The Video Volume Secret Behind Every Winning TikTok Shop Program

But like, I wouldn't say like, they're viral videos because I will say like, take talk shop, take thought they limit how many views that the shopable videos get, right? So like, they don't know the way is that I didn't know that. They don't want like, when you go on TikTok the app, they don't want their feed to be just take talk shop videos. But this episode of the e-commerce playbook is brought to you by Lutik. On meta, you give the algorithm a portfolio of ads, and it predicts which creative each impression should see.

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What is up, everybody? We are back with a pretty incredible episode.

These guys that I'm talking to have had a hell of a whirlwind of a couple weeks. I feel like we were just recently playing golf on the course, and we did okay. I think I think you I ended up beating me and Taylor. Did you beat all of us or no? I think we got first place, did we Tyler?

“Yeah, I think if I remember correctly, I think Taylor left after the 13th of Lutik so bad.”

If I remember correctly, I don't know. Yeah, I remember that too, actually. Now that you think about it, I think you just literally gave up and walked up the course, which is kind of unusual for him. Usually he like stick all the way around and just like end up losing.

But yeah, you first of one of the course, which is pretty incredible,

then you hit your very first stage. We had a pretty big event, a commerce round table, and then we were able to announce obviously at this point when this comes out the acquisition of you guys joining on to CTC. And look, I've known about you guys for quite some time because we're both pretty aggressive in this LinkedIn growth marketing and talking about our services, which Running for this episode, I really want to do two core things. One, talk about like, how did you get here?

“You guys have spread run this thing, and it's an important market.”

It's really, really necessary for all of our brands. I'm starting to see this in the internal channels of like, people that are wanting to have CTC services are actually just wanting to have a lot of like T bar services. Now that's underneath the CTC umbrella, which is so cool for me to see on the marketing and the sales side of things. And lastly is, you guys then ended up going back home to on campus.

And you guys are growing and building this back in the lab again.

So my first question is, how was it jumping on stage for both of you?

I know you both had two individual different roles that you played in the presentation. But I'm giving me the beginning of when you guys were just about to jump on stage to the rehearsal to how you guys think you did. Yeah, I would say so they're the lot going on around the time of the event. So to be honest, Alex and I did not practice at all until the day before when you took us on stage. So that was our first practice.

So I thought the practice went pretty well and then also the pitch deck we put in the side deck that we put together.

“Maybe prepared it like a week before I think Alex, I don't even really remember what we're prepared it, but it was there's so much going on where it's last minute.”

Our mindset and we do us on our sales calls is like, we are better talking to somebody, the audience, whatever, than reading off a slide deck. So we kind of put that together while the acquisition was going through. Okay, we're just going to see, you know, the slide, but really talking explained to the audience, you know, what it was. So we were, I don't know, I think right before we got on, we were a little nervous. We were kind of pacing back and forth, like five minutes with our little mic on.

Got to tweak that a little bit, but like, I don't know, like, I was more nervous. I'm still tired of this. I was more nervous for an online podcast I did like a few months ago that I was for commerce or a table and I think there is a wide and I think I occurred to you in the event like one the rehearsal that I before was great. And I just felt like the stage and how everything was set up was very comforting and like having like, you know, you as the MC and the people that we knew and it was just like, okay, it's just like a room full of people that we've, you know, already spoke with.

And I honestly felt pretty comfortable. I was, I was a low nervous beforehand, but like, I thought I went pretty well. I agree. Yeah, I think it went well. I would say the worst part was the anticipation, just like waiting for us to do it, like we really couldn't enjoy ourselves if we knew it was like great.

And then after we felt great and you know, we're able to enjoy ourselves a little bit more and then we got some reassurance from people that we did pretty well.

So I was great to, it's the number one fear people have. It's like spiders, heights, drowning and then like on stage, having a presentation like it's all, it's it's one of the hardest things for people to do and I was, I was, I don't know, I think I might have been telling this to you, Alex is like, it is kind of our duty, like as if we want to be men and business or we want to be even a woman and business, but if you want to be a person in business, that's trying to do big things, which you guys clearly are.

