TikTok wants sellers on TikTok Shop to livestream on the weekend.
The short-form video’s e-commerce platform is incentivizing sellers to livestream on the weekend by offering to co-funds coupons on products for eligible sellers. The effort, according to some sellers and agencies Marketing Brew spoke with, is dubbed “Golden Weekend Live,” and it marks a dedicated effort from TikTok Shop to try to get weekend live-shopping events to catch on in the US market.
Live shopping is already popular in other countries, particularly those in East Asia, but it hasn’t picked up steam in the same way in the US. Livestreaming on the weekend in particular could present a lucrative opportunity for sellers, according to Cory Iffert, owner, co-founder, and CEO, at the agency Iffert Media.
“The weekends are really beneficial for people to go live,” he said. “People that have full-time jobs may just not want to go live on the weekends, because they have family, they have plans, [or] they’re going on vacation.”
TikTok declined to comment on the record.
Time is money
Livestream shopping set-ups are a time-intensive process, according to William August, CEO at the agency Outlandish Inc, and some brands may choose to outsource it to agencies like his. For brands, livestreaming can be a big time commitment: both August and Iffert recommended that sellers do at least a two-hour-long livestreaming session every time they go live. That way, they said, brands can gain exposure for their products and build trust with customers through familiarity and consistency.
“Many sellers don’t realize that these are real people watching you, so you have to entertain and do customer service and educate on products and sell very quickly to 300 people at the same time,” August told Marketing Brew. “Generally, the sellers let us do it.”
Both Outlandish and Iffert Marketing have built out physical spaces (in Santa Monica, California, and Nashville, Tennessee, respectively), that feature sets from which they livestream for clients. While Iffert does all livestreaming for its clients, Outlandish occasionally allows certain clients for bigger livestreams to run their own streams.
Going once, going twice
While length is a crucial factor in livestreaming, so is content. Iffert said that his company’s hosts often point viewers to positive reviews left by customers, sometimes quoting from them directly, to highlight the potential benefits of products while also looking to gently push back on any negative sentiments they see in less-than-positive reviews, Iffert said.
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Outlandish uses an approach called FABES, August said, an acronym for features, advances, benefits, evidence, and sell. A key part of the strategy, he said, is to use storytelling to emphasize “the pain points [that] this product is solving.”
Timing is key for driving sales on livestreaming, too. Running flash sales, in which a product is usually offered at a discounted price for a short period of time, can sometimes boost sales from livestreams, Iffert said.
After “we got all the product info done, now we’re like, ‘Okay, it’s on a flash sale for the next five minutes. You guys don’t have that much time. There’s only two left. Who’s going to get it?’” he said. “Then we hard-sell for a little bit until those are gone, and then we just repeat that whole thing again with a different product or with that product.”
When viewership of a livestream drops, hosts can make adjustments to their pitch, August told Marketing Brew, like by hosting a flash giveaway on the stream.
“It’s a constant battle of up and down,” he said.
Overall, despite the effort that livestreaming can take, some livestreams have proven to be quite lucrative on TikTok Shop. Pop Mart, the maker of Labubus and other blind-box products, notched an estimated 85% of its June TikTok Shop sales from livestreamed content, according to e-commerce data firm Charm.io. While TikTok’s future in the US remains uncertain, for Iffert Marketing, the platform is more important than ever.
“We fully pivoted to just TikTok and TikTok Shop, so we don’t work on other platforms anymore,” Iffert said.