In today’s episode you’ll learn:
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How to use TikTok as a marketing tool
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What is TokShop and how can you use it to monetise your TikTok following (and make the most of User Generated Content)
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The best accounts to follow and how to create your TikTok strategy
Where to find Holly, the books and podcasts she talks about on the show:
Where to find Holly (and get your 14 day free trial)
https://www.tokshop.com/
Books Holly recommended
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Podcasts Holly recommended
Transcript:
Dahna Borg:
Hi and welcome to the bright minds of e-commerce podcast. I’m Dahna, founder of Bright Red Marketing – your eCommerce advertising specialists. You’ve probably heard of TikTok, you may even have downloaded it, but how can you use it for business? Today we dive into the app with Holly Cardew. Holly has just launched the TokShop app which creates a shoppable TikTok feed right on your website. We talk all things TikTok, brands to follow, and all about her brand new app, so let’s get into it. Welcome to episode eight!
Dahna Borg:
Hi and welcome to the bright minds of eCommerce podcast. Today we are here with Holly Cardew. Holly is the founder of both Pixcand most recently TokShop. She has helped thousands of eCommerce merchants optimise their e-commerce door by editing their product images and automating mundane processes. Just a few weeks ago, Holly discovered how fast TikTok was growing and considered creating an app to make TikTok shoppable for merchants. With her knowledge of building and launching app integrations, she built one in just over six days with an engineer to see how both brands and TikTokers would respond. So far, she’s received an overwhelming response. Welcome Holly.
Holly Cardew:
Thanks for having me.
Dahna Borg:
Thanks for being here. So tell us a little bit about TokShop and how it came to be.
Holly Cardew:
Yeah, so, actually it was side project a few weekends ago and I was here in San Francisco and I was speaking to an engineer and we were talking about social commerce and I was talking about most specifically how fast TikTok was growing, and what brands were using it for, and brands that weren’t actually on TikTok and came up with the idea to make TikTok shoppable because we realised that social commerce and user generated content is so important for eCommerce businesses. And so we got to it. We, built a website; I built front end of the websites, so the marketing pages, and Mike started building the back end app and it’s currently on Shopify.
Dahna Borg:
That’s amazing. I mean, obviously you’ve got a history of app development. That’s right,?
Holly Cardew:
Yes, correct. So for my other company, Pixc, we have a couple of apps, app integration, so I’m very familiar with that.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah. Amazing. So you obviously are on TikTok yourself?
Holly Cardew:
So it’s quite embarrassing. I’m on TikTok there to primarily learn about it. I do engage with a lot of content but it’s purely from a learning point of view. I mean I don’t want to be the parent, I’m not a parent, but I don’t want to be like my mother or my parents, where like: oh what’s that trend. I’m too old for that. So I was like, no, no, I’m not too old for this. It is quite hard to figure out, but I’m not too old for this. I’m going to go figure it out. So I did start consuming TikTok content and when you open up the app it is hilarious. Like some of the videos, are unbelievably funny. And I think as time goes on, the hour of them starts to learn. Like I actually started saving videos that were more not about singing and dancing, but they were educational videos about building a business, about scaling teams, about investing, about real estate. And so unfortunately I don’t get the funny content as much anymore. It is kind of sad, but it is an interesting platform because it is so new. It is growing. So fast and it’s sort of unfamiliar yet interesting.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah, definitely. I mean we were at a marketing conference in Australia here a couple of weeks ago and they had a feature on TikTok and how brands were using it, which was really interesting. But we went back to our apartment at the end of the day and spent three hours lying on the lounge room floor, cracking up laughing, just at ridiculous stuff on TikTok!
Holly Cardew:
Yeah, it is addictive.
Dahna Borg:
It’s funny, it’s a little bit dumb, but brands seem to be doing really well on there. So I suppose that brings me to my next question. Obviously TikTok going very, very crazy right now. It’s growing incredibly fast. Do you have any kind of thoughts on how you think it’s going to play out for businesses specifically in the next year or so?
