Sohun Sanka is currently with Euka.AI and they strive to build more impactful AI powered solutions for marketers. Fueled by his curiosity Sohun has taken roles across multiple departments and stood up several verticals for UGC, TikTok Shop and Influencer Marketing throughout his career. Sohun also conducts strategic workshops and audits of top brands and agencies to help optimize their creator marketing workflows.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Sohun Sanka from Euka.ai, focusing on creator marketing for TikTok Shop and social commerce. They discuss the growing importance of social commerce for e-commerce brands looking to generate demand beyond Amazon. Sohun shares insights on leveraging user-generated content (UGC), conducting trend analysis, and crafting engaging content to drive sales. They emphasize the need for thorough preparation, iterative testing, and personalized outreach to creators. The episode offers actionable steps for brands to thrive in the evolving e-commerce landscape, highlighting the significance of social proof and effective collaboration strategies.

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Episode SponsorThis episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

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Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael Gerber, author of The E-myth, and Matt Clark from ASM. Today I am speaking with Sohun Sanka and he is going to be talking a lot about how to approach creator marketing for TikTok shop and social commerce, and how this is going to explode your sales and make you relevant for the next decade of e-commerce. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure ecommerce brands to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a coach or a consultant who can help take your business to the next level, I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for that coach or consultant or mentor, have them reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough dot com. That’s e-comm with two M’s.

Josh Hadley 00:00:49  And let’s turn your dreams into reality. Today I’m excited to introduce you all to Sohun Sanka. Sohun is currently with Euka.ai and they strive to build more impactful AI powered solutions for marketers. Fueled by his curiosity, Sohun has taken roles across multiple departments and stood up several verticals for UGC, TikTok shop, and influencer marketing. Throughout his career, Sohun has also conducted strategic workshops and audits of top brands and agencies to help them optimize their creator marketing workflows. So with that introduction, welcome to the show Sohun. Thanks for having me on.

Sohun Sanka 00:01:21  Super excited to be here and absolutely love this podcast and love what you guys are doing.

Josh Hadley 00:01:26  Awesome! Well hey, I’m excited to have you on the show. You and I met a few months back and we’ve already jumped on a few calls outside of, our conversation today. And, we’ve always had very productive, fruitful conversations. And I am super excited to have you kind of spill the beans on everything that you’ve been working on and what’s actively working in social commerce right now and sharing that with our audience.

Josh Hadley 00:01:46  Because I know this, everybody in the Amazon ecosystem that’s been selling on Amazon, like they want to move more volume of sales off of Amazon, or at least they want to start generating more demand in traffic for their Amazon products off of Amazon, right? Because it feeds the beast this whole algorithm and flywheel on Amazon itself. So with that being said. So tell me tell me about your background. How did you get into this world of social selling, influencer marketing, etc.?

Sohun Sanka 00:02:12  Yeah, yeah, I’d love to. Love to jump in. So my first job out of college, I actually worked as a media buyer at an omnichannel agency called vendo, where we manage brands on Amazon.com, Walmart.com, and I helped build up their TikTok shop managed service from scratch, actually, and built up their affiliate program, manage the full team. We work with brands that, you know, are a little bit on the smaller side, you know, six figure R’s. And then I’ve worked with billion dollar brands as well.

Sohun Sanka 00:02:34  over there I was focusing specifically on creators. Right. So I started with media buying. I actually learned, you know, how it looked like when you took that creative asset from a creator and ran ads on it through Google, Facebook, or, you know, TikTok, whatever. And then I started working on building out UGC there, working with creators collaboratively there, worked on an Amazon affiliate marketing department, their work with a lot of tools like Levanta, Refresh and Impact, Comm KE Rakuten like you name it. Whole suite of affiliate tools then started moving into influencer with, you know, Aspire Tribe, greater IQ, so familiar with the space and the tools a lot. And as I was building TikTok shop and working at an agency, I sort of realized that with social commerce, there’s a lot more to come and no one really has it figured out yet. Back then, and I wanted to jump on to the technology side and work with I work with machine learning products to really solve these kinks in the workflow.

Sohun Sanka 00:03:21  Right. Because fundamentally, what I’ve seen with affiliate programs and software is that as you scale it, it eats the team alive because it becomes an unscalable beast, which then you feel trapped by. And so at UCA, some of the solutions we’ve been building have been super interesting because they’re solving these core problems. And I get to bring that marketer’s perspective where I’ve managed creators and manage projects for brands.

Josh Hadley 00:03:39  I love that. So you’ve got a depth of knowledge here in the social space. You’ve done general kind of affiliate marketing, which again, a lot of these straight DTC brands that did not start on Amazon, like that’s their bread and butter. Right. Like and I think that’s where your valuable experience comes from is look on Amazon it’s mainly all about demand capture, right? It’s there’s this many people that are searching for these many or this keyword this many times per month. Right? How do I create a product that serves all these people that are searching for the search term? On the flip side, you have these other DTC brands that have gotten really, really good at basically creating engaging content off of Amazon, obviously, and they’re pulling people in, whether it be from a Snapchat ad or whether it be from a meta ad, or whether it’s a blog article, or whether it’s SEO or whether it’s working through other affiliates to drive traffic to their site.

Josh Hadley 00:04:28  And so I love that you’ve got that background. I guess my question to you, Susan, is why? Why is social commerce an important topic to be talking about today? And what are your predictions of like, where does social commerce go from here? We’ve heard all the craziness with TikTok shop. It’s going down, it’s back up and all of that good stuff. But like, where do you see like, where’s the puck going here? even meta is like talked about how they’re going to do that for Instagram yet that’s yet to be seen. Really. so tell me, where is social commerce headed in your opinion?

Sohun Sanka 00:04:56  Yeah, yeah. No, that’s that’s a good question. so my perspective comes from the fact that now that I’m in SAS, you know, I work with a suite of the top agencies and top brands in the space, right? So I’m constantly getting different people’s perspectives. People are releasing industry reports on consumer trends. Right. And what I’ve seen, you know, with just how the creator economy is growing so rapidly and where social commerce is facing, too, is that people are switching from traditional, glossy creative to more creative, that emphasizes user generated content.

