Winning at Tiktok: Strategies from D2C experts Superbolt Agency
Transcript
[00:00:01] Paul: All right. And we're live. Super excited to chat today. We've got another awesome webinar this time with Diya & Zan from Super Bolt. I'll introduce I'll introduce them in a second. But my name is Paul, CEO and co-founder of archive. Really excited to have another group of really smart people to chat through some of the different aspects of influencer marketing. We started doing webinars because we were really excited to help the community, especially around influencer marketing, learn what's going on. Things are changing so fast in the industry, and there's no courses, there's no textbooks, there's no you know, schooling for this type of stuff. And the best way to get better is to learn from some of the best, most experienced people in the space. So we're here with some great people. We've got some awesome topics. Today we are going to talk about winning a TikTok specifically focused on what kind of UGC, how to get UGC, how to make it work, and all sorts of good stuff. With me, we've got Diya, who's the co-founder of Super Bolt, and we've got Zan, who's senior director at Super Bolt. You know, I met Super Bolt a little while ago, and they work with some of our fastest growing customers. Super bolt is an award winning agency. They've been featured in Adweek. They do amazing work on the performance marketing side across all sorts of verticals in GDC, and they manage over $50 million of media spend. That's a ton of budget, which means that they are constantly testing out different things, constantly learning, and have an amazing vantage for what's going on and what's working. So super excited to have both of you today. Diya, Diya and Zan to chat about TikTok, to chat about. Ugc. Welcome. And you know, excited to chat.
[00:01:50] Diya: Thanks so much for having us, Paul. I know this has been top of mind for several of our clients, so looking forward to diving in.
[00:01:56] Paul: Of course. Of course. You know, we've got some of the awesome logos that you all work with really impressive brands that probably a lot of folks in the audience recognize. So excited to share some of the learnings that you've been able to get by working across such awesome companies. So today's agenda we're going to start with about 25, 30 minutes of Q&A with some specific slides. We're going to talk about how to use UGC for TikTok ads. We're going to talk about how to cross over and best use UGC from TikTok to other channels. And then also we're going to talk about super bolt strategy for thinking about evergreen versus trending UGC and why that's important as they think about their media mix. And we're going to chat about these topics for about 25 to 30 minutes. And then we're going to have Q&A at the end. But before we start and talk about, you know, the program, curious to hear Diya and Zen like what's top of mind. What are you thinking about this week? Anything that's maybe not you know, that hasn't made it to the agenda.
[00:03:03] Diya: I think it's no surprise that the TikTok ban is perhaps top of mind for for some people this week. What's really interesting is that, you know, since it's been in the news, I think we saw TikTok spend go up 35% week over week. So people are pushing in TikTok. We've even seen it affect some of our CPMs and CPCs and some categories. So it's been really interesting to see what the next few months will look like. And I think regardless if there's a ban or not, there's a lot of other channels using TikTok like inventory, whether that's Instagram Reels or or YouTube shorts. So the strategies are definitely transferable, but it'll be an interesting landscape to keep an eye on for the upcoming months.
[00:03:43] Paul: Yeah. Super interesting. So when you know your clients are working with you and they're thinking about, you know, planning media spend over the year do you have any guidance for how long you expect things to just remain as is? Right. You know, TikTok gets banned. It's not going to happen overnight anyway. So is there some sort of buffer where it's like, hey, look, regardless of whether it gets banned, we've still got like a certain amount of time here to work on the platform. Let's, let's do our job.
[00:04:10] Diya: That's how we're thinking about it. Like spend is plugged in for the rest of the year. I will say no brand is overly dependent on TikTok, where, you know, if they're banned overnight, their entire marketing strategy is going to fall apart. So I think that's one thing to keep in mind. But for now, there's still a space in TikTok. There's still, you know, dollars to be earned and and impressions to be made. So we're we're keeping our strategy going strong, especially since it's becoming so transferable to other channels. So even if it, you know, drops off for the last few months of the year, it doesn't mean that any of the content that the teams made for us to use is going to be thrown to the wayside. And I think it's a lot more about, you know, how are we using it in the upcoming few months? Given that it's so strategic for some of our brands.
[00:04:58] Paul: Gotcha. Makes sense. How about you, Zan?
[00:05:02] Zan: Yeah, I echo Diya. I think we even talk about it a bit today. And we'll talk about it more where we're seeing that, you know, what works on TikTok is highly transferable to some of those other vertical video placements on Instagram, on YouTube shorts with the reels on Instagram. I mean, so I think there's a lot of diversification opportunities. And like Diya said, we are always focusing on making sure we have a good media mix where all of our spend is not too dependent on any one channel.
