Uncertainty about the ultimate fate of TikTok has been somewhat lost among the clouds surrounding other “T” things (tariffs and trade deals), but a lot of retail marketers will be very unhappy if some kind of solution isn’t eventually found. That’s because TikTok has become not only an important top-of-funnel feeder but also a source of conversions at the bottom of funnel, particularly via TikTok Shop and its livestreaming capabilities.
“The new player at the top of the funnel is TikTok,” said Vic Catalfamo, Marketing Director of supplements retailer BrainMD during a panel session at SubSummit in Dallas last week. “When it comes to product and service discovery, users were first quickly migrating to Google, and then to Amazon, and now it’s TikTok. It’s the new television. We decided about six months ago to make an investment and focus our marketing energies there, and it’s been incredible.”
As for the perception that TikTok users are all too young to be in the market for brain-enhancing supplements, Catalfamo reported that “more than 30% of TikTok daily users are over 40 years old, and that percentage is growing.”
Capturing Virality on the Fly
Panelist Doug Jensen, a former SVP of Global Data and Analytics at Estée Lauder, also described how TikTok has “upended everything. There can be a creator with 500 followers that no one knows, and her video goes viral. We can quickly go to that creator, license the content and build a campaign around it, so that other creators could further the impressions [users] get,”
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During his time at Estée Lauder, the brand began analyzing, and applying data to, multiple stages of the marketing funnel, a change from the sales-based models it had been using to measure campaigns’ success. That began to change “when influencer marketing became important in beauty, about 10 years ago,” said Jensen. “The challenge we faced was that we weren’t connecting these influencers to sales.”
Now, TikTok is showing that it can support both ends of the marketing funnel, he noted. “TikTok is about virality that can happen to you, and also commerce you can build and drive,” particularly via TikTok Shop, said Jensen.
Subscriber-Like Behavior Among Live Event Attendees
Those bottom-of-funnel conversions are often most visible during live sales events. While livestreaming as a whole seems to have stalled in the U.S., it can still be effective with the right product, cadence and price point.
“We have an affordable line, The Ordinary, that we’ve sold through live-selling processes, and we’ve noticed the same customers coming in for every different live event,” said Jensen. “While it’s not a subscription, we’re getting subscriber-like behavior happening over time, and it’s driving a huge amount of business there. Of course it depends on the product and the purchase cycle — it’s a $10 product that lasts only about one month.
“You might ask, why don’t we make it a subscription?,” Jensen added. “It’s more about the excitement” of a live event; these attendees/customers “want to see the product demonstrated.”
Enhancing Engagement with Access to Experts
While Frontdoor, the brand behind the American Home Shield home warranty service that features former SNL regular Rachel Dratch in its advertising, does not currently use TikTok in its marketing, it has found that live, real-time video communication can be an effective marketing tool — even if it’s one-to-one rather than the one-to-many livestreaming model. Panelist Sarah Duggan, VP Marketing at Frontdoor,, explained that the addition of video chats with experts in plumbing, appliances and HVAC have helped the company grow its audience.
“It’s a real live experience, and they can help [customers] diagnose, fix or just understand what’s happening in their home,” said Duggan. “It’s a ‘touch’ that gives a homeowner an immediate experience with our brand.”
The informational and educational aspects of these video chats help meet a major challenge Duggan faces: “The product I sell isn’t tangible — it’s peace of mind,” she noted. “That requires a lot more customer education so that consumers understand the value of what they’re buying. That’s not always understood immediately.”
Adding touches like video chat is effective because “most homeowners only submit two claims per year, and if we expect to have consumers continuing to invest in our brand, we need to show them what they are getting that’s above and beyond,” Duggan noted. And while the video chats have so far been targeted only to a small group of customers, Duggan already sees their value. “We need to raise awareness among young homeowners, and video chat has allows us to build audience growth,” she added.
More frequent “touches” are vital for reminding subscribers about the value of the service they’re paying for, and in some cases for adding additional elements to their subscriptions. “We want to get more share of wallet from consumers, but they’re not looking at my product versus other similar ones in the category; they’re looking at us versus Netflix and their other subscriptions,” said Duggan. It’s about understanding the way in which your product needs to be executed, but it’s also back to the ‘Marketing 101’ of the right message, in the right place, at the right time.”