You have to hit stages, you have to get presentations, you have to get people to listen, you have to be compelling, you have to do all these different kind of non work related things or like get the work done related things you have to be able to like talk about and so. Just being a host for you guys and seeing it, like I wanted to go above and beyond and like get you guys in a really good spot, Taylor already kicked us off, which you and I both know that dude is he delivered the presentation to me that morning, okay, so I, we would none of us saw it, it was beautifully done, of course.

That was there, his energy was there, and he delivered in his, his Taylor holiday manner as he does, and so it was cool, especially I remember the very first time I did a presentation, which was at this point 10 and a half years ago, I did it with actually a CTC client, popstock, so like there's a very full circle moments in all this and the one thing I remember and I'll tell everybody that's listening is like nobody knows what you're about to say, the only know how it comes across. You have that confidence if you're if your chest is out and you're speaking correctly, it's it's all day, it's you can do it's almost what I like to tell it's automatic and it's a back pocket talk.

“I talk at any time that you can pull it out and deliver and so I think you have it, I get a look at this hysteria that you hear.”

Why, why and how did you get all these ones and where did most of this like interest come from. So early on when we started the agency. We asked ourselves a question, it was like where are the business owners and they're on LinkedIn so we started posting on LinkedIn Tyler made a post way back in the day when we first started.

They was like two weeks after we started the agency essentially calling out David protein like how we would take them from zero to a million hours a month and take that shop.

And then he would tag the found he tagged the founders and that post. It worked like really well.

“So we just started spamming that post and then they got caught me eventually, but it worked for like three months and saying.”

I mean, the thing that the hardest thing about this is and I'm learning this first sounds like as I'm trying to build a. a TikTok program and and a creator platform. It is actually a lot of like upstart like just so much like thinking and strategy and program building out of this and I even even the way if I look at this is. You go what is a poor program what is a poor program look like and I'm going to name the five things I want you like to call out in the order. You're the are the right order sample volume is love a bad program as low sample volume a bad sample problem as you're shipping.

“Like you don't have enough samples ship to how many videos that these people are going to be posting.”

No creator community or any loyalty to the brand, which I were really want to talk about a lot of that because Tyler, I know you spent a good portion of the presentation on what does that community's potential look like. Contents flywheel and spill over will spend some time on this one right now and then the bottom of funnel is the only content that's ending up converting. So when you look at TikTok as a channel is it a bottom of a channel is it a top of funnel do you think it's a full funnel how do you view this.

But though it's they inherently like it's top of funnel but it also plays a part of the entire funnel so like obviously you have like the impressions they're not flowing down to like Amazon and you talk about the halo effect. And so that's where like the real public funnel comes from is it was impressions the halo effect to Amazon or retail or D to C but then you also have the content play and so like you've all these careers posting content and to most brands are getting a couple hundred piece of content per month from TikTok shop if not thousands at scale.

So those creatives are really good creative that performs a meta not every brands actually taking that content using a meta but the ones that are seeing a ton of success.

And so I always go back to like the case that we presented this for ridge.

Like 20% of their meta budget right now is going towards our TikTok shop content and they have any been on the platform for I think been like six maybe seven months that they've been on the platform and 20% of their meta budgets going towards our TikTok content and so they're seeing a ton of value from that. And I would say most like the big D to C brands are looking at TikTok shop as a sales channel because it's not like this massive sales channel is going to change your business but it's probably the most insane valuable channel like once you get that creator fly will going.

Most paid social teams run dozens hundreds even thousands of ads.

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They say you can't plan for a virology. Have you seen most of the brands have like one or two that take off and usually how long does it take for a brand to be like oh my gosh. That one video kind of put us on. And only takes at least a month to get like things rolling like but once you get that first viral video it's just snowballs and you get 10 get 100 and it just goes from there like an normally takes like a month to build the program up. But like for us and like our focus is not to get one viral video you want to get like thousands of videos right but like I wouldn't say like they're viral videos because I will say like take talk shop.

