it is going to take some time to understand what the viral format is on Tik Tok shop and what works and you're going to need to do a couple cycles of these samplings before you have something that you're ready to amplify with ads right for example different content Styles and different ways influencers showcase the product welcome to the Ecom breakthrough podcast are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business you You' already crossed seven figures in sales but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level join Josh Hadley an8 figure Ecom business owner and investor as he interviews highly successful business owners get ready because you are going to learn specific actions you can take today to help your business reach its full potential and leave a lasting impact on the world welcome to the Ecom breakthrough podcast I'm your host Josh Hadley where I interview the top Business Leaders in e-commerce past guests include Kevin King Michael E Gerber author of The --th and Matt Clark from ASM today I am speaking with Sohan Sanka and he is going to be talking a lot about how to approach Creator marketing for Tik Tok shop and social commerce and how this is going to explode your sales and make you relevant for the next decade of e-commerce this episode is brought to you by Ecom breakthrough where I specialize in investing in and scaling 7 figure e-commerce Brands to eight figures and Beyond if you're an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a coach or a consultant who can help take your business to the next level I bring hands-on experience strategic insights and the resources needed to fuel your growth so if you were someone you know is ready to scale or looking for that coach or consultant or Mentor have them reach out to me directly at Josh eom breakthrough.com that's Ecom with two M and let's turn your dreams into reality today I'm excited to introduce you all to sohun Sanka sohun is currently with Yuka doai and they strive to build more impactful AI powered solutions for marketers fueled by his Curiosity sonen has taken roles across multiple departments and stood up several verticals for ugc Tik Tok shop and influencer marketing throughout his career Sohan has also conducted strategic workshops and audits of top brand and agencies to help them optimize their creator marketing workflows so with that introduction welcome to the show Sohan thanks for having me on super excited to be here and absolutely love this podcast and love what you guys are doing awesome well hey I'm excited to have you on the show you and I met a few months back and uh we've already jumped on a few calls outside of uh our conversation today and uh we've always had very productive fruitful conversations and I am super excited to have you kind of spill the beans on everything that you've been working on and what's actively working in social commerce right now and sharing that with our audience because I know this everybody in the Amazon ecosystem that's been selling on Amazon like they want to move more volume of sales off of Amazon or at least they want to start generating more demand and traffic for for their Amazon Products off of Amazon right because it Fe feeds the Beast this whole algorithm and flywheel on Amazon itself so with that being said soan uh tell me tell me about your background how did you get into this world of social selling influencer marketing Etc yeah yeah I'd love to love to jump in so um my first job out of college I actually worked as a media buyer at an omni Channel agency called Vendo where we manage brands on amazon.com walmart.com and I help build up their Tik Tok shop manage service from scratch actually and built up their affiliate program managed a full team we work with brands that you know are a little bit on the smaller side you know six figure ARs and then I've worked with billion dooll Brands as well um over there I was focusing specifically on creators right so I started with media buying I actually learned you know how it looked like when you took that creative asset from a Creator and ran ads on it through Google Facebook you know Tik Tok whatever and then I started working on building out ugc there working with creators collaboratively there worked on an Amazon affiliate you know marketing department there work with a lot of tools like lavant referen impact.com CJ Rakuten like you name it whole Suite of affiliate tools then started moving into influencer with you know Aspire tribe creater IQ so familiar with the space and the tools a lot and as I was building Tik Tock shop and working at an agency um I sort of realized that with social commerce there's a lot more to come and no one really has it figured out yet back then um and I wanted to jump on to the technology side and work with AI work with machine learning products to really solve these kinks in the workflow right because fundamentally what I've seen with affiliate programs and software is that as you scale it it eats the team alive because it becomes an unscalable Beast which then you feel trapped by and so at Yuka um some of the solutions we've been building have been super interesting because they're solving these core problems and I get to bring that marketers perspective where I've managed creators and managed projects for Brands love that so you've got a a depth of knowledge here in the social space you've done General kind of affiliate marketing which again a lot of these straight D Toc brands that did not start on Amazon like that's their bread and butter right like and I think that's where your valuable experience comes from is look on Amazon it's m mainly all about demand capture right it's there's this many people that are searching for these many or this keyword this many times per month right how do I create a product that serves all these people that are searching for the search term on the flip side you have these other dtoc brands that have gotten really really good at basically creating engaging content off of Amazon obviously and they're pulling people in whether it be from a uh Snapchat ad or whether it be from a meta ad or whether it's a Blog article or whether it's SEO or whether it's working through other Affiliates to drive traffic to their site and so I love that you've got that background I guess my question to you soan is why why is social commerce an important topic to be talking about today and what are your predictions of like where does social commerce go from here we've heard all the craziness with Tik shop it's going down it's back up and all of that good stuff but like where do you see like where's the puck going here um even meta has like talked about how they're going to do that for Instagram yet that's yet to be seen really um so tell me where is social commerce headed in your opinion yeah yeah know that's that's a good question um so my perspective comes from the fact that now that I'm in SAS you know I I work with a suite of the top agencies and top brands in the space right so I'm constantly getting different people's perspectives people are releasing industry reports on consumer Trends right and what I've seen you know with just how the Creator economy is growing so rapidly and where social commerce is pacing to is that people are switching from traditional glossy creative to more creative