tiered system or something like that, but there's a ton of them out there. And essentially, you pay this company. They give you access to their database, they give you access to their software to have the communication, and then you get some content from it. The great thing about that is you are basically paying people couple 100 bucks to create a video for you that is talking about the the your product, and it gives you a ton of content to use, because that's the type of stuff that does really well on social media, because it blends in. Influencer marketing is different because, obviously, they're sharing it to their users. There are a handful of platforms out there that help with finding influencers. In fact, there's more than a handful. There's probably dozens of those too. The issue with almost all of those becomes the lack of relationship, right? So you have to look at influencer marketing almost like you're recruiting right, kind of like you're recruiting for employees, to a certain extent, because really, what you're trying to do is find influencers that not only are genuinely interested in your product, but have an audience that's very interested in working with you. And so you're trying to find ways to slowly start to work with each other to evaluate if this is going to be a more long term relationship, in which case negotiations tend to happen from there. So there's platforms out there, handful of them. I really like a couple of them that we've had people on, on the podcast in itself. I know the CEO of stack influence is one of them that was on the show. You know, they're all, they're all really good for certain things. Some of them are extremely expensive. Some of them are really inexpensive. And then, you know, there's a reason some of them are great for seating. So that's giving product to influencers completely for free, in exchange for them to actually post about something. There's something about that that I love, and that is. Volume, right? Like, if a lot of people look at like, Hey, I don't want to pay an influencer, you know, 1000s and 1000s of dollars to post about my product if I'm not going to make any money on it. And it's a one time thing, it's a really big risk. Well, a lower risk is to get 1000s of influencers at a lower cost to actually post your post about your product, and your cost is only giving away the product for free. This is why higher ticket products. It doesn't always work out, because you're giving away a pretty expensive product, but in some scenarios, it can work. And so by doing this, you're looking at more of a volume perspective. But then from there, what you can figure out is like, Okay, which of all these 1000s of influences that we worked with worked the best? Let's take this off of these platforms and start to have conversations with them about working with us more often, the issue becomes, when you're seeding influencers and they're posting about your product completely for free, there's a bunch of things in place that make sure that they actually post. You don't really have to worry about that. But they are not, they're starting their influencer journey, you have no idea if their you know brand is going to work. You don't really know who their audience is. You're just you're just swinging the fences. So there's pros and cons to it, because you look at a volume side, which I really like around like holidays and product launches and things like that, but it can also be kind of difficult, because you don't really know what's going to happen. And so then you also have to look at the other side of things, and this is where starting these conversations happen. And there are websites out there and platforms that allow you to kind of put parameters together, and you can scrape all these influencers. But nothing works better than sitting on social media, going through different posts, seeing who's commenting, seeing who's, you know, doing all these different things, and then starting those conversations and building that in a more organic approach, just like if you were to hire someone, you're going to want to speak to them directly. It's really not that different. And so that's where building these different relationships becomes very interesting to then talk to them. And essentially, what you're trying to do with a mix of the seating and a mix of the scraping different influencers and paying some of them, some of them you're seating, you know, some of them are on a commission. Some of them do get a flat rate like you fat, you figure all that stuff out. And what you want to do is you want to develop a database of influencers and creators that you really enjoy working with. And those are the ones that you basically start to then get away from the seating, you get away from all the other elements, and you start to work with them on a more regular basis. As you work with them on a regular basis, I really like to have them all do stuff around the same time to kind of develop that snowball effect. It works out great. But then, like I said, you have to make sure that you're not forgetting your own profile, because you can't. You're going to get a lot of people that do their own due diligence. It's the biggest thing in E commerce right now that a lot of brands don't realize is that consumers are way smarter than they once were 10 years ago. They are going to different websites to see if you've got different price points on your website, versus Amazon versus Walmart, et cetera. They're going to all of them to check all of your reviews. They're going everywhere to kind of make sure that you're legitimate. And if they find you on a Tiktok or an Instagram, one of the first places they're going to is your own profile. So if they go to your profile and they see like, hey, you've got, you know, 400 followers and you haven't posted in six months, they're going to think you suck, and they're never going to shop with you. So that's something you have to factor in. So the best way to do social commerce is to look at the entire platform and leverage it correctly. That means leveraging not just having it on a Tiktok shop, but also leveraging influencers, content creators, your organic social media advertising and having them all work together. Social media is really like its own ecosystem, right? When you think about let's look at your D to C website, right? The more traffic you drive to it, the better your organic search is going to do. Your SEO starts to improve. If you make sure, from a technical perspective, from a keyword perspective, a content perspective, et cetera, your SEO will continue to grow. So the more and more traffic you drive to that page, the faster you actually improve organically. So there's a lot of extra things that will affect your SEO, right? Same thing with email marketing, you can't you're not gonna make $1 off email if you don't have an email list. Well, you've got to grow the email list. Well, that comes from driving traffic to the website, and then more traffic you drive to the website, more emails you have. And so, like, it's a lot of things. There's a lot of gray area. There's a lot of things that overlap with each other on social media. It's all in its own ecosystem. It all overlaps with each other. It's really, really hard to make a lot of sales through organic