In this episode, we’re going to be talking about organic TikTok growth in the age of short-form video content. It’s a great episode you do not want to miss. Keep on reading.

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Welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. The 2X eCommerce podcast show is dedicated to digital commerce insights for retail and eCommerce teams. Each week, on this podcast, we interview a commerce expert, a founder of a digital native commerce brand, or a representative from a best-in-class commerce SaaS product. They have a tight remit to give you ideas that you can test right away on your brand so that you can improve commerce growth metrics such as conversion, average order value, repeat customers, your audience size, and ultimately, your Gross Merchant Value or sales. We’re here to help you sell more sustainably.

Speaking of which, the episode you’re about to read is an interview I had with Austin Armstrong, who is the CEO of SocialtyPro. They’re a digital marketing agency that specializes in TikTok marketing and search engine optimization. He’s posted over 1,500 TikToks with 325,000 followers, at the time of this interview, and millions of views. The average is about 2 million views per month. He is also a TikTok creator himself. He offers advice on how to approach TikTok as a digital native brand or a direct-to-consumer eCommerce brand.

We go through the fundamentals of content creation on TikTok whether or not to use a creator or to get somebody in-house, the cadence of posting, what makes a good TikTok page, what makes a good TikTok. Also, how to repurpose this TikTok content you’re creating on platforms such as YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. He has case studies. We go through a ton of case studies. We talked about Mermaid Straw, The Patch Brands, and several other brands, which he’s privy to either speaking to on his podcast or having worked with them.

He also talks about how to leverage TikTok for lead generation or building out your email list so you could retarget at some point or put it into your lifecycle marketing campaigns. Also, the call-to-actions and cues that you should place in your TikToks to drive conversions within the platform to other platforms and your eCommerce stores in general.

If you are looking to build out your TikTok strategy, this is an episode to read. For those who haven’t already, we would deeply appreciate it if you leave us a review on iTunes or the Apple Podcast platform if you enjoy this particular show. I’ll let you read this interview I had with Austin Armstrong. It’s powerful. Some of the things he shared, some trends on TikTok like ASMR, and many other trends on TikTok, which you could take away. I particularly like the case studies of brands he shared with us. I’ll leave you to enjoy this episode and I shall catch you on the other side. Ta-ta.

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Austin, welcome to the 2x eCommerce podcast. It is an absolute pleasure having you on the show. A warm welcome.

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

You run SocialtyPro. I always love to get a bit of background. What are the runup sets of events that led you to start and founding SocialtyPro?

I’ve been doing digital marketing for more than seventeen years, which is crazy to think about at this point. I started on MySpace when I was 14 years old. I got caught by that bug and never stopped. Fast forward a little while. That led me to work in a video marketing agency as an intern. I went from unpaid intern to paid intern to part-time intern to full-time and my boss at the time, who’s now my business partner, which is pretty cool, led to me working at other facilities, drug and alcohol treatment centers. I was managing their social media, and their entire online presence. The angle of our agency was in the behavioral health space. We’re heavily focused on video marketing and a bit of SEO.

I started my company, SocialtyPro, in May of 2019. It was very much a side hustle for the first 1.5 years of that. Years ago, at this point, I was let go from the treatment center that I was working with due to COVID. I was faced with the entrepreneurial decision of, “Do I try and find another job in the middle of a pandemic here where businesses are closing down and nobody knows what’s going on, or do I take this opportunity, bet on myself, and go all-in on my agency?” I did and it was the best decision I ever could have made. Even more specifically, I went all-in on TikTok and it was a combination of those two things that led me to be on this podcast with you.

There’s a lot of digging through there. Was the marketing strategy for your agency, predominantly via TikTok?

Yes, and it still is. We get probably 90% of our business directly from TikTok.

How long have you been on TikTok?

A few years.

From the looks of things, you have 325,000 followers, 3 million likes and on average, none of your videos get anything less than 1,000 plays.

They do pretty well but those are pretty low. They go up into the millions sometimes. It’s a wide range of views.

How does TikTok work? I know this is a general question but there will be some operators that have still not touched TikTok. From your success, if you were to whittle it down to the basics, how would you start to acquire a community and an audience on TikTok, if you were to do it as a direct-to-consumer eCommerce brand?

The first thing to know is that TikTok is entirely a video-focused platform. Aside from Instagram, which I’m sure everybody’s familiar with, there are a lot of different outlets to create content there now. You have images, videos, stories and you can even write text-based guides on Instagram. TikTok is a short form vertical video-focused platform. Even though they’re starting to roll out longer video lengths. At its core, it’s a short-form video viewed vertically on your phone.

