How to Drive Traffic to Your Shopify Store Using TikTok

Hey, what's up, guys? This blog is going to be eye opening because you're going to see how to drive traffic to your Shopify store using TikTok. We’re also going to show you a few examples of stores that are absolutely killing it. So stick around for that. 

Before we get started, I just want to say welcome to everyone new. My name is Christian Piñon, one of the co-founders here at BitBranding. 

We've been helping frustrated store owners since 2015 become impactful owners through tutorials, tactics and strategies. If you want to support our YouTube Channel, then hit that subscribe button and turn on notifications. It really helps us a lot. 

OK, with that out of the way, let's get started. 

First things first. You need to figure out who your ideal audience is. 

Typically what you hear is that older audiences are on Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Instagram also is maybe leaning towards an older demographic now, but it's important to know your audience because TikTok tends to have a younger demographic. 

That's not to say that your audience may not be there on TikTok, but you got to take that into consideration. And that's the first thing that you need to take into consideration when building something on that platform as far as a marketing strategy, social media strategy, you have to figure out who your ideal audience is. If you don't know that information, go back and do that information, go do that homework of figuring out who exactly is the person that you're talking to. How do they dress? What car do they drive? Do they have kids? Where do they live? What's their age demographic? That's also very important. What stage in their life are they there at. 

All those things are questions that you need to ask before you jump into any platform really. This is not just for TikTok. This is just more general advice when it comes to having a solid marketing or social media strategy. It's figuring out your ideal audience to make sure that you're just not wasting your time on that platform. 

So, again, you want to make sure that they actually fit that demographic. Like we said, TikTok has a younger demographic, maybe 30 and younger, 25 and younger, they are very active on the platform. And you also have to think about those people. Are those people going to be purchasing that product that you're trying to sell right through Shopify? If that's the demographic, then we need to move forward onto the next step.

Now, some of the businesses that we’re going to show you here towards the end of the blog, some have different demographics, but for the most part, it is a younger crowd. Stick around for the end of the blog because we’re going to show you at least three or four stores that are on TikTok that are killing it. They're doing a really, really good job. They know their demographic. They're doing all the things that we're going to be talking about in this blog. 

OK, now let's talk about the type of content. 

To us and our experience with TikTok, there's generally two types of content. There's the entertainment where there's a lot of people dancing and doing challenges and doing maybe funny things, and then there's the educational, more value driven content on TikTok. There's a lot of other things, but we would say those are the two main categories of content that you will see on TikTok. Now, there's people just repurposing a lot of different things and not creating original content, but those two things are going to actually propel you on the platform and it's going to be able to increase your followers, increase the amount of views, increase the amount of people going to your actual store. 

So those are the two main things that you have to think about, entertainment and then educational. Now, if you think about the entertainment aspect of things, we highly wouldn't recommend you starting with just entertainment, especially if you're a business and you want to get established in the platform. 

The first thing that you need to do is create that curiosity aspect of things while at the same time be educating your potential customers. So doing things like little tutorials or how this works. So one of the examples is a boutique and they do a great job of creating videos that have both the entertainment and the educational content. However, starting off from zero, focus maybe more on the educational side of things, more of the interest based providing value to them. 

So for a boutique or a store selling some kind of product that you can wear, show different ways on how to wear it. At that point, you're educating them on how to use that particular product. 

When it comes to entertainment, then our advice there would be to jump on trends, jump on trends early, early on, when you start seeing them. And the only way to jump on trends and to do it correctly is to be on the platform, to use the platform and to engage with people on the platform and like things so that the algorithm actually shows you what's popular. 

A majority of people, and I do this with the guys here at work, and my fiancée at home, I’ll show them a video and nine times out of ten, they've already seen that video. So the algorithm, when it comes to the very highly popular videos and highly popular trending challenges or videos or whatever, it tends to show it to the majority of people. So it's important to be on the platform AND to use the platform so that you know what's trending.

Something very important, again, with that, that you're starting off with the educational value driven content and then you can jump into doing some of the entertainment. Some of the businesses that we’re going to show you towards the end of this video have both. They have both and they're doing a really good job with both. Now that's not to say that you can't combine them also and want one piece of content. You can do an educational video that's also entertaining, it  may be a little bit more challenging, but it's absolutely possible to do the educational entertainment and do it together. 

So when you're coming up with the strategy on how to drive that traffic right to your Shopify, think about that, think about the products that you have, how you can educate your customers, and then from that education, you'll start using the platform more and then you start seeing some of the trends, some of the things that they're doing on the platform so that you can actually jump into the more entertainment side of things. We would highly recommend to do both not just stay into the value driven educational content, but do both and try to do it correctly by using the platform. You're going to know exactly where you're going to be doing. 