[00:05:31] Paul: Yeah. I mean, now, whether the platform TikTok stays or goes, it's basically built into Instagram, YouTube, Twitter soon. So there's a bunch of others. Exactly. Great. Let's start about UGC as a creative for TikTok ads. I mean, UGC has always been important, but, you know, for a lot of brands, right? Almost the entirety of their spend on TikTok is going to be. Ugc can you tell us a little bit more about how you think about that at Super Bowl?
[00:06:04] Zan: Yeah, definitely. So if we start first with just what users are accustomed to seeing on the different social platforms, you know, something like Instagram is where people are used to seeing the very elevated, filtered, polished content. And then TikTok is a place where all of that is stripped away. And so that all carries over to the ads. And the ad works best when it looks the most like the organic content that people are used to seeing on their feed. And since on TikTok, that's UGC. That's why UGC works the best on TikTok for ad performance as well.
[00:06:42] Paul: Awesome. And, like. So let me check. I think we have a site here. So speaking of UGC, right. We've got the concept of spark ads on TikTok. I'm sure some brands have heard about it and used it, but I'm sure a lot have not. Can you maybe explain what a spark ad is and how it works within the platform?
[00:07:00] Zan: Definitely. A spark ad is really just TikTok's name for boosting an organic post, so that can be an organic post that's on a brand's profile, or an organic post that's on a creator's profile and just putting paid spend behind it. We do tend to see that spark ads outperform traditional ads on TikTok, but really the benefit is when we're boosting that post that's coming from a creator's handle, because then the user experiences it in their feed, like a much more organic experience, because it's coming from a regular person's handle. And again, it goes back to the ad performing best when it doesn't resemble an ad. So if it looks like it's coming from a real person, people click through on it more. We see higher click through rates from ads like this. So it's really just the mechanism of boosting on TikTok.
[00:07:49] Diya: And the other thing I will add is that, you know, I think in on TikTok, the ads fatigue much faster than on the other channels. And so we need I think that's what some of the brands that we work with struggle with is how do we keep up with the amount of posts that we need from influencers, the amount of UGC content, because it's harder to get UGC than a produced image from a photo shoot that you've done a year ago. And I think that's when that's why a lot of our clients use archive as well, because it makes it so easy to find some of this. Ugc and so I think having a tool or a strategy in your tool belt about how you can continue to produce this content is important when you start advertising in TikTok in the first place.
[00:08:32] Paul: Yeah, I think it'll be helpful to actually get some maybe benchmark or specifics for folks. When you talk about ad fatigue. Do you have like certain thresholds or duration? Like do you look at it in terms of amount of spend you put on an ad or do you think about it, you know, number of days it's being run on? How do you start looking at that on TikTok versus, you know, some of the older platforms like meta?
[00:08:59] Diya: Honestly, I would say ad fatigue is different for different companies. And so we try not to have our own internal benchmark. Instead, we look at two things. We look at how the KPIs are evolving. Kpis like click through rate, for example, is a big one week over week. And what we've done is we've also built a tool internally that looks for each brand. What is the average run time before click through rate starts declining? What's the average run time before conversion rate starts declining? And so I think having benchmarks for each brand is important, but usually it's based on spend versus days. If I were to look at what has a bigger impact.
[00:09:36] Paul: Gotcha. And, you know, maybe we can talk about some examples. We're talking about needing a lot of creative. We're talking about creative fatiguing. If a company is spending, say let's say easy number, like $30,000 a month on TikTok, are we talking about five pieces of UGC? Are we talking about 500? Obviously it depends on the brand. But if someone's like thinking about, you know, testing or scaling the channel depending on where they are, to 30 K a month, how much content do you think they need to get started and just actually maintain it as well?
[00:10:09] Diya: I would say between ten and 15 a month. I know that's a big range, but it since it does depend I would say that's the range.
[00:10:19] Paul: Yeah. And do you see that number go up significantly for brands that are spending, say, 100 K or a million a month?
[00:10:28] Diya: It doesn't go up exactly in proportion, but it does. It would at least double, if not triple.
[00:10:36] Paul: Yeah. So if we're talking about, you know. Sometimes over 50 new creatives a month, right? That we've got to test for some of the brands that are trying to spend more on the platform.
[00:10:47] Diya: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why it's important. You know, before we work with a brand, we say, is it possible to get these pieces of content? And if not, like, what are our ways around it? Because if we have two weeks without new content, our metrics are going to start going down. And so it's important to kind of put new creative out before the fatigue starts because we really see that impacting our results.