It is the fastest growing social media platform of all time and fastest to 1 billion users. In 2021, it was the number one most visited website in the world surpassing even Google, which is a pretty mind-blowing stat. Why it is different is because it’s engineered to be addictive. First of all, it’s dopamine hit after dopamine hit of endless videos. It learns quickly what you like, what you’re engaging with, and what you’re watching for even seconds longer than other videos. It tracks all of this data.

It quickly knows what you’re interested in, as well as who’s interested in your content. When you’re first getting started as an eComm brand, it’s important to have a strategy in place of what types of videos you want to put out there and have a clear understanding of who you’re trying to reach or your buyer data demographic, your target audience. Having that clearly outlined and defined is going to make your content decisions way more effective so that you can hit the ground running.

What is your story? A few years back, the opportunity in TikTok was certainly not as mature as it is now. If you were to do this again, starting in 2022, how would you do TikTok? How would you approach TikTok?

What we do with all of our clients is we clearly outline who we’re trying to reach, their emotional pain points, and all of the products or services that you offer as a business. We begin to categorize different content. One category could be the pain point that your product solves. One category could be the behind-the-scenes or the story of the brand. One category could be the benefits and features of the product, to name a couple of examples.

Within each of those categories, you want to break it down into at least ten to start. Ten different ideas of videos that you could make. You could even outline trends that are going on TikTok. You can do a bit of competitor research in your industry and see some of the top-performing videos from a competitor and model those. Maybe that’s a different category as well.

What I recommend to do is to go through each of these categories, all of the videos in every category, to give you a systematic approach. If you do this every single day, you’re going to notice pretty quickly the emotional desire behind the product, those videos perform way better than talking about the features of the product or the behind-the-scenes or the story of the brand. Those videos perform way better than the other categories of content. That’s going to give you a clearer understanding of what works as well as what does not work. You can double down on what you see working to expedite your growth even faster.

With the storytelling, I’ve seen this a lot whereby you start out a brand on TikTok and you tell the story. It’s a combination. It’s a voiceover-type story, with a bit of B-roll and a bit of insight into what you do on an everyday basis. I’ve even seen that format repurposed to a TikTok ad. Do they work? How do you transcend beyond that, because not every brand is starting out? It’s like a David versus Goliath-type story that they tend to put in. What are the best ways brands can tell their stories and remain relevant to the TikTok community audience?

Telling the origin story of where you were up until where you are people doesn’t need to be as polished as a platform like Instagram. Part of the rawness of TikTok is why it’s so appealing to so many people. You can get on there and you don’t need to put on makeup, stage the scene, or do all of this stuff. You can get real raw and do a fantastic job. I’d recommend starting to film your process no matter where you’re at in your business.

If you’re in the founding stage, if you’re in the experimental R&D stage, or if you’re an established business that has been around forever, start documenting everything. You can start to craft that into a story. You can tell stories about problems that you’re overcoming as you roll out new iterations of a product, for instance. If you’re trying to get funding, you can tell that story of what that was like, the stories of your failures, and the stories of, “This is prototype number one. We sent it to market and we got this horrible feedback from people that we needed to correct. We’ve made this new adjustment to it. It’s a better product. Here’s where we’re at today.” Work in that you’re incorporating real feedback from people so that they feel like they’re along the journey for the process as well.

It makes no sense. From your perspective, what about overarching trends on TikTok? You have trending hashtags, sounds, and filters. Should brands utilize these trends? What’s your take on trends?

Trends can help expedite growth. I want to be clear that they’re not necessary in order to grow. You can have a successful account with hundreds of thousands to millions of followers, life-changing sales, and revenue without doing a single trend. Don’t think that you have to do a trend in order to be successful. With that said, they’re fun. It’s a fun way to lean into the platform a little bit and see how you can adapt that trend to your particular product or industry.

There’s always going to be a new trend that’s pertaining to a song, a filter, or even tent poles as well. In products, there are always Black Friday deals or get in early on that like Black Friday 2022. If you start creating content a little bit earlier, you’re going to be the first one to show up for that when the trend is coming. You never want to be too late to a trend. You want to catch it at the beginning, if possible so that when the wave comes, you’re already there.

You’re going to find a lot of these trends by spending more time on the app, to be honest. There are accounts that are dedicated to trend alerts, and whatnot, if that’s part of your strategy and game plan. By spending some time in the app, which I do recommend, scrolling through the For You page, you’re going to notice trends. You’re going to notice multiple videos that are doing something similar. You can look at that feature, the sound, the hashtags, and see how many people have adopted it, and jumped in.

