TikTok Live Saved My Business... | Jared Mortensen

TikTok Live Saved My Business... | Jared Mortensen Speaker 1: I have a friend in China. I'm in China every couple of months. He has a couple different live stream studios where he's going live on Douyin, which is the Chinese TikTok, right? And I went there and watched some of his live streams and it was like, holy cow, he was doing $70,000 to $90,000 an hour USD. It was just absolutely crazy. And so I spent a week or two like setting up the studio. I finally went live and it just absolutely blew up from day one when we started going. Speaker 2: Can you kind of go through that process? You go live, somebody wants it, makes a sale. What happens? Where does it go? How does it get fulfilled? Our guest is the founder and CEO of Real Man Apparel Company. And after nearly 20 years in the aerospace operations and finance, he launched his business right out of his garage. Now this is back in 2021. So he sold his first million In 11 months and since then he's expanded to TikTok Live and Shopify and now he's surpassed over 6 million in annual sales. We really want to thank Sellerboard, Sophie Society, the Titan Network and Connect Cash. We appreciate everything you're doing and we couldn't do this podcast without you. And sit back, relax and welcome Jared. You know, I don't know how you can do that because like this is a hour long podcast. I've talked to somebody on the Marketing Misfits that they spend pretty much their whole day on it. And by the way, that lady, sells over $20 million a year now on TikTok. It's crazy. And so now with your story, here's another just crazy story. So I'd love to, first we'll dig into it, but How the hell do you do it? How do you constantly just go in and talk? Is there a formula to it? Speaker 1: Well, I mean, first is just to get started. And so a lot of people, when they're going live and doing the live streaming, they think, oh, I've got to, if I'm going to go live, I've got to have like all this content, like this whole, you know, 60 minute script, but you know, live streaming, it's like Groundhog's Day every 30 seconds, right? So you have anybody that has their talking points from like their Amazon listing, you can go live and you're just hitting on that. Cause you know, the average viewer is, you know, 20 to 30 seconds. Just on there and off. You think TikTok, just like the content, you know, a lot of those, you know, those TikToks are, you know, 10, 15 seconds. And so there's a lot of people that are just on pretty quick and off in some cases, like. Impulse buys in 30 seconds. Now you have other people that they'll sit there and watch for hours at a time. My longest live is five and a half hours straight. And I've had people that watched like for hours and they're like on every day. So it really just depends on the viewer. Speaker 2: We had this challenge about two years ago and that was for becoming an Amazon influencer. And we would go on Amazon Live and it was It was a real learning curve for me because I'm used to doing something like this where you're constantly asking questions and getting answers. But when you were on the live, I started noticing that, just like you said, it wasn't 30 seconds. It was a bit longer. But then it was, okay, here's the formula. Here's how I'm gonna do it. A matter of fact, there's a board down there, like just a whiteboard that Kelsey made up for me. And he was here just saying, follow these rules. And so I went through it and it was great because you could stay on, then you could just turn it around, start talking about the exact same things again, and it wasn't that painful. And once you got the formula, Yeah, it's easy to do. So is that what you're doing? Speaker 1: Yeah, so you really just start with those those talking points We'll do it typically at like a five to ten minute flash sale on a particular product And so we're gonna we're gonna focus just on that on that product. But hey, these are our talking points and And you're going through that. But you know, you'll have comments. It's the thing is a lot of people like, oh, this is like QVC. No, it's completely different. This is interactive, right? So a lot of the live stream is about engagement. How do you engage with those viewers, they have different questions and comments. And so we try to, you know, you try to riff off that. So you got to be comfortable with your talking points. And so then you can try to integrate those comments, not allow the comments to like just drive you around, but how do you just build those in and put those into your into your spill or okay, that okay, this is I've got these 10 bullet points and this comment comes in and it's really number eight. And so I'm just going to wait a little bit other times you just change change the order. And so as you get more comfortable just talking about your product, and this is where like I recommend like founders like try this out because nobody knows and Designers, nobody knows a product better than they do, right? So you can jump on a live and go through it and just go through your bullet points. You just have to overcome the fear of being in front of the camera, but it can be weird because the talking back to you is just the comments, right? So you're having this conversation with your viewers, but it's not like it's necessarily face-to-face where you can actually see facial expressions. The closest you get is emojis, right? Which you're trying to interpret and slaying and those different different things. But yeah, so you try to just use those those comments to try and engage with with people and it's just helped us so much as far as being able to on TikTok because we can really directly connect with our community and with our with our customers and we can hear the feedback that they have and the questions and And those comments and so like it is allowed us to be a lot more, a lot closer to our community than we could through Amazon where you have this barrier and you can answer customer service questions and things like that. But it's just we literally, we've had viewer, I have a single guy that's a moderator that he is so engaged in the podcast. He will drive on his long weekends from Minneapolis to Wichita, Kansas and hang out in the studio so he can moderate, you know, live in the studio and he just does that on his On his holidays, he's that invested. And so that's the type of connection that we've been able to make with our community through TikTok. So it's really- Yeah, I was gonna ask. Speaker 2: You know, how do you handle the comments? Like, do you have somebody else responding to the comments while you're doing it? Or do you try to just verbally, you know, respond to the comments? What do you do? Speaker 1: Yeah, well, with those, you know, those comments, you can, it's really easy to kind of get pulled around with the comments and let the comments drive you. But then you can end up just focusing on one person, and you might have 1000 watching, right? And, and they just pull you off in this, this down this rabbit hole. And so, so you want to use those comments to actually help build the message and talk about the product. And so you want to use those comments versus let them direct you. But we do have moderators. So there's times we have 20 or 30 moderators