that emphasizes user generated content or as people were calling it Creator generated content right the influencer has become a more trusted mode of delivery and programs like community are being activated by affiliate marketing right and people are going by reviews people are going by people they trust or someone who knows someone they trust right um so there's a lot of trust that's driving consumer shopping behaviors right now one thing that's super interesting about Tik Tok is that um yeah there's trust but 80% of people actually spend time on the Discover page looking at content um and engaging there and these are people were like on Amazon they're not actually searching for a search term on the platform with a certain degree of consideration they're very raw Shoppers they're you're looking at gen Z and then the rising gen Alpha which will be the next wave of purchasing power there and you're appealing to them before they've even thought about buying the decision right um so really with social commerce and social selling it's really a more cost-effective way to use content and leverage the trust with consumers in a way that's not done with spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on PPC yeah no I love that and uh I I agree with your perspective there I do believe that over the next five to 10 years the world of Amazon as we know it is only going to get more and more difficult and to be honest with you the brands that are just kind of like the met too private label Brands where I just I found a you know a spatula and I slap my brand name on it like I promise you in the next 5 to 10 years those things are going to be dinosaurs those things are going to be extinct okay and it's because like you're up against the overseas competitors that are going to be willing to drive those prices down to where they're only making a 1% margin and they're happy with it because guess what they're getting kickbacks from the government they're getting all these other subsidies that we don't know anything about um there's this different like money laundering schemes that they could be playing too so like you just like you don't want to play that game right so the question is for all these people that got started on Amazon if that's where the puck is going on Amazon and private label as we know it is going to die then how do you PR prevent that from happening and this is my prediction the brands that are able to figure out demand capture for their products or their brand are going to be the ones that survive because guess what Amazon's not going anywhere right Amazon's only going to continue to grow over the next decade and what's going to happen is like Amazon just needs to be seen as like it's probably the most trusted choice of shopping for most consumers and that will probably only get more and more important over the next decade right to where the fact like you probably order something and literally it's going to be on your porch in the next hour right like I think that's where Amazon's going in the next decade so if that's where people prefer to shop is going to be on Amazon of course you want your products on Amazon we don't want to run away from Amazon but guess what in order to survive all the overseas competitors you've got to be able to do something that they probably can't do and won't do at least at a at a good scale and that is demand generation for your products okay and that's what you talked about uh soan where you talked about I I like the term instead of ugc user generated content cgc right Creator generated content I believe that that's where the game is going to be played and the brands that are doing that at scale and have an affiliate army or a Creator Army constantly posting about their products are going to be the guys that are surviving and actually thriving five to 10 years from now so the big question is this so so great Josh Josh sold me so sold me on the fact like I need to get into social selling I don't even know where to begin so where do people begin if they're like they're a brand owner they've got some cool products they don't even know where to begin with social selling where do you start yeah so I'm going to start by telling you the number one thing not to do um one thing not to do is now that Tik Tok shop unlike other influencer tools like you know the aspires and you know up fluences out there right they show you the revenue of the top performing creators the number one thing people do is they get onto a platform like ours or they go on a Tik Tok shop and they just go and reach out to the top performing creators who never respond you know that's the one thing you don't want to do it's it yes the affiliate plays an important role but with Tik Tok like I was saying since 80% of people spend time on the Discover page you need to go and do research on what content is moving the needle and think about the Creator as sort of like a foil to the content that is the main character in the fact that like you know your persona on Tik Tok right let's say they you know a young college student who's male right that Creator is delivering a viral format in a relatable way to that Persona you're trying to Target and so that's how you think about creators you know like fundamentally if you're just looking at content excluding all the variables of like engagement rate followers whatever um this Creator is relatable this Creator is authentic and we're banking on trust over here to drive the conversion and drive awareness ultimately like like Josh was saying demand generation to demand capture right um so what you want to do on Tik Tok is just showcase your product in a relatable and creative way and you need to dissect that between who's showcasing your product and how are they showcasing your product so what I would do first is go and do a bunch of trend analysis look at what people are doing that are similar and just break down a bunch of hypotheses to put together a test during launch love it all right well I think you've even got some slides to present so let's uh let's dive into that because I think that's the perfect segue into what what I want to dive into is like how do you actually do this so I want to walk through our listeners and those of you who are listening right now go check us out on YouTube because you're GNA want to see what sohun is is presenting here and what's going to happen is like we're going to walk you through like literally like the basic steps step one come over here analyze these competitors step two and we're going to walk through this methodically does that sound good Sohan sounds good to me yeah I'm GNA go ahead and share my screen and let's uh let's dive into it all right I think we're think we're good here all right so let's start so the first thing like I was saying is Trend analysis right you know throughout this presentation I'm going to be walking you through the step by step but the first thing you need to do before you start doing anything is at least a little bit of research right you should understand where things are heading on Tik Tok because they're a lot different than in Amazon right there's different factors that drive conversion Drive engagement there's ultimately a different customer Persona that you're also working with on Tik Tok than on Amazon right so the first