TikTok has become a world unto itself. The trends and content changes seem to follow their own algorithms as Millenials and GenZ seamlessly blend their personal, cultural, and commercial interests in engaging TikTok videos. TikTokkers want authentic, entertaining content in video format, which can prove challenging for sellers and vendors with large product catalogs.
Selling your products on TikTok means staying ahead of the game
Compared to other ecommerce platforms, there are no silver bullets to master TikTok marketing because the platform’s audience never stops evolving. The trends have lives of their own as creators, influencers and the billion or so users actively impact what people are watching and what kind of products they are interested in. What we can do is give you top tips and hacks on how to start selling and promoting your products on TikTok in bulk. No matter how big your product catalog is, a comprehensive product-to-consumer (P2C) platform will clean your catalog, create your TikTok dynamic product ads, and enable easy management of all your TikTok campaigns.
Set up your TikTok account properly
After you create your account and switch it to a pro account or business account, start to familiarize yourself with the performance and tracking options TikTok offers: Performance and audience data, which is a business content guide that gives you all the latest developments and news on the platform. Then there is the Video Showcase, which shows you some of the top trends that are popular with businesses and content creators. The commercial music library gives you access to more than 150,000 pre-cleared, royalty-free sounds you can use. Also, there’s the Web business suite: which gives you more data.
If you are using multiple social commerce platforms at once, you will save a lot of time and resources by using a third-party P2C services provider for your performance marketing insights and to update the latest platform developments automatically.
Finally, link your online store via Shopify or whichever platform you use. Then it's time to get your campaigns launched or, if available in your regions, launch your TikTok Shopping campaigns.
Make great videos! Invest in smart solutions to create enriched ads in bulk
It may seem like a no-brainer, but it can be challenging to create tens of thousands of TikTok in-feed ads quickly and without sacrificing the kind of customer experience that’s essential for your target audience. Companies feeding large product catalogs into TikTok are not necessarily looking to piggyback on user-generated content. They want to create their own product ads. After researching your audience’s profiles, look for a social commerce solution that can turn your catalog into enriched Dynamic Showcase Ads. P2C compatible video and image designer tools will turn your images into TikTok videos.
Choose your products carefully, not everything works on TikTok
Apart from a long list of banned items and content, you need to find out which of your products or product ranges will best fit the TikTok user profiles you are looking to sell to. Remember, TikTok's major user base is teenagers – Gen Z and Gen Alpha – with the next user groups being 20-29 and then, finally 30-39. So make sure the products you offer in TikTok are hitting these three groups.
Spend time investigating the communities and groups and see what is trending to get an idea of what you can sell from your catalog. Use hashtags in front of the common words that are advertised to see how others are advertising products similar to you. For reading lights or books, try #BookTok, etc.
Influencers are key to raising awareness for new brands or new ideas
Because TikTok’s main target group is Millennials and GenZ, suppliers need to look into influencer-assisted marketing on the platform. With trust being a decisive factor in social commerce, the younger generations are receiving recommendations from family, they trust influencers and content creators. Go to the TikTok creator marketplace in your business account to look for examples of influencer marketing that’s trending right now.
With trust being such an important factor, your content needs to be engaging and not overly pushy or full of advertising jargon. Hashtag challenges, how-to videos, contests, and video carousels are good options to create a buzz around something while providing engaging, authentic content. Essentially, your paid ads should be approached as though they were organic feed content and they should also blend seamlessly into TikTok’s user-generated content.
Connect your product catalog to TikTok perfectly with Productsup
At Productsup, we’ve spent the past years developing our social commerce solutions and video designer tools with TikTok in mind. We can now automatically add millions of SKUs wrapped in enriched TikTok Dynamic Showcase Ads in a fraction of the time it would take a team of designers and marketers to do the same. This is why we are one of TikTok’s only official partners.
Read our free TikTok guide below for more tips and information on the world’s most exciting and future-oriented social commerce platforms.
