With over 800 million active users in 2020, TikTok has quickly become Gen Z’s most-popular social sharing platform. In 2018, TikTok surpassed Instagram and Snapchat as the #1 free app in the Apple Store. TikTok’s attraction is based on an endless stream of entertaining, short-form videos, containing stimulating effects and music, and often features lip syncing, dancing, or funny pets. As an advertising platform, it can be a goldmine for businesses.
Mason Interactive is privileged to be one of the few agencies with access to TikTok Ads beta release. This means our clients can immediately launch their campaigns on TikTok (otherwise the self-serve ad platform is available only by request), and have the support of a trusted partner on a platform that can otherwise be challenging to advertise on.
TikTok in a nutshell
TikTok is most popular amongst young adults and teens, thanks to its creative and fun approach to social sharing. 66% of TikTok users are under the age of 30, making it an ideal platform for any business marketing to a younger audience. Even if your product is for older audiences, it may be a good idea to monitor the demographics: because TikTok is still a fairly new app, the audience will evolve over time, just as Facebook and Instagram have evolved.
With only 2,000 individual advertisers, TikTok opens up an uncluttered audience for any size business. While big brands, including Netflix, Apple and Walgreens, have already discovered TikTok’s potential, there’s an equal opportunity for smaller brands to get noticed.
Advertising on TikTok
As an advertising platform TikTok is very similar to Facebook and Google, and the same rules apply. Who do you target? What do you want to achieve? How do you measure success? What is your budget? Once you have the answers, the next step is to choose the right advertisement format.
In-feed native video ads
Gain exposure with 15-second video ads that appear when scrolling through videos on the platform, much like in Instagram.
Brand takeover
Go big and maximize your reach with full-screen ads that are displayed when the user opens TikTok. These exclusive ads are limited to one advertiser per day on each category.
Hashtag challenge
Engage your audience with a sponsored hashtag challenge that appears as a branded banner on the discovery page and drives users to create their own content using your hashtag.
Custom Influencer Content
Partner with influencers to catch the attention of TikTok users in your market. As a TikTok agency partner, Mason Interactive has access to TikTok Creator Marketplace, currently on beta, in which advertisers can search through available influencers across a range of categories.
Depending on your chosen advertisement format, you don’t need to break the bank to start advertising. TikTok has a minimum of $500 advertising budget at the campaign level and a minimum of $50 at the ad group level.
How to create thumb-stopping content?
The success of your TikTok campaign comes down to your content.
Focus on authenticity
TikTok users don’t expect to see flash camerawork or polished productions. What truly catches their attention is authentic and original content with interesting visual effects and music.
Stay on top of the trends
Familiarize yourself with what is trending on TikTok, and what type of content users are currently creating. From most popular tracks to trending hashtags and challenges, make sure your content is aligned with the trends.
Create Tik-Tok only content
TikTok is a one-of-a-kind platform, and videos that work on other platforms may be too commercial for TikTok users. In other words, create fun, interactive videos purposefully for TikTok, that encourage engagement.
To recap, TikTok is an ideal advertising platform for any business that wants to reach Gen Z. However, this platform, yet fun and authentic, requires a full understanding of its users and best practices in order to drive successful campaigns.
Want to get started with TikTok Ads? Access to TikTok Ads platform is currently available by request only and the qualification process can take upto one month. Once you have submitted your information through TikTok’s website, a representative will contact you to let you know if your business qualifies.
If you want to get started sooner, contact us today. As a TikTok agency partner we have instant access to the advertising platform and insights on the best TikTok advertising tactics.
The current e-commerce landscape can be challenging to navigate, to say the least. Logistics challenges, production disruptions, cash flow issues, and changing consumer behavior is creating uncertainty for many businesses.
In our latest e-commerce focused webinar, Mason Interactive Founder, Brook Shepard, and Adrian Padron, Director of Media, weighed in on questions all business stakeholders are facing today: how to stay in the market and on the top of your customer’s mind. We summarized the key takeaways from the webinar, including a case study of our client who successfully pivoted their strategy to drive long term revenue.