Take talk they limit how many views that these shopable videos get right so like they don't know that wait is that I didn't know that they don't want like when you when you go on tiktok the app they don't want their feed to be just. Tiktok shop videos right they want like I think it's like 10% of their entire feed to be shopping videos so they lower the amount of views on these shopable videos so it's less about virality right and views it's more about getting so much content like so like like.

“Bollywood videos right. Bollywood videos with the product tag it's more about that so like our goal right like after a month is to get at least a thousand videos back for the brand those videos then go to Jamie max.”

Tiktok shops at algorithm money goes behind those videos that's how that virality happens but like the view side like views are kind of irrelevant on tiktok shop because tiktok you know inherently limits the views on the shopable videos but like it's all about how many videos are getting back.

Okay so this is why you're telling me okay this makes a lot more sense.

You're wanting to get as many of the videos back as possible you're not looking to like go viral and it was like I need to get the thousand videos and that's like a good base mark for your head. Because it's not just a thousand videos it's a thousand videos from like the minimum GM before which you guys recommend and believe in which is like at least 3000 in GMV generated from a creator is that is not fair to say. Is it changing because some people keep telling me it's 5,000's 10,000 I feel like that's unrealistic for brands just starting on the program.

It it changes all the time so like some of our brand are one KG and B when they're just starting and then you have some of the brands that have a lot of brand equity and they're getting all the top creators requesting samples and so that criteria. It can be a lot higher so really just that we kind of play that base up creator interest I would say most brands are probably in that 3 to 5k range for samples and then we also look at post rates like usually post rates going to be. 60% 70% sometimes 50% or above is what we're looking for from creators and that's slide like.

That's all custom for the further brand like teller said like we have brands almost set you know a baseline of anybody above 10k GMV 70% post rate we have brands where it's 1k GMV 50% post rate but like teller said he hit on the head it's all about affiliate demand if you have really good affiliates requesting samples you just raise the bar if you don't have good affiliates pressing samples you have below but like that's all done on the outreach side like that big a big bullet point. The sample ship to video volume ratio that's like.

It gets at a high level like our main focus as an agency is how can we get as many videos back per sample we send so if we send a sample we want to get at least three videos back per that sample. These are billions are on a card make one video right so if we send those samples and send it and send it being a thousand videos back which is you know all your required to get back you want to get 3000 5000 10000 videos back because GMV max and GMV revenue take out shop it's. So we want to get as many videos back and the reason for that is how GMV max works so like if you when you look at GMV max GMV max it's an algorithm so nobody knows actually goes into the algorithm.

We just know yeah we just know that it's like if you have a slot machine you spend a hundred times the person assumes a hundred times as a lot like leech more likely chance person spends at one time did the jackpot and so it's like.

The video goes into GMV max it reads all that data like what was the hook what was the angle and then it if it does well let's say that video goes viral it was a video on how to make your hair grow or something the hair growth supplement. For older women and it would take that angle find all the other videos just like that and start putting spend behind it and so that's why it's a video volume game so the more angles we can get matching those that are working the more than they continue to spend in scale up.

Well one of the coolest things that you taught me after this and I've actually started using this on some so my at least how I'm like educating other people as a jumper in the market.

“Is and if you're listening to this on you can have to watch the video where you have to go to YouTube because I'm showing this on screen is this was such a good example and I don't know if you guys saw this on stage.”

I always maybe you did it tell maybe you're like too locked in but as soon as this hit the stage the amount of people that went like this.

Take to take a photo and pick up that it was like it was almost like you look out everybody was taking photos was like yeah that's that's some interesting stuff because everyone has grease and build out so let's let's talk to the consumers like why why does this work so well and there's a couple other slides will go go through for you on for those of their listening. But why does this work so well because I feel like it's eat super digestible I feel like I know where I'm going I can obviously join the community but talk with through like this page one of the creative brief.