on the podcast at a time or on the live at a time. And to be a moderator, you have to be a customer and somebody that's trusted, somebody that's on the live frequently and then we just get to know. It's crazy how you get to know Bubba624, right? And that's how you refer to everybody, just by their handles. But yeah, Bubba's always on there preaching about the product. And so sometimes we'll put it out there. Hey, if you want to be a moderator, hit us up in the DMs and then we'll set you up as a moderator. But you have to be trusted. You're not using any vulgarities or other types of things. And you're really good support and a customer. And of course, and one of those guys, some of the moderators, you know, then we'll actually start, you know, we'll send them free product and coupons and different things like that. But they're just really, they're missionaries for the brand. So like with TikTok, you have mercenaries and you have missionaries. And so our moderators, those are some of our missionaries. They're out there preaching about the brand and they just love it. They're literally just come hang out on the lives for hours at a time. Speaker 2: So before we go any further, what type of product do you have? Speaker 1: Yeah, so we have weird men's underwear, okay? So, you know, I was aerospace for 20 years. I worked at a pet products company for four years and then when we were getting ready to exit there, I told my wife, hey, I think we should start an underwear business. She's like, what in the world are you talking about? And so men's clothing and men's underwear in particular is not very size inclusive, right? It's pretty much like Like all men are like Kendall's like design like they don't have any any equipment down down below and You know women women are different shapes and sizes. They have different bra sizes cup sizes men are different sizes But they just are you know, the designs for men are just very very generic And so a lot of guys wonder like why am I sweating so much? well, the reason guys sweat so much is because they're they're their equipment's compressed and And there's two ways your body can cool down. Either you can move up and down or you can sweat. And so guys are like, I need vans, I need this, I need that. No, you just need underwear that actually is designed to fit your body. And so that's where we developed ABC pouch classification for men's underwear. So men can sit more naturally and then their body can actually regulate temperature. So it provides support. So people confuse support with compression. And so most guys are stuck in an abusive relationship with underwear. They think, oh, my underwear is supporting. No, it's smashing you, right? And so we need to help do a comfort intervention with guys to get them out of this oppressive and abusive underwear, get them into something that fits their body more naturally. So they get separation and support, but they are not getting smashed. So their body can actually just regulate temperature. And so that's where we developed our ABCD classification for men. The average size is about a B size, and then you have C and D on the larger side, and then A on the smaller side. So we have nine waist sizes, four pouch sizes. We have 36 sizes. So that's an issue managing that inventory, but it's something that guys need in order to fit their unique body shape and style. So a lot of guys just don't really realize how uncomfortable they are until they have a product that actually fits their body. We developed this and so this, again, TikTok really helps us talk about this fit and this feel, because that's, you know, most dudes don't even know their waist size, let alone a pouch size that I just made up, right? So having the TikTok Lives really helps us be able to talk through that and give guys confidence to, hey, this is what you should probably start with to order, so. Speaker 2: I'm just wondering, if you go through your TikTok listeners, Did you have any guys that sound like they were from Doge, like big balls? Was he ever listening? Speaker 1: Well, we have a lot of people that would jump on and say, I'm Z size, you know, and so the Z size guys are like, oh, that's a tumor or a cyst. You should talk to your doctor, right? So that's where, you know, you have those comments and you try to play with them and play off of them because we want to drive engagement. So there's a lot of people that will come to our lives just for the comments and for our mannequins. So like, you know, we've got our mannequins. So this is Ricky. Everybody gets named. All the mannequins have names or their personality. We can't show wearing the product because we don't want to get banned or flagged or anything like that. All of our mannequins have names here. They all wear prosthetics and so yeah, we have a lot of people that will come in and comment about their different size and we try to play with it, right? We're not like going to block those, oh, that's stupid. It's just run with the Z size, right? And so we have actually a group chat for some of our moderators and it's just called Z size. Speaker 2: You know, it's interesting because like Kevin and I will do a webinar once in a while and You think everything's going great, there's engagement, people are loving what you're saying, and then you'll get the troll. And the troll starts up, sparks something within other people. And they're like, it'll all of a sudden be one person, then two or three people. It doesn't usually explode, but it'll be, you know, two or three other people. And they're going back and forth. And that's the hardest thing. So we want to get them out of there. We want to get these idiots off. They're just causing a disturbance. And I remember during the coronavirus, that would happen here too. We'd have these idiots come on. And so Kelsey would be trying to get rid of them. But the second you get rid of them, they come back. Like, do you have problems like that with TikTok? We do. Speaker 1: I mean, we have some people that will come in and most in like 99% of the time, we're going to try to work with the troll, right? And not we're trying to convert them necessarily, but the TikToks algorithm loves comments, loves comments, loves comments, loves shares. Engagement, right? And so we wanna use those to the extent that we can. So if we have a troll, the cool thing is about our community, we'll have trolls jump in and say stuff. And then we're gonna have 20, 30 people like responding to them. Oh no, these are great. And so it's not necessarily just me responding, but when you have just all these users responding, it can actually help, right? By having some of those negative comments. Now, if you have somebody just spam in the comments, which I had this one dude that was just like, spamming my address, like in the comments, like, and so it just it was ruining the experience for everybody. And so we block them, right? Now that time I didn't have a mod on and I was doing it myself and that was kind of difficult. And so a lot of times when I was live streaming, when I was the most active live streaming, I was doing it myself. So there was times where, yeah, I'm trying to block the guy and then they drop me on another account and I'm blocking that account and I'm blocking that account. Now we have