Holly Cardew:
So I think businesses really need to embrace, TikTok. A lot of people are saying, “Oh, you know, our demographic’s not on tick tock”. And the thing is it’s not- there is a multitude of people and there are people there who are older, there’s a whole trending hashtag called over thirties, there’s over forties, there’s over 50, there’s over sixties, there’s grandma’s and everyone’s on there. It’s just it started with the younger generation. I think that businesses need to, it’s going to be a challenge for them because businesses are so used to, especially eCommerce brands, are so used to creating polished content for Instagram, and people are a little bit over that. They want real content. They want to see products, they want to see products in videos, and they want that video content, and now TikTok has started out with all the music and dancing, but I think over time it will morph more into an Instagram slash Snapchat slash YouTube where it has video content of how a product is worn and used. I think that brands need to, there is not one strategy at the moment that will work. I think it’s about trying things out and if fans are willing to try it out, for example, Gym Shark which is Shopify store, they do over $300 million in revenue, so they are absolutely massive, they have 1.6 million followers on TikTok.
Dahna Borg:
That’s insane.
Holly Cardew: You know, back in the day when it was easy to gain traction on Instagram, that’s what’s happening on TikTok, and anyone who ignores TikTok right now, they’re going to jump on later and they’re going to wish they were one of the first.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah. It’s that thing that when you know back in the day of Instagram is so easy to get followers. Like it was so easy to get followers. Now everyone joins Instagram now and they still think it’s easy to get followers and it’s not. TikTok’s now where Instagram was, like, there was some lady who had, I think she had like two videos and they were these really weird marketing videos and she had 200,000 – her two videos -I thought they were weird and I thought the advice was a bit interesting, but people were obviously resonating with it and following her and she could, you know, launch a business off that. And you know, eCommerce businesses are using it. I’ve seen a couple of examples, but do you, obviously you mentioned Gym Shark. Are there any other brands that, I suppose if people are still really uncertain about TikTok that you think they could go check out and see how people are using TikTok as an eCommerce brand.
Holly Cardew:
So I think it’s still relatively new. A big one that has a big account is Fashion Nova. There are huge eCommerce store. They’re also on Shopify. But then there’s, you know, the well known brands in Australia, like the Princess Polly’s, General Pants, Factorie, they’re all starting to get on TikTok. I wouldn’t say they’ve necessarily nailed their content. Mind you, some of these brands have literally signed up two or three weeks ago, you know, off six maybe 10 videos. So they are trying to figure it out as well. Then there’s other brands like Chubby Shorts, which is very popular in America. And then there’s another brand that I’ve discovered too, I never knew about until I saw them on TikTok called Wubo’s. And they sell sunglasses and they’ve managed to do interesting content because it’s not just about the product, it’s also about what happens in the office. And now if you take a brand that isn’t eCommerce, I think who’s doing really well is Washington Post, the newspaper.
Dahna Borg:
The newspaper is on TikTok?!
Holly Cardew:
Yeah. And they create really good content, but it’s on trend and it’s for a younger demographic because they know what they trying to do is get those sorts of people reading the newspaper. Yeah. You think it depends on what you want to do. Do you want to be educational? Do you want to be funny? Do you want to go with the trends? But at the same time it’s important that brands, a lot of people get on, TikTok, they want to be famous and so they start creating these trending videos. But soon you realise that that’s actually not authentic to you. And although it’s the thing to do at the moment, I think the platform is going to evolve over time and you just need to be authentic to you and your brand rather than create whatever’s the most trending video.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah, 100% have to agree with you there. As I said, I was at that marketing conference and they did a session on TikTok and they had a couple of brands, I won’t name names, but there was one brand in particular that was using TikTok and the videos that they were showing were very much those on trend meme style videos and it just didn’t work like it was just clunky and weird and awkward and I was one of their potential demographics and I just looked at them and went, what are you doing? That doesn’t make any sense. Like it wasn’t, it wasn’t funny. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make me want to buy anything. It didn’t make me feel like I was part of their, you know, their tribe or you know, give me any kind of emotional attachment to the brand. It was just cringe-worthy. It’s probably the best way to describe it yet, and I have a feeling that with TikTok you just kind of have to run that risk of being maybe a little bit cringe-worthy in trying to find your feet, but I really love your kind of theory on how that’s going to play out in that, you know, just be yourself, show what’s working for you, show the behind the scenes.