So with our briefs like there's a few man goals we want to get away from it we want to make it very visual so like obviously to talk shop a super visual so a few slides know as you keep going it's like literally videos that have gone viral they could click on and play and just see what works right away but like to be honest. The goal is to get people into the community so the first thing that they see is please join that discord community if they join the community the brief will also be in there the goals get creators off platform inside the discord or we then start to coach them but like.

the first slide as you could see right above the discord community we want to get this people essentially incentives to join the community so hey you want more resources going to discord you want on competitions to get free stuff and cash join the discord you want direct coaching join the discord future retainers join the discord like the whole goals of fundamentals inside the discord and then right below that as a snippet basically what we're saying earlier like tiktok rewards not one video but seven to 14 videos just trying to gain creators minds and post more than one video.

And obviously on the left side you have the product highlights target audience so they have some you know ideas of we know what the product is and like you know who was going after and then obviously you know the project details slide but like the whole goal of the brief is to get people into the community. Yeah yeah yeah. And I was just gonna add one more thing so the. If you go back to the original slide like every every brand has it they're own like almost every brand on tiktok has a discord community but like why should a creator join yours so we want to make a very clear to creators.

And like okay you're going to make a ton of money with competition you can make more money with retainers we have coaching in there which a lot of people don't have and so you have to make it very very clear of why should someone join your community and what they're going to get out of it. Either one of them one relationship for every brand is going to be different bits on what they can obviously provide for us we we have a lot of a very very big focus into coaching and competitions and so a lot of creators love that so we've really really hard and to providing that for creators because it's a ton of value for them.

“And this is going yeah going all right one thing about that to like not even like what you're showing but even before they get the creative brief.”

In the you can messaging when we give them the option to join the discord like teller saying every brand has a community.

But like we want to make it so so clear to join ours we hire these top affiliates become content coaches affiliates normally have to pay you know a few hundred dollars a month a thousand dollars a month to go in these coaching programs. For free for brands inside these discord so we let them now like hey you want free coaching from a top affiliate that you normally have to pay a thousand dollars a month to get come join cruises discord you get it for free.

“That's a crazy value because I started to see that as I'm getting because I'm trying to learn it from the actual content creation side to see like what is the experience of the person.”

Did you guys do any content yourself before you kind of jumped into like booking people or building the communities or no.

No, we don't we don't we don't we're not creators by early on we realized as early on we did a coaching calls ourselves and like creators respond so much better when a creator gets on a call is like oh I've generated a hundred k gb the last thirty days this is why you should listen to me. And so like that is a very strong hook when you get on a coaching call and also telling a friend that they're in good hands and like this guy or girl knows exactly what they're talking about. And so like very early we delegated that to a content coach because we do the importance of it because everything goes back to quality and getting careers everything they need so we don't want to sheep out on that and get what Alex or I or someone that doesn't know.

And giving updates all day do you like schedule is to you we build an MCP to kind of communicate to community or do you not want to automate it, especially at the beginning because you kind of want the brand voice to come out.

“I mean yeah we know these affiliates they have you know lives outside of ticked out shop and you know our specific brands so we want to make it kind of clear like hey we have a weekly call at this time once a week like you know set that time aside.”

That's where you can come on for an hour and just get a bunch of sauce on how to make good content and then you know from there it's as little or as much as they want to participate like every single day we have our coaches and daily hooks daily and spow at they want to drop their videos in the feedback chat they'll give feedback and every single video so from there is kind of just like a participation game. What we normally tend to see is for like every brand there's normally like five to ten people that are super super invested and funny not those five to ten people drive 90% of brands over all revenue.

So this is interesting so now my head is like okay the first month two months.

Speed at which we do a thousand two thousand five thousand ten thousand videos and actually through that is finding your your first set of like brand loyalists that are willing to be the coaches are willing to be just like hey we got you take care of us will be here we'll keep the community running. Which one usually first like does it take some time to find someone that's like oh they hit for grooms but they might not have a rich but they're going to continue to hit for like niche style products I feel like if you're health and wellness.