[00:11:11] Paul: Yeah. Gotcha. And well so actually 30 to 50 creatives for bigger brand, 10 to 15 for a smaller brand. What are your thoughts on traditional UGC where a user, i.e. a customer has generated content on the platform and maybe influencer generated content or actor generated content or some of this, maybe like for UGC. You know, I have no judgment to it. Right? But obviously. There's this authenticity authenticity piece of having a customer talk about the brand, but you can't control the messaging as much. You can't control the output, the volume and all of that. Do you use a mixture of both? Do you lean on one versus the other? Does it depend on the brand?
[00:11:59] Zan: I, I think it depends a bit on the brand to your point, Paul, but we'll definitely use a mixture, I think, again, to Diya's point that's something that we're so excited about with archive that we can go into this whole repository of real UGC that real users have created, and we still have the ability. We can't control the messaging that they originally put into it, but we have the ability to control which pieces we pick and run as actual ad content. But it all comes back to whether it's a real user or an actual influencer or creator. The more authentic it feels and looks and feels more like an organic piece of content that someone would engage with on the platform.
[00:12:39] Diya: I will say TikTok users are pretty like they they can. They know when something feels authentic versus when something doesn't. And so even if we use influencers and pay influencers, we make sure the influencers have a background and a passion for the product they're pushing. So if it's beauty, the brand will really fix specifically, beauty influencers who know how to talk about the product, who know what ingredients to highlight. And so I think picking someone who doesn't know anything about the industry would not lead to a good piece of content.
[00:13:07] Paul: Yeah, cool. Makes total sense. Let's talk a little bit about repurposing or crossing over content from TikTok. Why is it important? Let's maybe kick this off.
[00:13:20] Zan: Yeah. So we do. I think going back to what we were saying earlier with all of these vertical video placements that mimic TikTok, we tend to find that top performing assets on TikTok are highly transferable to those other placements, like YouTube shorts, Snapchat, Instagram Reels. But really, what we're illustrating here is how even if a top performing TikTok can be transferred to those other channels and perform well, which is important again, so we can diversify our spend and have spend in different channels. If we take a piece of content from one of those other channels and try to repurpose it for TikTok, but it doesn't incorporate some elements that make it feel organic to the platform, then it won't work. Well. Some examples of that are really making sure that it's using the TikTok text treatment, like what someone would actually use if they were uploading a TikTok themselves, or the TikTok voiceover. Some of those things that really make it look like a piece of UGC that was just uploaded to TikTok on its own.
[00:14:23] Paul: Cool. I've got some questions, but I think we have some examples here. Right. So let's actually flick through them. So on on the left right is going to be an OG TikTok. And on the right is one that you repurpose for Instagram. Is that correct. Yeah. Cool. So I'll play the first one. That we've got actually the, you know, TikTok native. Highlights. I'm sure there's some awesome sound that we spared the audience.
[00:14:49] Zan: Yes, some good voice over in the style of tick tock voiceover.
[00:14:54] Paul: Do you guys like voiceover or music or, you know, trending music?
[00:14:58] Diya: Voiceover works well because with trending music, you run into copyright issues with ads, which you need to be careful about. But as you can see, these are from two different brands. But on the right you can see even though it's two different brands, you can see the more polished approach to the Instagram.
[00:15:14] Paul: Gotcha. Yeah. So it's like, you know, custom copy. We've got some all that stuff. And I think. Cool, great. Anything else you want to add there on maybe the educational side of things? I have a couple follow up questions. If not.
[00:15:31] Diya: Yeah, I just I think, you know, people ask a lot about, like, what works on TikTok, what kind of brands. And I think we've seen success in, honestly, beauty, personal care, mom and baby, even health care. People are starting to use TikTok, interestingly, almost as a search platform, and then interact with posts based on hashtags. And what's interesting is then we do hashtag targeting based on what people are engaging with in healthcare, for example, we found that people are searching for symptoms, example, like PCOS symptoms, to see if other people are also identifying with it and having some of those symptoms. Beauty I think is really big on the channel. What is really interesting is that now a lot of B2C brands, they don't just try to drive revenue on their own website. Retail is a really important part of like growing it beyond a certain size. And TikTok is great for driving retail ad spend because, for example, there's hashtag Sephora hauls, there's hashtag Walmart, hashtag target, and so you can get in front of a user who is interested in shopping at a particular place with UGC, where the influencer talks about shopping at that particular place. So it's a really, really targeted funnel, even though you don't have the pixel to send back conversion data. So I think for all those types of funnels and industries, TikTok's been really interesting.