The electric vehicle analogy
To illustrate the importance of staying in-market, Brook shared an analogy around EV’s (Electric Vehicles):
Imagine a bucket that could hold all the potential EV buyers in America. It would be’d be a pretty big bucket.
The hard truth for car manufacturers, though, is that EV’s cost $12,000 more to produce than vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines; carmakers often struggle to recoup these costs through pricing alone. As a result, car manufacturers stand to lose money on almost every electronic vehicle sold.
So, in the current economic environment, most manufacturers are shuttering EV production and furloughing staff. “If we’re all going to buy electric vehicles soon, then they should be staying in the market and continuing to improve technology to make these cars more effective.
Now, imagine being the one EV manufacturer who continued advertising and improving their product during these months. Don’t you think they would have a leg-up on brand recognition and product when we come out of this? Honestly, I think that’s half the reason for Elon Musk’s outrageous tweets – he’s staying in front of the consumer, filling a bucket of potential Tesla buyers.”
The theory of customer bucket
One of the simplest and most logical ways to look at the health of your marketing ecosystem is based on the idea of a customer bucket. Think about your website as a bucket filled with water, where your customer base or the traffic you are driving to your site is the water. That bucket is full once you have healthy traffic coming to your website.
“We don’t want high bounce rates, low page view consumption, or low engagement post click,” Adrian says. The quality of your water is crucial to this. “If we’re not constantly filling [the bucket], that bucket will leak”.
Why? Because of pixels and tracking. Google and Facebook have pixels on your website that track users within up to 180 day windows, during which they will be available to you to remarket to. “If you stop the flow of traffic, you will stop the flow of the water, and so your bucket will continue to leak and eventually empties out,” Adrian explains.
Why an empty customer bucket can become a huge risk
Imagine you have let your bucket dry out, with just a handful of customers in it. You might think it will be easy to bounce back, relaunch advertising when the time is right and start generating revenue straightaway.
In this scenario, you will A) cause significant damage to the user experience B) double your future advertising cost and C) possibly lose contact with your most-loyal, high-value customers.
Doesn’t sound right? Let us explain to you why.
1. Increased ad frequency will have negative impact on user experience
If your bucket doesn’t have enough users to serve your ads to, the ad frequency will increase. This will lead to a poor user experience for those in the bucket because they are constantly seeing the same messages and creatives at a higher frequency [because they are the only ones in the bucket].
2. The impact on cost metrics
When you are ready to re-enter the market, after the market surges and your production comes back to full capacity, you will now have to fill the bucket up, and also acquire customers. “Now we’re looking at higher cost per averages than we would have had we kept that bucket full with quality users in the long term,” Adrian says.
If you are experiencing cash flow issues, and your focus is on profitability, we can shift your advertising strategy to brand search and remarketing. However, this strategy can only be applied short term whereas over time, when that bucket continues to drop, remarketing performance will also begin to decline.
The biggest long term risk? As we approach the holiday season in November – December, that is the key shopping time frame when most of our ecommerce clients drive more than 60% of their annual revenue from, you can’t build an efficient strategy if you enter the season with an empty bucket. “At that point, we’re not just talking about volume, but we also need to be as efficient and profitable as possible. And that strategy is only available if you have a healthy flow of customers to begin with” Adrian adds.
3. Losing the market to your competitors
Another negative impact occurs when you stop nurturing your high value customers [the good water in your bucket], and allow your competitors to grab them into their ecosystem. If your customer doesn’t see your brand in the market, your competitor will quickly capture their interest and as a result, you have lost a customer with a really high Lifetime Value (LTV).
How to keep your bucket full (without breaking the bank)
In order to achieve the best possible results in the current environment, change your campaign objectives to drive cost-effective Cost Per Impressions (CPMs). “We know for a fact that within our internal data set, there’s a CPM trend that shows that it is cheaper to be in the market today, Adrian says. “If you implement the strategy correctly, you can get more impressions with less, and therefore more traffic to your website, he ads.
