Sales volume surged 6 times in half a year, and some sellers leveraged TikTok's traffic pool

According to a report by Accenture , the global social commerce industry is expected to grow three times faster than traditional e-commerce, from $492 billion in 2021 to $1.2 trillion in 2025.

In this process, the development of TikTok has attracted much attention. As early as last year, TikTok 's monthly active users exceeded 1 billion, which is a big piece of fat for cross-border e-commerce sellers who rely on traffic, that is, order volume. In addition, the profit returns of traditional e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay have been declining, which has forced cross-border sellers to focus on TikTok e-commerce.

Third-party data shows that as of the third quarter of 2022, the number of TikTok Shop stores has exceeded 130,000.

However, TikTok is not easy to do, which is the most common feedback given by sellers who have tried to layout. At the end of 2020, there was a wave of " TikTok e-commerce " in the industry. Some big sellers directly recruited and formed relevant teams. The majority of small and medium-sized sellers also heard the news and let some of the original e-commerce teams transform to TikTok .

But they soon discovered that TikTok 's traffic conversion was not ideal. They often invested a lot of manpower and financial resources, but in the end got very little results. The effort was not proportional to the return. Instead, those service providers who did TikTok training made money first.

However, there are sellers who have tapped into TikTok 's huge pool of traffic. In this article, Yien will introduce three sellers who have achieved explosive growth on TikTok . Their experiences and practices may provide some inspiration for other sellers.

GMV surges 6 times in half a year, YOU finds growth on TikTok

During this year's Ramadan, many TikTok users in Indonesia were flooded with the #Wouldyouloveyou challenge, which has been viewed 2.12 billion times. The initiator of this challenge was YOU.

This year, more and more sellers have paid attention to YOU, one of the reasons being that it has leveraged TikTok 's traffic pool.

YOU is a brand under HEBE Beauty. Different from overseas brands that first expand into the domestic market and then expand overseas, YOU is a local brand created by a Chinese team in Southeast Asia in 2018. For a long time, it adopted shelf-style sales, and its marketing strategy was mainly based on traditional TV advertising and basic media.

At the end of 2021, after in-depth visits to various Southeast Asian countries, the marketing team decided to iterate the traditional marketing approach into a full-link closed-loop marketing approach based on TikTok.

It is often said that "choice is more important than hard work." This statement is well proven by YOU. After changing its marketing strategy, YOU achieved three marketing goals on TikTok at the same time: product promotion, brand upgrade, and online sales. Not only that, the brand achieved an explosive growth of more than 600% month-on-month in half a year. At the same time, from January to April, the monthly GMV continued to surge at a rate of more than 100%.

As we all know, the population structure of Southeast Asia is very young, but most of YOU's previous consumers were middle-aged women. Through TikTok, it found the missing young consumers.

In order to win over TikTok's consumer power, YOU launched a series of marketing activities. However, unlike many sellers who choose to rely on KOLs to promote products, YOU uses "topic challenges" as an entry point, combined with user interests, to create brand influence, gain attention, and ultimately drive sales.

For example, the #Wouldyouloveyou challenge mentioned above was launched by YOU in collaboration with influencers during Ramadan this year.

Ramadan in Southeast Asia is equivalent to the Chinese New Year, and the pain point of "forced marriage" faced by Chinese women during the Spring Festival is also experienced by young women in Southeast Asia. During the Ramadan festival, many brands' advertisements are designed to create a family-friendly atmosphere, and few brands discuss the topic of "forced marriage".

Based on this, YOU launched this challenge with the theme of caring about women, encouraging young women to love themselves, be themselves, and fulfill themselves. At the same time, it matched TopView (one of TikTok for Business's advertising products), telling the story of a young woman who was urged to get married by her family when she returned home, but at the same time faced a career opportunity and did not want to give up and wanted to be herself.

This marketing method of effective communication and deep empathy with target users has achieved amazing results. Judging from the effectiveness of the advertisement alone, it has received 88 billion views and 8.8 billion interactions. Many people have left a lot of positive feedback, such as someone saying that this is the first time he has watched a commercial advertisement.

This traffic eventually fed back greatly to online sales. In the first half of Ramadan, YOU ranked first in Indonesia in the TikTok live streaming category; YOU's popular lip glaze Rouge Power also ranked first in sales in the lip glaze category; during Ramadan, the anti-acne series was also a very popular product in the skin care category.

In addition to emotional communication with consumers, YOU also launched an entertaining song and dance filter challenge #HyAmino with TikTok influencers around facial cleanser products, which brought fresh vitality to users' Ramadan entertainment and also contributed to the rapid growth of TikTok Shop single products and GMV.

In addition to holiday marketing, YOU is also good at launching new products during various holidays to create hits. For example, Rouge Power Lip Glaze was launched on Valentine's Day. YOU released preheating posts and preheating materials from top V influencers through self-media, held product live broadcast conferences, invited top V influencers, well-known professional makeup artists and beauty media to create momentum, invested in KOL review short videos at various levels, and combined with a large number of live broadcast rooms for special or mixed broadcasts, etc., to increase online voice and complete online conversion while promoting product awareness.