[00:16:49] Paul: Oh, that's super interesting because when you think about their traditional, you know, back in the day dilemma between Instagram or meta ads that are going to be visual, all that stuff and a Google search ad that's going to have really strong search intent. You're saying that now because people are literally using TikTok to search for things. You get the best of both worlds because you can. Number one, you have people on TikTok that have that search intent that are looking for things. And number two, you can target them with rich UGC and TikTok videos, which is. It just gives you way more surface area to market your product than, you know, a little Google search result on a on a on a search ad, right?
[00:17:29] Diya: Exactly. I will say people with Google, I still think have more serious purchase intent for TikTok. It's a bit more discovery intent than pure purchase intent. But yes, I think the crossover between the search as well as the discovery aspect of TikTok is interesting.
[00:17:44] Paul: And this is where I think TikToks TikTok shop strategy ties in, where they clearly want to invest billions of dollars to build up that ecosystem so that a lot of that search awareness or, you know, top of the funnel intent actually turns into conversion. And that would be a super, super powerful kind of blended marketing platform where they've got all the content and UGC and visual stuff, where they've actually got people like transacting. And I think that would be a very, very interesting opportunity for brands. When you are spending on TikTok are you actually able to scale significantly early on these hashtags or search intents, or is it still pretty small? Because obviously if you're just, you know, you could spend a lot of money now on TikTok if you're targeting certain types of interests and whatnot, a lot of people are just scrolling through TikTok looking at the For You page, all that good stuff. How big are some of these hashtags that people are exploring or search terms that people are exploring?
[00:18:44] Diya: Honestly, some of the hashtags have millions of impressions, so it's fairly scalable. Meta remains much more scalable in terms of purchase intent. So I will say that's where most of our budget lies for our channels, either Meta or Google, depending on whether it's a discovery product or an intent based product. And metas, I think algorithm.
[00:19:04] Paul: Can you actually explain that? I think it'd be really helpful. So you talked about meta for discovery based product and Google for intent based product. What does that mean?
[00:19:13] Diya: Of course. So if you think about product categories, right. Like for example, if you're searching, looking for a doctor or you're looking for a service or you're looking for something particular, there are products that fall much more into something that people would look for during a specific need in their day to day versus something they would find on meta and buy. So those types of products, whether it's health care services, etc., we typically tend to spend a lot more on Google because there's a much shorter time between when they actually need something to, when they're buying something. But if you think about, for example, a lot more in like beauty fashion, like even mom and baby, if you're thinking about mom and baby, when people buy a crib, they're exploring it in their first trimester, right? They're they're responding to aesthetic images of nurseries on meta, but they're not actually buying. The purchase intent is not actually until the third trimester before the baby arrives, or even fashion. You might not necessarily be looking for something when you discover and buy. So I think industries have different places in the discovery versus intent funnel.
[00:20:16] Paul: Gotcha. That makes sense. And then going back to some of the budget you were telling about your spend allocation for purchases you know, in here you're recommended about 15% of ad spend. Can you talk a little bit more about how you think about spend allocation across meta? You know, obviously you're still spending a lot on meta.
[00:20:34] Diya: For sure. And I think that really depends on industry. Again, for some industries we have zero spend on TikTok because those industries are not mature as mature. But in what I mentioned before, you know, beauty, personal care all of those categories were definitely spending between 10 to 20% on TikTok. The thing with TikTok is you have to understand how to attribute conversions, because TikTok's attribution is much less mature than something like Meta or Google, and Meta and Google have a lot more first party data. And so they're able to, you know, say, okay, even though someone like looked at our ad like ten days ago, seven days ago, we're still able to say that this person bought because of a meta ad, TikTok is still working its way up to a more sophisticated attribution system. And so as brands, we need to use things either as simple as post-purchase survey, where you ask someone where they first saw your ad, which is of course not great because it comes with its own flaws, or even using an attribution tool. Or you could use something as simple as looking at a KPI like cost per non bounced user. You know, looking at making sure that TikTok brings in a good quality of user. But you need to have those other tools in your hand to actually understand what TikTok drives incrementally, so that we can then be smart about how much spend to actually allocate to that channel.
[00:21:55] Paul: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And things are changing quickly. Before we go on to the next topic where we've actually got a bunch more UGC that we can talk about and play, I just want to go back here. So just to confirm you, what you're seeing is that even with short form video platforms like reels and shorts. Tiktok short form will repurpose nicely, you know, with little editing to other platforms. But the reverse is not the case, right? It's not even saying that obviously like a static IG feed post or typical IG video is not going to do well. You're saying that even within the short form video there's just differences in how content reacts across different platforms.