posts unless you're doing some type of advertising as well, or even just boosting posts. It's really hard to make sales organically on social media unless you're leveraging influencers who are pushing people to your profile. It's also really difficult as a brand to grow your own followers. A lot of people don't want to follow companies because they know that you're biased and they know that you're just trying to sell them stuff and blah blah. So you have to find a way to position your messaging and your profile and your effectively your TV show, to. Be more entertainment, educational, and not just pedaling a product the whole time. So you've got to find ways to get them all to work together, to work correctly. So this is why you see a lot of Amazon sellers that will come from Amazon, because they want to start diversifying, and they go over to Tiktok to try and like, just, hey, I'm going to put up this product, and then I'm just going to give influencers the option to sell it and then make a ton of money if you're lucky enough that someone picks it up and it goes viral, yeah, but chances of that happening are slim. You have to put the work behind it. You have to put the relationships behind it with the influencers to get it all to work, and then, even then, to make sure that you're covering all of your bases, that's when you've got to make sure that you also have your advertising efforts in place. And you'll notice this whole time, I didn't talk about any really prospecting advertising. I didn't talk about running any ads towards completely cold audiences. I'm not saying it doesn't work. It absolutely works. There's just a fine there's a finesse to doing top of funnel versus more middle of funnel. And if you're looking to really improve on the social commerce side, there's dozens of things you can do to grow that audience that's going to get pixeled for you to then be able to retarget so social commerce becoming huge, you also then factor in like live, like live, social commerce, shopping and things like that. And these are influencers that are effectively live streaming and talking about the product. And you know how people should be purchasing it? There's, I don't know if you've ever seen it. It's hilarious. There's a influencer that, I think there's a couple of them, different Asian influencers, that literally, like, they'll grab, like, a product, and they'll be like, buy this, and then they'll move it, and then they'll buy it. And they'll, like, I saw one this girl, she'll like, grab a dress, put the dress on, be like, This is what it looks like, and then she'll go to the next dress. And, like, literally, in seconds. It's hilarious. It's awesome. Apparently it works. I think she's making, like, a ridiculous amount of money doing it, but it's stuff like that that can be very interesting that you have to keep testing.
Andrew Maff 21:47
Live shopping, pros and cons, QVC. I'm based out of Westchester, Pennsylvania. If you know where that is, that is where QVC is. So this area is very interesting in terms of people that are constantly getting a job and losing a job, because QVC is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. They're trying social commerce, shopping. Now we'll see what happens. And so that's always kind of interesting, right? Of like it worked on TV. Can it work on social media? And so now more and more company media companies like that, are trying to lean in on it. And so these are different areas that where social media becomes a really different beast. The problem is the lift of social media, right? A lot of brands jump over to certain platforms, and they just wonder, like, Why isn't this working? For me, it's like SEO. It doesn't happen overnight. It can take a really long time for things to really start to grow and start to get that snowball effect. But just like SEO, as soon as you stop doing it, you just start to go downhill. And so if you do decide you want to start again, you've got to ramp it back up, and then it's an uphill battle to even get it back to where it was. So it's one of those things that if you're going to do it, you have to commit to it and make sure that it's being done correctly. So you've got to think about, if you're creating your own content, you may need video editors. You may need photographers. You're going to need content creators. You're going to need to get that you're going to need to get the product to the content creators. You need to develop a system to get the content in to make sure it's scheduled, and testing different copy and different posts and things like that. You're going to make sure you have advertising in place. You're gonna need someone who wants to work with the influencers. There's six or seven people that can be involved over in through doing social commerce correctly. And one of the reasons I wanted to do this topic today was because I find a lot of specifically Amazon sellers, because they're always kind of hesitant to jump into doing their own website, so they just want to go to Tiktok because it's the new shiny thing. And the issue kind of becomes with jumping from an Amazon to a Tiktok Amazon. You know, years ago, used to be like, get a product, throw it up. Especially if you make your listing look really good, you're going to do just fine. And the logic to these brands is, oh, I'm going to do the same thing on Tiktok. That's 100% not the case. Tiktok does take a lot of work. There's still a lot of things that have to go into play there. And it's the same thing on Instagram, even even through other areas like Pinterest and YouTube and all these different social media channels, there's a lot of different things you have to factor in, and it can be an extremely lucrative way to start to diversify and not be so reliant on these different like marketplaces and things like that. But the other thing to think about is, once you start venturing into social media, they start to do their own due diligence. And if you don't have your own website, they're going to be kind of skeptical about the reality and how good this product might actually be. And so that's where it becomes kind of a risk to do that, unless you can make sure that you're pushing them to Amazon and Amazon alone. So social commerce, overall, a lot of stuff going on. It's constantly a growing area, but it's something I wanted to talk about because we do so much of it, and there's so many common misconceptions about how it should be done, at least in the beginning. To test it, once you get going, it's pretty self explanatory. Everyone knows it, but it's more about when these brands come from. An Amazon and want to jump into Tiktok or even any other social media platform is knowing the reality of what is necessary to really get a social media platform really being beneficial for you, questions, comments, concerns, feel free to reach out to me. But as usual, thank you all for joining me today. I appreciate it, and feel free to check out ecom show.com check out all of our previous episodes, but as usual, thanks you all for joining us, we will see you next time. Have a good one!
Narrator 25:29
Thank you for tuning in to the Ecomm Show. Head over to e commshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTusker YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the Ecomm Show.