“There’s a CPM trend that shows that it is cheaper to be in the market today”
Adrian shared a real-life example, supported by client data, on how his team pivoted strategy for a client who needed to cut their advertising budget. The new approach was to maintain a consistent level of traffic, while reducing advertising costs.
His team shifted from revenue-centric strategy (driving sales, which is an impossibility given that this client’s factory is closed) to embrace storytelling. The revised messaging, that focused on video assets and authenticity, achieved huge engagement with thousands of likes per post and a record hitting number of video views.
The biggest win of the new strategy was maintaining a flat bounce rate despite the major shifts in the market, and thus continuing to drive not just steady volumes of traffic, but good quality traffic to the client’s website.
Using ad creatives that emphasized social relevance and brand values, enabled the client to build trust on the brand and its products. Once the market returns back to normal, the team will shift to a remarketing strategy to engage with these new and existing customers who have engaged with the content and built a relationship with the brand during the pandemic.
Key takeaways to adapt to your strategy
When looking at your marketing funnel, focus on consideration and awareness strategies to make real impact and drive those brand value bringing interactions to continuously drive traffic, and attract new customers. Pivot your objectives and positioning, while controlling the overall advertising cost, in order to keep your customer bucket full for the future.
Here at Mason Interactive, we stress the importance of building up your brand equity. Whether your focus is on the long term benefits of SEO or a robust PR strategy, there are numerous ways brands can build up their authority across channels and within the consumer space.
In our recent e-commerce focused webinar, Thriving in a Crisis, Katie Klencheski, founder of SMAKK Studios, highlights the many ways she has been working on building brands that connect authentically with consumers over the past decade.
Brand development has changed
Five years ago, there was a change in the marketplace, but a shift really came to the forefront two years ago that focused on consumer sensibility. Did you know that on average, we now see 5000+ brand ads and images per day? “In a sea of brands, it takes a lot more to stand out than it used to,” Katie says.
Brands are evolving – we used to be in a place where brands could talk about functional needs, value or quality, and the crop of emerging D2C brands over the past 10 years prove that design and personality were enough to stand out for a little while – but that alone is not enough anymore.
Brands that embrace the idea of a higher purpose are starting to win the day
69% of consumers in the US are “belief driven buyers” who are looking for brands that align with their values and brands that connect with those values are winning. Consumers want the products they choose to have a positive impact on our planet, build communities, drive social change, foster inclusion, and meaningfully enable self expression.
Consumers are showing up for these brands in the marketplace. Katie mentions a recent study where brands marketing sustainability are seeing 5X growth over those conventionally marketing products in their category.
Millennials and GenZ want to work for brands that are trying to make the world a better place. Additionally, many at the top of the food chain believe that the focus on shareholder values is the only thing that should be driving corporations’ decisions. Consumers and investors are looking for brands who are going to restore a sense of community, a sense of humanity and help us heal from this moment.
Building brands for what’s next
“In order to win, we have to take on today’s issues with solutions for the future and create meaningful relationships with consumers,” Katie adds. The success of any brand depends on its ability to own its unique white space and cultural moment.
At SMAKK, Katie emphasizes the importance of looking at the DNA of the brand, competitors, brand audience and cultural landscape.
“Right now, brands have an unprecedented opportunity to connect emotionally with their audiences”
“Because people have a strong sense of memory to things they have an emotional connection with, this is a time when we can do things as brands that are going to build a tremendous amount of brand equity because we are doing things at a time where people will remember us for our actions.”
Brands that lead are going to emerge in a position of power and be able to engage with their audiences afterward. To thrive right now, brands need to speak this moment, and put their values and purpose in service of their audience’s needs.
Not a moment just to sell but to engage and connect
Before your brand can act, you must be clear on your foundational “why”. This is an opportunity for brands to spend time articulating “What is our purpose?”, “What are our values?”, “How does that inform the products that we create?”, and “What does that mean for our position in the market?”.
“If we understand the core of what a brand is, that should inform every action, every interaction and every reaction that that brand has across every channel that they have,” Katie adds.