[00:22:41] Zan: It will still your first part. Absolutely correct. If it's working on TikTok, we typically see it perform well on the other platforms that we have outlined here. If there's something that we've run on those other platforms where we have given it, the more branded treatment, we're maybe using the brand's style guide to stick to fonts, etc.. If we want to bring over that same UGC asset to TikTok, the asset itself can work, but we need to rework how it's presented as an ad so that it's using more of the TikTok native elements, like the TikTok voiceover, like the TikTok style of text, so that it feels more organic to the platform. But the UGC asset itself can still work. It just needs to have the slightly different treatments to it to make it feel organic.
[00:23:27] Paul: Yeah, and have you seen that change at all over time? Do you think that over time more polished, branded UGC right. That's got a little bit of these. You know, this you know, this brand font, these brand colors, these maybe bumpers at the end. Do you think that will make it to the platform, or do you think it's just going to stay like this for a while? Because obviously I'm sure brands are like, hey, can we just have some more you know, ads team, like, let's get some more branded content on TikTok. We're tired of showing all this. Ugc yeah. Do those conversations happen a lot on TikTok or brands? Pretty receptive. And do you think that will change over time as TikTok potentially matures to being a bigger, broader platform?
[00:24:09] Diya: I think it changed a little bit already. You know, for example, now we have those like stickers that that pop up when you're watching a TikTok ad about a new product or like pushing someone to go to a website which is a more branded banner on the UGC, I don't think it will move away from being a UGC first platform. And I think brands are not pushing back against that. I don't think the content can be entirely branded with zero. Ugc, but I think the UGC is becoming a bit more elevated. To answer your question.
[00:24:40] Paul: Makes sense. All right. So trends evergreen 60% a little bit of both. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by, you know, by this chart and how brands should think about that?
[00:24:56] Zan: Yeah, definitely. I know we touched on trends a little bit before. It's sometimes we're a bit limited with how many of the trends on TikTok we can actually participate in from an ad perspective, just because if those trends are using copyrighted sound, we can't run it as an ad. But going back to the theme of wanting to make sure the ad resembles what people are organically consuming on the platform, we still like to check in, especially on those hashtags that we might be targeting for specific audiences. We like to make sure we know what's trending on those hashtags, and then incorporate those trends into the UGC that we run to that specific hashtag. So that's a super curated experience, and it feels like what people are interacting with organically there. So that could be anything from we see like the point of view trend work really well, honestly, across a lot of different clients. And it can be adapted to a lot of different clients, but that's still more of a trend. That's TikTok specific. And then the other evergreen piece of it we like to make sure that because trends can have a short shelf life and you have to pause it once it's no longer trending on the platform, we like to make sure we still have enough other efficient, scalable, creative lives so that the performance doesn't dip after we pause the creatives that had been relying on the trends. So some of those evergreen concepts can be just sort of the typical before after product and use someone speaking directly to camera, doing an unboxing. And those are general types of evergreen UGC content that always work well and that we tend to find good scale with. So if we can continue to keep those live and continue to scale them, we're covering the overall scalability of the channel as a whole, and then the trends are more additive and can help boost performance because they're riding on what other people are actively seeing as super popular on the platform.
[00:26:52] Paul: And if a trend is ripping on TikTok, one of those trend ads videos is that just only going to be helpful for TikTok, or do you see that working as well on meta other short form platforms?
[00:27:03] Zan: I think you.
[00:27:04] Paul: Can be content.
[00:27:05] Zan: Yeah, I think even organically, the TikTok trends eventually make their way to other platforms, but there's a little bit of a lag time. So it's really mostly on TikTok that we want to make sure we're keeping up with the trends. And then on some of the other platforms it can be more of the evergreen. Ugc yeah.
[00:27:23] Paul: So there's definitely dedicated content creation for TikTok here. Not just from a, hey, let's create some evergreen content that's going to work well for TikTok, but we actually are spending a good amount of time creating trend specific TikTok that we might never even reuse for other platforms.
[00:27:41] Zan: Yeah, it's definitely something that helps the the platform perform. So there is a little bit of extra investment and time to make those trends specific. Udcs.
[00:27:52] Paul: Gotcha. All right. I'm I guess. Do you want to maybe describe them and then I'll play them. Anything you want to just give some of the listeners context for. We've got some example evergreen ads, and we've got some example trend ads that will go through. Definitely.
[00:28:13] Zan: These also don't have sound. So for again, the sake of easy playing on the call. But you can play them through as I talk about them. This first one is one of the evergreen UGC styles that we see again work for a lot of different industries. We call it like a listicle style, where we're giving three reasons why or five reasons why. And we aim to incorporate, you know, the top value propositions that users will care about, but really position it in problem solutions sort of style. So this here is only nine ingredients. A lot of people care about simplicity in their skin care. So this is more of a listicle reasons why to believe in this product. The one on the right is again, there's no sound, but it's the very casual, direct to camera speaking. And this is a style that also works well across industries, and we can do a lot of different things with it. Repurpose a single piece of content into a shorter video versus a longer video. And this really resembles the general type of UGC that people see on TikTok, where it's someone who just propped up their phone and decided to talk for 30s or so. So it really mimics what people are used to engaging with organically.
