Product Startup Podcast Episode 202: TikTok Advertising for Hardware Products

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today, we learn how to sell a new consumer product on TikTok from a 20-year PPC marketing expert.

00:00:07 Kevin Mako: This is the Product Startup Podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in hardware product development,

00:00:13 Kevin Mako: prototyping, manufacturing, product selling, and everything in between.

00:00:16 Kevin Mako: Hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for hardware startups.

00:00:22 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Nikki Lindgren to the show.

00:00:26 Kevin Mako: Nikki is the founder and managing partner at Pennock, a PPC digital advertising agency.

00:00:30 Kevin Mako: Specifically for consumer product brands. She has managed hundreds of product sales campaigns

00:00:34 Kevin Mako: online with over $20 million in ad spend per year. Today, Nikki is going to share some valuable

00:00:39 Kevin Mako: knowledge for inventors, startups and small manufacturers on the types of content ads to use on TikTok

00:00:44 Kevin Mako: for selling hardware products, how to use a new TikTok store, best practices for the effectiveness

00:00:48 Kevin Mako: of ads, and the structure of specific content in those ads so that you can sell big. Now on the episode.

00:00:56 Kevin Mako: This show is produced by Mako Design, the original firm providing end-to-end consumer

00:01:01 Kevin Mako: or product development services tailored specifically to hardware startups, small

00:01:05 Kevin Mako: manufacturers, and inventors. Take your product from idea to store shelves at MakoDesign.com. Now on to the

00:01:13 Kevin Mako: episode. Nikki, welcome to the show.

00:01:14 Nikki Lindgren: Thank you so much for having me, Kevin.

00:01:17 Kevin Mako: We're looking forward to

00:01:18 Kevin Mako: talking to you today about selling a new hardware product on TikTok. TikTok, obviously, has blown up.

00:01:25 Kevin Mako: It's a big platform all around the world, not just for teen dances anymore. It is for all topics.

00:01:30 Kevin Mako: and it is a massive, massive platform. It's also an incredible platform to get notoriety

00:01:36 Kevin Mako: and get eyeballs onto new inventions, new product ideas, new products that are coming to market.

00:01:42 Kevin Mako: So it's particularly relevant for the listeners that are developing, designing the next hottest,

00:01:47 Kevin Mako: latest, new consumer product. There's a lot of different ways that you can utilize various platforms.

00:01:52 Kevin Mako: And today, we're going to be talking about TikTok with an expert that's worked with millions of dollars

00:01:57 Kevin Mako: of ad spend, countless amounts of brand, hundreds of products.

00:02:00 Kevin Mako: on advertising across a variety of platforms, but is definitely an expert when it comes to TikTok

00:02:06 Kevin Mako: and selling direct to consumers on the TikTok platform. Before we get into all of that,

00:02:11 Kevin Mako: Nikki, just give us a bit of a history of how you got to be the success story that you are today.

00:02:15 Nikki Lindgren: Yeah, absolutely. So I started in marketing really right out of college. I worked in-house and agency side

00:02:22 Nikki Lindgren: in the fashion and lifestyle space. I was working for pottery barn, world market, here in the San

00:02:26 Nikki Lindgren: Francisco Bay Area. And all that experience kind of led me to be one of the first team members

00:02:32 Nikki Lindgren: on the e-commerce store for World Market. So that was just a huge success story and lots of

00:02:38 Nikki Lindgren: opportunities to get exposed to different parts of digital that I wasn't getting at Pottery Barn.

00:02:42 Nikki Lindgren: All that led me to be agency side, sometime in-house again, and finally just crafting our own agency.

