TikTok Ecommerce Solutions - with Alexander Vladimirov from Aleph

This talk focuses on how TikTok can enhance e-commerce business strategies, particularly through advertising opportunities that have recently become available in many regions, including Bulgaria. The speaker showcases TikTok's Symfony Creative Studio, which enables automatic video translations and highlights user-generated content as a powerful marketing tool. He emphasizes TikTok's role as a trend-setting platform, explaining how it shapes consumer behavior and can be leveraged to acquire new customers. The discussion includes insights on catalog ads, which are tailored to user preferences, and the emerging TikTok shop, where purchases can occur directly within the app. Additionally, he introduces innovative tools and techniques for scaling marketing efforts using AI-generated content.

Yeah, that introduction I totally didn't write with chat GPT at all. Uh, it's a very good solution. Uh, and I'll also be talking a lot of very good solutions for Tik Tok. So, yeah, I know it's late. I already can taste the beer in my mouth as well. I had to drink three coffees just to stay awake. But anyway, uh let's uh discuss uh something new. Maybe

you you've heard, maybe you haven't heard, but Tik Tok is open for advertising in most of the world, including in Bulgaria since July. So, uh uh I will discuss how Tik Tok can uh I'll showcase you how Tik Tok can help your e-commerce business uh with couple of uh automatic solutions. But before that, I'll just uh showcase briefly one of the solutions that I will finish up

at the end of the presentation. The Tik Tok Symfony Creative Studio. how it can actually help your business translate uh videos from lang one language into another. So I'll show you now one video from our partner from Tik Tok, Agneska Zamiesa uh who is our partner manager from Warso. She's Polish. She doesn't understand a word in Bulgarian. She doesn't speak Bulgarian, but she filmed this video. It

it was actually filmed in English and she translated uh in Bulgarian using Tik Tok's too. Tik Tok. Thank you. So yeah, uh like I mentioned, she doesn't understand a word in Bulgaria. She doesn't know what she said. Uh but maybe some of you here don't know as well if you don't speak Bulgarian which I apologize but anyway uh the point had to be made. I will discuss

later how she actually managed to film this video. Before that u I'll just briefly uh talk a little bit about how Tik Tok users are using the the platform and how e-commerce businesses can um actually use this data. So first of all, let's talk about trends. Tik Tok is the number one place in the world currently where trends are made. You probably know about the very demure

trend. Uh how it was pretty much everywhere. It started from Tik Tok. Basically, Gen Z's um use Tik Tok for search engine as well. Uh also Tik Tok is the place where people go to check which uh fashion brand is currently trendy, which beauty brand is trendy, what kind of food they eat. So basically what uh every media even in America are saying that Tik Tok is

practically trying to shape how people are eating. You've probably heard the term Tik Tok may made me buy it. I only I'm only buying this because of Tik Tok. Like I said, a lot of people mainly the Gen Z population and it with the years it's going to continue to increase uh for which generation is going to use this are practically going into Tik Tok and they're

searching with keywords just like how they're doing on Google. So this is basically the new search engine. You've probably heard about the cucumber trend. This was very very big last year. So basically it was a cucumber salad. Absolutely basic. Uh you you can basically like like the Bulgarian uh reda salad pretty much but without tomatoes just cucumber some chilies very basic stuff but uh in countries like

Iceland where practically they don't grow cucumbers they import it. All the cucumbers were bought outside uh from the shops. They were sold out because of this trend because everyone wanted to try it. So that's the power of Tik Tok. So how can actually Tik Tok help your business? It can help you acquire new business. It can help you grow your uh current uh clients and it can

definitely help with brand building. So uh let's start with the first uh insight how it can help you acquire new new customers. Tik Tok made several different uh um different ways uh questions for their clients. Uh and uh it turned out that more than half of the users are inclined to shop online. So 64 3.7 and it turned out that most of the users almost half of

them are not active on other social media channels. So you will be reaching new unique people with your campaigns and because of this because you're reaching new unique people you will have unique additional conversions which you not and new purchases which you will not be getting uh from other channels. How they found this brands are using post purchase surveys. Anyone can do that. There's plenty of solutions.