If you don’t know exactly what your purpose is and what your values are, you won’t be able to act in a way that is authentic with your consumers. Once you have defined these characteristics, only then you can begin to focus on personality, story telling, visual identity and tone of voice, and how it works across your different channels.
Here’s examples on how Mason Interactive client Dagne Dover embraces its values:
Last month’s campaign won’t work today. The core of who you are [as a brand] shouldn’t change, but what you are putting out in the world has to. Therefore, we need to be creative about how we are creating content.
Embrace solo content creators
Reach out to photographers with home studios or influencers to show how they engage with their product – how does your product live at home?
Break the 4th wall and show people what’s behind your company
Letters from the founder, business problems, show employees – we are all in this together. Because we are losing social connections in the real world, we are moving to social media to fill the gap. Brands have just as much real estate in our feeds, if not more, and therefore that’s exactly where brands need to be.
Be real. Now is the time to show up as humans.
“We are going to see a ton of campaigns that focus on real humans and making meaningful content that is authentic to connect and seize this moment,” Katie concludes.
On April 21, Google introduced free product listings on the Google Shopping Tab and Shopping Property in order to provide better search results for users. In times like these, when physical retail has taken a hit, we at Mason Interactive see this as a fantastic opportunity for merchants to boost sales.
How does this benefit Paid advertisers?
Benefit 1:
Our paid ecommerce partners that absolutely crush in shopping campaigns will now have the benefit of indexing for “organic” shopping listings.
Benefit 2:
1+1 = 3! Anyone that has been in the PPC game for long knows this is the mantra of advertisers everywhere when it comes to combining the powers of Paid & Organic SEM. Own the SERP, own your brand, gain more efficiency by getting in Google’s good graces.
What should you do next?
Action 1:
If you are not currently using Shopping ads, set yourself on Google merchant. Work closely with your agency partner to make sure all your connections are set up correctly and you are ready to rock! If you are a current Partner of Mason Interactive, don’t worry, you are already set up to start serving on these free listings.
Action 2:
Make a stronger push on SEO for your products. Optimize those titles and descriptions, use the right product tags and make sure you have given attention to your Google category!
Action 3:
Pay close attention to your paid performance over the next month. With Organic coming into the mix that means there will be new competitors in the market. If you give the right attention to Organic for Shopping, you may be able to afford more lenient budgets and automated bidding targets. Remember, if you are indexing for Organic and Paid, you will net stronger results than doing one on its own.
This is an opportunity for brands and marketers. The “free listings” in Shopping are essentially the new Organic listing on the market and will need the touch of an SEO expert.
Do you have more questions on the free shopping listings and what steps to take next? Get in touch, we’d love to strategize with you.
As a Google Premier Partner, we get the latest and greatest information and will update this topic as we learn more!
There is still much unknown about COVID-19, it’s ultimate impact on the global economy, and when the virus will level off.
One thing we know for sure is that when things bounce back to normality, consumers will rush to buy goods and services, enjoy restaurants, book trips and experiences. Brands who will win this audience, are the ones who are ready to flip the switch back on instantly.
We would like to share what we are doing to ensure a swift return to business as usual, once this passes. Use these ideas to prepare your marketing for the upcoming surge:
Content – build a content library
Write a series of blog articles and create a publishing schedule
Design creatives to promote each article
Produce video content; how-tos, explainer or even cooking videos!
Shine the spotlight on an employee in a mini blog series or social media cards
Reach out to customers to collect testimonials and write case studies
Revise your social media plan and schedule new content in
Buyer persona – take an in-depth look at your ideal customer
What is their demographics?
Where do they spend their time?
What do they like to do in their freetime?
Where can you find them?
How can you engage with them?
Data management – tidy up your CRM!
Remove hard bounced email addresses and unengaged contacts
Find the old leads you haven’t contacted in a while, is it worth reaching out again?
Improve segmentation so you can send more personalized content
Build new prospect lists to expand your database
Get inspired – gather new ideas and learn
Analyze data from previous years’ marketing efforts (such as email data and event lists), is there something you can learn and take into action this year?