In the end, in the first week of Rouge Power Lip Glaze's spread on TikTok, the related hot topic #YOUREDCODE received 30 million discussions. During the spread period from February to April 2022, it topped the TikTok beauty sales daily/weekly/monthly charts many times.

The reason why Y.OU can impress consumers so accurately is inseparable from the fact that it has enough insights from local employees. In the process of brand expansion, we often mention the importance of team localization. Only local people understand the needs of local people. The selection of marketing touchpoints and content production must have enough local teams involved to maximize marketing effects.

In terms of team localization, more than 90% of the employees in YOU's local team are locals, and Chinese employees account for only about 10%. In addition, its CEO, VP, and HEBE Beauty e-commerce director are all based in the local area.

Most of the users on TikTok are young people, and their interests are updated very quickly. Therefore, if brand marketing wants to keep up with them, the marketing strategy must be updated quickly. The frequency of the YOU marketing team changing its marketing strategy is in "weeks".

The reason why this iteration speed can be maintained is that YOU's marketing team is not fighting alone. TikTok is a very new social platform, and it is difficult for people to have enough knowledge about it. Therefore, YOU used the "big force to make miracles" method to mobilize the entire team to study it together and start advertising at the same time.

This approach eventually achieved unexpected results. For example, some senior pitchers may not necessarily have good ROS after a period of advertising, but some employees who have no marketing and advertising experience, such as designers, may have good content or good optimization, and they may have advertised with good ROS performance.

As we all know, capital has shrunk its investment this year, but in February this year, YOU received US$40 million in Series C financing, which shows that the capital market also recognizes its future online development potential.

From "0" to a leading women's clothing brand, NOWRAIN successfully tapped into TikTok resources

In April this year , in the "Fashion Discovery" ranking competition held by TikTok, an independent women's clothing brand and Patpat, which is well-known to sellers, won the honor of top fashion merchant. It is Nowrain.

The legal information website JUSTIA shows that the owner of the Nowrain trademark is Vipshop (China) Co., Ltd. In other words, Nowrain is Vipshop's fast fashion women's clothing overseas brand.

Many fast fashion women's clothing independent websites have a "SHEIN dream". As we all know, SHEIN's social media marketing is very good. In this regard, Nowrain targeted TikTok, which is becoming more and more popular and has users of the same age as his own customer base.

At the end of June, TikTok officially introduced that after half a year of operation, Nowrain not only accumulated 100,000 followers on TikTok, but also successfully converted traffic into orders, becoming the leading brand of women's clothing on TikTok Shop, and firmly ranked among the top three women's clothing brands in the platform's apparel industry.

From the perspective of marketing methods, NOWRAIN adopts a combination of tactics, giving full play to the role of short videos, live broadcasts, and promotional activities, rather than focusing on a single channel. Through short videos and the matrix of influencers, users are told who "I am", and then live broadcasts are used for conversion, while seizing the explosive opportunities of each promotion.

NOWRAIN General Manager Lin Zhibin believes that live streaming and short videos complement each other. After live streaming develops, the efficiency of promoting short videos will be very high. Conversely, if the short video content is promoted in the live streaming room, the ROI will also be very high. "What we do is to make the two form a closed loop."

As a short video social platform, creating high-quality content is the first priority to achieve successful traffic generation. NOWRAIN is well aware of this. In the creation of short videos, NOWRAIN divides it into three levels, namely marketing goals, content quality, and accurate traffic. At the same time, it also optimizes the quality of short video content from two aspects: one is to use hot topics to arouse user interest; the other is to use popular culture to enhance the video effect.

After polishing, NOWRAIN has created many popular videos, which have greatly boosted the growth of GMV. For example, one popular short video brought in more than 2,000 orders on the first day.

However, the number of orders driven by short videos is limited after all, so NOWRAIN uses the live broadcast room as the base camp for receiving traffic and achieving conversions.

At the same time, in order to maximize the role of live broadcasting, attract users in a targeted manner, and accumulate fans with different needs, NOWRAIN has carried out a matrix and vertical content style layout for live broadcast accounts. It currently has 1 self-broadcasting account (nowrain) and 4 proxy broadcasting accounts (nowrainuk, nowrain_girl, nowrain_fashion, nowrain_outfit), all of which have made differentiated style positioning according to sports style, sweet style, etc.

Data from a product selection tool shows that in the past month, NOWRAIN has occupied three seats in the top 100 TikTok UK product sales list, one of which was launched in early July and sold for $7.49. It ranked 40th. Other popular items include zippered hooded jackets and high-waisted butterfly print T-shirts.

It is worth noting that in addition to converting traffic directly on TikTok, NOWRAIN also directs traffic to its own website. This is also what many independent website sellers want to do most after paying attention to TikTok.

SimilarWeb data shows that nowrain.com has three popular marketing channels, among which social media ranks third, accounting for 14.77%. I believe this must be inseparable from its layout in TikTok.