auto filters for words. And so if somebody comments certain words, it's automatically, it just doesn't even show up. It shows up on their screen, but it doesn't show up on the, On the screen for anybody else or for the host. So sometimes people say, hey, you're ignoring my comment. Well, your comment probably has humble Gary. It's getting filtered out. That's why I'm not seeing it. So yeah, we do have that. But you have the trolls that you have to kick them out sometimes. Speaker 2: So let's get back to why the TikTok Live platform? Why did you go to TikTok compared to other platforms that you could go live? Speaker 1: So, you know, I, you know, we were on, we've been, we were selling on Amazon for about, we're going up on two years, right? I mean, it started in 2021 and 2023, I think we started posting like September of 2023. So it was really early days for shop, for TikTok shop in the US. Now, I have a friend in China. I'm in China every couple of months and so I was over there and he has a couple different live stream studios where he's going live on Douyin. Which is the Chinese TikTok, right? And I went there and watched some of his live streams and it was like, holy cow. He was doing $70,000 to $90,000 an hour. USD, not RMB, like USD per hour is women's apparel, right? And so it was just absolutely crazy. Very professional. I mean, he's got multiple studios and my mind was just absolutely blown. Today we're going to look at how the sales that they were doing, the level of engagement and what it was like in China. I think the first time I went to a studio was like early 2023, but I'd gone a couple times. Then it was like, you know, in September, October, we started posting on TikTok. We were selling it a little bit, but not, it was all branded posts, no affiliates. And then we got strapped for cash. I mean, I brought a lot of inventory in for Q4 and expecting a lot of growth, which it was there. And then I had a new PO person and she cut double POs, a couple of different POs. And so I had some double inventory. And so it's like, holy cow, we were really strapped for cash and Amazon slow pays, right, in the fourth quarter because of potential returns and things like that. And so it got to where I didn't know if I was gonna be able to make my mortgage. I was worried about making my mortgage for the first time in my life. In November, October, December. And so I was super, super worried. And so then I was like, I was literally praying. I'm like, God, what do I need to do to be able to like deal with this cash thing? And just pray and pray. And the answer came back really distinctly. God's like, you need to live stream on TikTok. And I'm like, no, that sucks. Unknown Speaker: I don't want to do that. Speaker 1: I've never done anything like that before. I'm not comfortable doing that. And that kept coming back strongly and strongly. Hey, you need to live stream on TikTok. And so I spent a week or two like setting up the studio and I was like mentally making excuses not to go live. Oh, I'm gonna fix this. I'm gonna fix that like and and then I finally finally went live and it just absolutely blew up from from day one when we started going. Live now, there wasn't a lot of people going live at the time on shop. And and so it was it was it was crazy because we didn't we barely had enough followers, you know to get everything set up and going and as soon as we went live it just it just took off and a TikTok at that time was just paying like quickly. There was all these incentives and and so we went from I mean within within a week. It was always a week before Black Friday when we first went live. And it just absolutely took off. So we were hitting that 200 order cap with a new account on TikTok. They used to have a 200 order cap in a day. And we were hitting that some days in 15, 20 minutes. And so then, okay, we're done selling for the day. So it's like, I guess we won't do it. So it was about $7,000 that we're hitting sales in 15, 20, 30 minutes. And so it was, It was amazing. So just quickly, we were able to get the cash that we needed to get through that period. And then, yeah, we just kept running with it. Speaker 2: So one of the things that when I started to do the podcasting, the hardest part was the learning curve when it came to the equipment, how to set it up. From where we are now, where we were five years ago, completely different. And we wasted thousands and thousands of dollars. Was there a learning curve? Like what do you need to set up your live studio? Want more unfiltered tips from top eCommerce experts? Well, hit subscribe and you'll never miss a Lunch With Norm episode. Speaker 1: So when I first started, probably for the first five months I was live streaming on TikTok, all I was using was my iPhone. I had my iPhone and I had a ring light. That's what I was using. Then I set up my laptop so I could see a dashboard that showed my metrics, the real-time numbers. I was running with just this laptop sitting here and then my iPhone with the bad camera so I could see the comments. I was literally doing moderation and doing comments. On my phone, on the app, and that's all I was doing. So yeah, some people like, oh, I need to have this $30,000 studio with these professional lights and all this equipment. And that's the beauty of TikTok is it's just tends to be a little more raw. Now you gotta have good sound, right? So that's absolutely vital. And so, but you can get decent sound as long as you're facing your phone and you're pretty close to it, you can get decent sound with an iPhone. But if you guys are just starting out, you can get, you know, just a USB lapel mic that can give you what you need. But people will drop, they'll drop just for your sound actually over your video, your video quality on TikTok. But if it's lagging, you gotta have a good internet connection and that sort of thing. But so that's just kind of, standard, but you don't have to have a lot of equipment to get going on TikTok. Speaker 2: So I guess, yeah, you'd probably just need a lapel mic. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: That would probably be the easiest. Not so much for me. I'd have to attach it to my ears or something. But like right now, like we use this mic here and it's completely different. Like we went through all sorts of different mics and that was probably one of the most expensive things. But I guess that wouldn't work if you're doing a live studio, unless it was a boom. But the lapel mic would probably be the best. And then as for a camera, or do you use a teleprompter? Speaker 1: I've never used a teleprompter. We use whiteboards, where we'll talk bullet points for my Hosts, I don't do much of the live streaming anymore. I have two and a half full-time hosts. Actually, I just picked up a fourth. So we have two full-time and then two part-time hosts that are running. And so it's just a whiteboard. I've never used a teleprompter. But I do have a little better, I have a better device now that's an integrated camera. It has a camera, 4K camera, mic, screen. It's kind of like a tablet with an integrated 4K mic. But it's coming out of China, so they're not even available in the U.S. You can't even buy them here, so I am from an agency that buys them from a place in China, so called a Kodoti