Have you heard of the cosmetic brand called Too Faced?

No, I haven’t.

They did something clever in 2021 where they created a dance sequence or technique and then they also got to on our test to create a sound loop with vocals. The person was able to get the lyrics. It was hip hop based and they got a couple of their advocates or their creators to get into the trend with their hashtags. They had a hashtag, a dance, and a soundtrack. They bundled all that together and it was phenomenal. It trended because creators had a lot to work with. It wasn’t just a hashtag. They were able to accelerate the awareness of their brand through this hashtag. They also paid to amplify it.

The dance technique or sequence was amazing. Everyone had their own versions of it. It almost became culture-defining at that moment in time. I found that interesting. They’re at the upper end of the direct-to-consumer spectrum in the sense that they have sufficient funding. Have you come across anything similar where brands are creating trends themselves beyond hashtags or jumping on existing trends?

First of all, that’s a brilliant case study example that anybody can take advantage of. You could come up and develop that strategy. If you’re able to rally influencers as well as paid, you can throw fuel on the fire there and expedite that. If you do it and hope for the best, it’s likely not going to be picked up by the masses. I have a TikTok podcast and this was a guest that came on, a company called Mermaid Straw. They have sustainable packaging products. They started with a metal straw and they have reusable bottles for your soft drinks, whatever.

They’ve leaned into a trend called ASMR, which is the sounds and relaxation style of things. It’s a trend within a trend. It’s not inherently related to their product at all but in most of their videos, they start every single video off by sliding this packing cube onto the table. They record the sounds of picking the straws out of their containers and packaging this thing and all of the sounds that come with it. It’s colorful as well. They use pinks, turquoise, purples, and all kinds of beautiful colors there. They’ve leaned into this ASMR trend. That’s something that their brand has been associated with.

It’s a massive sob trend on YouTube. It made its way through a TikTok and it’s banging when you think about it. Interesting. Do you promote your podcast on TikTok yourself? Do you let it sit in the podcast ecosystem?

Yeah, we absolutely do. It’s called BusinessTokPodcast.com We do a video podcast of it. What we do is clip out meaningful segments from the conversation and turn those into short TikTok videos across social media that we repurpose.

From the podcast, do you have any other sorts of clever case studies from eCommerce brands finding success in TikTok, particularly in the organic sphere of the platform?

Another great one is a company called The Patch Brand, which are multivitamins, things for energy, and whatnot. It’s a patch and it absorbs through the skin. It’s an industry disrupter. It’s taking on the multivitamin and the supplement space but something similar that people understand like nicotine patches if you’re trying to quit smoking cigarettes or whatnot.

They’ve done a fantastic job jumping on trends, telling relatable stories, and leveraging influencers and UGC as well. One of the interesting things that they did is they hired influencers initially to create some content for them. They ended up hiring one retainer to be a dedicated content creator for their brand. The owner does create some content himself, but they wanted to leverage an existing content creator on a regular basis that has that face value a little bit but already knows how to hit the ground running with videos that are going to resonate on TikTok. The energy, how it’s structured, the editing, and everything in there. That was a fascinating example, as well.

Holding someone accountable who knows the craft is so important. It’s such an important step to systematize it because the founder could be working on sorting out finance or doing other things in the business and forgets about it and it dies there with no responsibility. I’m on their TikTok page now and their packaging is nice and it’s appealing. It’s a Millennial forecast. There are lots of product demo ads. It’s a new way of doing things.

I got some.

Which brings me to my next question. How important is product packaging? How important is the redefined utility or the redefined approach to a product at the novelty effect and packaging? How important is that for success on TikTok?

It’s essential not just for TikTok but if you’re ever doing shelf space or anything like that, it has to stand out. It has to pop. It has to be eye-catching so that they can know that when they see that packaging, it’s clear that it’s this particular brand. You’re using colors. It’s descriptive. When I look at this one, I clearly see the benefit of it, what it does, what’s in it, and everything. It looks like a trusted brand. It’s important. The more unique and interesting that a product is and looks, the more adoptive it’s going to be as well.

If your goal is to get your product to be mass adopted and go viral on a platform like TikTok, you want it to be something that people want to have and show off, not just use for themselves but ultimately show off and be a brand ambassador for it. Going back to Mermaid Straw, for instance, their products are super colorful. The mermaid colors, turquoise, pinks, purples, blues, etc. People are happy to show those products off because they’re colorful and attention-grabbing

What I found interesting from what you said earlier was the fact that the majority of your consultancy leads in business comes from TikTok. What age demographic and sex demographic are your customers? Are the Millennials or Gen Xs running brands or are they probably even older folks like Gen Z? What is the demographic? We’ve always thought that decision-makers hung out on LinkedIn, TikTok, or Twitter. Finding this unique way of getting clients from TikTok is interesting to me. Do you mind shedding a bit more light on the demographic of your customers?