thing I do if I were starting the swim scratch is driveing dive into Trend analysis so for for a lot of our Amazon Watchers let's start with an analogy that you guys are familiar with right keywords so what we can do is actually type in keywords associated with your niche in Tik Tok I'm sure a lot of you had tried to like type in a keyword like shapewear into your Tik Tok search right um one thing you can do to shamelessly plugin where I work um is you can put in the keyword shapewear and we'll pull in all the top brands that are mentioning shapeware in their videos and in their content we'll pull out hooks that they're using and we'll also pull out more content inspiration and ideas the way I would think about that um if I was an Amazon seller is like this is a keyword generation tool you can plug in your top non-branded search term here our AI will go find Rel topics and keywords and inspiration for you and then you plug that in as well so you can do this endless this like virtuous cycle of research with your top non-branded Search terms and Tik Tok Trends to find out the most highly valuable and impactful research right and then once you figure out where the trends are what's relevant to your product you know you want to look at these trending products and start to really break down the content Styles the niches and really dive into the you know nitty-gritty here so let's go on to that Sohan so let's say let's say I'm make manufacturing like darts for like a dart board okay what if I go in there and I type in you know just darts right or darts for dartboard onto Tik Tock shop or even onto Yuka okay and I'm trying to find creators that are talking about darts I guess what if I don't see anybody talking about darts or what if there are no other existing products out there that like creators are promoting um yeah tell me like what would you do if you're that brand owner yeah yeah so if you're trying to figure out you know a product where you're sort of creating a new category right like I I did this with one of the brands I work with it was like a karaoke machine product and like people weren't really selling karaoke machines you know what I mean um so what I'd do is I'd start from that list of top non-branded Search terms go through through your reviews go through all your content and things you've done on other channels and compile a list of keywords related to your product or that solve like related complimentary problems right like a really easy example um you know for like darts is like looking up dart board you know what I mean or like dart games or something like that right um where you can go and find something related put that in here and find related niches and then say like hey you guys created content that's very similar and we think it would be a good fit you know we'd love to reach out to you here's what we do we're actually the first to enter here so we're offering this exclusive offer X Y and Z is it a good sign or a bad sign if there are no competitors on Tik Tok shop for you right is it good to enter a new category You could argue yes and then you could also argue like no like there's a reason why there's no competitors like you don't have a product that's viral worthy so to speak yeah so I think it is a it is a good like you know there's less pressure on your price right like if you're going into an incredibly competitive category I think you can all say supplements is incredibly competitive right you're going to have to deal with a lot of third party sellers pushing down on price doing those discounts right operating on that 1% margin like you said um so there is going to be an uphill battle there but then same with no category right you're you're trying to capitalize on demand that really hasn't been proven by the market to be there um either way for both approaches really it's going to be the same you have to invest in creating a lot of good content and like showcasing and building awareness first and then you're going to layer on all your Tik Tock shop growth levers on top right so if you're coming in with darts and let's say no one knows about darts um what are some trends that you could capitalize on that are far related from darts but have a lot of you know search on or our big trends on Tik Tok and how do you slowly capitalize capitalize on those and bring those back into showcasing educational and informational content to then drive conversion either on Tik Tok shop or off platform that's the way I'd look at it it is an uphill battle definitely if there aren't a lot of products on there but that doesn't mean that there isn't a Way Forward because Tik Tok shop hasn't even been around in the US for that long so it's still pretty new so what's interesting too for us um I agree with your perspective when we first got on to to shop like there were no other people selling exactly what we sell and but we did see some related products right as you said like they're tangent okay these other people are selling stationary related products like let's see if we could reach out to them and see if they we could get something um to move there right and so we did right but it it's not a for sure thing but like I said it it's a numbers game you've got to get awareness out there get that flywheel kind of turning so I just wanted to reiterate like just because there are no direct competitors like that doesn't mean like it's a completely bad opportunity and I would argue for any brand that's out there like I think Tik Tok shop is worth a shot right reach out to like when I say like reach out to creators like I'm talking like having like a thousand creators sample your product and create videos for it right like give away a thousand that's now we're talking about a good test in the market we're not talking talking about here's 10 creators here's 100 creators you actually want at least as many creators that have posted like a thousand videos that's my perspective and if at that point you're not seeing traction he maybe there is something underlying that's it's not going to work for social commerce um what what would you use as like a measuring stick that way sohun like for like if you're going to test the market that's unproven so to speak yeah so I think like there's a lot of preparation that comes into this once you launch too like you have to have a certain degree of like social proof you know what I mean like to convince the affiliate that they should take on your project and even post so like what I would do is like you know get those reviews right import those from you know D Toc like use a preferred partner like yapo or whatever um make sure that you know you have some social proof there try to get a preliminary amount of sales as well before you reach out to creators so that even if you are newer to the market you can still tell people like hey this is a hot product people are buying it right and that's going to significantly increase your chances that every piece of content he puts out sales um to go back to your first point when it comes to like essentially proving the concept that your product can work I think it's pretty iterative I I agree with your uh your statement where it was like you need a thousand pieces of content like sure let's let's take like you know 500 or a th000 right depending on your scale of