Moreover, it can be seen from the website that NOWRAIN is trying to turn consumers on the independent site into its own "promoters" on TikTok. In the 1st anniversary event of NOWRAIN, it encourages consumers to post short videos with NOWRAIN products and add the topics #NOWRAINyear #NOWRAINyear and #TIKTOKFASHION in the video to win a reward of up to $1,000. It stated that if the GMV brought by the short videos or live broadcasts made by consumers to promote NOWRAIN products within a week reaches more than $1,500, they may receive a commission or gift certificate reward of at least $100.

It can be said that NOWRAIN has now reaped the benefits of TikTok, and having tasted the sweetness, it will continue to make efforts on TikTok.

Vipshop is hiring TikTok operations assistants in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, with a salary of 8-9K, according to recruitment information. Applicants for this position need to be fluent in spoken English and able to translate in real time, and also have cross-border related experience (TikTok , Shopee, eBay, Amazon, Shopify, etc.) . The educational background requirement is somewhat relaxed, and only a college degree or above is required. In addition, those with overseas product selection experience will be given priority.

Currently, the nowrain outfit hashtag has accumulated 48 million views on TikTok, and the Nowrain fashion hashtag has accumulated as many as 112.8 million views.

Wholeee’s brand awareness tripled on TikTok

Unlike the first two sellers, Wholee is a cross-border e-commerce platform. In a sense, Wholee is also a seller. Similar to the supply model of SHEIN and the recently popular Tume, merchants only need to supply goods and take orders, and the operation and marketing promotion are the responsibility of the platform.

As we all know, "the product is not the same as the one in the picture" has always been a pain point for online shopping. The original intention of Wholeee was to provide consumers with "genuine and cost-effective" products. Users on TikTok are keen to create real and positive content, which coincides with Wholeee's brand image of "the product is the same as the picture" and "what you see is what you get".

In addition, TikTok users are active and have strong spending power. The content they create can often trigger a trend, which is very helpful for brands to break through the circle. These are also the reasons why Wholeee has made TikTok a key marketing platform for layout.

Unlike many sellers who aim to "facilitate transactions", Wholee's marketing focuses on brand building and brand marketing. Through self-made or co-created videos with influencers that convey the brand's core advantage of "Wholesale Prices Without the Risk", a distinctive brand image of "goods for the copy" is created.

From the current perspective, Wholee's overall marketing strategy on TikTok is mainly to continuously and focusedly convey the core message of "goods to the version" through the method of "corporate account operation + influencer marketing".

Wholee's official TikTok account "Wholeeofficial" officially started operations in March. It has accumulated 146,000 followers, received more than 476,000 likes, and many original videos have been viewed more than 100,000 times.

Entering the homepage of its account, the first thing that comes into view is the core advantages of its brand. Browsing the videos posted, it can be seen that the overall number of views is not bad. One video introducing six products such as humidifiers, colored lights, and Bluetooth headphones that can be purchased for $0.01 has received 111,000 views and more than 1,300 likes .

When doing marketing on TikTok, many sellers will choose to cooperate with influencers. Wholeee is no exception and has summed up its own set of experience.

The first is to fully "respect the creativity of influencers and the characteristics of the platform" . In addition, on this basis, we can take advantage of the trendy hot spots on TikTok to effectively enhance the influence of content. For example, in the videos co-created by Wholee and influencers, a large number of interactive game forms such as yes or no blind boxes and family challenges, which are very popular among TikTok users, and popular content creativity such as TikTok leggings and meme pictures are used, taking advantage of the popularity of trendy elements themselves to leverage the platform's dissemination volume.

The selection of influencers is also very important. Wholee ’s cooperation with influencers emphasizes the word “wide”, giving full play to the role of influencers at different levels.

The strategies they implemented included:

Since top influencers have a large fan base, Wholee chooses to cooperate with influencers when it needs massive exposure and brand endorsement.

Although mid-level influencers do not have a large fan base, their fans may be very loyal and have good purchasing power. The cooperation fees for promotion are not as high as those for top influencers. Therefore, the cooperation method for this group of people is mainly to bring goods in segmented vertical categories, promote some hot-selling products through matching people and goods, or explore some special products. With products as the core dimension, tell users that it is most cost-effective to buy these products on Wholee.

Although the KOCs (key opinion consumers) at the tail end do not have a fan base, they have good content production capabilities. Therefore, Wholee’s cooperation with this group of people is mainly in the production of product advertising content. By re-editing the expressive content into advertising videos, the performance advertising can have better localized attributes.

It is also worth noting that Wholee focuses more on comedy talents in the selection of talents, and the videos co-created with talents are also mainly humorous. In one collaboration, they even boldly selected a joke blogger to read out the comments with jokes to show the characteristics of Wholee platform's goods-to-blog.

Wholee has certain considerations when choosing to cooperate with funny or communication authors. On the one hand, it wants to obtain more natural recommendation traffic by combining with TikTok hot spots. On the other hand, soft-implanted content also makes people more willing to consume content.

Through TikTok's questionnaire survey, Wholee found that after several months of marketing, the brand awareness of Wholee among users reached by the project has nearly doubled.

TikTok

YOU

NOWRAIN

Wholee