Home brand Sweet Furniture: Knocking on the door of hot products with the power of experts

Now, more and more overseas companies have found new growth on TikTok. Even some merchants with multi-channel layout have not only sold their products on TikTok, but also created a brand effect. Sweet Furniture is a typical example.

Sweet Furniture is a Chinese overseas brand focusing on furniture products. It has been committed to innovation and exploration, and has continuously developed advanced technologies and products to improve people's work and lifestyle. During the Black Friday promotion last year, Sweet Furniture created a GMV of 12 million US dollars on TikTok, directly topping the GMV top 1 in the home furnishing category of TikTok Shop. At this time, it had only been less than five months since it entered the platform.

As GMV climbed, Sweet Furniture, a newcomer in the home furnishing category on TikTok, became famous. Faced with this sudden dark horse, overseas consumers showed great attention and love.

As we all know, on the TikTok platform, products with low average order value are more likely to sell out in large quantities. Home furnishings are not only large products, but also have a relatively high average order value. How did Sweet Furniture achieve price breakthroughs and sell out quickly?

“Last year, influencer marketing contributed 70% to 80% of the total GMV. This year, the sources of our GMV are more diverse, and we have also launched product cards (PSA) and live streaming, but the contribution rate of influencer marketing still accounts for 50% to 60%,” said Pan Qin, head of operations at Sweet Furniture, who directly pointed out the key role of influencer marketing in the success of Sweet Furniture.

On August 15, the TikTok for Business 2024 SHOPNOW Brand E-commerce Overseas Marketing Summit was held in Shenzhen. During the event, Ennet interviewed Pan Qin, the head of operations at Sweet Furniture, to learn more about Sweet Furniture's marketing strategy and explosive product strategy.

It became popular in just one month after joining the platform, and the number of orders increased due to expert marketing

Sweet Furniture started to enter TikTok in July last year , but they didn’t expect to have their first hit product in the back-to-school season in August. They themselves didn’t predict that they would have such a big hit in such a short time.

Talking about the first hit product, Pan Qin, head of operations at Sweet Furniture, still remembers it vividly. "It was a cabinet with 9 drawers, which became popular through a short video posted by an influencer." Before that, Sweet Furniture only had two or three orders a day at most, and more than ten orders at most. However, this video increased sales to 2,000 or 3,000 yuan.

At the beginning of the video, the audience is presented with an extremely messy lady's room, with clothes piled up in a disorderly manner and scattered everywhere. However, when the owner of the room purchased this cabinet, the situation changed dramatically. All the clothes were neatly stored in the cabinet, and the room instantly became tidy and orderly, as if it had been changed into a brand new space.

It was through such a wonderful presentation with great visual contrast that the product sales volume exploded rapidly, achieving remarkable sales results.

With this good start, products such as the "armless chair" were subsequently promoted by influencers' short videos. Sweet Furniture's hot product strategy is to promote 3-4 products within a period of time, give them to influencers to produce materials, and then go to the market to find hot spots. There is no need to choose too many hot spots, and relatively concentrated firepower can increase the probability of producing hot short videos.

Sweet Furniture’s viral videos on TikTok

However, although expert short videos can bring explosive exposure in the short term, their popularity is often time-sensitive. As time goes by, new content continues to emerge, and the popularity of expert videos will gradually decline.

Therefore, Sweet Furniture will re-use the short videos of influencers through the advertising product of TikTok for Business. "Some short videos with natural traffic have a very long life cycle on the advertising side, including some videos we are currently running in advertising, the earliest of which can be traced back to the fourth quarter of last year." In other words, if it only relies on the natural traffic of short videos of influencers to survive the entire cycle, its vitality is relatively short, but with the empowerment of advertising, it can effectively extend its decay cycle. "VSA (short video shopping ads) are used more often. Now the product Product GMV Max is also relatively easy to use and easier to use. It is equivalent to using intelligent algorithms to deliver, match the audience, and then run back to a maximized GMV target." The head of operations of Sweet Furniture said.