sampling um it is going to take some time to to understand what the viral format is on Tik Tok shop and what works and you're going to need to do a couple cycles of these samplings before you have something that you're ready to amplify with ads right for example different content Styles and different ways influencers showcase the product will have different average video views which signal like hey are people staying on this video long enough do they find this entertaining and then they're going to have different click-through rates right where it's like hey if I if I boosted this content with ads could we have a proper conversion with a proper row as here so I would start looking for those signals when you're doing this sampling at scale find the successful variables and then bake them into a creative test for your next round of sampling and see the incremental growth I love that I think that you hit on that I think that's a really U good point well taken which is like it's this is an iterative process right you've got to like send a bunch of samples out see what happen see who's working well see what getting better views then go find more of those type of people and say hey these are the other videos that have trended a little better than others so create more like that right and it's just it is iterative um but I think like it's worth the uphill climb so all right so let's move on to step number two here yeah so the next step is uh the product analysis um like Josh was just saying um an an iterative process also you know you need to understand the variables within that iterative process and understand how you can verify success right so what we've done is we've also broken down content into its like modularized format where we've correlated certain components of it with certain performance metrics to explain that more deeply let's talk about hooks so a hook is what you see in the first two to three seconds of the video right some people say three some people say two but ultimately like if you can get your average watch time of your video Beyond a couple seconds the algorithm is going to prioritize your content a little bit more and I would challenge a lot of the viewers to actually look at their content in their Tik Tok account and see on average like when people are dropping off in their video and if you find people dropping off you know below five seconds below three seconds I would take a look at some hooks that are really working on the platform and try testing those hooks into similar content Styles right and so that'll help increase your average video views that'll help increase your visibility really affordably rather than boosting it through ads right um and then selling points when you're launching on Tik Tok shop versus an Amazon the customer thinks differently the customer has different purchasing decisions you're not going to drive purchases through like A+ content and infographics right you're going to have to work your selling points in a very creative way that works with the Trends on Tik Tok and the way you verify that is through your clickthrough rate right so we're able to see like what selling points are really working we see those you know High video views but with a big click to rate and then a big click to order rate right we can go into all the kpis But ultimately like you know in the middle of your video after you introduce your content with a strong hook what selling points are really driving the customer to take action here and you know do a little bit more exploration on your listing for your product right and then the last component is like how is this product being packaged natively to Tik Tok users right so there's viral content Styles like for example for cakes um something I'd look at is like hey like you know is there like uh you know get ready with me you know what I mean something like that right or is there like a viral transformation which is something that our product pulled here right and if you have that content that's already working the algorithm is boosting that kind of content in general and you layer in Hooks and selling points and test that off of something that's booming that's a that's a pretty pretty good hypothesis on like hey you know this creative has a stronger sign to work than if I take what's worked on meta you know what I mean and launch that here yeah one thing that I love about the the tool that you guys have Yuka is that you can put in your product here and it's going to pull up all these like top selling points and the top hooks so here's the hack that I would share right as soon as you're getting like a bunch of these Creator videos and you can drop your product in here and it starts pulling out like hey here's your top performing hooks guess what you do with that content go update your Amazon A+ content and your secondary images and and even your bullet points and your description and like you work all of that in there right because like if it's doing well over here it probably means that's a really good hook to maybe start with your secondary image right or maybe even put that that type of wording or phrase like creatively on your main image maybe on product packaging or something like that it's like ready to go I don't know ready to shed 50,000 pounds I don't know you know what I mean I mean something outlandish but I think that's the point is like take what's working well and then go apply it onto your Amazon listings that's I think like the power of this whole social commerce thing is like you're finally getting like live feedback from people and if something's trending well on Tik Tok it means that some component of it that's resonating with people and if it's resonating with people that like stops them in the middle of their scroll their their Doom scrolling then obviously it would stop them in their tracks if they're actually looking for that type of product on Amazon so I don't I just want to reiterate like how important I think that is so sohun let's go step three those are great points um yeah I mean to go even deeper also like you know we do a product produ level analysis right where we can look at um what's working across all the videos on this product but sometimes you want to understand your creator profile right and your customer Persona so we can go a level even deeper right so let's say I want to focus on one video the top performing video like we can modularize that even deeper and just look at the key idea the hook the selling point and then you can just give this stepbystep script to creators cuz you got to think about Tik Tok shop and social selling versus influencer marketing with influencer marketing you're taking a professional content creator and you're collaborating with them to talk to their audience with Tik Tok shop and social selling you're actually working with a lot of everyday people who aren't super experienced content creators or who aren't doing this deep dive research with like four to five hours to come up with a viral format right so my thoughts are why not just use technology and what's working out there and give them a script and like variate some of these elements to what's relevant to your product look at the audience demographics and adjust that messaging like in this video for cakes right it's actually a majority male audience