Sohun Sanka 00:05:20  Or as people were calling it, creator generated content. Right? The influencer has become a more trusted mode of delivery, and programs like communities are being activated by affiliate marketing. Right? And people are going by reviews, people are going by people they trust, or someone who knows someone they trust. Right. So there’s a lot of trust that’s driving consumer shopping behaviors right now. One thing that’s super interesting about TikTok is that, yeah, there’s trust, but 80% of people actually spend time on the discover page looking at content and engaging there. And these are people that are unlike on Amazon. They’re not actually searching for a search term on the platform with a certain degree of consideration. They’re very raw shoppers. You’re looking at Gen Z and then the rising Gen Alpha, which will be the next wave of purchasing power there, and you’re appealing to them before they’ve even thought about buying the decision. Right. so really with social commerce and social selling, it’s really a more cost effective way to use content and leverage the trust with consumers in a way that’s not done with spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on PPC.

Josh Hadley 00:06:15  Yeah, no, I love that. And, I agree with your perspective there. I do believe that over the next 5 to 10 years, the world of Amazon as we know it is only going to get more and more difficult. And to be honest with you, the brands that are just kind of like the meta private label brands where I just I found a, you know, a spatula, and I slapped my brand name on it. Like, I promise you, in the next 5 to 10 years, those things are going to be dinosaurs. Those things are going to be extinct. Okay? And it’s because, like, you’re up against the overseas competitors that are going to be willing to drive those prices down to where they’re only making a 1% margin, and they’re happy with it, because guess what? They’re getting kickbacks from the government. They’re getting all these other subsidies that we don’t know anything about. there’s this different, like money laundering schemes that they could be playing to. So, like you, just like you don’t want to play that game.

Josh Hadley 00:06:59  Right? So the question is for all these people that got started on Amazon, if that’s where the puck is going on Amazon and private label as we know it is going to die, then how do you prevent that from happening? And this is my prediction. The brands that are able to figure out demand capture for their products or their brand are going to be the ones that survive, because guess what? Amazon’s not going anywhere, right? Amazon’s only going to continue to grow over the next decade. And what’s going to happen is like Amazon just needs to be seen as like it’s probably the most trusted choice of shopping for most consumers, and that will probably only get more and more important over the next decade. Right? To where the fact like, you probably order something and literally it’s going to be on your porch in the next hour, right? Like I think that’s where Amazon’s going in the next decade. So if that’s where people prefer to shop is going to be on Amazon, of course you want your products on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:07:46  We don’t want to run away from Amazon. But guess what? In order to survive all the overseas competitors, you’ve got to be able to do something that they probably can’t do and won’t do, at least at a good scale. And that is demand generation for your products. Okay. And that’s what you talked about. So where you talked about I like the term instead of UGC user generated content. Right. Creator generated content I believe that that’s where the game is going to be played in the brands that are doing that at scale and have an affiliate army or a creator army constantly posting about their products, are going to be the guys that are surviving and actually thriving 5 to 10 years from now. So the big question is this. So on, so great. Josh. Josh sold me so and sold me on the fact that like I need to get into social selling, I don’t even know where to begin. So where do people begin? If they’re like they’re a brand owner, they’ve got some cool products.

Josh Hadley 00:08:33  They don’t even know where to begin with social selling. Where do you start?

Sohun Sanka 00:08:36  Yeah. So I’m going to start by telling you the number one thing not to do. one thing not to do is now that TikTok shop, unlike other influencer tools like, you know, the aspires and, you know, influencers out there, right, they show you the revenue of the top performing graders. The number one thing people do is they get onto a platform like ours, or they go on a tick tock shop and they just go and reach out to the top performing creators who never respond. You know, that’s the one thing you don’t want to do. It’s yes, the affiliate plays an important role, but with Tick Tock, like I was saying, since 80% of people spend time on the discover page, you need to go and do research on what content is moving the needle and think about the creator as sort of like a foil to the content that is the main character. And the fact that, like, you know, your persona on TikTok, right? Let’s say they’re, you know, a young college student who’s mail, right, that creator is delivering a viral format in a relatable way to that persona you’re trying to target.

Sohun Sanka 00:09:21  And so that’s how you think about creators, you know, like fundamentally, if you’re just looking at content, excluding all the variables of like, engagement rate, followers, whatever, this creator is relatable, this creator is authentic, and we’re banking on trust over here to drive the conversion and drive awareness. Ultimately, like like Josh was saying, demand generation to demand capture, right? So what you want to do on TikTok is just showcase your product in a relatable and creative way, and you need to dissect that between who’s showcasing your product and how are they showcasing your product. So what I would do first is go and do a bunch of trend analysis, look at what people are doing that are similar, and just break down a bunch of hypotheses to put together a test during launch.

Josh Hadley 00:09:56  Love it. All right, well, I think you’ve even got some slides to present. So let’s, let’s dive into that, because I think that’s the perfect segue into what I want to dive into is like, how do you actually do this? So I want to walk through our listeners and those of you who are listening right now, go check us out on YouTube because you’re going to want to see what someone is, is presenting here.

Josh Hadley 00:10:14  And what’s going to happen is like, we’re going to walk you through like literally like the basic steps. Step one come over here, analyze these competitors. Step two. And we’re going to walk through this methodically. Does that sound good.

Sohun Sanka 00:10:23  Someone sounds good to me. Yeah I’m going to go ahead and share my screen and let’s let’s dive into it. All right I think we’re I think we’re good here. All right. So let’s start. So the first thing like I was saying is trend analysis, right. You know, throughout this presentation, I’m going to be walking you through the step by step. But the first thing you need to do before you start doing anything is at least a little bit of research. Right. You should understand where things are heading on TikTok because they’re a lot different than an Amazon, right? There’s different factors that drive conversion. Drive engagement is ultimately a different customer persona that you’re also working with on TikTok than on Amazon. Right. So the first thing I do if I were starting this from scratch is driving dive into trend analysis.