Now, before we jump to the examples that I'm going to show you, there's also a part of the puzzle that is missing here. And after you figure out your audience and your strategy and what exactly you're going to be posting, you need to have a strong call to action on every video. 

That could be a verbal call to action that could be written call to action, potentially both potentially three times, in the description of the video as well. You just need to make sure that you have a call to action on your videos where they know exactly where to get that particular scarf that you're showing them, how to tie or that watch that you're showing them how to style with different outfits, or maybe you're showing them how your product actually works. 

You need to make sure that you let them know how they can purchase that product or how they can find out more information about that product. So it's very important to have these strong call to actions in every video.

Now, beyond having them on the video, one of the only ways right now in TikTok to send them to your website or send them to a landing page is through having to link in the bio. 

A couple of things here. You can have just your store link in the bio, which we would recommend depending on the type of store, but something that you need to take into consideration is that not everyone who's going to land on your link in bio is going to be ready to purchase. So you may want to do something where they go to a landing page where you're giving away something for free. Now, this doesn't have to be necessarily a big product or the product that you sell that you're giving out for free. It could be some sort of training. It could be maybe a style guide. It could be a lot of different things. This is what we called a lead magnet. 

Typically in marketing terms, we call it lead magnet. It's something of value that you exchange for an email. So if that person is not ready to purchase your product or any of your products that you're selling, then at least you want to collect that email address. One of the easiest ways that we teach our clients on how to collect the email address is through that lead magnet. That lead magnet's going to allow you to collect that email address and then give them something of value. 

Now, it has to be something that your audience considers a high value item, that it's a no brainer, to give you that email address. So you also want to shy away from things like, and we’ve seen this a lot where they do 193 ways to drive traffic to your site. That could be one that we use, but that may be too much. If you think about it, if someone's going to look at 193 and see like oh that just seems like that would be impossible to go through. That's also something to take into consideration. Some people do maybe too much when it comes to what they're giving away for that email address. You want to get that email address and you want to get that information, but at the same time you don't want it to be something so mind boggling that they won't take action on whatever it is that you're trying to give them. But again, the trick and the idea here is that you get their email address so they can start going into your email campaign. 

So that's important to set up some sort of email campaign. There's different things out there that you can do this with. For our company and for our clients, we use Active Campaign. We've seen people use ConvertKit, you could potentially use MailChimp. So there's a lot of different companies and softwares out there that can handle the email drip campaign after you've collected email addresses. 

So when it comes to TikTok and that link in bio, consider going to a landing page where you're giving away something for free to collect the email address. Or also consider just going straight to your page. And again, this all goes back to step number one, which is your audience. You need to figure out who your audience is and who you're selling to so that when people actually land there, you know who that person is going to be that lands there and whether you want them to get that free a freebie so you get the email address and then you get them in that email drip campaign, or if you think they're going to be ready to buy, you could potentially do both with something like LinkTree, there's different softwares out there where you can do multiple links right. You click on the link in bio and it gives you several options. 

So you can have several options, shop now or get this free training or get this free PDF or whatever it may be. That way you can actually hit both audiences. That could be a strategy that you use for your business. But again, it goes back to the audience and it goes back to the strategy that you have in place for your business. 

Now, if you enjoyed these different ways to increase traffic on Shopify with TikTok, make sure that you check out the video that I did maybe last week or two weeks ago on general practices to increase traffic to your Shopify store here.

So last but not least, let’s look at a few examples of businesses that are killing it on TikTok and they're doing great things. 

First off we have a boutique that is called Pink Lily. They have 73,000 followers, 533,000 likes and they're just doing absolutely great. 

All of their content has that mixture of entertainment and educational. So you'll see things like this is how to style a midi skirt, how to tie up a button up, three ways to style pants and tank sets and then they also have new arrivals.

So they're combining that how to or the educational, and they also have done a few entertainment ones like When Someone Asks Me Why I Tan So Much. 

That video right there is going to be more of an entertainment style type video and has 7,000 views right there. So, yeah, all these videos have a pretty consistent view amount. Then you have your outliers like eight of our favorite outfits from our Cabo Collections which has 11,000 views.

So again, they're doing a really, really good job with their strategy and their content and what they're putting out. They have a really, really good call to action: Want 20% off? Text Pinklily to 76391.