watching it and that's super interesting because that actually tells me that hey top video for cakes is more about maybe their male Partners gifting it to their female Partners you know what I mean um and that's going to completely change the way I message the product and if I didn't do that I might just go in and be like here's a woman talking about cakes let's copy the content and give it to the creators um so yeah love it love it all right let's keep going cool and this is some more some more things you can do uh with keyword research so one thing that we can do is you can take a list of your top non bradden Search terms like I was saying earlier right and find out if it was mentioned by a Creator so I've worked with Brands who are launching those really Niche products like Josh was saying where they don't have a category that really works like one brand that comes to mind that I work with really closely is called my magic healer we help take them from like a four to 5K Mr completely organic in a couple months just through doing more Niche affiliate Outreach and management right so we taken related keywords to the problems customers were facing or things that people were searching for on Amazon and we'd find every single Creator that's related or mentioning or talking about that right because if you think about why that's important I want to give a creative brief to someone who's a better fit for doing that content style right each creator has their own feel like their own theme the own way they promote content so if I'm targeting People based on signals that they can follow my creative brief better that's that's what I'm going to do with my Niche product because it's all about showcasing my product creatively to create that free brand awareness right um and then of course if you want to do some Outreach on it we can turn that into a list and automate that Outreach so you're only spending most of your time doing the research and less of your time manually messaging the creators each one by one yeah I love that well and I think here's the important aspect of that too Sohan is that you look at like oh I just need to go after like when people think about like hey I need to go find a Creator that's going to go talk about my brand you're theoretically going to think like oh I got to go after the people that are producing the highest gmv or the best creators and as you mentioned earlier it's like it's actually quite the opposite which is exactly why I love social selling is because like imagine if you could just have 2,000 small little creators that would end up producing the exact same volume that one of those big guys would but guess what you're doing it at Pennies on the dollar compared to what you'd be paying that that top Creator right because they're going to command a premium and and things like that but more importantly than this those top creators are going to be really hard to get a hold of and actually showcase your product but these these smaller people right are going to be more accepting but here's the challenge as well okay great I want to work with all these small guys my wife she has $100,000 plus following on Tik Tok as well and she gets hit up all day long like her message thread is just like it's atrocious on Tik Tok right like she doesn't want to dive in there she's just getting spammed all day long like will you feature my product will you feature this product will you feature that product so you have to get in the mindset of these creators that are getting hit up with hundreds of messages per day per hour almost and you've got to think about like how am I going to stand out and so really like the best way to stand out is instead of having the the prey and spray approach of like I'm just going to reach out to all women who talk all women creators are my audience it's like well to your point go find these people and what I love we're using Yuka my favorite thing is like we'll type in the keyword that we want and then we'll grab all of those creators and then we'll send them into like our bot campaigns where it's like it keeps messaging them until they reply or ask for a sample right and our message reply rate so I don't I'm curious what your average is that you see on Yuka we have seen anywhere right now I think we're averaging like 11 11% but on some of my more targeted campaigns we are getting 15 to 20% response rates which in my opinion like that's an astronomically high like this is a cold DM to these creators so soan like what are you seeing on that front that is like five times higher than like the average response rate on Tik Tok shop like I've audited like hundreds of Tik Tok shops from agencies and big Brands and like for any small seller that's coming on you need to expect a one to three response rate when you get on if you're doing everything right um fundamentally with you know Josh's brand and like what they're doing is they've proven their success on the platform and that hooks the affiliate in to respond to their message so you your response rate can get higher it definitely does start at 1 to 3% once you start getting those sales you fix some leaks in how you're messaging right because like Josh is also automating follow-ups he's doing very targeted approaches to people you start to get higher into that middle you know single figure percents right and then to get to that double digit percents you really have to be selling through so all people need to think about when they respond to your message is is this product likely to sell if I post a video that's not that great like being completely blunt um that's how creators one of the things creators do when they make their decisions um the way Brands can get around that is through this personalized Outreach right let's say you know Josh's wife 100K followers receiving tons of DMS but someone sends her a creative brief with a very personalized message on a piece of content she created last week I'm like pretty sure that that would capture a lot of attention from her and at least get her to think and read about the message a bit more than another one being like here's 50% commission for my new product yep on the on the point of commission we haven't even talked about that or maybe is that coming up later we haven't talked about commission um I don't have that here right now in the slides but I can you know go over that a little bit um I talked about this on a previous uh podcast episode I did where people were starting to look at uh Commission of top brands and like matching them um that can be like a false growth signal right so when you plug in your commission into Tik Tok shop in your open collaboration it actually gives you a range it says like hey if you plug in this protein powder product people are offering 15 to 20% within this range when you're launching you don't want to be on the lower end um you want to be on the higher end right but you don't need to go like astronomically High because if you think about what's going to drive the needle here to the in terms of an offer you want to have a good commission but you also want to give them a little bit of a deal to bring to Their audience too because I will say the way they look at it is it's a combination of the affiliate offer times the product's likelihood to sell I mean Josh's brand has a