Sohun Sanka 00:10:59  So for a lot of our Amazon watchers, let’s start with an analogy that you guys are familiar with, right? Keywords. So what we can do is actually type in keywords associated with your niche in TikTok. I’m sure a lot of you had tried to like, type in a keyword like shapewear into your TikTok search bar, right? one thing you can do to shamelessly plug in where I work, is you can put in the keyword shapewear, and we’ll pull in all the top brands that are mentioning shapewear in their videos and in their content. We’ll pull out hooks that they’re using, and we’ll also pull out more content, inspiration and ideas. The way I would think about that, if I was an Amazon seller, is like, this is a keyword generation tool. You can plug in your top non-branded search term here, or I will go find related topics and keywords and inspiration for you. And then you plug that in as well. So you can do this endless like virtuous cycle of research with your top non-branded search terms and TikTok trends to find out the most highly valuable and impactful research, right? And then once you figure out where the trends are, what’s relevant to your product, you know, you want to look at these trending products and start to really break down the content styles, the niches, and really dive into the nitty gritty here.

Josh Hadley 00:12:00  So let’s go on to that. So and so let’s say let’s say I’m manufacturing like darts for like a dartboard okay. What if I go in there and I type in, you know, just darts right. Or darts for dart board onto TikTok shop or even onto UK. Okay. And I’m trying to find creators that are talking about darts, I guess. What if I don’t see anybody talking about darts? Or what if there are no other existing products out there that like creators are promoting? Yeah, tell me, like what would you do if you’re that brand owner?

Sohun Sanka 00:12:30  Yeah, yeah. So if you’re trying to figure out, you know, a product where you’re sort of creating a new category, right? Like I did this with one of the brands I work with. It was like a karaoke machine product and like, people weren’t really selling karaoke machines, you know what I mean? So what I do is I start from that list of top non-branded search terms. Go through your reviews. Go through all your content and things you’ve done on other channels, and compile a list of keywords related to your product or that solved like related complementary problems, right? Like a really easy example.

Sohun Sanka 00:12:57  you know, for like darts, it’s like looking up dart board, you know what I mean? Or like dart games or something like that. Right. where you can go and find something related, put that in here and find related niches and then say like, hey, you guys created content that’s very similar and we think it would be a good fit. You know, we’d love to reach out to you. Here’s what we do. We’re actually the first to enter here. So we’re offering this exclusive offer X, Y and Z.

Josh Hadley 00:13:18  Is it a good sign or a bad sign if there are no competitors on TikTok, shop for you, right? Is it good to enter a new category? You can argue yes. And then you could also argue like no. Like there’s a reason why there’s no competitors. Like you don’t have a product that’s viral worthy, so to speak.

Sohun Sanka 00:13:32  Yeah. So I think it is a it is a good like, you know, there’s less pressure on your price.

Sohun Sanka 00:13:36  Right. Like if you’re going into an incredibly competitive category, I think we can all say supplements is incredibly competitive, right? You’re going to have to deal with a lot of third party sellers pushing down on price, doing those discounts right. Operating on that 1% margin, like you said. so there is going to be an uphill battle there. But then same with no category, right? You’re trying to capitalize on demand. That really hasn’t been proven by the market to be there. either way, for both approaches, really it’s going to be the same. You have to invest in creating a lot of good content and showcasing and building awareness first, and then you’re going to layer on all your tick tock shop growth levers on top, right. So if you’re coming in with darts and let’s say no one knows about darts, what are some trends that you could capitalize on that are far related from darts, but have a lot of, you know, search on or our big trends on TikTok and how do you slowly capitalize, capitalize on those and bring those back into showcasing educational and informational content to then drive conversion, either on TikTok shop or off platform? That’s the way I’d look at it.

Sohun Sanka 00:14:27  It is an uphill battle, definitely if there aren’t a lot of products on there. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way forward, because TikTok shop hasn’t even been around in the US for that long, so it’s still pretty new.

Josh Hadley 00:14:36  So what’s interesting to for us? I agree with your perspective. When we first got on to TikTok shop, like there were no other people selling exactly what we sell. But we did see some related products, right? As you said. Like their tangent. Okay. These other people are selling stationary related products. Like, let’s see if we could reach out to them and see if we could get something, to move there. Right. And so we did. Right. But it’s not a for sure thing. But like I said, it’s a numbers game. You’ve got to get awareness out there and get that flywheel kind of turning. So I just wanted to reiterate like just because there are no direct competitors like that doesn’t mean like it’s a completely bad opportunity.

Josh Hadley 00:15:11  And I would argue for any brand that’s out there, like I think TikTok shop is worth a shot, right? Reach out to like when I say like reach out to creators. Like I’m talking like having like a thousand creators. Sample your product and create videos for it, right? Like give away a thousand. That’s now we’re talking about a good test in the market. We’re not talking about here’s ten creators, here’s a hundred creators. You actually want at least as many creators that have posted like 1000 videos. That’s my perspective. And if at that point you’re not seeing traction, okay, maybe there is something underlying that’s that’s not going to work for social commerce. what would you use as, like, a measuring stick that way? So, like, for, like, if you’re going to test the market, that’s unproven, so to speak.

Sohun Sanka 00:15:48  Yeah. So I think like, there’s a lot of preparation that comes into this. Once you launch to like, you have to have a certain degree of like social proof, you know what I mean? Like to convince the affiliate that they should take on your project and even post.

Sohun Sanka 00:15:59  So like what I would do is like, you know, get those reviews right, import those from, you know, DDC, like use a preferred partner like your POA or whatever. make sure that, you know, you have some social proof there. Try to get a preliminary amount of sales as well before you reach out to creators, so that even if you are newer to the market, you can still tell people like, hey, this is a hot product, people are buying it, right? And that’s going to significantly increase your chances that every piece of content you puts out sells. to go back to your first point, when it comes to like essentially proving the concept that your product can work, I think it’s pretty iterative. I agree with your, your statement where it was like, you need a thousand pieces of content, like, sure, let’s let’s take like, you know, 500 or 1000, right? Depending on your scale of sampling, it is going to take some time to understand what the viral format is on TikTok shop and what works.