Holly Cardew:
I think it’s really about adding value for the viewers. So it’s not about you, it’s like because the videos are literally 15 seconds or 60 seconds. I’ve heard that between 10 and 12 seconds is the best content, but again, it depends on you and it depends on your audience. I think that it is about playing around with it and if you can capture someone’s attention in a very short amount of time and give them some added value, they’re more likely to watch the video again and they’re more likely to like it and then we’ll likely to share it. And those three things will actually help the TikTok algorithm understand you, your videos, and push your content further. And the interesting thing is with TikTok, which doesn’t happen on any other channel, TikTok embraces sharing the video on every single channel. So you can send it as an SMS, you can send it as a WhatsApp message, you can push it to Twitter or LinkedIn, well, Instagram, whereas Instagram doesn’t allow you to quickly share a post. It only allows you to share posts on your feed or to a friend. And so this is where you have potential, you think you’re just on TikTok, but you’re not because you have potential for your video to go viral or be pushed to other platforms by your audience.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah, and I think that’s a really clever strategy just from a TikTok perspective. That’s why they’ve been able to grow so fast because I’ve seen heaps of TikTok videos on Instagram and gone, “Oh, that’s cool, I’ll go follow them on TikTok too, because I like that”. Whereas every other platform you have to be on the platform to see the content. TikTok is everywhere.
Holly Cardew:
Definitely.
Dahna Borg:
You can’t really avoid it. So I know that the app is super, super new, but have you got any kind of success stories that you can share?
Holly Cardew:
We launched, we got accepted by the Shopify app store about eight days ago, Friday the previous week, and we have close to a hundred instals, which is pretty good considering we are so new and Shopify is going to feature our app this week as a staff pick, that I just got an email about. I’m really excited because it means that more and more stores will know about us and we also have some of the largest stores using us. I won’t name names, but we do have an enterprise store starting to use us from Japan, which is really exciting and they are embedding their content directly onto their eCommerce site, which is what TokShop does for businesses.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah, that’s amazing. I mean considering you’re so new, we’ll have to maybe do a followup in a little while when you’ve got some, some like case studies and things, but obviously in a week any case studies would be questioning.
Holly Cardew:
We have a 14 day trial. So to be honest, we don’t even know it’s still so new for them too. Not just the analysis side.
Dahna Borg:
Exactly. So, that’s very, very exciting. So I think we have covered that. Obviously lots of people have already got kind of that Instagram shopping feed on their sites. If they were going to do both, have you kind of thought or got any thoughts on where people would actually put TokShop on their website? Like how does that work?
Holly Cardew:
Yeah, so you can put TokShop into places, what you could embed it anywhere if you wanted to. So with TokShop, you can have your own content and then you can also follow hashtags, which is user generated content. So for example, you wanted to have a, you could either run a challenge, or, you might find that Gym Shark might have a hashtag. I can’t remember what theirs is but say for example, it’s, I know that there’s a brand called Rothy’sand they have a hashtag on Instagram called Rothy’s in the Wild. And so what you can do is you can pull all that user generated content. Then you would be embedding it typically on your home page. Or, you can embed it on your product page. So once you tag your products that are in the videos, they can appear on your product pages.
That’s amazing.
So that way, like it works for both the business but also for the user to be able to see what is going on in the video. They’re going to spend more time on your site. And the other suggestion that I really want to push for, which people haven’t really done is putting that TikTok content on your blog. So embedding videos into your blog posts so it’s shoppable blogs because once you have tagged the videos, you can basically embed that any way you want.
Dahna Borg:
That’s unreal. I really liked that and I love that you can put user generated content and make that shoppable as well. Cause from my understanding, a lot of the Instagram feeds is just your feeds. Is that correct?
Holly Cardew:
That would be correct. Some, I guess it depends on how you’re set up, but it is mostly the brand’s content and sometimes I understand brands want to do that because they want to keep their content consistent. They want a certain look. That’s such an Instagram way of thinking, you know, having a beautiful feed and having it all perfect. I don’t think shoppers want that anymore. They want real, they want authentic, they want to see how it is like I am 5ft 2, so I’m small. I’m a size six and I want to see how something is worn on someone who’s my size, not someone who’s six foot because that doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t sit the same.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah, 100% I love the the extra user generated content side of that. I think that’s going to be a really, really powerful feature of your app and congratulations for putting that in there. It’s amazing.
Holly Cardew:
Thanks. I’m really excited to see what businesses do with it.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah. Do you have a TikTok feed for the business that people can follow that as well?