ton of Leverage because it's selling so well he could probably lower the commission on his products and still not hurt his response rate too much because the product's so likely to sell right you know alternatively newer sellers would come on the platform they might need to adjust with a better affiliate offer to get them to choose something that's less likely to sell based on their visible sales volume so that's how I look at commission strategy when I'm launching a new product on Tik Tok shop yeah oh I I love that I think you articulated that well most people get hung up with like what's the magic commission percentage that I need to give to people and to your point like it it there isn't right there's going to be a range what I would try say is like all right maybe start with something that you know is a little higher than average right and if you're not getting responses then maybe try to push it up a little bit more and push it up until you get something and then as you talked about like hey once you kind of reach mass volume then you can maybe start bringing that back down because you've created that like Network effect so to speak where people trust you um which goes back to like let's talk about this one of the strategies to launch on Tik Tok is like look back in the day people used to do these search find bu campaigns on Amazon right it's like hey go go purchase a bunch of people that will go purchase your product and reimburse them guess what doesn't work on Amazon now but that works on Tik Tock shop and I'll just leave it at that because look this is the Imagine Amazon Circa 2010 2015 like that's where we're at right now in the Tik toop shop stage will that last forever I don't think so so while the getting's good maybe employ some of those old tactics that uh were working Once Upon a Time on Amazon and apply them into Tik Tok shop and make it appear that you already have reached mass volume that gives you a much better leverage point when you start reaching out to these creators yeah yeah definitely have heard a lot of similar um Amazon tactics and there are a few people doing that but like Josh is is saying like it's not not like very in for some reason there's a gap and people just don't do that on Tik Tok shop but it is a marketplace with an algorithm with an appearance you have to present um so why not um it's a good call up love it all right let's move on here cool so now let's just go over how to actually reach out to creators so you've done all your research you put together the perfect series of creative briefs based on the personas you want to Target and Trends you want to capitalize on right now it's just all about how do I take out all the manual mess from messaging these creators individually so one thing that I get asked a lot um is like you know and we we talked about this earlier is like what's the average response rate so a piece of clarity I want to you know drive here is that when you send a Target collaboration or Target invite which is the Creator's preferred invitation type because they don't have to use a a fixed monthly sample it doesn't start a chat with the Creator so fundamentally there's actually no way for a Creator to respond to a Target invite unless they go find your shop separately and and create a thread and message you um so it's really interesting where like you know we'll see a lot of people send Target invites and they're like why is my response rate so low because you're are verifying with the wrong kpi you need to verify with your incremental lift and Sample requests that's what you need to do there so so hun I think that okay so double down on that because I thought it was going to be the exact opposite um for this reason and and I would love for you to explain more when we first started the only thing that I did was targeted campaign outreaches that's it like I would just spray and prey a bunch of targeted outreaches so where tell me again where is that ending up in the Creator's message bucket or DMS or lack that of because we were getting like decent re like we were still getting like hundreds of sample requests along the way and we've also started adding Yuka and their regular message bot which is just lit things on fire 10x but tell me the difference of that because I do think that that is a really important call out yeah no it's it's super funny because I was like thinking about it too because when I was managing Brands too I was like I need to look at what the creators are receiving and validate everything that I'm doing here you know what I mean and I don't think people do that enough so I created my own Tik Tok shop affiliate account uh posted some videos posted some AI generated videos too of course because I work at an AI company um and then I looked at where creators were receiving these so there's actually a few few things in the Creator tab under a shop button so you click into your Tik Tock you click earn and then you go into this portal where you manage all your Tik Tock shop activi this is actually separate from the DMS you receive on your Tik Tok platform like your social platform this is a Tik Tock shop portal embedded within there and then you'll see a section called collab invites so I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen creators and DM say hey send me a collab invite um that's a Target collaboration there's different wording on the seller side versus the Creator side but creators understand it as a collab invite because in their UI they see a collab invite section so that's where they receive Target plans when I'm a Creator and I click into that I actually see um almost like a little like email flyer thing you know just like an invite right and I can click into that invite or that email and then I can request a free sample or and the product's already available to promote because with Target collaborations you don't need to request to promote it or add it to your showcase I click on free sample and then my sample request goes straight through so it's very frictionless versus in my target um in my Creator portal there's also a messages section and you can when you look at it it's called like chat with seller and this is where your messages go if you're dming creators on Tik Tok shop affiliate and this is where people pull responses from so there's a little bit of a disconnect it's like I send creators to Target collab here and then I'm looking at all my replies here and I'm trying to make them match up and it doesn't really make any sense because you're sending invites to a place where people can't respond in your portal and you're tracking responses in a place where you never sent an invite interesting so then where's the best place to reach out to people and what's in specifically on Yuka what's the best type of bots to be using then yeah so what I did was I highlighted our message plus Target collab product card bot and this is something we actually engineered in house where you can send them a Target invite that way they don't have to use one of their fixed monthly sample requests so it's very frictionless no risk to the Creator and then you have a messaging tap open because you need to send them follow-up messages and reminders that they've received a product so you can get that good offer in front of them and then from there you actually