Sohun Sanka 00:16:39  And you’re going to need to do a couple cycles of these samplings before you have something that you’re ready to amplify with ads, right? For example, different content styles and different ways influencers showcase the product will have different average video views which signal like, hey, are people staying on this video long enough? Do they find this entertaining? And then they’re going to have different click through rates right where it’s like, hey, if I if I boosted this content with ads, could we have a proper conversion with a proper Roas here? So I would start looking for those signals. When you’re doing this sampling at scale, find the successful variables and then bake them into a creative test for your next round of sampling and see the incremental growth.

Josh Hadley 00:17:11  I love that. I think that you hit on that. I think that’s a really good point. Well taken, which is like this is an iterative process right. You’ve got to like send a bunch of samples out, see what happens, see who’s working well, see what’s getting better views.

Josh Hadley 00:17:24  Then go find more of those types of people and say, hey, these are the other videos that have trended a little better than others, so create more like that, right? And it’s just it is iterative, but I think like it’s worth the uphill climb. So all right so let’s move on to step number two here.

Sohun Sanka 00:17:38  Yeah. So the next step is, the product analysis. like Josh was just saying, an an iterative process. Also, you know, you need to understand the variables within that iterative process and understand how you can verify success. Right? So what we’ve done is we’ve also broken down content into it’s like modularized format, where we’ve correlated certain components of it with certain performance metrics. To explain that more deeply, let’s talk about hooks. So a hook is what you see in the first 2 to 3 seconds of the video, right? Some people say three, some people say two. But ultimately like if you can get your average watch time of your video beyond a couple of seconds, the algorithm is going to prioritize your content a little bit more.

Sohun Sanka 00:18:12  And I would challenge a lot of the viewers to actually look at their content and their TikTok account and see, on average, like when people are dropping off in their video. And if you find people dropping off, you know, below five seconds, below three seconds, I would take a look at some hooks that are really working on the platform and try testing those hooks into similar content styles, right. And so that’ll help increase your average video views. That’ll help increase your visibility really affordably rather than boosting it through ads. Right. and then selling points when you’re launching on TikTok shop versus an Amazon, the customer thinks differently. The customer has different purchasing decisions. You’re not going to drive purchases. You’re like A+ content and infographics, right? You’re going to have to work your selling points in a very creative way. That works with the trends on TikTok. And the way you verify that is through your click through rate. Right. So we’re able to see like what selling points are really working. And we see those, you know, high video views, but with a big click through rate and then a big click to order rate right.

Sohun Sanka 00:18:59  We can go into all the KPIs. But ultimately, like, you know, in the middle of your video, after you introduce your content with a strong hook, what’s selling points are really driving the customer to take action here. And, you know, do a little bit more exploration on your listing for your product. Right. And then the last component is like, how is this product being packaged natively to TikTok users? Right. So there’s viral content styles like for example for cakes. something I’d look at is like, hey, like, you know, is there like, you know, get ready with me. You know what I mean? Something like that. Right? Or is there like a viral transformation, which is something that our product pulled here. Right. And if you have that content that’s already working, the algorithm is boosting that kind of content in general. And you layer in hooks and selling points and test that off of something that’s booming. That’s a that’s a pretty good hypothesis on like, hey, you know, this creative has a stronger sign to work than if I take what’s worked on meta.

Sohun Sanka 00:19:46  You know what I mean? And launch that here.

Josh Hadley 00:19:48  Yeah. One thing that I love about the the tool that you guys have yuca, is that you can put in your product here and it’s going to pull up all these like top selling points and the top hooks. So here’s the hack that I would share right. As soon as you’re getting like a bunch of these creator videos and you can drop your product in here and it starts pulling out like, hey, here’s your top performing hooks, guess what you do with that content? Go update your Amazon A+ content and your secondary images and and even your bullet points and your description. And like you work all of that in there, right? Because like, if it’s doing well over here, it probably means that’s a really good hook to maybe start with your secondary image, right. Or maybe even put the that type of wording or phrase like creatively on your main image, maybe on your product packaging or something like that. It’s like ready to go, I don’t know, ready to shed £50,000? I don’t know, you know what I mean? I mean something outlandish, but I think that’s the point is like, take what’s working well and then go apply it onto your Amazon listings.

Josh Hadley 00:20:42  That’s, I think, like the power of this whole social commerce thing is like you’re finally getting like live feedback from people. And if something’s trending well on TikTok, it means there’s some component of it that’s resonating with people. And if it’s resonating with people that, like, stops them in the middle of their scroll, their, their doomscrolling, then obviously it would stop them in their tracks if they’re actually looking for that type of product on Amazon. So I just want to reiterate like how important I think that is. So so let’s go. Step three.

Sohun Sanka 00:21:08  Those are great points. yeah. I mean, to go even deeper. Also like, you know, we do a product level analysis, right, where we can look at, what’s working across all the videos on this product. But sometimes you want to understand your creator profile, right? And your customer persona. So we can go a level even deeper. Right? So let’s say I want to focus on one video, the top performing video.

Sohun Sanka 00:21:27  Like we can modularize that even deeper and just look at the key idea, the hook, the selling point. And then you can just give this step by step script to creators, because you’ve got to think about TikTok shop and social selling versus influencer marketing. With influencer marketing, you’re taking a professional content creator, and you’re collaborating with them to talk to their audience. With Tick Tock Shop and Social Selling, you’re actually working with a lot of everyday people who aren’t super experienced content creators, or who aren’t doing this deep dive research with like 4 to 5 hours to come up with a viral format. Right? So my thoughts are, why not just use technology and what’s working out there and give them a script and like variates some of these elements to what’s relevant to your product. Look at the audience demographics and adjust that messaging like in this video for cakes. Right. It’s actually a majority male audience watching it. And that’s super interesting because that actually tells me that, hey, top video for cakes is more about maybe their male partners gifting it to their female partners.

Sohun Sanka 00:22:20  You know what I mean? and that’s going to completely change the way I message the product. And if I didn’t do that, I might just go in and be like, here’s a woman talking about cakes. Let’s copy the content and give it to the creators. so yeah, love it.