That's just a quick way to get that email address. We talked about having that landing page. Well, they're not doing a landing page, but they're doing a way to get your phone number by texting them to get that 20% off initially. So, again, the lead magnet doesn't have to be something physical. It could be that 20% off that Pinklily's doing right here and then you can also see that link in the bio. It's just their website, clean, simple pinklily.com.

So check out Pinklily. They're doing really good stuff. Their @ is @shoppinklily. You can find them on TikTok. You can see some of the things that they're doing and how they're doing them.

Another one is this guy here who is pretty funny. You may have seen him before on TikTok. It's Unnecessary Inventions and we actually did not know that he was selling a lot of these things. We thought it was just for fun that he was making these things, but he's actually selling it. So he designs and builds unnecessary things. 

"So I invented a T-shirt with a flip out cup holder built right into the shirt. So the next time you're hungry, open up the fridge, maybe grab yourself some Noosa yogurt, toss it right in there. So you're playing video games. You're going to take a quick break, grab a quick bite of yogurt while it's right there and right back to gaming. Maybe you got some chores to do. You got your yogurt right there. Eat it and onto the next."

So the reason why we love it so much is because he's combining both entertainment and education. He's obviously showing you how the product works while at the same time, being funny and entertaining. So he has a lot of funny things in here. Obviously, people are loving his things. He has 3.1 million followers. So if you're on TikTok, you've been on TikTok for a while, you've probably seen this guy, this guy already. You may not follow him, but you definitely want to follow him. Then he has his call to action that is just going straight to his shop for you to shop some of the things that he's actually making here on the Unnecessary Inventions account. 

He's also hooked up with David Dobrek, that video has 4.5 million views:

"He always wanted a Hawaiian punch water fountain, so I built it for him."

So that's also a next step and that is something that we talked about on the last video that we told you to go check out. We talked about TikTok influencers. TikTok influencers are people who are going to be a really good synergistic partner because it's just so good, TikTok is so, so good for discoverability and people engaging with your content and viewing your videos. It's insane the amount of views and the growth that you can have on this platform compared to anything else. 

Think about Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, anything like this platform right now is super, super, super hot. So doing collaborations with other users is going to be awesome for you. User generated content. It's also something that you can put into your strategy, these duets type videos. That's also going to be important for, you know, part of your strategy. So there's a lot of different things that you can do here. And this video, we’re not going to break it down too much, but we’re just showing you the general strategy and the general layout of what you need to do because these stores are just absolutely killing it. 

Onto the last store we want to show you which is Air Surferz. 

We stumbled upon this account one day and thought it was weird and quirky, but at the same time people are buying them and they're doing a really good job. A lot of their content is very much just the educational type. There's really not much to it. They're just showing you how the product works. Almost every video here is just essentially just showing you how the product works.

Super simple. Strong call to action in the video, link in bio. Air Surferz for only $9.99 with free shipping, and he's just showing you how the product works.

Just a little piece of wood and you strap it to your finger so it doesn't fly off and then you just air surf outside of your window when you're in the passenger sea. So it's absolutely great and it's fun. Again, that call to action right there on the link in bio, has their website for you to go buy and purchase a product. They go directly to that particular product because that's the only thing that they're selling right now

Hopefully in the future they expand to other things, but, they're just doing a really good job of showing you the product. It caught our attention whenever we were watching one of these random videos. You'll see the majority of their videos have that link in bio. They tell you how much the product is and they're just showing you how the product works. They haven't even gotten into the entertainment part and they have 87,000 followers. So they could be doing a lot more videos, a lot more thought provoking videos, maybe more validation videos they could explore into different products. But for right now, they're just killing it with that one little surfboard that you put in your fingers and do it outside your window.

Those are some of the examples that we have for you today. Hopefully that will give you a little glimpse of some of the possibilities and some of the things that you can do on TikTok. There's also not just only e-commerce stores on TikTok. There's lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, coaches, etc. There's all kinds of people making a killing on TikTok and absolutely using these strategies, using the entertainment, using the educational aspect of things to to show value, to drive traffic to their websites and drive traffic to their courses. So definitely go into TikTok and check it out. It’s going to be very, very beneficial for you to jump into this because TikTok could potentially take over the e-commerce side of things when they figure out how to sell products on individual posts, just like Instagram is doing right now. When they figure that out, it's going to be a game changer.

Right now, they're partnering with Shopify to do the ads and the ad side of things. It's also very important. But doing this organic strategy where, just like Instagram right now, you post a picture of your product, you can tap on it, you can purchase, TikTok will eventually have something like that. So jump on TikTok right now, get familiar with the platform, start creating some content. It's going to be something very beneficial for you to start learning and start playing around with.

Thank you so much for checking out the blog.

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