have a way to verify your response rate in addition to verifying your incremental lift and Sample request from starting this love it all right so the option the best one to use on on Yuka is the the message plus Target collab product card and I would just like double down on that to say like as soon as we started using Yuka like we literally like 10x the number of creators that were signing up with us monthly just by using this feature and it also replaced one of our team members that was manually sending these Target collabs originally so win-win across the board yeah I don't want to take any responsibility for that love it all right let's move on yeah so this is the this is the best invite type for cold star shops or when you're starting there um and then over here going back to the keyword research you know we've done over here right so name your Bot include a naming convention with the intended goal and then add in I I recommend personally because Tik Tock shop with affiliate marketing your sales on your product are visible so limit the Creator's Focus to just one to two things you want them to focus on right if you want to add your PID maybe your second PID which is the same thing as a skew um is a variant or a related product or something else you want to push that has a high chance of selling right so think of your Bot as like a campaign right I I I chose the best messaging type I'm messaging all the creators that align with this keyword based on my campaign goal and I'm going to add in the products I want to focus on and then next here's all the nitty-gritty on how I would fill this out so for your Target collab use the same naming convention because once you start using Yuka and you're reaching out to thousands of creators a month you're going to want to track your overall Outreach performance via a naming convention for standardized reporting so you can understand and ab test different variants of your messaging understand and validate the response rate of the Creator profile you're reaching out to as well and then for Target collabs you know going back to that commission rate number you need to include something that's at least 5% higher when I'm a Creator and I actually receive a Target invite I get to see that hey this target invite is 5% higher than your open plan commission so that's another point of Leverage you have to hook in your creator so it's extremely important because it is visible to the Creator if you just send them a Target invite with the same open plan commission they'll know you're just like you know sending a bunch of mass Outreach just to send more Outreach you're not actually giving them a better offer um and then allow at least six to eight months to promotion I think people get really stingy when they you know turn on their target invites like give the Creator a chance to promote the product during its viral period um that's really that's going to actually affect how much they opt in because if you think about the production cycle right I receive the content I plan out the content I post it um and get sample requests approved right that's like a one month cycle so if I give you like 90 days to promote it it's just sort of like I'm not even able to reap the benefits of my return from trying to promote this content multiple times um so give them enough time and then the last Point here is draft a message that leads with social proof If You're Josh Hadley's brand right and you're selling incredibly well um lead with that and appeal to the Affiliates decision-making process if you're an Amazon brand that is crushing it on Amazon maybe doing seven or eight figures there right let them know that you are an Amazon brand that is selling through say like hey you know we're an e fig brand on Amazon with 10,000 festar reviews and we're launching on Tik Tok shop right now and this is exactly what we want to offer you and why you should accept boom love it and so I keep the messages short and sweet the way I think about Affiliates is they're going through 50 Target collab invites a day maybe a 100 if they're really good right so in 5 seconds can I hook this affiliate and get them interested in promoting my product don't overwhelm them with all your USPS and all your information right now because that's going to turn them off and they're going to stop reading that and that's going to affect your response rate yeah here's one of my my favorite features that we started using with you guys like we like you talked about like hey a curated message is going to stand out and sound better to the Creator right it's like hey I appreciate your content is about it's it's very wholesome and I love your three kids or something like that right your AI tool to create that like I tested it and like it it basically will do that for you so like you say like yeah use Ai and it's going to read that that Creator's content it's like hey you have a beautiful family and I love your your content about I I don't know outdoor farming or whatever it is right and it's GNA like call it out like so you're already like 10 steps above all the other Mass Outreach companies so that's been one of my favorite features um as well real quick on the target collabs are you limited is is Tik Tok still limiting you to only like 1,000 active campaigns at any given point in time I don't think so um I'd have to double check and get back to you on that but you know we we have a lot of brands that are sending out very high volumes of Target invites um but not completely sure because we were originally blocked from creating new ones unless we retired old Target C targeted campaigns but maybe that sense changed so yeah no I'll take a look into that cool all right well let's uh let's wrap up let's wrap this stuff up cool and then you know the next thing is like you just choose the Outreach you want to run it on you reach out to like a couple thousand creators a day anyone who's sent out Target invites manually knows it's a huge pain um and then you start running it and so you know for all of the viewers here U you know we love J he's an amazing partner of ours we'd love to give anyone a 30-day free trial on our growth plan um of course if you guys want this deck uh Josh will send it out to all the viewers but you can also email me happy to share every resources over I'm an open book and then what I do also is I give Brands a free affiliate program audit and we can take a look at all the link leaks in your program you know where there's redundancies or room to automate with AI maybe there's a way to amplify insights with our trend analysis and keyword generation tools and things like that as well love it soan this is this is awesome and I would encourage anybody that's getting into this come check out make sure you grab that deck and follow this step-by-step process that he laid out we barely scratched the surface as it comes to social selling today um we will have soan back on the podcast and we're gonna dive even deeper today was like social selling social commerce 101 um we will get into uh the 2011 301 class here coming up and sohan's going to break down like what he sees working with some of those bigger Brands and then I'll also share kind of what's working with our brand and how we're leveraging yuka's AI tool um but Sohan as we wrap things up I'd