Josh Hadley 00:22:33  Love it. All right, let’s keep going.

Sohun Sanka 00:22:36  Cool. And this is some more some more things you can do with keyword research. So one thing that we can do is you can take a list of your top number and search terms, like I was saying earlier. Right. And find out if it was mentioned by a creator. So I’ve worked with brands who are launching those really niche products, like Josh was saying, where they don’t have a category that really works, like one brand that comes to mind that I work with really closely is called My Magic Healer. We help take them from like 4 to 5 k mrr completely organic in a couple of months, just through doing more niche affiliate outreach and management.

Sohun Sanka 00:23:04  Right. So we take in related keywords to the problems customers were facing or similar things that people were searching for on Amazon. And we’d find every single creator that’s related or mentioning or talking about that. Right. Because if you think about why that’s important, I want to give a creative brief to someone who’s a better fit for doing that content style. Right? Each creator has their own feel, like their own theme, the own way they promote content. So if I’m targeting people based on signals that they can follow my creative brief better, that’s what I’m going to do with my niche product, because it’s all about showcasing my product creatively to create that free brand awareness. Right? and then of course, if you want to do some outreach on it, we can turn that into a list and automate that outreach. So you’re only spending most of your time doing the research and less of your time manually messaging the creator’s, each one by one.

Josh Hadley 00:23:48  Yeah, I love that. Well, and I think here’s the important aspect of that too.

Josh Hadley 00:23:51  So one is that you look at like, oh, I just need to go after, like when people think about like, hey, I need to go find a creator that’s going to go talk about my brand. You’re theoretically going to think like, oh, I got to go after the people that are producing the highest GMV or the best creators. And as you mentioned earlier, it’s like it’s actually quite the opposite, which is exactly why I love social selling is because, like, imagine if you could just have 2000 small little creators that would end up producing the exact same volume that one of those big guys would. But guess what? You’re doing it at pennies on the dollar compared to what you would be paying that that top creator. Right? Because they’re going to command a premium and things like that. But more importantly than this, those top creators are going to be really hard to get Ahold of and actually showcase your product. But these these smaller people, right, are going to be more accepting.

Josh Hadley 00:24:35  But here’s the challenge as well. Okay, great. I want to work with all these small guys. My wife, she has 100,000 plus followers on TikTok as well. And she gets hit up all day long. Like her message thread is just like it’s atrocious on TikTok, right? Like she doesn’t want to dive in there. She’s just getting spammed all day long. Like, will you feature my product? Will you feature this product? Will you feature that product? So you have to get in the mindset of these creators that are getting hit up with hundreds of messages per day, per hour, almost. And you’ve got to think about like, how am I going to stand out? And so really like the best way to stand out is instead of having the, the spray and spray approach of, like, I’m just going to reach out to all women who talk, all women creators are my audience. Like, well, Pierpoint, go find these people. And what I love. We’re using Euka.

Josh Hadley 00:25:16  My favorite thing is like, we’ll type in the keyword that we want, and then we’ll grab all of those creators and then we’ll send them into like our bot campaigns, where it’s like it keeps messaging them until they reply or ask for a sample. Right. And our message reply rate, so I don’t I’m curious what your average is that you see on Euka, we have seen anywhere right now I think we’re averaging like 11%, 11%. But on some of my more targeted campaigns, we are getting 15 to 20% response rates, which in my opinion, like that’s an astronomically high. Like this is a cold DM to these creators. So so I’m like, what are you saying on that front?

Sohun Sanka 00:25:48  That is like five times higher than like the average response rate on TikTok shop. Like I’ve audited like hundreds of TikTok shops and agencies and big brands. And like for any small seller that’s coming on, you need to expect a 1 to 3 response rate when you get on if you’re doing everything right. fundamentally with, you know, Josh’s brand and like what they’re doing is they’ve proven their success on the platform and that pokes the affiliate into respond to their message.

Sohun Sanka 00:26:10  So your response rate can get higher. It definitely does start at 1 to 3%. Once you start getting those sales, you fix some leaks and how you’re messaging. Right. Because like Josh was also automating follow ups. He’s doing very targeted approaches to people. You start to get higher into that middle, you know, single figure percents, right. And then to get to that double digit percents, you really have to be selling through. So all people need to think about when they respond to your messages. Is this product likely to sell? If I post a video that’s not that great, like being completely blunt. that’s how creators one of the things creators do when they make their decisions. the way brands can get around that is through this personalized outreach, right? Let’s say, you know, Josh’s wife, 100 followers, receiving tons of DMs, but someone sends her a creative brief with a very personalized message on a piece of content she created last week. I’m like, pretty sure that that would capture a lot of attention from her, and at least get her to think and read about the message a bit more.

Sohun Sanka 00:27:00  Then another one being like, here’s 50% commission for my new product.

Josh Hadley 00:27:04  Yep. On the on the point of commission. We haven’t even talked about that. Or maybe is that coming up later?

Sohun Sanka 00:27:10  We haven’t talked about commission. I don’t have that here right now in the slides, but I can, you know, go over that a little bit. I talked about this on a previous, podcast episode I did where people were starting to look at commissions of top brands and, like, matching them. that can be like a false growth signal, right? So when you plug in your commission into TikTok shop in your open collaboration, it actually gives you a range. It says like, hey, if you plug in this protein powder product, people are offering 15 to 20% within this range. When you’re launching, you don’t want to be on the lower end, you want to be on the higher end, right? But you don’t need to go like astronomically high. Because if you think about what’s going to drive the needle here to the affiliate in terms of an offer, you want to have a good commission, but you also want to give them a little bit of a deal to bring to their audience, too, because I will say the way they look at it is it’s a combination of the affiliate offer times, the product’s likelihood to sell.

Sohun Sanka 00:27:56  I mean, Josh’s brand has a ton of leverage because it’s selling so well. He could probably lower the commission on his products and still not hurt his response rate too much because the product’s so likely to sell, right? You know, alternatively, newer sellers would come on the platform. They might need to adjust with a better affiliate offer to get them to choose something that’s less likely to sell based on their visible sales volume. So that’s how I look at commission strategy when I’m launching a new product on TikTok shop.