Because of the content that I created, it does gear older so I get a lot of Millennials and Gen X. Primarily millennials and Gen X are my clientele because I’m talking about how to grow your existing business online, how to get more website traffic from SEO and showing exact case studies of our clients and whatnot. It’s not interesting to a Gen Z kid so it does attract older demographics of people. There’s something interesting here about where that misconception comes from. There are over a billion users on TikTok worldwide now.

In the United States, there are over 100 million active users. That’s people logging into the app. Where this misconception comes from is what content you’re seeing. You’re seeing a lot of younger people creating content. When you first open the app, the algorithm doesn’t know what you like. You have to train it a little bit. Over time, it’ll serve you more of the content that you’re interested in. Initially, it’ll show you the most viral content because it’s trying to figure out what you like which does gear towards younger kids and whatnot.

This is an opportunity for most brands because what it’s showing is there are a lot of people lurking and watching, but they’re not actively creating. There’s a gap there in the industry in the marketplace. There’s a gap in every industry. Even some of the more saturated marketplaces are not that saturated compared to some of the more mature platforms out there. My agency is proof that there is an older demographic there.

I’ll bring out a quick case study of a guy. I always like to bring this guy up as a case study of anybody that says, “There are only young people on there.” There’s a guy, Scott Sims, and @Turning65WithScott is his user. His entire account is about Medicare enrollment for people 65 plus which is an insurance in the United States for after retirement. He’s got 130,000 or 140,000 followers and he’s only talking to the 65 plus community, as well as their children who are 35, 40, 50 years old and trying to help their parents out. There are absolutely older demographics there.

One of the key points you mentioned earlier, which I find important, and I didn’t dig deeper into it was the fact that you use TikTok to enrich and build out your email database. You put in flows and retargeting and all of that. What about cross-platform audience building? You’re using TikTok to generate more subscribers on your YouTube or Instagram. How would you suggest people approach audience building on other platforms using TikTok as leverage?

There are two main ways that you can do this. You can directly connect your YouTube and your Instagram account to your TikTok. When someone views your profile, there’s a little icon there. It’s like a social media icon. If they click on that, it’ll pop up a menu for YouTube and Instagram. I highly recommend connecting that. By having that, a percentage of people will cross-pollinate because that’s a well-known feature and functionality on the app.

In order to cross-pollinate people over to YouTube, for instance, if you put out a long YouTube video, you could put out a teaser trailer on TikTok, and say, “In this video, I’m going to cover X, Y and Z. I did an entire YouTube video about this. You can find the full video in my profile.” Tease it, hype it up a little bit, and provide them with those next steps that they can come over.

For Instagram specific, one clever thing that I’ve done in the past is sometimes a video on TikTok will get taken down for a content violation or content policy or something like that. When that happens, what I do is I’ll create a video and say, “TikTok doesn’t want me to show you this.” I tease what the video is about and then the value of that video. I’ll say, “You can watch it on my Instagram because they don’t censor.”

I’ll say something controversial like that. First of all, of course, Instagram censors. That increases the engagement of that video. Everybody runs through the comments and says, “What do you mean they don’t censor? Of course, they censor.” I’m creating intent and a reason to go over to my Instagram. That is a fantastic way to drive traffic over there. You can re-upload that video.

A third strategy that I recommend is time-sensitive right now. We’re in an interesting landscape in the social media world. What we do, and I do this personally and for everybody that we work with, is we start on TikTok. We create a well thought out video for TikTok and we download that video watermark-free. We use a website called SnapTik.app. It downloads that video watermark-free and then we upload it onto Instagram as a reel. We upload it onto YouTube as a short. If it’s 30 seconds or less, we upload it on Facebook as Facebook Reels. We also post them on Pinterest as Idea Pins, which is a newer feature on Pinterest. We post them on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you have a brick-and-mortar location or an office and you have a Google My Business page, we post them on Google business profiles.

I personally don’t post them on Snapchat because I don’t like their discoverability platform but we post them everywhere because everybody is trying to catch up with TikTok right now because it grew so fast and all of these platforms steal from one another. Short-form vertical video works across the board right now. In a few months, I went from about 3,000 followers on Instagram to 52,000 followers on Instagram. It is almost entirely from repurposing my TikTok videos as Instagram Reels.