You can do it manually. You can buy a third party solution to do that. So how to utilize this? After a person a customers has made a purchase, you can ask them where did you where did you learn about us? Where did you find about us? Where did from which ad did you uh click to buy? Whatever question you can ask and surprisingly yes uh a huge

percentage it turns out nowadays that is from Tik Tok. This information is generally for whole of Europe. It's not specifically for Bulgaria or any Balkan country. One very interesting thing is why Tik Tok helps you uh build your branding in general. Tik Tok it uh has become a place where users are watching videos for a very long time. So the average view of the uh videos in

general are much higher than other social media networks. Um but they also want to see new content all the time and all the time. And what kind of t content we're going to discuss in a bit. First of all, let's just like I mentioned about the search engine. What the user generally looking for in Tik Tok. It's content about clothing and accessory. So fashion brand. If you

have a bash fashion brand, perfect. Beauty and personal care. Number one for skin care, for any fragrances, for any u hair products. They go on Tik Tok to find out why uh this is working for them. And basically this is a survey again Tik Tok which uh Tik Tok made for in this case for Eastern European customers. They really want to shop for also products uh from

that same categories as we're seeing from what they're wanting to to see in terms of content. So shopping and content come together in this perspective what type of videos they want to see. So don't focus on the actual product to sell it, but focus on the benefits of the product. So user generated content, you've probably heard it many many times on Tik Tok. This is the go-to

video format. You need to use video creators to make product reviews, product presentation. The if the product is physical, use it. Show it how it people can uh use it in their real life. That's what they want to see and that's what going to bring you success on Tik Tok. So let's discuss now the more technical solutions. How uh can Tik Tok uh scale your business? So

we're going to talk a little bit about catalog acts. What is this? Actually there is still no catalog ads in Bulgaria. So probably you haven't seen them. But if you're from Romania, if you're from Greece, if you're somewhere from Eastern Europe, catalog ads have been active for quite a long time and has been one of the best solutions for e-commerce advertisers. It's similar uh way of working

uh to other social media channels if you're using. So basically it's it's uh based on your e-commerce feed from your website product catalog. It's absolutely dynamic. So it knows what the users uh what kind of products the users prefer to see. So it will prioritize those products for those uh people people in um respect. Uh but also since if you're already advertising on Tik Tok with standard

conversion campaigns, uh catalog ads has shown to increase results by more than 36%. Uh in this case, it's uh decrease of the cost per purchase. Uh for Bulgaria, we are expecting Tik Tok to introduce catalog ads in the following weeks. The official release date in for Bulgaria and several other six new markets was uh last week. It's already active in Serbia for example. So one market at

a time they're releasing it. So hopefully uh we'll see it soon and you can utilize it in Bulgaria in particular. For other markets like I said you can do it already. Um like I said the uh the catalog know it knows the algorithm. it knows what kind of products uh to show to the users. How you can also uh utilize uh interactive add-ons which I'll showcase in

a bit how they're going to look and uh it will definitely uh help if you use smart plus campaign which is full automation. Don't do any targeting. Don't do any um additional um um additional uh things for the campaign. you just put give creatives and you let the and the budget and the algorithm knows which people to uh target as well. It's really important to have an

always on and a retargeting campaign uh running in parallel. But this is just a example how it's going to look like if you're using a video and a dynamic uh catalog product at feet at the bottom on the left side and the right side is basically just a typical carousel with the dynamic uh feed uh from the catalog in this case used. Also, um it's quite important

if you're using the static um images like the carousel to always utilize all the different options the Tik Tok gives to make the ad look a bit more native to Tik Tok a bit pretty let's say because users on Tik Tok are used to seeing videos and if you're using catalog obviously that's not a video so it in theory it shouldn't it it shouldn't work but in

practice it actually does especially when you we're putting price we're putting different product features uh the dynamic add-ons like I said you can put different uh uh offers promo codes etc etc it's something that users will expect and they will want to click on it especially uh if it's relevant to them also how to see which products are performing the best you have the catalog insights the

pending categories you can see which product is uh uh being sold the most. You can focus more on that product. Uh uh you can have a uh you can make a separate conversion campaign focusing only on this product. You can you can have a tent you can see a tent which products is about to s be be sold out etc. It's quite useful to do this. But

something more interesting Tik Tok shop maybe you've heard about it. Tik Tok shop is a solution of Tik Tok which is offered in several countries around the world. Unfortunately, Bulgaria is not one of them. But we have Germany, we have France, we have Italy, Spain and UK and Europe. We have United States and we have several other Asian countries. So what is unique here? You're not the

the customer is not going to your website, but they're actually going on the actual Tik Tok shop. The Tik Tok shop is what you're creating and the purchase is happening on Tik Tok, not on your website. This is very uh let's say it could be something new for you. It could be something new for your customers. But it turns out that more than half of the users

on Tik Tok are aware in those countries in particular are aware what Tik Tok shop is and they would still buy from Tik Tok shop. something interesting in the USA Tik Tok shop is much much larger now than than global um e-commerce giants like the Chinese brand Sheen like Sephora. So this is yeah just statistic for Tik Tok from all the different uh advertisers that are using