Josh Hadley 00:28:19  Yeah, I love that. I think you articulated that well. Most people get hung up with like, what’s the magic commission percentage that I need to give to people. And to your point, like there isn’t, right? There’s going to be a range. What I would try to say is like, all right, maybe start with something that, you know, is a little higher than average, right? And if you’re not getting responses, then maybe try to push it up a little bit more and push it up until you get something.

Josh Hadley 00:28:40  And then as you talked about like, hey, once you kind of reach mass volume, then you can maybe start bringing that back down because you’ve created that like network effect, so to speak, where people trust you, which goes back to like, let’s talk about this. One of the strategies to launch on TikTok shop is like, look, back in the day, people used to do these search, find, buy campaigns on Amazon, right? It’s like, hey, go, go purchase a bunch of people that will go purchase your product and reimburse them. Guess what? Doesn’t work on Amazon now, but that works on TikTok shop, and I’ll just leave it at that because, look, this is the imagine Amazon circa 2010, 2015. Like that’s where we’re at right now in the TikTok shop stage. Will that last forever? I don’t think so. So while the guitar is good, maybe employ some of those old tactics that were working once upon a time on Amazon and apply them into TikTok shop and make it appear that you already have reached max volume.

Josh Hadley 00:29:30  That gives you a much better leverage point when you start reaching out to these creators.

Sohun Sanka 00:29:33  Yeah, yeah, I definitely have heard a lot of similar, Amazon tactics and there are a few people doing that. But like Josh is saying, like it’s not not like very for some reason there’s a gap that people just don’t do that on TikTok shop. But it is a marketplace with an algorithm with an appearance you have to present. so why not? it’s a good call out.

Josh Hadley 00:29:51  But all right, let’s move on here.

Sohun Sanka 00:29:54  Cool. So now let’s just go over how to actually reach out to creators. So you’ve done all your research. You’ve put together the perfect series of creative briefs based on the personas you want to target and trends you want to capitalize on. Right now, it’s just all about, how do I take out all the manual mess from messaging these creators individually? So one thing that I get asked a lot is like, you know, and we talked about this earlier is like, what’s the average response rate? So a piece of clarity I want to, you know, drive here is that when you send a target collaboration or target invite, which is the creator’s preferred invitation type because they don’t have to use a fixed monthly sample.

Sohun Sanka 00:30:27  It doesn’t start a chat with the creator. So fundamentally, there’s actually no way for a creator to respond to a target invite unless they go find your shop separately and create a thread and message you. so it’s really interesting where like, you know, we’ll see a lot of people send target invites and they’re like, why is my response rate so low? Because you are verifying with the wrong KPI. You need to verify with your incremental lift and sample requests. That’s what you need to do there.

Josh Hadley 00:30:49  So I think that okay, so double down on that because I thought it was going to be the exact opposite. for this reason, and I’d love for you to explain more. When we first started. The only thing that I did was targeted campaign outreaches. That’s it. Like, I would just spray and pray a bunch of targeted outreaches. So where? Tell me again, where is that ending up in the creator’s message bucket or DMs or lack thereof, because we were getting like decent, like we were still getting like hundreds of sample requests along the way.

Josh Hadley 00:31:18  And we’ve also started adding yuca and their regular message bot, which is just let things on fire ten x. But tell me the difference of that, because I do think that that is a really important call out.

Sohun Sanka 00:31:27  Yeah. No, it’s it’s super funny because I was like thinking about it too, because when I was managing brands too, I was like, I need to look at what the creators are receiving and validate everything that I’m doing here. You know what I mean? I don’t think people do that enough. So I created my own TikTok shop affiliate account, posted some videos, posted some. I generated videos too, of course, because I work at an AI company. and then I looked at where creators were receiving these. So there’s actually a few few things in the creator tab under a shop button. So you click into your TikTok, you click earn, and then you go into this portal where you manage all your TikTok shop activity. This is actually separate from the DMs you receive on your TikTok platform.

Sohun Sanka 00:32:03  Like your social platform, this is a TikTok shop portal embedded within there, and then you’ll see a section called Collab Invites. So I’m sure a lot of you guys have seen creators and DMs say, hey, send me a collab invite. that’s a targeted collaboration. There’s different wording on the seller side versus the creator side, but creators understand it as a collab invite because in their UI they see a collab invite section. So that’s where they receive target plans. When I’m a creator and I click into that, I actually see, almost like a little like email flyer thing, you know, just like an invite, right? And I can click into that invite or that email, and then I can request a free sample or, and the product’s already available to promote, because with target collaborations, you don’t need to request to promote it or add it to your showcase. I click on Free Sample and then my sample request goes straight through. So it’s very frictionless versus in my target. In my creator portal.

Sohun Sanka 00:32:51  There’s also a messages section. And you can when you look at it it’s called like chat with seller. And this is where your messages go if you’re DMing creators on TikTok shop affiliate and this is where people pull responses from. So there’s a little bit of a disconnect. It’s like I send creators a target collab here, and then I’m looking at all my replies here and I’m trying to make them match up. And it doesn’t really make any sense, because you’re sending invites to a place where people can’t respond in your portal, and you’re tracking responses in a place where you never sent an invite.

Josh Hadley 00:33:20  Interesting. So then where’s the best place to reach out to people? And what’s specifically on Yucca? What’s the best type of bots to be using them?

Sohun Sanka 00:33:27  Yeah. So what I did was I highlighted our message plus target collab product card bot, and this is something we actually engineered in house where you can send them a target invite. That way they don’t have to use one of their fixed monthly sample requests.

Sohun Sanka 00:33:38  So it’s very frictionless, no risk to the creator. And then you have a messaging tab open because you need to send them follow up messages and reminders that they’ve received a product. So you can get that good offer in front of them. And then from there, you actually have a way to verify your response rate. In addition to verifying your incremental lift and sample request from starting this.