In this process, Sweet Furniture will have different videos to reach different groups of people:

Sweet Furniture uses promotional videos to reach users who already have the desire to buy these furniture products . Because users already have the idea of ​​purchasing, when they see this product on TikTok, the price advantage is an important advantage that triggers them to place an order.

Sweet Furniture uses short videos to repeatedly reach out to users who have no intention of buying . When users see these videos, they may place an order.

Connect with tens of thousands of influencers to drive long-term growth in GMV

In fact, when Sweet Furniture first entered the platform, it had already recognized the importance of influencer marketing and formed a team of nearly 30 people to fully engage in TikTok influencer networking, hoping to quickly launch a large number of influencers so that they can concentrate on producing batches of short videos in a short period of time.

"Only when the number of short videos about the same product reaches a certain level within a short period of time will there be a possibility of explosive sales," said Pan Qin, head of operations at Sweet Furniture.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, the number of influencers who have collaborated with Sweet Furniture has reached 10,000, and this number has reached nearly 40,000 so far.

In fact, they also took some detours in the process of establishing connections with influencers. At the beginning, they set some screening criteria, such as the number of fans, past GPA (a set of indicators used to evaluate the performance of influencers on the platform: G stands for growth indicators, P stands for popularity, and A stands for activity), etc., but after a period of time, they found that these data were inaccurate. "We quickly made adjustments and no longer required the number of fans of influencers, but paid more attention to their past performance in bringing goods."

After nearly a year of cooperation with various influencers, Sweet Furniture has also found that the more fans an influencer has, the better the sales data is. The influencers with the highest output are those with 10,000 to 100,000 fans, and their sales results are even better than those of the top influencers with millions of fans.

The data released at the Overseas E-commerce Marketing Summit also showed that in the Southeast Asian and American markets, influencers with 10,000 to 100,000 fans have great potential. Take the United States as an example. Although the number of influencers in this group only accounts for 33%, they contribute 35% of the GMV of American influencers.

In view of this, Sweet Furniture has developed the following influencer cooperation strategy: continue to cooperate with mid-level influencers to expand the scale, and after laying a solid foundation, gradually develop fixed cooperative relationships with some of the influencers who have strong sales capabilities and high brand stickiness, and try more possibilities for cooperation, such as live streaming, etc.

At present, following this strategy, Sweet Furniture has cultivated a number of influencers for regular cooperation and formed a close cooperative relationship with them. The GMV output brought by them now accounts for the highest proportion among all influencers.

In fact, companies going overseas are well aware that influencers play a crucial role in driving orders. However, how to establish connections with influencers and start cooperation with them is often a major problem that bothers them.

At present, there are two main solutions:

The first is to use platform services. TikTok has a wide range of official advertising products for connecting with influencers, including TikTok Creator Marketplace (TTCM), TikTok Creative Challenge (TTCC), TikTok Creative Exchange (TTCX) and other platforms, which can help sellers connect with influencers more easily, especially when the team is not so sufficient.

The second method is for sellers to establish connections with influencers through email. However, TikTok for Business emphasized at the summit that when using this method, it is important to use influencers with 1 million followers as a dividing line.

Influencers with more than 1 million followers generally have extremely high originality, are full of ideas, and have strong content creation capabilities. Therefore, when the seller team communicates with these influencers via email, they only need to briefly explain three points, namely who you are, what your product is, and why you are here.

For influencers with less than 1 million followers, sellers need to provide more detailed content, such as duration, scene, audience, and even elements of how they want the influencer to present the video, so that the influencer can directly refer to them to make short videos.

It is worth noting that in this process, sending the cooperation requirements to the influencer does not mean the end. Merchants must do a good job of tracking to ensure that the videos fed back by the other party meet the requirements. In addition, the influencer must provide a creator code ( Creator Code) or invitation code (Invitation Code) in order to place advertisements in the TikTok AM background.

With effective marketing strategies, Sweet Furniture is rising strongly in overseas markets and quickly occupying an important position. It is not only a brand, but also a successful example of Chinese home furnishings going overseas. Its successful experience is of great reference value to many companies that hope to expand overseas markets. Among them, its clever use of the TikTok platform and unique advertising strategy are particularly worth in-depth exploration and learning.

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