[00:29:27] Paul: Yeah. This one really reminds me of a couple, what, maybe four years ago when we were doing a lot of these, like, listicle, landing pages for ads, driving, you know, Instagram ads towards these three reasons why, five reasons why. Where do you typically drive traffic to here? From we've obviously got this listicle thing. Are you pushing to TikTok shops these days? Are you pushing to home page listicles? Where does that go?
[00:29:56] Diya: Start it off by pushing to TikTok. Shop small, but they're taking their cut of the price went up. So at that point, we're paying for the ad cost to acquire a customer, and then we're paying a margin to TikTok shop. So for a lot of brands now, they're using TikTok shops as more of an organic strategy to drive organic posts to and to paid. We're driving either to own site or to retail locations. When we think about sites like sometimes we drive to the PDP, but sometimes there's a stark difference between the content on TikTok and, you know, the very transactional nature of the PDP, in which case we will build TikTok landing pages that have a lot more video in them, have a bit more TikTok font, a bit more description of the product, if the if the ad itself didn't have too much on it, that then leads to the PDP so that there's less chance of drop off between, you know, this like super organic looking content and then a price on the PDP makes sense.
[00:30:56] Paul: Makes sense. All right. Let's look at the next ones.
[00:30:59] Zan: Yes. We find this one to be very popular with our skin care and beauty brands which, like you mentioned, have a really big presence on TikTok. But that product application, especially if we can see a bit of a before and after, works very well as an evergreen concept for a variety of beauty and skincare brands. And then this one on the far right. It's a bit of both an unboxing and a product in use, but really seeing someone engaging with the product, opening it up, seeing it in their space really helps people understand how they can also bring the product into their own lives, too.
[00:31:39] Paul: Yeah, extra points are putting kids in the video or pets always helps. Definitely. Cool. And we've got a couple trends once.
[00:31:49] Zan: Yeah, we have some trends here. So this one on the left is that kind of texting trend. And I think it might have paused already, but it's a bit of that texting trend and was using some of the non-copyrighted sound. That was big on the platform at the time. The one in the middle. This is one of our beauty brands, and it's someone doing her makeup routine, but using the clean girl makeup trend, which, again, is not something that's necessarily trend specific to TikTok. It was something that people were kind of talking about as an aesthetic across you know, different verticals or not different verticals across different platforms. But it's a trend that's more has to do with the whole industry versus specifically TikTok. So that's one difference I'll mention here. And then on the far right, there is this trend that was big on TikTok a little while ago, things people regret buying, but then they would give all the reasons that they actually love it. So this was our client's take on products they regret making, but all of the things that people love about it.
[00:32:55] Paul: That's a cool one. Awesome. Super helpful to see these. We're going to share the deck as well. So you can all have some of these really good references for you to potentially kind of give us references to influencers or content creators. These are some really good examples. And I think one of the things I like about you know, your process is clearly very, very thoughtful on the structure of the content, the type of content. I think that's especially important as anyone thinks about scaling content production, whether it's for TikTok ads or other things. Just being able to think about content in different content buckets or types so that you can decide what's working, iterate on that. So nice to see that show up in some of these descriptions. Cool. We're going to jump into Q&A. Thanks for a lot of the super valuable info. We've got some questions in the comments that I'm going to run through. Let's start with one around a clarification of some of the things we talked about. But let's kind of give a clarification. 10 to 15 pieces of UGC, what was the monthly spend there? And maybe, you know, add any other thoughts on the content volume side of things.
[00:34:05] Diya: Yeah. Between. That's for between. I would say between 25 and 35 K of monthly budget. I think the important thing to keep an eye on is you know, how often is your, your personal creative actually fatiguing? I think something to look at is, is click through rate. Cpcs, of course, linked to click through rate and CPMs. To essentially look at is your content actually fatiguing fast enough that you do need 10 to 15, or can you use a few less pieces of UGC in the mix? So I think it's important to understand, you know what what's the number for your own personal brand?
[00:34:44] Paul: Cool. Someone asked a question about editing ads and spark ads. If you're if you're doing spark ads, right, the influencers shipping it typically, you know, publishing on the platform. How does that editing process happen? Can you work with them to edit them? Like what? What does that look like?