love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways and uh you let me know if I'm missing anything here so action item number one is I hope that you've been convinced that social selling is is where things are heading so if you're not what I would say like action I'm number one is like start to make social selling and social commerce one of your top priorities in the business because the best time to start is now slash yesterday and I promise you we are already seeing this in the product categories that we are in on Amazon like those that have an outward traffic demand generation are kicking everybody's trash and the people that are just relying on their Amazon search volume and stuff they're losing organic ranking and it's not just price and it's not just overseas competitors it's a it's a matter of volume of people that are searching for particular products that they're finding off of Amazon okay so start start looking into social commerce that's action item number one action item number two is to sign up with one of these tools to go and start experimenting like you've got to do the research on your kind of like your niche in specifically on Tik Tok shop I don't even think there's any other social commerce platforms to go to at this point that are worth your time so I would go on to Tik Tock shop I would sign up I would go through that process to like just get your account signed up there's going to be some hoops that you have to jump through and then it's get one of those tools there's Kao data there's also Yuka uk. a um there's a lot of these different platforms that are going to allow you to see like what type of products are moving and who are the type of creators that are promoting those products um and then from there you'll be able to do some Outreach so my third and final action item is like look social commerce is honestly not as hard as many people make it up to be like honestly the strategy is this sign up for Tik Tok shop start reaching out to creators period like it it is it is as simple as that and but sohun show us some more advanced ways to make those outreaches more meaningful to make sure that you're reaching out to the right creators so follow those steps and if you follow those steps like this is an iterative process that we talked about so what you're going to do is you're going to stumble upon something that's like ah okay these type of creators are working well oh these type of products from my brand are doing well all right well screw the other ones like let's run with these ones for now right so it's just kind of like it's one of those interesting things where you almost have to like just throw things at the wall and see what sticks and then keep doubling down on whatever is sticking at the time so hun anything else that you would add as an action item no that was that was very well put together I I love the way you were communicating that and drawing some parallels with Amazon too because like fundamentally The Shopper base is the same you know are you going to diversify your channels or just stay on Amazon only forever how are you generating new demand and not relying on you know Amazon's constraints to grow your business um so super great action items and great takeaways awesome all right so final three questions what is the most influential book that you've read in why yeah so the most influential book I read and it was when I was working in operations super random it's called six thinking hats I think fundamentally with business um you need to have good critical thinking skills and approach problems from multiple different directions so the author put forward this um Paradigm of hats where maybe you'd have a red hat that considers the humanistic impacts of any decisions you make or things you move forward with maybe you have a blue hat that shows how to organize a process and control so you can make things more scalable in your business maybe you have a black hat where you're actually looking at things from a critical perspective and actually contemplating if we launch this initiative versus another initiative what's the cost benefit so that's one of the best books I've read highly influential into how I learn digested information and dealt with problems love it great recommendation all right question number two what's your favorite AI tool or chat GPT prompt that you've been using and why yeah so my favorite chat GPT prompt it's something that I've been uh using with our team to take some of the work off their plate is i' go on to you know podcasts like Ecom breakr and host my own and I take the transcript of every single video I download a PDF file and i' prompt chat gbt to turn this into a very actionable ebook with takeaways and also suggest some lead magnet and so for a lot of business owners who are looking for ways to advertise and grow their business right starting from zero to 100 because 100 to a million is a lot easier um you need to like figure out very fast and Scrappy ways to distribute your content and information and give your customers what they want um so that's been a game Cher uh we're looking at launching a series of eBooks from like every single podcast we've been on and just sharing all this information with everyone well I can't wait till the ebook comes out uh for this one all right uh so in third and final question here is who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why yeah um actually one of uh one of my old uh CEOs um Darren Saul who's the CEO of Vendo was very involved in my growth um and he actually helped me like like move through different departments at Vendo to learn things from a lot of different perspectives um incredibly intelligent um you know they have a lot of blogs posts they're they're owned by this bigger company called platform as well and they focus on Omni Channel growth so they have blogs for like launching on Walmart.com which is like very hard to find information on but then also how that spills over into Amazon how to get into retail and launch your brick and moreor strategy simultaneously and then Tik Tok shop because ultimately like business as a whole to be about how you grow your business Omni Channel and and really bring it to life right um I just find it very interesting on like what they're doing and I'm biased because I work there um and then also follow Josh Hadley of course um but yeah that's that's one of my big interests and big uh information sources into a lot of perspectives that I have today love that well great well Sohan thanks so much for coming on the show and for your time today if people want to follow you they want to learn more about you where's the best place to reach out yeah you can reach out on my email address on the deck sohun uk. also feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn it's just my first and last name uh and I have my call Link in there if anyone ever wants an audit or wants a chat social commerce awesome I love it well thanks again for your time today we'll have you back on the show for 2.0 looking forward to it thank you so much for having me on thank you for listening visit Ecom breakthrough.com for more information if you've enjoyed today's episode the best way you can show your appreciation is by clicking the Subscribe button and quickly leaving a review see you again next time