For Chinese companies to go global, they can “play” on TikTok like this!

According to DataReportal, there are about 4.48 billion social media users in the world. In other words, more than half of the world's population is active on social media.

Social media , especially visual content, is increasingly becoming a gateway to purchasing products. According to a report from The Influencer Marketing Factory, about 60% of people said they had purchased something while watching a live broadcast on a social media app before.

Among them, TikTok has attracted more and more attention from Chinese sellers with its huge traffic pool. In recent years, more and more sellers have achieved success on TikTok, either by creating popular products or further enhancing brand awareness.

This has made more people curious about how TikTok works. At the same time, they are wondering how these sellers can find the right marketing focus and how to efficiently match traffic opportunities with products.

The answers to these questions can be found at the TikTok for Business 2023 SHOPNOW Brand E-commerce Overseas Marketing Summit.

Embracing the power of the community to break the bottleneck of Chinese companies going global

"When everyone can express themselves and create, authority and officialdom are no longer the only things. Instead, users are more willing to follow content that interests them, invest more time in platforms with high-quality content, and spontaneously gather to form community circles," said Yang Wei, head of TikTok for Business' overseas commercial brand.

As a short video APP with social attributes, TikTok uses video content as a carrier to connect video creators and ordinary users to form a community.

Every day, hundreds of millions of real platform users create, watch and share various forms of immersive product content on TikTok, delivering good things to community users with similar interests, triggering extensive discussion, interaction and sharing.

Chinese companies have entered the next stage of going global. When talking about overseas markets, sellers usually mention the word "volume". With the changes in the traffic structure of marketing platforms, traditional delivery strategies are no longer sustainable. In addition, consumers have also put forward higher requirements for content quality and media presentation. Overseas companies need to pay more costs to impress and influence the target audience.

Under the new circumstances, it is imperative to choose new traffic platforms and use new marketing methods.

As the world's leading short video entertainment platform, TikTok currently has more than 1 billion monthly active users. The rapidly growing TikTok is becoming a must-have platform for companies going overseas.

For e-commerce companies going overseas, the rapid rise of TikTok has brought unexpected social power.

First, the real-life recommendations of good products on TikTok can provide in-depth information about products through innovative and immersive short video live broadcasting scenes, and consumers are willing to stay for this. Secondly, the interest recommendation mechanism and the logic of finding people with goods can not only help users meet their existing shopping needs, but also stimulate potential shopping interests. Thirdly, in the diversified and highly active TikTok community, no matter what category, there are fans who communicate with each other and promote the popularity of content to be seen by more people. These real community word-of-mouth have become the core force in consumer decision-making and a lever for e-commerce marketing.

Overseas companies at different stages can get marketing support and acceleration through the TikTok community.

For emerging companies in the early stages of development, TikTok, as a barometer of consumer trends, can help brands and niche products quickly gain recognition. According to statistics, 15% of overseas users’ online shopping journeys start with brands they recognized on TikTok.

For companies in the fast-growing stage, TikTok's diversified e-commerce solutions can bring efficient advertising conversions. In some categories in the European, American and Southeast Asian markets, it can even bring more than 2 times the advertising revenue, achieving efficient business operations.

For mature brands that have already established a presence overseas, TikTok is also a platform worth cultivating in the long term. Edelmen's global trust survey tracked brands that have been cooperating with TikTok since 2018 and found that they have gained a 41% increase in brand trust, which also proves that taking root in the TikTok community can help brands truly become the long-term choice of consumers.

elf is a makeup brand that made use of the TikTok community to break through. Founded in 2004, after more than a decade of development, the brand hit a bottleneck.

When the company was about to run into trouble, a group of beauty lovers suddenly appeared on TikTok and spontaneously shared elf's cost-effective beauty products on the social network. At that time, the 3 million+ views of the original UGC content directly led to a 3% increase in product sales.

After realizing TikTok's social media influencer ability, elf quickly launched a series of digital marketing activities around the TikTok platform. For example, it created a business challenge with the same name around the brand's full name #eye lips face. The rhythmic music and the promotion of top celebrities not only showcased the brand's full range of new cosmetics, but also conveyed the spirit of "expressing oneself" through the trendy expression of Generation Z. During the event, the challenge generated more than 7 billion views, and the single won the fourth place on the Spotify list.

Short videos and live broadcasts "double opening" to accelerate enterprise growth

In addition to social networks, short videos and live broadcasts are the other two links in TikTok's business closed loop.

At the summit, Ruan Fei, senior investment director of Fosun Ruizheng Capital, said that from the perspective of investors, investment is about changes and new opportunities in the investment world. As far as cross-border e-commerce is concerned, the changes in short videos and live broadcasts brought by TikTok are the most important changes in the world today.

There are two solutions for Chinese companies going overseas to do business on TikTok:

The first is to open a store directly, namely TikTok Shop. Currently, the sites that have been opened include the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore. The three categories with the highest share are fashion, beauty, and home furnishings.

Second, you can use TikTok’s various advertising products to drive traffic to the independent site and complete consumer conversion on the landing page of the independent site.

Whether it is TikTok Shop or independent site transactions, short video information flow is the recommended delivery method.

In response to this, Yao Ni, head of TikTok for Business's overseas e-commerce industry operations strategy, gave two suggestions: First, ensure diverse and sufficient material, because users of short video platforms like to see fresh content and their attention is always being competed for, so the most important thing about the material is that it is sufficient and diverse; second, at different budget levels in the cold start phase, ensure that the account has enough plans to ensure a steady growth.