Holly Cardew:
We do, TokShop.com, we haven’t started posting anything yet and now we’re in hibernation because of the whole a Coronavirus. I don’t know. I would either have to get really creative with content but for now, yeah we do have a business account. We haven’t put anything on it. We’re fully focused on building the app and making sure that we have all the features that businesses want and we’ve already started getting requests so we are working spending most of our time on that. But that’s why I am trying to use TikTok from a personal point of view, which is Holly Cardew, to basically learn and educate businesses on what they could do. I’m really passionate about building tech companies, so I’m sharing more so on that side, not just on what you can do with TikTok. I’ve also been working with a couple of influencers to ask them on their opinion. So we will be bringing out content and more information on what businesses should be doing with their TikTok accounts and how they can grow their following.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah. Wonderful. This might be a really weird question, if people wanted to see how other brands are using your app, is there any way for them to see? Like is there like a hashtag or anything that people can see other brands using it or is that all going to be like privacy?
Holly Cardew:
We will create case studies which will come out help people some ways. Still iterating fast, learning fast, seeing what we can do. We definitely want to bring out more content and showcase more brands. There is nothing directly where you can click and see. You can go on the Shopify app listing page and there are, there is content around how the app looks, but just wait this week or next week and we’ll have videos out with more and more content.
Dahna Borg:
Amazing. So basically keep an eye on the Shopify app page?
Holly Cardew:
And our blog and our website. So we’re tokshop.com and we will be showcasing our customers there.
Dahna Borg:
Amazing. I’m very, very excited to see how businesses use your app. I think it’s a brilliant concept. Well it’s not a concept anymore. It’s, it’s a reality. It’s, it’s live, it’s Shopify’s top pick. I like it.
Holly Cardew:
And we’re also bring out the universal app in a couple of weeks so it will be available to all platforms. We just launched with Shopify. So if you’re on any other platform – B-commerce, Magento – they will be available shortly.
Dahna Borg:
Oh that’s great to know. That’s great to know because so many people just do the Shopify one and go, we’re done. So that’s great to know, to be everywhere. And do you think there’s anything else we’ve missed either in regards to TokShop talk in general or just kind of like your history that you think is interesting for our listeners?
Holly Cardew:
I mean there’s always, so we have, there’s always so much information. I’m trying to think. Depends what your listeners want to hear about the most and what they struggle with. Like one of problems that we can solve for them.
Dahna Borg:
I think the biggest problem most of our listeners have is around how to test out new platforms, how to test if it’s right right for them, kind of strategy concepts. If you’ve got any, I mean we did talk a little bit on that before, but if you’ve got anything else, any other nuggets of gold?
Holly Cardew:
Yeah, so I think what is really important is if you’re testing something new and you don’t have a lot of budget, you can go and hire a virtual assistant or a marketing assistant for a few hours a week using a freelancing platform and you can go and test out one of these channels. So whether it’s TikTok, whether it’s, you know, you want to do email marketing, whatever you want to do, you can have a small budget, test something out for you know, two to four weeks, see how it works and then ramp that up. Rather than being bringing on a full time employee. You can scale up what is working, and what isn’t. And I think that might be the case with something like TikTok. I mean TikTok is, you will need to dedicate time and effort to it and don’t try and do two videos, four videos, and then stop. They do suggest doing one to three videos a day. Definitely not what I’ve been doing. I would like to create more content around that, but it is important to keep going and pushing through to see if it’s working for you. Businesses always struggle with time and resources. Resources, mainly money and people, and so I always suggest to people to use a platform, a freelancing platform to hire someone for 10 hours a week, whether they’re in Australia, whether they’re in America, Philippines, you name it, they can be anywhere in the world to help them test and trial a new idea. I also suggest not delegating anything that you don’t know how to personally do as a business owner because that’s when budget goes out of the window and the person you’ve brought on doesn’t truly understand your business. So if you find that you’re posting on Instagram or posting on TikTok and you find something that works, get somebody else to help you to continue that while you try the next thing.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, to be fair, that’s how a lot of businesses that we have worked with in the past have gotten in trouble with Facebook ads, is I have no idea what they’re doing with Facebook ads. They hire someone and that someone kind of takes them for a ride cause they don’t know what they’re doing anyway, so I can do whatever I want and they get screwed over and they don’t get the results they want. And then they come to us and they’re like, ah, but we don’t really trust Facebook marketers. So we go, okay, well look, this is how it works. This is what’s happened. And by the time we kind of get through that call, they’re like, Oh, I didn’t know that. So I think from any platform perspective, you have to be familiar with the basics. You don’t have to be pro at it. You don’t have to, you know, be able to, be an expert at it, but you really need to understand the basics so you know what’s going on and what to ask for. So definitely agree with you there. Wonderful. Well I’m excited to see what happens with TokShop and even just TikTok in general. You’ve actually inspired me to go have another play. Now we get to the last couple of questions that we ask everybody. Do you have any secret routines or habits that you follow personally each day to keep you on track in business?