[00:35:02] Zan: Yeah. If we had an edit for creator, it would have to happen before they actually posted it. So I know I talked about giving a TikTok, the different tax treatment, etc. but when it is a spark ad we don't ever have, then our hands on it unless they send it to us first and we do some of the treatment and then send it back to them. But it still has to come from their own handles. So we can either work with them for an edit that's more of like a reshoot, or we can help provide, you know, all of the in graphic text treatment, things like that, but it always gets sent back to them to post from their own handle.
[00:35:39] Paul: Gotcha. So there's basically, you know, behind the scenes conversation and potentially editing that happens before we before the influencer creates a content and therefore we then spark it. Yeah.
[00:35:51] Zan: But once it's on the platform, it's it's there. So no editing. Gotcha.
[00:35:57] Paul: Another question is have you found any useful AI tools to help with UGC creation, editing, all that sorts of stuff.
[00:36:09] Diya: I. Sorry. Go ahead.
[00:36:12] Zan: No, I was just going to say, I think the most valuable tool that we found has been archive and being able to, you know, do the quick search. For example, you talked about some of our retail funnels that will run on TikTok. And so for brands that sell at Sephora, we might bid on the or target the hashtag Sephora haul. So if we go to archive and we see what UGC have people mentioned Sephora in and buying this brand specifically at Sephora, that's a super helpful tool. But I didn't know if there was anything else you wanted to add.
[00:36:44] Diya: Yeah, I think I don't know about. Ugc creation necessarily, but I think for so many brands like UGC is being made in the background. And you almost like, don't even know about it to some extent. And to Zan's point, I think that's when a tool like archives been helpful, because then you're able to get access to all of this UGC that's being made in the background, and perhaps you don't have to you know, do the work of like, sourcing them. You can do the work of like, looking at what's already out there, what's what exists, what do you like, and just working directly with the influencers to make that part of your strategy moving forward.
[00:37:21] Paul: I appreciate the shout out. Hopefully archive can help people all around. We have a lot of influencer marketers on the stream. We went pretty deep on the paid side of things which is great. And offers a, I think, helpful perspective. But What's some advice you potentially have for influencer marketers to help make an ads team successful? Help made the paid team successful. How can they help you? Just have better content. Have more content? What do you what are some maybe tips or thoughts there?
[00:37:53] Diya: I think a feedback loop is so, so important between the influencer team and the paid team. I think sometimes, you know, the influencer team sends over like ten pieces of like, really beautiful content, like really varied, but they perhaps like don't get the data back on like what's working and why it's working. So I think that's something that we've seen be really, really important. I think the other thing is that it's hard to look at the true value of influencers when just looking at paid. I think that's something that we've come across a lot because influencers will post organically. There's a lot of, you know, value they can bring from their side. Then we do almost see paid as something additive. So with some of our brands, we worked with their influencer teams to almost come up with a formula right where we value, perhaps like organic actions that can come from an influencer post in a certain way with a certain ratio and then value, maybe actions that come from like a paid boost of that influencer post in another way, and then we aggregate it to give each maybe influencer a piece of content to score, and then we send that back to the influencer team so they can really analyze, like what makes sense for them to continue pushing into continue pursuing, continue working on. But I think that that conversation and coming up with like a common creation of metrics, both the paid and organic team can look at together is so important.
[00:39:16] Paul: Did you have anything else to add? Zan?
[00:39:20] Zan: No. I think that's really how we found the best method to work with paid and influencer teams. But it's definitely oftentimes a close collaboration like that.
[00:39:29] Paul: Yeah. So let's try to I want to be more specific here. Imagine I'm an influencer marketer at a brand. I just brought on a paid ad agency. What does close collaboration look like? Can you give us some examples of, like, meeting schedules or agendas, or is it just kind of like you're sinking in slack, like what is like world standard collaboration look like with a client if you're interfacing with their influencer marketing team? For influencer marketing team, for example?
[00:39:57] Zan: Definitely. I think something that's a regular part of our work with clients is reporting on creative and finding the insight about what makes that creative work. And so sometimes the brand side will choose to have their influencer point of contact on the call with us so they can hear directly from us. Here's exactly what's working about this creative, and what elements of it we'd want to bring over into the next batch of influencer creative. You're going to get to us. And then when they work on briefs for the influencers, they're able to incorporate all of that. But sometimes it's live calls, sometimes it's having a bit of a repository of some of those learnings about, okay, here's what's been working best, and it's an ongoing document that's a living document, and both sides have access to it. Sometimes it's even just a quick slack about, hey, we're thinking of working with this influencer. We worked with her in the past. Can you send us how she performed on the paid side last time? And we have all of that kind of conversation just over slack.