00:02:49 Nikki Lindgren: I think I had enough experience working on both sides to really understand what emerging brands were

00:02:54 Nikki Lindgren: looking for. And so we built our own shop four years ago. We're very small. There's

00:02:59 Nikki Lindgren: just 10 full-time employees. And we're really dedicated to helping our brands grow on their

00:03:04 Nikki Lindgren: e-commerce platform first and foremost. But we're doing a lot on Amazon in like Walmart

00:03:09 Nikki Lindgren: Wayfair ads these days as well. Most recently, obviously TikTok has been a huge win for us in the

00:03:15 Nikki Lindgren: emergence of TikTok shops, which I believe is like a month and a half old at this point in US,

00:03:19 Nikki Lindgren: has also really opened a lot of new doors for us in terms of how to mix me.

00:03:24 Kevin Mako: media onto TikTok. All right on. Great history. And I'm really excited to learn today

00:03:30 Kevin Mako: about, and let's start big picture. Let's start looking at it to understand like what TikTok is

00:03:34 Kevin Mako: does a platform and how does it apply to a hardware startup? And then what are some of the options within

00:03:39 Kevin Mako: the platform to start moving product, making stales, building brand recognition,

00:03:44 Kevin Mako: using TikTok to actually grow a new hardware brand. Yeah, I think the first thing people brands

00:03:49 Nikki Lindgren: I should be thinking about is the type of assets that they have available. So when we're talking about

00:03:54 Nikki Lindgren: any paid media platform these days, but particularly paid. We really need something that is

00:03:59 Nikki Lindgren: platform endemic. And so having assets that are really low-fi, really kind of shot on phones is

00:04:05 Nikki Lindgren: what we're looking for when we think about TikTok and also user-generated content,

00:04:09 Nikki Lindgren: creator content. So if the brand we're working with and the hardware product is not really big

00:04:15 Nikki Lindgren: in those lanes, we would maybe think about building the plan of getting this creator-led content

00:04:20 Nikki Lindgren: out first organically on TikTok before loading ads there.

00:04:23 Nikki Lindgren: But I think that's one thing we've helped a couple brands with is get onto the platform

00:04:28 Nikki Lindgren: when they don't have assets that really apply to the platform. So the first thing is really

00:04:32 Nikki Lindgren: understanding the type of audience you're targeting there to make sure you're producing assets

00:04:36 Nikki Lindgren: that are going to be engaging before anything else. That's interesting and powerful for a hardware

00:04:40 Kevin Mako: startup too because it's relatively cheap and easy to do user-generated content. The type of content

00:04:46 Kevin Mako: that we're talking about here for TikTok is something that you as the inventor, as the founder, can do

00:04:51 Kevin Mako: yourself. There's a ton of different things you could do. You can do works throughout the development

00:04:56 Kevin Mako: process. You could do works on what you're doing with the factory. You could do just talking about your

00:05:00 Kevin Mako: product and some of the benefits or some of the pain points that it's helping solve for some of the

00:05:04 Kevin Mako: opportunities that's creating for some of your startups. And there's dozens of other things you can

00:05:08 Kevin Mako: talk about. But the important thing to note what Nikki is saying here, especially on the

00:05:12 Kevin Mako: TikTok platform, you don't need fancy creative marketing budgets in order to have

00:05:17 Kevin Mako: great content that performs well on the TikTok platform.

00:05:21 Nikki Lindgren: 100%. And I would say the less fancy, the assets look kind of the better they'll perform. So I think that that is favorable for people who are a little nervous about going out there with lower five productions. It's the perfect mix. The emergence of shop, though, is really where we're seeing a lot of benefits there. So it's really easy for a brand to set up a shop on TikTok. There's like toggling a couple buttons, especially if you're on Shopify. It's like a one click and you're off to the races. Once the shop is enabled, we can, that

00:05:51 Nikki Lindgren: then produce ads or run ads rather, that point to the shop. So the consumer doesn't even have

00:05:57 Nikki Lindgren: to leave the TikTok environment to convert. And what we see when we do this is usually a 20% lift in return on

00:06:04 Nikki Lindgren: on ad spend or a 20 to 30% reduction in customer acquisition costs. So the idea of not only just the young

00:06:12 Nikki Lindgren: consumer, but any consumer wanting to stay on TikTok to complete their purchase is huge. And we do see similar

00:06:18 Nikki Lindgren: trends on other platforms like meta shops will perform similarly in terms of Lyft. But it just

00:06:24 Nikki Lindgren: kind of speaks to the way consumers are shopping. If they don't have to go to your e-commerce website

00:06:27 Nikki Lindgren: these days, they're happy not to.