You might do good across other health and wellness things is this is those are some of the trends that you see which is also the benefit of.

I've worked with some of the paper boys so you start to see health and wellness home accessories male female any like macro trends that you guys are seeing right now across the portfolio.

Yeah I mean I would say it takes for you to send hundreds of samples to find the stop 10 and so it goes back to being a volume game like you're going to a lot of creators are going to fail they're not going to do any GMV but it's going to take that volume to find the stop 10. I see look at their data of like what they've done for grooms if you're another supplement but it doesn't mean they're going to do well for you and and the problem with a lot of brand. If a creator is crushing for grooms and making a ton of money with them why should they promote your brand instead and go to your brand if you're something similar.

“And so that's where you have to go up to those mature creators coach them up get them bought into what you're building and build up that creator program so.”

Like what Hudson did early on is he just poured into creators one on one relationship with them giving them everything they need and then over time they became a stop creator so it takes time but that's the best way to do it because those creators will never lead you that's where that call like community comes from.

And that's what comfort clothing playbook is when people talk about it didn't happen overnight it was months of pouring into creators so they're still.

Foring into creators every single day and and have one on one relationships with them. Do a Hudson's post where he like starts sharing. Oh my god I did 75 thousand dollars a month and he just like it's just somebody that's like they think for changing my life I'm like bro this is. Back in the day you used to feel gross being an affiliate like you'd be like I feel weird like I don't want to be feel like you like how dare you of like a offend me by calling it affiliate now you're like. But you give me any part of a sling that part of people are proud to make content it's just like I feel like TikTok shop is completely and especially TikTok creators has completely changed the persona of like.

For lack of a better phrase chilling products have you seen this. Yeah, and I would also say we're seeing that now it's like everything is going to the TikTok model where you have the tribe and where they're trying to give a percentage.

“To creators on metal and I think I think I just aligned the incentives with creators and brands and so I think it's it makes a ton of sense with the continued it is on a why this was never done the beginning.”

Because it just aligns and said so when you make money the creator make the ton of money and everyone wins in the end and everyone incentivized to make really really good content and perform. Okay, you hit on something very important so obviously the owner of tribe he was there he was watching a listening to a paying attention. So where where I think this goes and I'm going to be like a little bit futuristic some curious on what you guys think about this too. To try pops up and there's already been platforms like.

Get brands and incense and obviously have tribe and you have a bunch of like creators circle like there's a bunch of these platforms that people can use to get access to to creators. That eventually just be percentage of spend and it'll eventually just be across every platform we already hear the mumbles and grumbles of meta going to do this on reels. It's it's got to all go this direction where like you got to build your community you have to build as many like deeper connections as possible or else no one's going to be around this anymore.

I would say I mean for seeing it real time like you just mentioned it like there's so many softers and platforms trying to do the tri model the same thing.

I would say like the crystal ball like a vibe of guess.

“Like where this is heading it's if you want to like succeed like in the future as a brand you got to really have a loyal community so then whatever software is ripping at the time you just deploy your loyal community into.”

And then like the affiliates aren't commissioned over onto meta as well. But like I mean social commerce is changing so much like two years ago like take up shop was like brand new like this was even a thing. So it's just you just got to be in your toes but like if you have a loyal community of creators then you can just be in your toes and deploy them into whatever you know whatever's no. Yeah I would say so like we're already seeing like big players like Amazon just partnered with YouTube to make YouTube shop and and kind of have that so we're going to start to see big players like that.

I don't think meta's taking it very, very seriously because they've tried launching it before and so like this is the second time they're launching Instagram shop.

And so if they act or trying to launch a Instagram shop and so they take it serious, I think it could be a big opportunity. But I think the priorities are in like creating like the meta world or whatever they're doing on like the AI side. So I don't know if we'll ever get there. I don't think they're going to catch up to TikTok. I think TikTok has so much momentum right now. It's like the number one fastest growing e-commerce channel and like the entire world. And then I would also say live selling. I know a lot of people talk about it as well. Part of social commerce. I don't think it's going to ever be as big as people say it is like I just don't think we have the same infrastructure as China because like.