Make a list of the hot topics (excluding COVID-19) in your industry, what is going to be the next big thing?
Find online courses and strengthen your skillset, such as video editing, SEO, project management
We hope these tips will give you new ideas on how to use this downtime more efficiently and help you align your marketing efforts to the future.
We’ve been working closely with current and prospective clients to help them navigate their digital advertising goals while monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic.
While shifting strategy, brand messaging and quarterly forecasts have been at the forefront of our routines and conversations, we look to the data trends, opportunity for brand awareness and shift in platforms as we prepare our clients for long term gain. We spoke with Greg Byrnes, Co-founder of Tayst Coffee Roaster, who shared how they leveraged Amazon to transition from B2B to D2C in light of the current times.
Greg, what are the pros and cons of shifting Tayst to Amazon?
As a direct to consumer business, we wanted to avoid Amazon because it was our belief that we wanted to control the customer and the customer life cycle. It became very apparent launching the business that you can’t avoid Amazon. It’s the go-to resource for anybody doing any shopping and so they’re going to check and compare with it, and they’re going to investigate it.
There are two ways to think about it. One, you can lose business to it, but are you really losing business to it? Because they’re actually helping you capture back a percentage of business you would lose. The average company can’t afford to offer low prices and free shipping. Amazon can. They have a dialed-in user base who is paying them a premium for Prime, and so right away, I think you’re actually increasing your average order size that way, if you’re looking at it holistically overall, rather than decreasing it. When you combine the two resources, overall you’re achieving a net positive gain.
We’ve done some investigation and there is lifetime value on Amazon. An area that we were afraid of, and it’s very hard to track, but it does look like we get over 40% of our customers to come back and purchase from us on Amazon. That bodes well for strong lifetime value and brand recognition and so it gave us more confidence to really invest the dollars and time into growing Amazon.
“The average company can’t afford to offer low prices and free shipping. Amazon can.”
Amazon has also been adding tools, they didn’t have this initially when we started with it, like the Subscribe and Save program, and so you can motivate a lot of your customers and have it pretty much in their buy box. You can enable it and yes, we do have a strong percentage of our customers on Subscribe and Save. The problem is, Amazon takes 15% of your margin, and when you add an additional 5% off for Subscribe and Save, it really starts to hurt your gross profit on the business. That’s the biggest problem on the Amazon side.
The other big positive from Amazon is that it’s almost like a billboard for you. I do answer the phone at times, and we ask people where they found us, and they say that they originally found us on Amazon. A lot of people also want to order directly. One, we create promotions to get them to come directly, but two, sometimes they want to support the local business and know they have a relationship with the local business. So it is a good funnel that way.
How can growing the D2C side of the business help push B2B in the long run?
We do want our coffee in hotels and offices, because if you’re drinking our coffee at your office everyday and you really like it, there’s a good chance you might order it for your home machine. We are now thinking about that vice versa as well. We’ve been doing alot of push marketing, pushing people to sign up for our business, but if we start to grow our consumer business, it’ll be easier to pull those consumers when they go back to work – to bring the businesses in. We’re looking forward to that.
Are you currently running any Amazon Product Ads?
We are. There are some real strategic things that you have to do when you’re setting up Amazon. There’s a playlist here. It’s just like setting up a search campaign, or any kind of marketing campaign: there’s content that needs to be built on the landing pages, the titles and descriptions need to be optimized for keywords that people type into Amazon. You need to think of Amazon as a gigantic search engine. It’s a product driven search engine and so, all of the keywords in your descriptions need to be adjusted. The images are very important, and reviews are extremely important. Amazon is not a zero to sixty process because of the review issue.
When you go to Amazon, you’re not going to buy a product that has two or three reviews, so there are strategies to grow your reviews quickly, which can also be an asset. Some people like when there are 40, 50, or 100 reviews. They see a growing product, and the 4 or 5 star reviews, where people are sharing what’s great about it. You really have to keep your reviews at 3.5 or 4 stars, or it will really hurt your conversion rate.
Amazon Enhanced Brand Content is a powerful technique that can boost sales.
