How does going viral on TikTok affect your business? Does it really move the needle and how long does the virality last?
These are all questions that I hope to answer from my personal experience after going viral on July 31st, 2023. I’ll also dive into the details about what we learned during and what we have done since to prepare for whenever the next video hits.
Here’s the video: Shoutout to Sophie and Ben! Hope your day is filled with love, laughte… | Card Ideas | TikTok
The Results
Within 72 hours our video received over 921k views, 109.7k likes, 115 comments, 13.1k shares, and 4,343 favorites.
How Did It Impact Sales?
Our website receives little to no traffic on a daily basis. Over 80% of our business is through Amazon FBA, and social media marketing is our strategy for driving more website sales.
In short, we were caught off guard. Thankfully our infrastructure was ready to handle the volume.
Sales could have easily been much higher. At the time the video popped, we did not have enough followers to link our website to the TikTok profile page. I believe you’re able to link your website once you reach 1,000 followers, which we didn’t earn until later that day. So for the first 6 hours, nearly 300,000 potential customers were forced to leave the app to search “Sleazy Greetings” in their browsers to find our store. *Ouch
Also, we didn’t link the correct product from our TikTok store to the video nor was it even listed to the TikTok Shop. The only place to buy was on Etsy, Amazon, and our official website. *Double Ouch
I bet that would have easily doubled sales out of convenience.
More intriguing, our Amazon sessions, clicks, and purchases for the “Congrats” card featured in the video increased by roughly 900%. Consumers left TikTok and were actively searching on Amazon to purchase. This was a new launch of only a few days old on Amazon so we did not have a large quantity in stock. One hundred units sold out within a few hours. Still neat to see people migrating to Amazon to make purchases.
How Long Did The Virality Last?
Everything was short lived and only lasted about 72 hours. To this day, we still receive several hundred views a day on the video.
I have noticed that our new videos, as a whole, get more views than compared to before going viral. Almost as if TikTok recognizes our content and pushes us a bit more. I know the bump is not attributed to the 8,000+ new followers we gained. Analytics state that 95% of our views on new videos come from the For You page on TikTok, which is the organic feed.
Why Did We Go Viral?
The percentage who watched the full video (48.74%) is significantly higher than our other videos (27.76%). This video kept people engaged and on the TikTok app so they kept pushing it on the For You page. Optimizing for this metric seems to be what most marketers want – and it makes sense.
To do well, I think videos need at least these two basic characteristics.
After reviewing successful campaigns by other brands, I strongly believe that…
- the overall ‘theme’ or ‘message’ your marketing campaign revolves around on TikTok, and…
- how you edit your content…
… are the most critical factors determining whether or not your video takes off.
In addition, TikTok was heavily pushing the use and promotion of your products within your TikTok shop. They really wanted brands to start linking their shop to their account.
Theme And Message
Our first videos did very poorly. We filmed anything and just published it without a real plan or overall message. In addition, our content was not edited well and took far too long to get to the entertainment.
In my research, I found dozens of successful TikTok pages where every single video started with the exact same question, and those videos got millions of views. Very simple ideas with little to no production budget. Simply, walking up to strangers and asking “Are you happy” or “What’s the story behind your wallet” or “What’s your favorite book”.
They were not scripted, apart from the initial question, so everything that followed was entirely genuine and easy to connect with on a personal level.
From these campaigns, our hypothesis was that consumers love watching reaction based videos.
I hired a team and decided to film reaction based content with one singular theme that’s easy to convey within 3 seconds – “react to this card.” Our products are naturally funny, offensive, divisive, and sassy – this can make for great content.
So our team started walking up to strangers on the street and asking them to “pick a card” out of a random box and give their unfiltered reaction. The box approach added a touch of mystery – I can thank ChatGPT for that idea.
Here’s the first attempt at a video that earned poor results: Breaking news: Mother’s Day cards declared the official currency of ki… | TikTok
Optimize Your Hook
For this particular viral video, I strongly believe that a big part of why the video did so well was because of the hook. People are scrolling looking for a reason to stop, and those first 3 seconds did a good enough job capturing their curiosity, “What is this and how will this stranger react?”
“Pull a random card out from this and I wanna get your immediate reaction.”
It’s not well written, but it has some keywords that I think draw attention.
Emotional Keywords: pull, random, out, immediate, reaction
The first videos we experimented with had horrible hooks and started with a boring small talk introducing the company. Our viral video starts with the question – cutting out all the fluff.
What We Are Doing Now
Website
After the huge boost in site traffic, we noticed holes everywhere leaking potential. We did not optimize things like our conversion rate, average order value, upsells, cross-sells, retargeting / follow-up emails, abandon cart promotions, pop-ups, etc. so we left a lot of revenue on the table.
So now, we are redesigning our website to maximize the massive spikes in traffic. And we hired a marketer to help build out a whole series of email flows to drive higher lifetime values.
Also, we’ll use a LinkTree link within our profile or equivalent to drive people to our Amazon storefront, website, specific products, email signups, promotions, and more. This might help direct the wave of traffic the next time a video does well.
Using TikTok For Product Development
We received 115 comments filled with great product feedback from TikTok viewers. It’s helped us develop a new line of products we would not have initially thought of.
Over 2,000 people liked a message stating that they first believed our wedding design to be a baby shower pregnancy design. This sparked a whole new collection that we’ll be launching soon that will hopefully reignite this viral video. We will use this comment thread as the theme for the next video by selecting the “reply with video” option.
Now we view TikTok as not only for customer acquisition but immediate product feedback before ever committing any real money to production. My team plans on releasing sketches and allowing the TikTok community during Live videos and polls to offer suggestions during design.
We are going to pre-launch big releases on TikTok months out to help drive buzz and get people excited. I’m entertaining the thought of doing pre-orders or developing basic landing pages with email signups for products we know might have a shot at doing well.
Video Content
Our approach is going to change slightly. While we still are going to focus on reaction based videos, we are going to start experimenting with different hooks.
We think that we should be leading the question in a particular direction so we receive better responses and reactions. Basically, it directs the conversation but in a natural way. For example, rather than asking for their immediate reaction and leaving everything up to them, we will ask more specifically, “is this birthday card too rude or not rude enough?” Then we have a series of interesting follow-up questions to probe funnier and funnier responses.
After that, we’ll edit so the entire interview is only 20 seconds or shorter of prime entertainment.
DO: Always link your e-commerce products to your videos. This absolutely boosts your views and gives you a better chance. We use Aftership to sync inventory and publish new products to the TikTok Shop. Make sure to optimize your keywords and titles for shoppers to find your listings, much like Amazon or Etsy.
Written by Nathaniel Treichler
