🚨 In today’s newsletter 🚨

• A guide to TikTok marketing

• The hot new thing in DTC advertising

• How to sell to different countries

Let’s get into it👇

#1 - 💃🏽 TikTok made an e-comm marketing guide

📰 TL;DR - Whether you’re totally new to TikTok or just trying to up your game, you should take a look at the e-commerce guide the platform just published. The link below is a report about it, but you can find the actual guide here. You do need to fill in a form, but you don’t need a non-gmail address. Also, this is about running ad campaigns, not using TikTok Shop. All together it’s a breezy, idiot-proof guide that will get you up and running.

💡 Insight - Yes, you can definitely find multiple guides out there for marketing on TikTok. I like this as a quick-start guide and I also like that it comes with stats straight from TikTok. There’s a little section about Hismile, for example, with a link to a full case study. I also want to draw your attention to Spark Ads, a TikTok tool that turns your existing TikTok content into ads. As they point out, organic TikTok content performs well as ads, so definitely consider that option if you’ve ever had a TikTok take off.

➡️ You can read the article here...

#2 - 🔥 How sending free products to Micro-Influencers has helped brands 5X revenue in 2 months

Tapping into the power of social media Micro-Influencers and a platform called Stack Influence that automates influencer collaborations at scale (hundreds of promotions a month), Amazon brands like Unilever, Magic Spoon, and Blueland have been able to grow their monthly revenue by 5X, decrease their ad costs using a war chest of influencer UGC, and build an army of affiliate marketers to consistently drive new customers.

➡️ Get Started Here

📣 If you want to reach our audience of 10,000+ DTC store owners, email [email protected] or set up call here 

#3 - 🚚 Mobile billboards are the hot new thing

📰 TL;DR - DTC brands are increasingly turning to out-of-home ad campaigns, and a popular option has been mobile billboards. As in, ads carted around by trucks through major cities. Some DTC brands taking part include BelliWelli, Chomps, and Curie. One advantage, beyond the novelty factor, is that mobile billboards are way more affordable than the traditional kind. A billboard in somewhere like NYC could be anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 but you can get a truck for $170 per hour. They can also do some neat technical things like capture phones with location services on to get data for retargeting ads.

💡 Insight - OOH ads have some specific use cases that make them more worthwhile. Because they’re geographically limited, they’re a nice option if you’re looking to break into a specific market (like a college campus, or particular city) or if you have a pop-up or other physical event to tie it to. With digital advertising getting more tricky, it just makes sense that DTC brands are looking beyond screens for marketing campaigns.

➡️ You can read the article here...

#4 - 🛠️ Things worth checking out

🍎 BNPL - Apple Pay just got more powerful with a new buy-now-pay-later option. Read here.

🐶 WOOF - Holiday shoppers are increasingly adding their pets to their gift-buying lists. Read here.

🤔 MARKETING - This startup wants to automate marketing tasks for Shopify merchants. Read here.

🧶 ETSY - Read all the holiday season updates coming to Etsy.

🍳 OUR PLACE - The makers of the viral Always Pan are launching at Target.

#5 - 🌎 How to target a new country

📰 TL;DR - This SEO guide looks at how to set yourself up to target a new country. There are a few ways to do this — with a separate entity, with a subdomain, or with a subdirectory. This goes over the pros and cons and use cases for each option. It also has some great tips for what your country-specific site or subsite should have, like local language and location info, which is important to Google.

💡 Insight - This is a good, quick guide to the technical side of country-specific e-commerce, but let’s also talk about the customer experience. Surveys show that customers always prefer to shop in their language and currency when it’s available. Platforms like Shopify come built with tools to set this up, so take advantage of it. If you’re in the US and see orders coming from Canada, for example, it’s worth taking the time to set up a redirect option to a subdirectory (or another option). It would also be smart to make sure to have country-specific shipping and returns info.

➡️ You can read the article here...