00:06:29 Kevin Mako: That's powerful. It's amazing that you're seeing those kind of

00:06:32 Kevin Mako: results. And the nice thing about everybody listening to the podcast right now is that this is a fairly

00:06:36 Kevin Mako: fairly new platform. So you're probably ahead of most of your competitors or if you've got a

00:06:42 Kevin Mako: truly innovative hardware product, you're probably far advanced of, let's say, alternative buying

00:06:46 Kevin Mako: options for your particular product.

00:06:48 Kevin Mako: Either way, why not start to at least understand a little bit about the opportunities of

00:06:53 Kevin Mako: this platform, research it, get to know it to see if it might be a good fit for you, especially

00:06:58 Kevin Mako: because this is an early adopter scenario.

00:07:01 Nikki Lindgren: Exactly.

00:07:02 Kevin Mako: So talk to us a bit more about the ads and some of the tracking metrics. I know that on lots of

00:07:07 Kevin Mako: different platforms, you have ways to really understand return on ad spend that leads to A, B, testing

00:07:13 Kevin Mako: and all these other great tools and tricks that you can use to optimize your ads and perform well.

00:07:17 Kevin Mako: Do you see a lot of those similar?

00:07:18 Kevin Mako: tools on TikTok. And especially if you're buying through the platform, that to me has a

00:07:25 Kevin Mako: great deal of transparency all the way from the initial engagement through to the actual purchase,

00:07:28 Kevin Mako: being able to see different types of content, how well they perform. Yeah. And the interesting thing about

00:07:34 Nikki Lindgren: paid these days in general, and it's not just TikTok again, this is a little bit more of a broad

00:07:38 Nikki Lindgren: statement, is the platforms, the machine learning behind it is doing such a great job of helping us

00:07:44 Nikki Lindgren: target these days. So once we put into the platform, our objective is a sale and we won't want that sale

00:07:48 Nikki Lindgren: to occur directly on TikTok shop. Most of the weight that ad manager or a company is going

00:07:54 Nikki Lindgren: to be working on is the creative itself. So when we think then through how do we measure this on the

00:07:59 Nikki Lindgren: platform, we're going to first be looking at things related to engagement rate. So how many seconds

00:08:05 Nikki Lindgren: of your ad are they watching? Generally speaking, it's still just three seconds, which hardly counts, right?

00:08:11 Nikki Lindgren: But leading with a really interesting beginning to captivate the audience to watch longer is going to be

00:08:16 Nikki Lindgren: key. But now, once you start to build the ads and get them to watch a couple

00:08:21 Nikki Lindgren: seconds, you now have the capabilities to remark it to people who just watched one, two,

00:08:26 Nikki Lindgren: three, five seconds of your ad. So you're setting this level of remembrance and brand recall

00:08:31 Nikki Lindgren: and product to recall within the TikTok ecosystem, which is great. So as we're setting stuff up,

00:08:37 Nikki Lindgren: we think about like kind of the overall full funnel of what one can expect on TikTok. So we're

00:08:41 Nikki Lindgren: starting with that engagement. And then we're trying to drive the second touch point to be that

00:08:46 Nikki Lindgren: conversion, whether it's on TikTok shop or on the e-commerce store. That's great.