[00:40:50] Diya: And I think it's two things. Like weekly we look at, you know, like what the ongoing numbers are. But I also think it's so important to look either monthly or quarterly, like depending on your spend. Because once you aggregate all of the results it can look a little bit different than what it's like when we are actively in the middle of running the post.
[00:41:08] Paul: That makes sense. Yeah. So I think like just two really good takeaways here. Number one make sure you're talking to whoever's deploying that content whether and I think it's whether it's for ads or potentially in other formats. And make sure you're understanding the metrics that they're looking at, the value they're getting and how it's performing. So you can just like you're looking at your influencers and saying, hey, like, what are the organic views? You know, how many comments did we get? How many potentially sales? Bringing in the performance data from other channels can help you understand, like the type of content that's going to work for this versus that and iterate on that. And then the other thing I really like is keeping some sort of a log of what's working. And again, that starts with being. Thorough and principled around how the types of content you're creating, right? So if you're just working with 100 influencers and you're like, go create content that's going to be really hard for you to then classify that content and then be like, hey, this category of content is performing this type of content is performing. If as you're briefing influencers, you're giving a couple different content buckets or different ideas or styles or trends, you can then know exactly, hey, you've got 100 pieces of content.
[00:42:14] Paul: Ten of them are unboxing, ten of them are get ready with me. Ten of them are this and that. And then that's just like a much better foundation to start being structured. And then again, you can look at the organic performance of that content, and you can also look at the paid performance of that content. And over time being like, hey, the unboxing videos are crushing. And then you could, you know, refine it, right? Let's do unboxing videos with kids, with dogs, with, you know, this lighting and kind of like keep iterating that way. But I think ads teams are really experienced at labeling and classifying content because we get like fast feedback loops. And I think on the influencer side, that's much less common. But I think it's relevant even for organic and can give influencer teams superpowers in terms of enabling ads teams, if you're doing that as well as you're briefing your content creators, because then you're just going to iterate faster, learn faster, and have way more, I would say, like winning creatives and and as you take more shots on goals. One more question. I run a skincare brand and we're going to try TikTok. What are the top three content types I should try? What are you seeing work well right now?
[00:43:22] Diya: I think the the ingredients approach, I think it depends, like what the main value propositions of the skincare are. For a lot of our skincare brands, there's like 1 or 2 like star ingredients, like which it really is the forefront of their like brand voice and umbrella as a whole. In which case I think the ingredient focus, like pointing that out is super important. I think texture showing product in use is super important for skincare. People want to see what it looks like, what it feels like, and how it blends into the skin. But then feel free to to add on to that.
[00:43:54] Zan: Yeah, the the texture and product shots are really important. Seeing someone actually applying it and even occasionally we'll or we oftentimes see that, you know, someone doing their skincare routine at night and then seeing what they look like in the morning, kind of that before or after feel without it just being a shot of a before and after, but turning it into a unique style by making us taking us through their routine and seeing how it actually works on the skin, especially for something that might be like a quick working mask that always works quite well to the before afters.
[00:44:27] Paul: Awesome. Cool. Love wrapping up with a quick dips. Thank you Diya. Thank you. Zan. It was especially helpful to see some of that content in here. You walk through it. Where can people follow you if they want to learn more? You know, either about some of the educational stuff you've been sharing or potentially about Super Bolt and working with you guys there.
[00:44:48] Diya: For sure. Feel free to check us out. We have a website, Super Bolt Dot agency, but otherwise feel free to reach out to either of us on LinkedIn. Always love chatting with people in the the industry meeting face to face. So looking forward to that. And thank you so much for Paul for having us. Hopefully this was insightful to some of the people listening.
[00:45:08] Paul: Yes. Yeah. No, I think we we covered a lot. Really appreciate all of you. Great. So hope this was valuable for everyone. Do follow us on LinkedIn and do follow Zan and and Super Bolt as well on LinkedIn. On the archive side, we've got two more webinars this month. We actually have one next week where we're going to dive deep into gifting with an agency that works with a dozen brands and really does an amazing job there. If you want to learn more about archive we have amazing technology to help brands you know, detect. Ugc capture. Ugc find, UGC, which can be really helpful. As we talked about a little bit on this podcast, head over to archive.com/demo. We're happy to walk you through the platform and show you how we can potentially help. We work with over a thousand brands and would love to work with any new ones as well. Again, we've got an awesome webinar next week. Hope to see you then. And if you have any ideas for a guest that we should chat with reply in the comments. I appreciate everyone's time and big thanks to Zan. Super excited to partner with Super Bolt and this was a really awesome conversation. So thank you all.