Josh Hadley 00:33:55  Love it. All right. So the option the best one to use on on Euka is the Message plus target collab product card. And I would just like double down on that to say like as soon as we started using Euka, like we literally like ten, the number of creators that were signing up with us monthly just by using this feature, and it also replaced one of our team members that was manually sending these target collabs originally. So win win across the board.

Sohun Sanka 00:34:17  Yeah, I don’t want to take any responsibility for that.

Josh Hadley 00:34:20  All right, let’s move on.

Sohun Sanka 00:34:21  Yeah. So this is the this is the best invite type for cold start shops or when you’re starting there.

Sohun Sanka 00:34:25  and then over here, going back to the keyword research, you know, we’ve done over here, right. So name your bot, include a naming convention with the intended goal and then add in. I recommend personally because TikTok shop with affiliate marketing your sales and your product are visible. So limit the creators focus to just 1 to 2 things you want them to focus on, right? If you want to add your PID, maybe your second PID, which is the same thing as a skew, is a variant or related product or something else you want to push that has a high chance of selling, right? So think of your bot as like a campaign, right? I chose the best message you can type. I’m messaging all the creators that align with this keyword based on my campaign goal, and I’m going to add in the products I want to focus on. And then next, here’s all the nitty gritty on how I would fill this out. So for your target collab, use the same naming convention, because once you start using UCA and you’re reaching out to thousands of creators a month, you’re going to want to track your overall outreach performance via a naming convention for standardized reporting.

Sohun Sanka 00:35:18  So you can understand and AB test different variants of your messaging. Understand and validate the response rate of the creator profile you’re reaching out to as well. And then for target collabs, you know, going back to that commission rate number, you need to include something that’s at least 5% higher. When I’m a creator and I actually receive a target invite, I get to see that, hey, this target invite is 5% higher than your open plan commission. So that’s another point of leverage you have to hook in your creator. So it’s extremely important because it is visible to the creator. If you just send them a target invite with the same open plan commission, they’ll know you’re just like, you know, sending a bunch of mass outreach just to send more outreach. You’re not actually giving them a better offer. and then allow at least 6 to 8 months to promotion. I think people get really stingy when they, you know, turn on their target invites, like give the creator a chance to promote the product during its viral period.

Sohun Sanka 00:36:03  that’s really that’s going to actually affect how much they opt in. Because if you think about the production cycle, right, I received the content, I plan out the content, I post it, and get my sample request approved. Right. That’s like a one month cycle. So if I give you like 90 days to promote it. It’s just sort of like I’m not even able to reap the benefits of my return from trying to promote this content in multiple times. So give them enough time. And then the last point here is draft a message that leads with social proof for George Hadley’s brand. Right. And you’re selling incredibly well. lead with that and appeal to the affiliates decision making process. If you’re an Amazon brand that is crushing it on Amazon, maybe doing 7 or 8 figures there, right? Let them know that you are an Amazon brand that is selling through, say like, hey, you know, we’re an eight figure brand on Amazon with 10,005 star reviews, and we’re launching on TikTok shop right now.

Sohun Sanka 00:36:45  And this is exactly what we want to offer you and why you should accept. Oh I love it. So I keep the messages short and sweet. The way I think about affiliates is they’re going through 50 target collab invites a day maybe 100 if they’re really good right. So in five seconds can I hook this affiliate and get them interested in promoting my product? Don’t overwhelm them with all your USBs and all your information right now, because that’s going to turn them off and they’re going to stop reading that and it’s going to affect your response rate. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:37:08  Here’s one of my my favorite features that we started using with you guys. Like we like you talked about like, hey, a curated message is going to stand out and sound better to the creator, right? It’s like, hey, I appreciate your content is about it’s very wholesome and I love your three kids or something like that. Right. Your AI tool to create that, like I tested it and like it, it basically will do that for you.

Josh Hadley 00:37:28  So like you say like, yeah, use AI and it’s going to read that that creators content, it’s like, hey, you have a beautiful family and I love your your content about outdoor farming or whatever it is. Right. And it’s going to like call it out like so you’re already like ten steps above all the other mass outreach companies. So that’s been one of my favorite features, as well. Real quick on the target collabs, are you limited? Is is TikTok still limiting you to only like 1000 active campaigns at any given point in time?

Sohun Sanka 00:37:54  I don’t think so. I’d have to double check and get back to you on that. But, you know, we have a lot of brands that are sending out very high volumes of invites. but not completely sure.

Josh Hadley 00:38:04  Because we were originally blocked from creating new ones unless we retired old target targeted campaigns. But maybe that sense changed.

Sohun Sanka 00:38:10  So, yeah, I’ll take a look into that.

Josh Hadley 00:38:12  Cool. All right. Well, let’s, let’s wrap up.

Josh Hadley 00:38:14  Let’s wrap this stuff up.

Sohun Sanka 00:38:16  Cool. And then, you know, the next thing is, like, you just choose the outreach you want to run it on. You reach out to, like, a couple thousand creators a day. Anyone who sent out target invites manually knows it’s a huge pain. and then you start running it. And so, you know, for all of the viewers here, you know, we love Josh. He’s an amazing partner of ours. We’d love to give anyone a 30 day free trial on our growth plan. of course, if you guys want this deck, Josh will send it out to all the viewers. But you can also email me. Happy to share. Every resource is over. I’m an open book. And then what I do also is I give brands a free affiliate program audit, and we can take a look at all the leaks in your program. You know, where there’s redundancies or room to automate with AI. Maybe there’s a way to amplify insights with our trend analysis and keyword generation tools and things like that as well.

Josh Hadley 00:38:56  Love it. So this is this is awesome. And I would encourage anybody that’s getting into this. Come check out. Make sure you grab that deck and follow this step by step process that he laid out. We barely scratched the surface as it comes to social selling today. we will have someone back on the podcast and we’re going to dive even deeper. Today was like social selling. Social commerce 101. we will get into the 201301 class here coming up, and someone’s going to break down like what he sees working with some of those bigger brands. And then I’ll also share kind of what’s working with our brand and how we’re leveraging UCLA’s AI tool. but soon as we wrap things up, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways and you let me know if I’m missing anything here. So action item number one is, I hope that you’ve been convinced that social selling is is where things are heading. So if you’re not what I would say, like action item number one is like start to make social selling and social commerce one of your top priorities in the business.