device, but you can't even buy them in the U.S., so. Speaker 2: And what does that do? Speaker 1: It's an integrated live streaming device, and so it's like a 12-inch TV. It's a tablet, but it's got integrated 4K camera. It's got some software that's running, so it's kind of like an OBS. So it's got an OBS integrated into it, but it's their version of like an OBS or kind of a Stream Deck. Type deal. And so, but you've got, it's got integrated camera. It's got a integrated mic and it's got an amazing mic. And so we don't, we don't use a boom mic or anything like that. So even if I'm turning around, changing direction, it picks up really, really well. So as you walk around the studio, we pick up mannequins and move around. You can still hear really, really well. So we're not running a lapel mic. You can, you can connect a boom mic into the device, but we, we haven't done that. So. Speaker 2: Is there anything special you have to do to get set up for live? Speaker 1: Not from a brand. I mean, you have to have followers to be set up as an affiliate to go live for shop. I mean, you have to have your affiliate lives to, or your affiliate, sorry, your followers, 5,000 followers to be able to, and have an affiliate account. If you're a non-brand, right? If you're a brand, then you can go live with, I do recommend that you go, you know, get up to, it's easy. It's pretty easy to get the followers. If you could just do, you can do a campaign like on TikTok for followers. And so you're actually almost like paying, like the objective is to get followers versus like a sale. And so you can, you can get followers pretty quick on TikTok. They needed followers for a, for a brand or an affiliate in order to, to, to be able to go live. Speaker 2: I guess there's been a bit of a learning curve. Because your whole business plan has shifted from probably your product opportunity, which was really cool, but were you planning on going retail or Amazon like FBA, and then you shifted over to TikTok, or is there a combination of everything right now? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's everything. So I mean, we're we are right now about probably 60-65% Amazon. And so Amazon is still the dominant piece of that. And then TikTok and Shopify are going back and forth. Our goal by the end of the year is actually to have our Shopify to be equal to our Amazon. It'd be great if TikTok is there. We're launching our first TikTok specific products in the next six weeks. And so products are designed specifically for TikTok type price points. So the sweet spot for TikTok is like $30 or under $20 to $30, depending on what the product is as far as volume. And so for our category, that's kind of where we're at. And so a lot of our products are more on the higher end from what you'd see a lot of times on TikTok. And so we've designed some products that are more targeted at TikTok. And so we just ordered in larger volume so then I can get the price down, expecting that, hey, we're going to really blow these up on TikTok. And so we're trying to design our sets. So some of it has to do with pack sizes and then just the product style and things like that for Amazon versus TikTok. Versus Shopify. Speaker 2: So specifically with TikTok Live, can you kind of go through that process? You're on there, you go live, somebody wants it, makes a sale. What happens? Where does it go? How does it get fulfilled? Speaker 1: So for all of ours, we take all of our orders and they come in via TikTok and we have that like link to Shopify. So we have everything goes to Shopify. Shopify is kind of our inventory management system, but then it routes. And so it'll come into Shopify. And we have inventory, most of our inventory is at Amazon. So it's shipping FBA or MCF for TikTok. And so our order will come to Shopify and then it will, depending on where it's at, if we have inventory at Amazon, it will send the order to Amazon to ship MCF. If it doesn't have an Amazon, then we have a warehouse here in Wichita, Kansas, like right outside my house. And so it'll ship here. And then we also use Portless in China for, so like if we're out of stock on something, we can get this inventory right to Portless in Shenzhen. And so we'll have stuff that we'll ship out of Shenzhen if we don't have it in stock in those other two. So Shopify is making that kind of routing, doing, we're kind of running through Shopify and it's, we've got routing rules set up there that we'll ship based off of priority and how do we get it to them the fastest. So that's how that works. And so then that tracking is passed from like Amazon's passed back to Shopify and then back to TikTok. So everything's integrated. So it's all automated with different connectors that have all that set up. So we don't have any manual touching of any of the orders. Yeah, so it's it's worked pretty well. So that's and that for us was really important to have all that set up so it could be pretty pretty automated. Now, we have a pretty strong development team on our side. And so there were some things where we had to do some custom development back when we first first started, but that we built ourselves, but right now it's a lot of the stuff is matured. So it's, you know, there's a lot more options available to be able to build those integrations between the different systems. Speaker 2: Very good. Okay, we are at the bottom of the hour and if you're new to this podcast, we do something really special at the top of the hour and that's when we give away a prize and that's usually supplied by the guest and today it has been and this is a cool one. What is the prize today? Speaker 1: So we're gonna give away multiple sets of our product, right? And so if you win, you'll be able to decide, okay, we've got boxer briefs, we've got briefs, we've got a lot of different products. And so we'll give away, I mean, we could do up to five sets. So we wanna do five sets. If you don't want that many, you could do fewer. If you want some boxer briefs, we've got three inch, six inch, nine inch boxer briefs with a fly, without a fly. And so you can just, we've got a running tight compression pant. They were designed for people up in the North. We thought, hey, people are going to be cold. And so they'll wear this running tight. We found that the biggest sales are in Florida because anybody that, when it drops below 60, they think they're freezing to death. And so we sell it on there. And so we've got a whole range of products that you can try out as part of the giveaway. Speaker 2: Okay, that's fantastic. So if you want to enter, it's hashtag wheelofkelsey. If you tag two people, you'll get a second entry. And because we'll be doing this next week, we'll also be putting it into our newsletter. So that's the third way of joining the Wheel of Kelsey. So hashtag wheelofkelsey, tag two people, or Monday, you can enter in the newsletter. And that's at lwn.news. Now, if you are listening right now and if you have any questions about TikTok Live, just make sure you put them in there. We're here for another half hour. So Kels, let's go over to a sponsor and then we'll be right back. Did you know Amazon profit is more than revenue minus ads? Seller board calculates your true profitability, factoring in every fee, return, shipping cost, and