TikTok Shop (Coming Soon), The Influencer X Factor, and a Buying State of Mind

If this is the first article you’re reading in this series, you may feel as if you’ve just jumped onto a moving train.  For reference the two articles leading up to this one are  🏎️ 💨 Tear Thru Your 2023 Rev Target with TikTok Shop (Coming Soon) and TikTok Shop Social Sales Tsunami is Surging... Learn to Surf with Us :surfer: (Coming Soon) The first presents the data that will confirm TikTok is not just “some gorilla” in the social media marketing room, but King Kong.  The second article provides some perspective on who Influencers are and through two additional marketing personas we introduce how Influencers relate to the audience.

Today, we dive a bit more into the Influencer / Follower ecosystem and address the often unpredictable (yet beneficial) network effects companies can look forward to when working with people that are not only those most representative of contemporary culture but actively involved in shaping it.

To offer a more complete picture of personas, and give you the full birds eye view of how you can maximize on Influencer Marketing we will meet Chloe, Francesca, and the Hausers.  

Picture Chloe, a twenty something professional makeup artist that works in Los Angeles on movie sets.  A few of her first gigs were doing horror movie makeup and now she feels pigeonholed.  She feels trapped because no one wants to give “Chloe Queen of Zombies” (as her coworkers and contacts affectionately call her), a chance to glam it up for anyone on the red carpet.  She has a plan though.  After studying top Influencers in her field, researching affordable makeup options for the general consumer, luxury brands, and those she uses in the studio… she’s ready to put in the effort to build an audience.

Chloe doesn’t want to be accused of ripping anyone off, or attempting to ape top Influencer’s styles, but neither does she want to waste time creating tutorials and featuring products that no one is interested in.  Livestreams are great, but she rarely has time.  For Chloe, shoppable TikToks that show up in her feed are her way of understanding and participating in culture’s trending pulse.  Beyond shoppable posts Chloe visits her favorite Influencer Profiles and reviews the products they endorse.

While Chloe may not have the audience or reach of a top Influencer sponsored by a leading cosmetics company, she is one of many secondary Influencers watching the trends and creating content with the intention of capturing brand attention.  She and many other aspiring Influencers become something of a secondary boost for the trending winners of the day. 

She is also a buyer herself.  When she sees a tutorial she’d like to recreate or thinks she can do better, purchasing the product she wants is a seamless transition from inspiration to acquisition.

As a quick aside, brands may find themselves capable of influencing the conversation on TikTok and driving traffic to their own TikTok Shop by throwing down a content challenge that creators can’t resist.

Next up, we meet Francesca, a young mom of twins in Miami.  She enjoys the funny videos for herself, but she’s found toy reviews on YouTube to be increasingly commercialized and less trustworthy.  Furthermore, as a Marketing Executive she has read much about TikTok’s algorithm and favors it over the competition.  She loves that when browsing for toys, she can easily browse shoppable feed content that catches her eye and determine if the parents and kids interacting with the items are sincere.

Francesca will pay attention to the Toy Influencers, but more often she will just visit the toy brand directly to see what they’re selling and browse for real life interactions.  Shoppable posts in her TikTok feed are fast becoming Francesca’s preferred way to make purchases because when she sees a review of an item that she likes, she doesn’t need to go offsite and tediously search the internet for what she literally just saw… neither does she have to deal with a click-through to a slightly different product offsite, nor deal with a tedious checkout process.  

When she sees what she likes, she is able to act fast.  From a brand perspective, she is able to convert at the moment of inspiration.  And the more she shops like this for her kids, the more inclined she is to shop for everything like this.  For Francesca, being able to browse shoppable content is the ultimate of unfiltered product review sites – all made possible by TikTok Shop.

Last but not least we meet the Hausers.  They’re not what you would consider the typical TikTok user.  At least not yet. They’re one of TikTok’s newest growing user segments which includes those with more means, financial stability and beyond.  In fact, their daughter-in-law Francesca showed them how she uses TikTok to bypass biased reviews associated with legacy search and see the products they’re curious about, all without ever having to visit a showroom.

The Hausers share a TikTok account and they love Livestreams. It reminds them of the Home Shopping Network on late night TV, but more dynamic, fun, and entertaining.  The more they engage, the more they discover a growing community of people like them.  

Mr. Hauser enjoys watching the quick Do It Yourself videos, and discovering products he never knew existed, while Mrs. Hauser enjoys her ability to cycle through feeds of before & after interior design reveals, one after another, (as opposed to sitting through an entire episode just to see the punchline).  

With TikTok Shop, the Hausers first and foremost enjoy the shoppable posts that show up in their feed, curated by TikTok’s algorithm, but they also enjoy browsing the profiles of their favorite content creators and seeing what is endorsed in general.  

Static content (and content that becomes static – as it all eventually will) is great for the super fans who miss a livestream, or have to drop off midway through, but it’s even better for the casual user and social shopper looking to validate whether or not an item they’re considering is the one for them… and also what item to consider in the first place.

TikTok Shop empowers the type of people seeking to make informed purchasing decisions to find what they want most and remove the barriers to purchase when they see what they like.  

Likewise, for people that may not even know what they want, TikTok provides a vacation from the ordinary, with the music, and cornucopia of visuals – it puts users into a more emotional state of mind, the same as if you were on a real vacation.  And, as we are often susceptible to an impulse purchase of a souvenir or snack while enjoying a real life vacation, TikTok brings that vacation experience, that buying state of mind to you, wherever you are.

By corollary, consider your experience inside of a Las Vegas Casino, the sights and sounds, novelty and surprise all around you, epic value within the reach of your fingertips, or so it seems.  The slot machines calling to you, there are shows and sights to see, the line between luck and serendipity blurs amidst all the glitter.  

TikTok and by degrees TikTok Shop is that casino experience in the palm of your hand, wherever you are and whenever you access the app.  A world of novelty and surprise, desire and excitement – one’s memento (or souvenir) is only a click away.

The future belongs to the brands eager to help weave the dream.

To find out how YOU can be the thread that helps your company weave the ultimate eCommerce tapestry with TikTok Shop, reach out to Juan Olea (jolea@influential.co) at Influential or Lauren Farrer (lauren.farrer@borngroup.com) at BORN Group.