Josh Hadley 00:39:49  Because the best time to start is now yesterday. And I promise you, we are already seeing this in the product categories that we are in on Amazon. Like those that have an outward traffic demand generation, are kicking everybody’s trash. And the people that are just relying on their Amazon search volume and stuff, they’re losing organic ranking. And it’s not just price and it’s not just overseas competitors. It’s a it’s a matter of volume of people that are searching for particular products that they’re finding off of Amazon. Okay. So start start looking into social commerce. That’s action item number one. Action item number two is to sign up with one of these tools to go and start experimenting. Like you’ve got to do the research on your kind of like your niche in specifically on TikTok shop. I don’t even think there’s any other social commerce platforms to go to at this point that are worth your time. So I would go on to TikTok shop, I would sign up, I would go through that process to like just get your account signed up.

Josh Hadley 00:40:39  There’s going to be some hoops that you have to jump through. And then let’s get one of those tools. There’s kalo data. There’s also yucca, Yucca I, there’s a lot of these different platforms that are going to allow you to see, like what type of products are moving and who are the type of creators that are promoting those products. and then from there you’ll be able to do some outreach. So my third and final action item is like, look, social commerce is honestly not as hard as many people make it up to be. Like, honestly, the strategy is this sign up for TikTok shop. Start reaching out to creators, period. Like it is. It is as simple as that. And but someone showed us some more advanced ways to make those outreaches more meaningful, to make sure that you’re reaching out to the right creators. So follow those steps. And if you follow those steps like this is an iterative process that we talked about. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to stumble upon something that’s like, okay, these type of creators are working well.

Josh Hadley 00:41:27  Oh, these type of products from my brand are doing well. All right. Well screw the other ones. Like let’s run with these ones for now. Right. So it’s just kind of like it’s one of those interesting things where you almost have to like, just throw things at the wall and see what sticks and then keep doubling down on whatever is sticking at the time. So anything else that you would add is an action item?

Sohun Sanka 00:41:44  No, that was that was very well put together. I love the way you were communicating that and drawing some parallels with Amazon too, because like fundamentally, the shopper base is the same, you know, are you going to diversify your channels or just stay on Amazon only forever? How are you generating new demand and not relying on, you know, Amazon’s constraints to grow your business? so super great action items and great takeaways.

Josh Hadley 00:42:02  Awesome. All right. So final three questions. What is the most influential book that you’ve read and why.

Sohun Sanka 00:42:08  Yeah. So the most influential book I read, and it was when I was working in operations super Random, it’s called Six Thinking Hats.

Sohun Sanka 00:42:14  I think fundamentally with business, you need to have good critical thinking skills and approach problems from multiple different directions. So the author put forward this paradigm of hats where maybe you’d have a red hat that considers the humanistic impacts of any decisions you make or things you move forward with. Maybe you have a blue hat that shows how to organize a process and control, so you can make things more scalable in your business. Maybe you have a black hat where you’re actually looking at things from a critical perspective and actually contemplating if we launch this initiative versus another initiative, what’s the cost benefit? So that’s one of the best books I’ve read, highly influential into how I learned, digested information and dealt with problems.

Josh Hadley 00:42:48  Love it. Great recommendation. All right. Question number two. What’s your favorite AI tool or ChatGPT prompt that you’ve been using and why?

Sohun Sanka 00:42:54  Yeah. So my favorite ChatGPT prompt, it’s something that I’ve been using with our teams. Take some of the work off their plate is I’d go on to, you know, podcasts like Ecomm Breakthrough and host my own.

Sohun Sanka 00:43:03  And I take the transcript of every single video, I download a PDF file, and I prompt ChatGPT to turn this into a very actionable e-book with takeaways, and also suggest some lead magnets. And so for a lot of business owners who are looking for ways to advertise and grow their business, write starting from 0 to 100, because 100 to 1 million is a lot easier. you need to, like, figure out very fast and scrappy ways to distribute your content and information and give your customers what they want. So that’s been a game changer. we’re looking at launching a series of ebooks from, like, every single podcast we’ve been on and just sharing all this information with everyone.

Josh Hadley 00:43:35  Well, I can’t wait till the e-book comes out, for this one. All right. So in third and final question here is who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Sohun Sanka 00:43:46  Yeah. actually one of, one of my old, CEOs, Darren Saul, who’s the CEO of Vendome, was very involved in my growth.

Sohun Sanka 00:43:54  and he actually helped me understand, like, like move through different departments at vendo to learn things from a lot of different perspectives. Incredibly intelligent. you know, they have a lot of blogs, posts. They’re, they’re owned by this bigger company called platform as well. And they focus on omnichannel growth. So they have blogs for like launching on Walmart.com, which is like very hard to find information on, but then also how that goes over into Amazon, how to get into retail and launch a brick and mortar strategy simultaneously, and then TikTok shop, because ultimately, like business as a whole, be about how you grow your business omnichannel and really bring it to life, right? I just find it very interesting on like what they’re doing and unbiased because I work there. and then also follow Josh Hadley, of course. but yeah, that’s that’s one of my big interest in big, information sources into a lot of perspectives that I have today.

Josh Hadley 00:44:38  I love.

Sohun Sanka 00:44:39  That.

Josh Hadley 00:44:39  Well, great. Well, so and thanks so much for coming on the show and for your time today.

Josh Hadley 00:44:42  If people want to follow you, they want to learn more about you. Where’s the best place to reach out?

Sohun Sanka 00:44:46  Yeah. You can reach out on my email address on the deck. So and I also feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s just my first and last name. and I have my colleague in there. If anyone ever wants an audit or wants a chat. Social commerce.

Josh Hadley 00:44:58  Awesome, I love it. Well, thanks again for your time today. We’ll have you back on the show for 2.0.

Sohun Sanka 00:45:04  Looking forward to it. Thank you so much for having me on.