even cost of goods using FIFO logic. That's first in, first out logic. Plus, they automate your PPC, forecast inventory and avoid stockouts, reclaim money with Amazon reimbursements, set FBM shipping by period and track Walmart profits with the same dashboard. And you don't even have to have an Amazon account. You can try it for free for two months. Sellerboard. Know your numbers, scale your business. Is there a secret? Is there something that our listeners can take and run with that a lot of people don't know about with TikTok Live? Is there some secret sauce? Speaker 1: Well, one is to start, but the two is understanding that you're selling to an algorithm and you're selling to a person, right? And so when you're on, and the algorithm for live is different. Than the algorithm for posts. And so the things that you do on posts, like for posts, you want to get likes, right? So liking a post is a form of engagement. Likes on lives are pretty meaningless because you can sit there and spam like, right? And so, so they're, they, from an algorithmic standpoint, they really don't mean much, right? So the things that really matter on a live are. Comments, shares, watch time, GMV. TikTok is a GMV, that's sales, right? So those are the things that matter. And so when I first started doing the live stream, I had no idea what I was doing. So I would get on the live and I'm like, hey, let's give a few minutes for people to join. And so I'm just like chit-chatting. Like the first part of the live is like ultra, ultra important, right? And so, because the algorithm is scoring you. So the second you go live, it's scoring your level of engagement. And so as soon as you go live, we usually, we'll do a giveaway or we're going to do something that's going to be able to drive engagement. And so like, for example, we've done some giveaways where it's like, Hey, whoever can come up with the best name for our mannequins, we're going to, we'll do, we'll give you a free set. And so we'll do this, do this stuff. Cause that's going to drive comments. So we're getting people to comment, comment, comment, and drive engagement. And there's a lot of times we'll start a live. We're not trying to sell at all. We're trying to sell to the algorithm. Now, we'll have a flash sale going and we'll have a flash sale pinned with a discount, usually on the set that we have on the mannequin so people can see it and they'll see that, hey, I can get a deal on this, but we're not going to mention it other than, hey, that set that's pinned, that's the set that you're going to get in the giveaway. But we're trying to do things to drive engagement because the TikTok algorithm, it's going to look at, okay, what's your engagement like after 30 seconds and a minute? And they're going to do these different pushes. And so depending on how you score, Like, comment, share, GMB and watch time. It's going to give you another push, right? So it's going to give you a viewer push. So you'll see these pushes 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. So you'll see these different pushes that occurred depending on your level of engagement or if you're not driving engagement, then you'll see these drop-offs. It's more pronounced as you get more and more viewers, right? So as you get more traffic and the algorithms say, hey, this is really interesting, engaging content, like we're going to push it to more people. So now if you only have one or two people, it's harder to tell. But if you have 100, 200, 300, 500, And so we tend to like almost peak our viewers at about the 15-minute mark and then we're really trying to hold that. There's times where we'll get it back above that or we can get higher later if we have a spike in sales or something like that. So we might do some other crazy flash sale to try to drive a spike spike layer but later but a lot of times we're getting to kind of this at the 15-minute mark that's probably setting our ceiling as far as we're going to be. And so we're trying to get that as high as we can in that first 15 minutes. And then you're trying to hold those viewers as you go through the live. And we typically are, we always wanna run more than an hour. If you're running less than an hour, the algorithm says, hey, you're not really serious. We're not gonna consistently push traffic to you. Then there's times where you might have a technical issue or something like that, or, you know, something happens, your internet, you lose your app, you know, so that you're not always gonna hit an hour. But if you, you want to try to go at least an hour if like consistently and so but we were usually running between an hour to two hours for us and then we'll go off for a while. So I have my guys they'll go live. For usually two hours, an hour to two hours, and they'll create content for an hour, two hours, because you got to rest your voice, you know, you know, podcasting, like you can get talking and you can just tear your voice up and you know, your brain turns to mush. And so we'll go live for a while, and then we'll create content on TikTok. And then we're cross posting on multiple platforms as well at TikTok content, and then we'll go live. And so kind of give some rest. Speaker 2: Is the platform something you should consider after you've become familiar with Amazon or getting sales or already getting sales on Shopify? Is it an afterthought, like this is the next thing so we can jumpstart our sales or can you just go into it right away? Speaker 1: You can go into it right away. Some of it depends on your product. Some of it depends on your comfort level though as well, right? So there's some people that are a lot more, it's just more natural for them. They can talk about their product. There's a lot of things that are demonstratable that they tend to do well on TikTok, but you have, golly, I mean, they're selling supplements and they've done just amazing there. Of course, they're giving away Cybertrucks and stuff like that for their affiliates, but it helps that you can have something where you can actually talk about it, because you've got to drive engagement. But it's interesting on TikTok what people will engage with as well, right? I mean, I've seen people in a food truck sitting there chopping cucumbers, and you have like 3,000 people sitting there watching this dude chop cucumbers. You do need to test some things and kind of figure out what's gonna do well. There's one guy that sells a ton of mattress toppers and he's sitting in his dirty, dingy garage. It looks kind of ghetto, right? But he's got tons of viewers. Because it's interesting, people stop and look at it and watch. And he sells a lot of toppers sitting in his garage with the dirty garage door and the handwritten signs and everything. So there's some people that can jump in and just do really well on TikTok. And the thing is, we saw this Especially when we first started on TikTok, a lot of people were not comfortable buying on TikTok. And so we were seeing a 50 to 80% uplift in our search traffic on Amazon when we go live on TikTok. So we saw this massive, and it's not as pronounced now, but when we first started, it was this massive halo effect onto Amazon. So much so that we were able to go and increase our price by 15% on Amazon. So we would go do that. When I go live, I'm