Once all of that is done, Amazon gives you the opportunity where if you have a trademark of your brand, you can sign up for what is called brand registry. Once you do that, it enables you to use other features on Amazon. For example, there’s a section where you scroll down to an area with content that a company can insert, it’s called Enhanced Branded Content, and that area of content can only be created if you’re registered as a trademark of that brand. The benefit of doing that is it opens up two additional advertising modules. You can advertise on standard sponsored listings on Amazon, and it’s a little obscure but if somebody types in ‘coffee k-cups’ and i’m bidding for that key term, my product should come up as one of the listings.
There are now two new ad units that open up. One, sponsored brand now allows me to, if someone types in the word Keurig or Peet’s Coffee, I can appear in a full ad above all of the products, under those searches. They also have the retargeting ability, so if a customer has viewed our products or clicked on an ad, we also have the ability to target them off of Amazon.
There’s so much great strategy and there are so many things that agencies are going to need to figure out or somebody on staff at the company. It’s not just a product feed like Google Shopping. In order to make Amazon successful, you have to look at it holistically, you have to understand that some people just prefer to shop there. As a business, as long as it’s making economic sense for you.
Amazon has an algorithm, there are incentives for driving traffic to Amazon. Amazon is creating this ad platform where you can buy ads to drive customers back to that platform. You’re paying to drive them traffic, which is unbelievable in a lot of ways, but hopefully you’re benefiting financially by them buying your product. Amazon benefits from you buying your product. But you might drive that user back and they might choose your competitor.
“Amazon is forcing you to be a good vendor and a good partner. “
Can CPG brands move into Amazon quickly?
It takes time to build Amazon. Because Amazon makes you earn your way to more traffic organically by placing an emphasis on things like the reviews. It’s not to say that if you have a strategic advantage and a very high profit margin that you can’t purchase ads on Amazon and grow rapidly, but the fact is Amazon is not a “turn on and start selling like crazy” mechanism. Not only does Amazon want you to prove yourself, but they make sure that your delivery rates are on time, and if your deliveries are not on time, they penalize you by reducing your traffic.
Your response rates to customer inquiries – if you don’t answer a customer within 24 hours, you get a negative – there are a lot of different things that they qualify you to do in order to make sure that before they start trusting you to handle the increased traffic. Amazon is forcing you to be a good vendor and a good partner.
Do you have anyone on your team who is solely responsible for managing Amazon?
We should but we don’t. We have people managing Amazon from an inventory standpoint, who are essentially making sure that we’re filling orders. We use a Fulfilled by Amazon product, so Amazon ships our product for us, so that’s important, but we are the ones who manage it from an advertising standpoint. Thankfully we have Mason Interactive helping us drive a great ACOS and ROAS and that’s what we keep trying to figure out – how to drive more customers at a more profitable rate.
We have not been sophisticated enough to drive traffic or incentives to Subscribe and Save. We actually raised our prices over the past few months in preparation to be able to run some deals and promotions on Amazon. This also allows us to account for increasing our ad spend. I would take this into account for strategy and what you’re doing as far as your gross profit and whether you can make room for deals like that. Those are great ways to increase your impression levels and increase visibility and sales.
How are you positioning Tayst to new consumers on Amazon?
When you look at our Amazon [store] products, in the middle you’ll see the Enhanced Branded Content. There’s an image of a woman drinking coffee and we talk about our pod and our brand story. It’s really important to have that kind of content. Our pods are 100% compostable and to be able to say that, we had to provide legal proof of testing and studies before Amazon would allow us to sell our product. Amazon wouldn’t allow us to sell in California for over a year because California’s restrictions on claiming compostability are so strong.
There are a variety of different compostable products coming out to varying degrees, some are not 100% compostable, some are partially, some you have to peel the label off. Ours are from the packaging to the pod to the coffee we use, which is rainforest certified coffee. It’s a true sustainable brand, with grown beans and the soil taken care of, and farmers paid the right wages. We look at the full supply chain of it, not just the end product, and that’s very important to us as business owners but also to eco-conscious consumers.