Holly Cardew:
Sounds quite basic but I, because I work in multiple places and sometimes at home, so we have a distributed team. I actually, it’s really important that I get up and get dressed. Doesn’t matter where I’m going. If I’m staying at home, it changes my mentality of what I’m doing for the day so that for me is probably the most important. I think also a lot like as a founder or as a business owner, we spend a lot of time doing and we, I know for me, sometimes I feel guilty for not doing, but actually it’s really important that we just stop and think about where we need to go as a business and look into the future to help our employees navigate the path of where they need to go. It’s not just about doing, doing, doing in your business because otherwise that’s when competition can come along or you get a little slack because things are easy. So for me it’s actually spending time alone thinking about future products, future vision. And that’s I guess where TokShop came along. It’s always about, you know, I do have Pixc, my other company. We sell to the same customer, but it’s a totally different product. And so for me it was about thinking about what’s next.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah, I love that. I love that. Do you have a favourite business book?
Holly Cardew:
Oh, so I’m sitting here in front of all my books on the shelf, which happened to be business books. I quite like The Hard Thing about Hard Things. That’s probably my favourite at the moment. And I really want to start a book called the Messy Middle, which is a very thick book. I guess it’s about, I think a lot of businesses focus on, you know, when you’re small and you’re a startup and they focus on when you’re large and enterprise and you know you’re doing so well, but they don’t really talk about the journey in between.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah, I like that, I like the sound of that. I’ll have to read it. That question is entirely selfish, just so that everyone knows. I like hope someone else gets something out of it. But I’m a huge book nerd, so I ask this question for my own safety. I should send you a photo of all my books on the shelf.
That sounds like a great plan. Please do that.
Do you have any favourite podcasts business or not?
Holly Cardew:
Oh, so I do listen to business podcasts. You know, I really enjoy business and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. So I don’t really have anything that’s not business unless it’s, I quite like psychology, things like listening to Esther Perel and I’ve started listening to Culture Amps podcasts, they interviewed her too. And then I would say my favourite business podcast would be How I Built This, which is quite common. I don’t know if you’ve listened to any of them, but you know they have the founder of like Dyson, the most amazing founder of the software company called Cisco, which is a multibillion dollar company, and how she was kicked out, she built the company with her partner, they were asked to leave by investors. Then she went on, so a technology person went on to build a makeup company, Urban Decay, and sold it for $200 million. So imagine being able to deal with a technical company and a makeup company, it’s just incredible. So that would probably be a podcast that I do enjoy.
Dahna Borg:
Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you very much. And if people want to get in touch and heard, you’ve got a 14 day free trial, is that right? Or 14 day trial?
Holly Cardew:
We have a 14 day, it’s free trial on and we’ll be on other platforms shortly so you can go to the addresses and things. So you can go to tokshop.com or you can just search TokShop or TikTok in the Shopify app store and you will find our app and you can install it. And of course we’re on all social platforms. I am mostly on all social platforms and you can reach out to me. I’m best on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Dahna Borg:
Awesome.
Holly Cardew:
And you’ll notice that our TokShop accounts are relatively new, but we are getting started.
Dahna Borg:
Well the app only launched, what was it last week?
Holly Cardew:
Yup, exactly.
Dahna Borg:
And the idea was a couple of weeks before that – I love it. I love how quickly you’ve done this. It’s amazing.
Holly Cardew:
It was pretty unbelievable. It was three weekends, so six days of builds. So less than 30 days from idea to launch, which is pretty exciting.
Dahna Borg:
That’s incredible. That’s incredible. Well thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and I hope our listeners got a lot out of it and are excited to kind of go and test out TikTok and TokShop. So thank you very much for your time. It’s been a pleasure having you.
Holly Cardew:
Thank you so much for having me today. Thank you. Bye.
Dahna Borg:
Thank you for listening to the eighth episode of the Bright Minds of eCommerce podcast. Don’t forget we load all of the links, show notes, and a full transcript onto our website. You can find everything at brightredmarketing.com.au/show notes/episode eight. The link will also be in the episode description. If you love the show, we’d love for you to leave a review. We love reading them and the more reviews we get, the more we can grow our audience and the more guests we can get. So thank you very much for listening. Have a great day.