like, if you're gonna buy from me on Amazon, I'm gonna go raise my price. So when I would go live, I would go raise my price on Amazon 15, 20% because if that traffic's gonna go there, I'm gonna make my money on Amazon. But we were getting so much halo effect over onto Amazon that we ended up just raising the price and then we're able to hold. That price and so we just just kept it there. And so so we've seen a lot go over to Amazon and then we were seeing a lot of people just searching for us like a lot of Brandon search on Google when we go live on TikTok. And so that's why we initially set up our Shopify is to just pick up that branded search that we were getting off from Google when people were seeing us on TikTok and then they're trying to find us on Google. So we weren't doing any ads. We didn't run into any meta. We set up the website just so we could pick up that organic branded search on Google. Speaker 2: The halo effect is real. I've heard so many people talk about it and a lot of people don't believe it. But it is real and people might not trust buying on TikTok. So they go over to Amazon. You did the right thing. You raised your price 15 to 20%. So why are you going to lose 15 or 20% on a sale if you're going over to Amazon, right? We all want to make money. So that was a, that was pretty cool. There's a lot of me too type of products out there and I've seen it. I've seen people try to sell it and One company might do their marketing slightly different. They sell out while everybody else is eating dust. And I'll give you an example, like Me Too doesn't mean exactly mean too, but I have a bunch of non-alcoholic spirits that I work with. And there's people out there that kill it. Like they're selling hundreds of thousands of dollar a month in that niche. And then there's some that are selling nothing like under $1,000. So same thing. Okay. Very similar. But they're converting. Is there a secret to converting on TikTok Live? Speaker 1: I mean, authenticity on TikTok is really, really important. So I think for us, when we first launched, the fact that I, as the founder and designer was the one selling it, and I'm in the US and or Western, and that there was a level of engagement that we were able to build from a brand with our customers, that other like me too, or other foreign like sellers Can't necessarily, can't do. And so there was a lot of credibility and a lot of authenticity associated with the brand when it's like literally the designer that's selling it. You know, maybe it's, okay, I came up with this product. And so with TikTok, just authenticity is really important. That's why the UGC, when other affiliates are posting and really talking about this and really good UGC, not just like what I call the mercenary. I mean, the mercenaries sell stuff and they'll do onesies, twosies And so some stuff, but people that really like our best affiliates on TikTok are people that are customers. And in some cases, I mean, they're customers and they're not set up as an affiliate. Like they don't have a following, but they, they believe in the product so much that, that they, we help them get set up. I give them the followers and I help them get their affiliate account set up. And so they can actually go out and share, you know, for for the brand. And so. I think building that brand and that connection is really important, but just being really, really authentic. And so being able to connect effectively with a customer. And so, yeah, maybe it is, and I can't speak to some of these other products necessarily where they're very similar to something else because ours is so weird and different. Like that's part of what differentiates us. Speaker 2: Yeah, but your product has competitors out there and they're big competitors. If they happen to have a live or if they're competing against you, that was an Incredible 11 months to get to a million and then to get to 6 million in annual sales, you're converting. So there has to be something that's happening to people that say, and your product is expensive. We're not talking like Fruit of the Loom 399 sets of underwear. So you've got a high quality, more expensive, competitive, because these types of underwear for men now are coming out. And you have to compete. So there's gotta be something in there that makes you stand out or can convert over your competition. Speaker 1: Yeah, so for us, you know, if we can get that first person, that first person to come in, 30 to 40% of our orders every day are return customers, right? So our return customer rate is extremely high. We haven't been able to figure out how to do a subscription type model yet, but I mean, we're trying to figure that out because our return customer rate is so high. So, so hi, we know we could get it to work. Just kind of figuring out how it how that that works. And so that helps us a ton once somebody actually. something, once a guy finds something that fits for them, they'll keep coming back. A lot of guys, they're loyal and lazy. And so they will just, once they find something that's good, they'll just buy it for like the rest of their lives, right? And so now that's the problem that we have with like getting a lot of guys to actually try the product because they're just gonna always, oh, I've worn Hanes my whole life, right? And they're great. If somebody buys a set, they're not sure their size, we say, hey, just start with the B size pouch. They try it and if it doesn't fit, just DM us or send us an email. We'll send you another set for free. Where I've sent like four or five sets to a guy to try to help him find the right material for their body, the right fabric, or sorry, the right fabric, the right inseam, you know, the right style and the right waist pouch size. And so like I had this one guy from Chicago, I literally sent him five different sets trying to get him the right thing. And then like a week later, he spent like $1,500, you know, with this, right. And so that's an investment that we make on our side to make, to help get guys into the brand. And then once they're comfortable, they're just gonna keep coming back. Now we have people take advantage of us. We have people steal from us. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's gonna happen. Speaker 1: We get that, right? But we want to err on the side of being generous and loyal to our customers, right? So if somebody's gonna trust enough to buy from us, we're gonna work with them and try to help them find something to a fault, right? And so even though, and my customer service, it's hard, because they see all the different people that are stealing from us. And so that can be hard at times, but like, hey, we always want to err on the side of like making sure we're taking care of our customer. If somebody ever has a quality issue, like we're going to send them a full set, a three-pack in replacement for that one. Things happen, but I've got pictures of things where somebody's like, oh, I put this on the washer and it just fell apart. And they send me the pictures of it. And I'm like, yeah, those are teeth marks, right? I could see your dog grab those and pull them out. Unless your washer has teeth. You know that that didn't happen to washer. I know I know where material fails. I know how you know there's times where stitching