Eric Siu and Neil Patel break down TikTok Shops, where 33 million U.S. consumers already buy. They outline a playbook using paid ads, live streams, and creator partnerships. The best opportunity: connectors who source products and partner with creators without building their own brand.
All right, so we are going to talk about how TikTok Shops might be the next big opportunity. So those of you that can see my screen, it's okay, I'll read off of it if you can't. But by the way, we have a new Marketing School channel, which I'll talk about in a second. But Greg Eisenberg, who's a friend who talks about community quite a bit, so he says this, he says, someone is going to make $100 million in 2024 with a TikTok Shop. They'll probably have no inventory, no venture capitalists, and be 24 years old. That's— this stat is crazy. 1 out of 10 Americans are going to buy something on TikTok Shop this year. So Neil, can you see this graph okay or not really?
I can see the graph and I believe it too because I know a lot of people that are doing amazingly well in D2C on TikTok right now. It's much more profitable. You can scale it quite well than most of the social channels out there.
So look at the percentage change here. So you can see the percentage. So first and foremost where my cursor is, so in 2022, You can see 33 million social buyers on TikTok. So US has 330 million people. That's exactly 10%, right? And then you can see the rate of change over time. So, you know, in 2021, a lot of people were using it and then the rate of the growth rate slows down a little bit, but still it's a lot, right? 40% growth rate, 7.5%, 5.6%, and then percentage of TikTok users as well, which is a pretty high chunk. So it's just going to continue to get bigger. I don't know about you, Neil, but have you bought anything off of TikTok?
I have not bought anything off of TikTok.
Neither have I, right? So it's like, it's just because we don't do it doesn't mean other people aren't doing it. It just means we're getting older. So— Right.
I have bought things because of TikTok though, but not directly from TikTok.
Yeah.
Does that make sense? Like indirect conversion.
Totally. Yeah. And so Greg says this, right? He says, look, I don't know how to say this to any other way, any other way, but every entrepreneur should be thinking about selling their product or service on a TikTok shop, not because it's a new product, But because TikTok wants to see TikTok Shops succeed, they're pushing it big time. So it's a ton of tailwind for you. And typically what we see with these new features, whether it's like Instagram launching Stories, right? Whenever they launch a new feature or like Live, when Facebook launched Live a long time ago, these new features get pushed quite a bit, right? And then this is a feature that directly ties in with their revenue. So they're going to be pushing it. So what Greg says here is he said, I'd use ads, lives, or affiliate sellers to drive traffic. I'd partner with creators to leverage their distribution. You are more likely to become a millionaire building a TikTok shop than a founder or early at a early founder at a VC-backed startup.
You probably will make more money doing this too than trying to create a startup. It's just such a massive opportunity. You just have to make sure the product is really cool. If you can't create a good product, go find a good product, white label it, and then Go sell it on TikTok. Look, it's a big opportunity. We're even seeing Pinterest as a big opportunity, but a lot of people just don't care to leverage it or talk about it. It's a massive company. Like, people take Pinterest for granted. And when you look at like—
Q3 revenues were like $750 million or something.
Yeah, it's a $20 billion market cap company. So it's a substantially, you know, decent-sized company. Like, even Snap, there is volume there. But Pinterest, at least in its current form, is bigger than Snap from a market cap perspective. And what most people get wrong is they look at it as just like, oh, TikTok. Well, if it works well on TikTok, it'll probably work well on Snap, it'll probably work well on Instagram, and it'll probably work well on Pinterest. So you can just run the same playbook. You may have to adjust it a little bit here and there, but you can end up generating quite a bit of revenue from all of them.
Here's how I see it. Look, If you're good at building relationships, so let's say you build relationships with distribution, which might be the creators, and then you go find a product that looks really interesting, you can be the connector. And you being the middleman, you can actually make this all happen because it's— you drove the strategy, you drove the ideas, and you don't necessarily need to go through all the pain of creating all these products and services or finding distribution. You just like— I'm not saying networking is an easy thing. It takes years to build great relationships. But this is just yet another way for people to do really well on top of all the new ways for people like now. Look, the cost of creating a business nowadays is the cost of failure really is really nil, right? It's like little to nothing. And so that's more of a reason for those of you that are listening, maybe you're in college right now to go out there and try something like this.
Well, here's one thing to note. If you're going to end up doing this, it won't work for all businesses. For example, if you're in B2B and you're selling high-ticket items, and what I mean high ticket. I'm not talking about those people who are like, buy my coaching program for $5,000. I'm talking about, let's say someone wants to sign up for a consulting client from my agency, NP Digital, and it's a million-dollar contract. It's not going to happen on TikTok. It just won't. So it's like for me to set up a TikTok shop and sell consulting packages at a million-plus dollars, I'm not going to do well from that. So you just got to keep in mind who your ideal customer is, the purchasing price. Because if your purchasing price is so large that someone needs to end up talking to you before they buy from you, it's less likely to do well on TikTok Shop.
All right, look, TikTok's for consumers, right? TikTok, look, TikTok social buyers, like people are buying, people are buying products typically. When even when you look at Facebook Shop or whatever, people are typically buying products. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.