I don't even know if China has like retail stores like everything they do is online like selling and so it's like. It's a completely different world over there for for commerce. So I don't think like live selling is ever going to be as big in the United States. So I think a lot. I love people are putting a lot of focus in the net, but I'm kind of not not all in on that yet. Yeah. That's interesting. I've thought about this a lot to you. I'm like, where does this go? And obviously you guys have seen a crazy rocker ship in growth and I mean kudos to tank kudos to CTC for them seeing like this is undoubtedly where the future goes. Now whether it's live shopping which they're trying to do that stuff to a Jordan.

And then using the shop trying to like cook up some offerings and thought processes around some brands somewhere will have to take a serious like I truly be watching this like I watched the get salute team and those guys are cooking every single day.

Sling and hydration and I'm like, guys like that get it you know like guys guys guys that saying hey we're going to go all in and this we're going to commit to it.

And they don't think about this and you said at the beginning they don't think about it from like I'm going to spend one dollar and I'm going to get three dollars out.

“I'm going to spend one dollar I'm going to get ten dollars out that's how they used to think about any other average channel meta Google you that you I name those two because those ones are the one I'm specifically used to playing with.”

But everybody else can't use tiktok as like I'm going to spend one dollar to get to it's I'm going to spend here because I know I need the content and it's going to lift all the other channels. Before I let you guys go I want to just speak a little bit to what is like the halo impact that you usually see and is that something that we measure month one or more like month six. More like month read a month six month one like you really won't see much halo if you're a new brand because you're setting up the shop the listings doing that reach getting product and people's hands.

Those videos are certainly get posted those going to be max like the month one you don't see much halo it's kind of around like day 90 as when you start to see it. What we see like for every you know three sales on tiktok shop you'll see a sale either on Amazon or you know Shopify like that's kind of like the number that we're seeing.

“Yeah, yeah and I would also say on top of the halo fact like you have to count feel like the content played a meta so like you could see that early on like month one month do you can start testing content to meta and see value from that.”

But yeah the halo effect right now it's at least what we're being told from the reps is the halo effect to read tales like six times bigger than the one to Amazon and it's pretty crazy but the problem is it put traffic so you can't actually track you can just do a good check. Yeah, I really am curious to see where that goes and help you are starting to track the retail halo effect is everyone talks about eventually is going to have to be real numbers behind it. But I don't know how we'll do that. It's tough right now even from what I know what access most these guys out they don't they don't give daily updates they give like weekly or like monthly updates for and so everything's a retrospect so you're going to have to measure.

Now you have that from total aspen for that month, but you're going to have to look like geos specific you're going to have to look at where did you even know where you even on the shelves whether you even where you sold out do they keep it stock there's so much more play on the digital retail pull through or like social commerce to retail pull through that I don't even know if they ever get there I hope they do because it would make a lot easier for some of these larger and bigger brands but.

Yes, it felt good to get back in a routine.

We still need to get like or ask or actually like desk like tolerate just moved into this new apartment so like I'm looking at taking it from like my bed.

“Yeah, we need to get we need to get like desks. So that's what we'll do probably that maybe hit up Walmart or something, but it feels good to be finally back in a routine on our computer sling in calls and you know on the back end of stuff.”

Agreed. Agreed. Oh, yeah. Well, boys. I appreciate your time. I thank you for all the solstere about to drop in because it's not coming to get you back up to California. We have we have an events to deal with. We have blocked Friday to deal with.

We have golf to deal with. We have all the things and so I'm super proud of you guys jumping on stage to such short notice.

We have all the things going on delivering. Get that first one under your bell and look. It was only like 650 people. Not a big deal. Right. I told you it's going to be super easy. Thanks guys. Good to see you boys. Thank you.