fails and things like that tension things happen. And so we want to go above and beyond with to replace. Products if there's any type of issue because we want to support our customer because we support them and because it's a long-term game, right? So they saw we support them and they're going to keep coming back and then they're going to tell other people right whether that's on TikTok, whether that's you know, their friends. Oh, they're buying. We have so many customers that are buying for their friends, you know. A lot of people, they joke about like getting underwear for Father's Day or like as a gift and they're like, oh, that's like, it's like socks or something like that. But in our case with our product, it's like, holy cow, like this is something that people are committed to and it's a lot, they love to gift it so much. So our biggest sales month each year is January. January is our biggest sales month, right? And the only thing that we can really attribute it to is people are getting our product for Christmas. For the holidays, and then they're coming back and just replacing their sets in January. So it's really pretty crazy where we see, we're not peaking in November, December, we're peaking in January. Speaker 2: You've got the person that loves the product and then they have gift cards. Speaker 1: Yeah. And the gift cards as well. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know if this is something that I'm big into events and event marketing. And I'm just wondering if you've done this and if you have great, tell me to shut up. But I think this might be a new technique. I don't know, but I do a lot with Google Business Profile. And one of the things to get indexed and it's weighted extremely high. My job is to go into your Google business profile, create an event. The event could be TikTok Live. Google blasts it out there. You've got incredibly high indexing for that because it's a dated event. And LinkedIn does the exact same thing. And the other social platforms do as well. But the main ones like Google, if you blast that out, Before your TikTok Live, and same thing on LinkedIn, we were just talking to Josh Lee yesterday on Marketing Misfits, and he was talking to us about, if you put a live event, all of your connections get notified. So it's instant, like they automatically get notified. So now you get all of this extra exposure for each event. So every time we do a podcast, we could do a live event or we do an event, we do an event, we do an event. So that's something that you can do. And also, I'm not sure if you can do this, but when you start to see the buying habits happening in different areas, let's say it's Chicago, a suburb of Chicago or suburb of Fort Lauderdale, 350 people or less, You can start pumping out press releases out to Chicago, the area, and then when people say, oh, wow, I saw that. I'm going to look for the name of your brand. They get it. It's first place. You're going to have number one ranking. Overnight in areas that you're doing prior to your live. I don't know if that makes sense But I think there's an opportunity there for people who have never done that and again, I'm not a TikTok live person I know marketing and I I know the power of Google and I know the power of LinkedIn so Is that being done, do you know? Speaker 1: I have not heard about doing that off of LinkedIn or Google, driving that to TikTok. And so that's something we need to take a look at. We do that on TikTok, right? So your followers get notified and then we'll do preview posts on TikTok with the live event, right? So you can schedule the live event on TikTok. And so you do these preview posts and then people can actually like sign up for it. So we'll do that, especially with product launches, when we're doing a new product launch. We'll start doing preview posts on TikTok days ahead. And so people can actually get, they'll sign up for it. And so then if they're on the platform, or if they've got push notifications set up on TikTok, they'll get notified when we are going live. But we need to look at that on Google, because we're not doing that on Google. And we're trying to do as much as we can to drive up That profile and the SERPs. Speaker 2: My invoice will come after. Speaker 1: We chatted a little bit when I hunted you down about the press releases and some of the other stuff. So those are some things that I really looking to get your help with. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no problem at all. So let's talk about Shopify versus TikTok. So your traditional DTC, like how is that different from selling on TikTok Live? Speaker 1: So right now, the biggest push for us on the DTC, one is to pick up that branded traffic coming off Google, right? So we've done a lot of work from an SEO standpoint to, so there's a lot of different things we've done To describe organic SEO, so we're not doing any paid Google or YouTube, right? So at work, you know, so because we're getting so much branded search there. You know, that's where we started. Now, we've done a lot of work to pick up long-tail keywords on Google. So again, it's all organic. And now, we are driving with any of our TikTok posts, we are cross-posting to Meta, so Facebook and Instagram on our branded account with that and YouTube Shorts. And so we'll just take that TikTok content and then we're running it on there. And then on Meta, When we see a post that is doing really well from an organic standpoint, it crosses a hundred like category, then we'll go put add money behind it and then drive that to our, I mean, all those posts, when we're putting on meta, they're all linking back to our Shopify site, to rmac.store. But we are putting money behind the stuff where we're seeing organic performance, good organic performance. We're not creating a lot. We've done some like higher, higher production quality ads for videos for meta. They've performed okay. The more of the UGC raw stuff, TikTok style stuff that we've done has performed a lot better from an ad standpoint, but we are doing, we'll do statics. I mean, I've used the icon as a AI based, ad generation tool that will create some different stuff. So we're doing static stuff off of that and testing those, but they're still not performing nearly what like the TikTok related posts are doing. So we're working to scale. We scale that ad traffic right now coming off meta to our Shopify site. And then of course, once we get their emails and we're doing a lot of SMS and email retargeting with everybody that comes on there. So it comes onto the site. We are scraping IPs too and be able to remarket to people as they come visit the site. Speaker 2: What are some mistakes that people are doing when they're trying to launch your TikTok Live account? Speaker 1: They're not going long enough. They give up too easy. I mean, they spend too much time trying to get things set up, make it like over complicated as far as the set. So they spend too much money. They spend too much time trying to make it perfect. They're making the perfect enemy of the good versus like just starting and then iterating, right? So you want to start, test. And make sure when you are testing that you're only changing one thing at a time. Sometimes people are changing like camera angles or changing depth