That’s a forecast to pump up creators who are active in reels and reels platforms. Repurposing is the game and short-form content is where it’s at. Attention spans are short. You’re looking at 10 to 15 seconds to get your point. It’s a super interesting conversation. Finally, what are your thoughts on utilizing creators, particularly TikTok creators? Do they have a creator program? Who do you think is doing it well? What brands do you think are doing it well? How should the audience think about the use of creators on TikTok?

Leverage an influencer that’s going to be similar or who creates content that’s in alignment with your brand. If your product is for 35-plus men and it’s a beard trimmer, you’re probably not going to want to leverage a Gen Z creator that’s talking about the latest TV show or something random because it’s not going to be related. Pick somebody that is in alignment with the values and is creating similar content to what your brand and your product are.

We mentioned a couple of great brands that are leveraging TikTok in this episode. One of the best brands out there on TikTok right now, and I’ll highlight two, Duolingo, which is a language learning app. They are so funny. They have their mascot, which is this green bird and they troll other brands. They do such a funny way of leaning into the comments, responding to people, and leveraging this bird in different trends. It’s hysterical.

Another international brand that’s fascinating is an airline company called Ryanair. They’re a budget international airline. Their TikTok is so funny and it has worked so well for them. They have a couple of million followers on there. They’ll take a picture of their airplane on the tarmac and they’ll use a filter where it’s just the eyes and the mouth of the person and they’ll position it on the airplane. They’ll use a trending sound or they’ll say something relatable. It’s so funny. Look at what big brands are doing on the platform. Get creative with this. Leverage creators that are going to enhance your brand and bring positive awareness and intention to what you’re selling.

I enjoyed the Ryanair. The interesting thing is they haven’t put up many TikToks out there. They’ve only put up 40 TikTok but that has amassed millions of views. My takeaway from this is to be fun and be entertaining on TikTok while still throwing in your sales pitch in a fun way. It’s a fun platform. In order to blend into the platform or pop out of the platform, you need to be entertaining. The final question has got to do with what content teams should look like in eCommerce businesses.

There are a lot of issues with paid marketing at the moment. Brands that are managing to get through with the inflationary pressures are also rising ad costs. The drop in conversions from paid ads has leaned a lot towards organic content, whether it’s organic content on a YouTube channel, whether it’s organic content on their blog, or SEO organic content. A lot of them are leading g into that to get cheap traffic. Paid is getting more leverage off the back of that. Looking at the video-first world that we live in, in your opinion, what should an internal content team look like at an eCommerce brand?

You can start with one person, one competent digital marketer that is comfortable being the face of it, developing content ideas, and editing within the TikTok app, because the app itself is easy to edit, and then repurposing it across the board. If you have a dedicated social media person on your team, that is a fantastic way to get started. You could have one rock star. If you want to expand, you could expand into different roles. You could have a specific content strategist work on creating the ideas, doing the research on topics, competitors, trends, hashtags, sounds, etc. Have one person dedicated to the actual research. Have some talent to create the actual videos. That would be an awesome dynamic and duo.

You could expand it into an editor if you need to. It isn’t necessary. It depends on the type of content that you’re creating but remember, you can have a lot of great results being raw. For instance, in my videos, it’s me holding a selfie video up and then switching the camera view to record something on my computer screen and then back to me. I have 325,000 followers and do 2 million views a month. It’s all about the messaging. That’s the most important thing. I do all of our content myself. I’m not saying that everybody is going to be as experienced, but you can get the ball rolling with one person and then scale up if you absolutely need to or if somebody’s not confident in one of those aspects.

Do you have any content deals?

What do you mean by content deals?

With 2 million views a month and 325,000 followers, do brands come to you to collab?

Yeah. I’m also an influencer, not just an agency owner and creator. It’s a big part of my business model. I highlight a lot of useful websites. My content is focused on useful digital marketing strategies that brands can directly implement useful websites that are going to make people’s lives easier. SaaS companies come to me constantly. I do 3 to 4 brand deals a month and those videos go up across all of my social media that I had mentioned.

Fascinating stuff. Austin, it’s been an incredible pleasure having you on the 2x eCommerce podcast show. I could go on and on. Where’s the best place people can reach out to you? Your website is SocialtyPro.com Your handle on TikTok is @SocialtyPro too.

My podcast is called BusinessTok. I interview businesses and entrepreneurs in every industry that are leveraging TikTok to drive sales. It’s a tactical podcast. That’s BusinessTokPodcast.com or you can search for BusinessTok and find that podcast anywhere.

Will do. Austin, it’s a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you.

Thank you.