However, when a company reaches a stage where it needs sustained growth, short videos can no longer meet the needs of rapid business growth for TikTok Shop. This is when live streaming needs to come into play. This strategy is also called “double-opening” of short videos and live streaming.

The live broadcast room traffic generally consists of three parts: one is the private domain traffic generated through daily operation and maintenance of corporate fans; the second is the precise traffic brought by live broadcast room advertisements; and the third is the natural traffic driven by various indicators of the linked store service experience.

After rapid development, it has entered a stable growth phase, and the strategy of independent sites is slightly different. At this stage, "how to convert traffic into sales" is a question that independent site sellers are more concerned about.

Yao Ni, head of TikTok for Business's overseas e-commerce industry operations strategy, said that data analysis can be used to confirm the growth potential and supply situation of the product category, analyze the target audience's pain points and needs, match product selling points, and study consumer interests and preferences in combination with TikTok platform trends. Finally, potential products can be locked in, and through influencer endorsements and material testing, hot products can be promoted and converted into business.

It is worth noting that for test materials, sellers often subjectively make a few, run them, and then give up when the results are not good. This is incorrect.

Yao Ni said that materials cannot be based on guesswork. The key action lies in the early analysis of the target population and the selling points of the product, such as efficacy, quality, novelty, and appearance. After cross-multiplying the population, scene, and selling point, for example, 2 populations, 3 scenes, and 4 selling points, 24 directions will be cross-multiplied. Then do A/B testing in the account plan and let the system tell you which one is better. Evaluate through click-through rate, conversion rate, ROI, and GPM, and increase the delivery of good materials.

GMV tripled in 8 months, this is how they “play” on TikTok

Puxi, who has been deeply involved in the domestic slippers category for many years, would never have imagined that one day its products would be associated with the three words "feeling of stepping on shit" and become popular on TikTok.

Last year, a video shared by an ordinary user on TikTok about his experience using Park Si slippers was viewed over 500,000 times within a week, and also drove a 500% increase in sales on the platform.

In the video, he novelly replaced the soft texture of slippers with the "feeling of stepping on shit", which aroused strong reactions from other users. Because of "fun" and "curiosity", they were attracted to it and went to their usual shopping platforms to search and buy.

In fact, Park Xi had already opened an account on TikTok in 2020, but it was not until this video appeared that he realized the power of TikTok seeding.

So it started to invest in budgets and work with vertical influencers to do brand promotion and endorsement. After a series of operations, Puxi's brand voice on TikTok has grown by leaps and bounds since the second half of the year.

Puxi relies heavily on TikTok's influencer ecosystem when doing marketing. They use 1% of the top influencers to help new products gain momentum quickly, use 10% of the mid-level influencers to help new products quickly increase sales, and use the tail influencers and amateurs to produce content to create a sense of reality, while also feeding back word of mouth, forming a complete promotion matrix.

Different influencers have different purposes for cooperation. "When we cooperate with top influencers, we prioritize exposure, because their traffic is relatively stable, so we recommend trailers. When we cooperate with mid-level and tail influencers, we recommend bringing in cars, which can not only ensure exposure, but also capture long-tail traffic for conversion." Qian Shuai, co-founder of Puxi Cross-border, said at the summit.

As more and more players entered the short video track, Puxi quickly entered the live broadcast track and built a matrix of content live broadcast rooms. Now it is also focusing more on live broadcast.

"TikTok is a very efficient, one-stop platform for user operations. Through TikTok's expert ecosystem, it can help users recognize brands. Through short video accounts and live broadcast accounts, brands can retain users. Through TikTok Shop, users can be converted into consumers." Now Qian Shuai truly feels the tremendous power of TikTok.

Today, the commercialization of TikTok is a very important weapon for Parks. Last year, just eight months after entering TikTok Shop, its overseas GMV increased by 300%. Currently, half of its GMV comes from TikTok.

In general, Park Xi did two main things on TikTok: First, he used TikTok to do content marketing, working with influencers to produce short video content and gain exposure. Second, he entered TikTok Shop, through which he achieved a closed loop from user seeding, conversion, to final retention in the TikTok ecosystem, and carried out one-stop operation and management, achieving dual growth in brand voice and user retention.

When Park Xi’s TikTok marketing journey just started, the technology fashion brand realme had already established emotional resonance with users through TikTok marketing, thereby increasing brand awareness.

How is it done? At the summit, JJ Kwan, head of realme's global social media, shared how to continuously integrate local user habits through "localized" brand management to enhance the brand's influence and user preference in the local market.

In realme's view, if mobile phone products want to impress consumers and achieve sales conversion, they not only need to highlight product advantages, but also need to use content marketing to form brand awareness on an emotional level.

On TikTok, realme can accurately target users and provide content that users are interested in, thereby stimulating dissemination and quickly accumulating brand voice and number of fans.

In order to promote the new product C55 in 2023, realme promoted it on TikTok through Branded Mission and advertising products, inviting many influencers to create videos using songs inspired by "C55" to drive more potential users to participate in the communication activities. So far, the #realmeC55TheChampion challenge page has been played more than 66 million times, and the average video interaction value has increased by 367% compared to the 2022 Ramadan Challenge.

Now, TikTok has become one of realme's most important channels for communication and operation. After several years of in-depth cooperation and layout, realme has already deployed TikTok accounts in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin American markets, enhancing brand awareness and bringing users closer.

It can be seen that overseas companies can leverage short video creativity and influencer marketing to drive and assist growth, and combine it with store opening, live streaming and other capabilities to make their business take root.

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