of shot. They're changing their background and they're changing too many variables to really understand what is really affecting things. So you need to go live longer and only change one thing at a time. But it's amazing. There's sometimes that you can just change a camera angle like five degrees and it has significant material impact on your sales. You change the depth of two feet on a shot. It has a material impact on your shop or on your sales. So there's some little tweaks. So it's interesting, just small little things can make a big difference. And so it's important to test and not give up. Oh, I tried that, it failed, it didn't work, right? And so you need to try and iterate and not give up. The same thing with posting content. We've had very few viral videos on TikTok. We work, we post, we sell, we post, we sell, we post, we sell. And it's a job, it's work. Right. Some people want they want to just have this. I'm going to get the secret sauce and then it's just going to I'm going to get this like mega viral video. And we get some we get stuff that it's four and five million views. The half-life on TikTok is super short as well, right? So we have viral videos and they'll do 5 million views in three days and then no more after that. So some of those can be pretty short-lived. And so we've got our systems and process set up so that we're just doing it continually. Just assuming that, hey, we're going to get three to five sales out of each video and we just post and post and post. And then occasionally you have something that We're an affiliate that takes off and sometimes the lives take off, but it's about being consistent and not giving up, but just testing and iterating and testing and iterating and optimizing. Speaker 2: Okay. What time is it? We got a couple of minutes left. We have a question. Unknown Speaker: How do you reach your target market on TikTok Live? Speaker 1: Well, the algorithm is really good. You need to show your product, right? So that really helps. And that's part of going live longer. So as you go live longer, like over that hour, two hours, the algorithm is going to learn who is engaging with my content, who is engaging. And so the algorithm is, that's why TikTok is amazing is because It's algorithm is way better than everybody. Everybody else is playing catch up to be able to like really target customers and then target, you know, virality. Like what is this product really? Like, is it, is it really a viral product? Really good. And so, but it's just really good at finding your target customers. And so now we have an English live and we have a Spanish live because I don't want to confuse the algorithm. I don't want to mix those two. So we post Spanish content over here. We post English content over here. When we go live on our Spanish account, if somebody is like asking questions in English, we'll only respond in Spanish. And so we try to make sure that we're keeping that algorithm trained, you know, separately. Speaker 2: And so- So two separate accounts. Speaker 1: Yeah. So you can, within TikTok, you can have, you have your parent account and then you can have sub-marketing accounts. And so we have a sub-marketing account that's Spanish. And so it's almost like an affiliate account, but the brand controls it, owns it, and automatically the products are available to that marketing account, but we only post in Spanish. So if you're looking at different languages or geographies or things like that, Or like sub-brands, like within your main brand, like you can do that, or categories. Speaker 2: So if people are tired, guys are tired of their tighty-whities, or their girlfriends want to buy them a really awesome gift, where can they do that? Speaker 1: Yeah, you need to go to rmac.store, r-m-a-c.store, Real Men Apparel Company. It's a funny name, but guys remember it. And so it helped, but you can find us on TikTok, Instagram, any of the socials. We're all over the place. So top selling men's underwear brands, you know, on TikTok. So if you search for men's underwear on TikTok, we're going to show up, but you know, Google us, but rmec.store. We prefer you to buy it from the website. That's, that's always the best. Cause it's going to ship people like, Oh, I just shipped faster from Amazon. Well, you know, if you buy it from me on my website, it's going to ship from Amazon. Or if you buy it on TikTok, it's going to ship from Amazon anyway. It's not gonna make a difference, but yeah, it's funny. We have so many customers. We have women that will like buy this as like a gag gift or a white elephant gift, or it's like a male lingerie. And then the guy tries it on, they're like, holy cow, this is like super comfortable. And then they come back and buy a whole lot more. So we encourage you, stocking stuffers, buy it as a white elephant gift, gag gift. Yeah, so just we'll get you into the brand and then we'll get you hooked. And so then we've got you. Speaker 2: So if there's a underwear that you have, like one of the packages that you have are basically nothing, can I send that over to Kels? Speaker 1: The negative sides or the zero sides? Speaker 2: I can see him frowning in the background, shaking his fist. All right, so Kels, let's go to a commercial and we'll come right back. Are you an Amazon seller? I checked out your listing and said, it should be doing better. What am I doing wrong? There's got to be a better way. Well, guess what? There probably is. You just haven't had someone tell you exactly what's working and what's not. Flat World Network is for frustrated Amazon sellers. We'll take a look at your listing, your rank, your PPC, your traffic, and guess what? We're going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly about your listing. And if you're interested, we'll even fix it for you. So if you're serious about scaling, go to flatworldnetwork.com and book your free audit today. Let's go to the wheel. Unknown Speaker: All right, here we go. Speaker 2: What's this for, Kels? Unknown Speaker: This is for a six-month subscription to Warmi. So Jared's giveaway is going to be for next Wednesday. So I've got everyone that entered today entered. But yeah, let's see who... Speaker 2: This is a great, a really great giveaway, especially You know the problems we've had with our email account lately and Wormy's been able to help us out. So Steven, you got six months. Okay, Jared, thanks a lot for coming on. This is great. I don't know anything about TikTok Live. I always like learning new things. Speaker 1: I appreciate the opportunity. I love listening to the show. I've picked up a couple of different Tracefuse. It's one of my favorite. I started using those guys after I listened to them on your podcast. I just appreciate the opportunity to come on and share and give back. I felt like I've listened to you and Kevin for so long and I've taken so much. And so it's like, okay, this is something actually I know about and I want to share and kind of get back to the, uh, to the community. Uh, I felt like, uh, I've learned so much from all these other, uh, businesses that have been willing to be on the, on the pods and share. And you're, you're amazing. Speaker 2: Oh, well, thank, thank you. All right, everybody. Hope you liked today's podcast and we will see you next Wednesday.