Tik Tok shop in America. But how to get started? So first of all uh the official uh requirements are that you need to have a company based in those markets. So if you want to have a Tik Tok shop in Germany for example, you need to have a German company. But we do have a solution that if you don't have a German company, we might be able

to help you. So if you're interested in Tik Tok shop in any of those countries, just reach out to us over there after the uh presentation and we can discuss the possibilities. And then after everything is uh uh is done uh it's just the technical step. So you can again link the Tik Tok shop with uh several different uh uh partners. So it's not that difficult uh

to do uh in general. And after that you have also paid solutions and organic formats that you can utilize to with your uh Tik Tok shop. Also, uh you have an affiliate program with affiliate links that you can give to content creators to use and sell uh uh your Tik Tok shop uh products basically and they get a commission out of it. So, it's quite uh useful

uh as well. But let's uh to finish up, let's go back with the solution I mentioned in the beginning. How can Tik Tok actually help you create different videos in different languages? So Tik Tok has this platform called Tik Tok one creative. So it's their um solution to find everything create creative about Tik Tok in it. Creative center currently it's not uh it's also uh it also

has its own website on Tik Tok that anyone can go into but in the future it will going to be moved to Tik Tok one in general. It's the place where you can find trendy content, top performing ads from various of advertisers from around the world, including Bulgaria that it could be quite useful to see what's working for them that you can include in your strategy as

well. create their marketplace for markets like Romania, for markets like uh um all the Western European markets, but even like from the Balkcons, Romania and Greece, you can reach out to creators who can film user generated content videos for you. Usually uh they have a fee of doing this but it's a one platform to make this easier instead of you actually having to look on Tik Tok

or uh anywhere else uh on the web how to find uh content creators and the best solution is the creative exchange which is is actually for uh if you're working with us it's free for you. So if you spend an a certain amount of um uh a budget for a month, you will get free videos from specific content creators picked by Tik Tok that uh could be

useful for your brand. So it's definitely a very interesting uh way to help scale up your business as to how to uh use um AI to translate videos and to um film any other videos is the Symfony Creative Studio which uh you can uh open as well and it's quite uh uh easy to use. It's practically up go one go back. It's uh completely done by AI.

You've probably heard about AI many many times even today. You're hearing it uh everywhere. But it's basically videos generated with AI. There's um content creators that have sold their basically bodies, let's say that their faces, their bodies to Tik Tok to use them for um basically for videos. So there's hundreds and hundreds of different uh avatars that can be used. You can also create your own custom

avatar. Uh so even you can become an avatar of such video if you want to. Um and basically uh when you combine this avatar with static images, it can create a script for you. It's completely automated. Uh you can create a fantastic video in 5 minutes that is going to look like a user generated content because a person is going to be speaking etc etc and uh

it's uh going to save you a lot of time by doing that. So in terms of translations like uh I mentioned uh some video some languages are completely supported for direct translation. Uh for example Bulgarian is not supported for direct translation but you can use a script to generate uh like Agneska actually did. She posted her script into the video and uh the voice that was speaking

wasn't her. It was the AI generated voice which was speaking in Bulgarian. And this guy here, Sebastian, who is another colleague from Tik Tok, he's German. He only speaks German and English. And he also did these videos in Czech and Slovak. Quite similar. actually. So yeah, this tool really easily can just translate everything with just couple of minutes can generate your video and those videos you can

use in your ads without any issues. You can technically use them for other platforms even though you shouldn't but uh it's fine. So uh you can basically use that tool to scale your uh social media campaigns in general which is quite good. So in general uh this was pretty much it. I still have like around a minute time so maybe if we can do like a Q&A

or something like that. If someone wants to ask a question uh or you can just immediately talk to us over there behind the stand. Uh so yeah thank you very much. I'll be happy to help your businesses grow on Tik Tok.