00:08:50 Kevin Mako: Now, for somebody

00:08:51 Kevin Mako: who's just starting out on the platform has a new single product. So this is a one skew brand. They've

00:08:57 Kevin Mako: got their new invention. They're producing it. They now want to gain some sales. What do you look at in terms

00:09:03 Kevin Mako: of the number of pieces of ad content that they should be relaying versus organic? I mean, what would be like

00:09:09 Kevin Mako: a reasonable starter platform based off content on the TikTok platform that they could at least at that point be

00:09:15 Kevin Mako: comfortable. They've got a starter version of getting their ads out there reasonably

00:09:20 Kevin Mako: professionally so that they can actually take a decent shot at using that platform to drive serious

00:09:24 Nikki Lindgren: sales. Yeah. So the number of assets is going to depend a little bit on the budget size. So

00:09:30 Nikki Lindgren: minimum daily spend on TikTok is tiny. It's just $20 a day. If you're only spending,

00:09:35 Nikki Lindgren: you know, very minimally to get going, you just need a couple of assets. When the budgets are going to be

00:09:40 Nikki Lindgren: 500, a couple thousand a day, you're probably going to want, I would say seven plus assets. But

00:09:45 Nikki Lindgren: here's the key. The asset should be distinctly unique in the variety of video you're

00:09:52 Nikki Lindgren: producing just so you have a clear winner, right? Brands that have more creative assets available to

00:09:59 Nikki Lindgren: them are going to want to mix different hooks and different selling points so that a couple

00:10:04 Nikki Lindgren: different cuts of ads can be made into 20 variations. So that's how the big players are

00:10:11 Nikki Lindgren: doing it. But if we're talking about just dipping our toes in to see.

00:10:15 Nikki Lindgren: if it works, I would say four to seven assets and having them all be as different from

00:10:21 Nikki Lindgren: one another as possible. So the brand can really start to evaluate what angles are working and

00:10:27 Kevin Mako: then move in that direction. Can you break down what the structure of the ideal ad looks like,

00:10:34 Kevin Mako: the different types ads? You mentioned the hook. Talk a bit about that, the three second rule,

00:10:37 Kevin Mako: all these sorts of things that can allow somebody at home to essentially create their own

00:10:42 Kevin Mako: version of an ad that is structured properly for TikTok.

00:10:45 Nikki Lindgren: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think when we're looking at the structure, we want to lead with something

00:10:50 Nikki Lindgren: compelling. So having that hook up front of, you know, being first to market in this innovation space

00:10:56 Nikki Lindgren: or whatever it is is going to be the biggest lead. Then the middle of the video is going to be

00:11:02 Nikki Lindgren: whatever your unique selling proposition could be. It could be us versus them, like what's on the market

00:11:06 Nikki Lindgren: today versus this new innovation. It could be ways in which it makes your life better, but just some

00:11:12 Nikki Lindgren: unique selling proposition that is important to the business. This could even be the founder,

00:11:17 Nikki Lindgren: the inventor had an issue that he or she was solving. And, you know, so it can be a little bit mission led to.

00:11:23 Nikki Lindgren: It doesn't just have to be, you know, a real USP, so to speak. Then the end is going to be an offer,

00:11:29 Nikki Lindgren: hopefully. So if we can offer them a discount or anything of that sense, like that's going to be the best

00:11:35 Nikki Lindgren: way to end the video. But then there are the cards and the pop-ups that we can put on our TikTok ads too.

00:11:40 Nikki Lindgren: so you can always have that omnipresent in the ad experience, whatever that offer is. So we don't

00:11:46 Nikki Lindgren: have to wait until the end of the video for the consumer to see the offer. And what's the typical length

00:11:51 Nikki Lindgren: of these videos? They can vary. So what you'll find today, at least, and you know, TikTok ads platform is

00:11:58 Nikki Lindgren: changing all the time, but an ad cannot be longer than 60 seconds. So if you have an ad that is longer

00:12:04 Nikki Lindgren: than 60 seconds that you want to push live, you just have to push organically first and then pick it up as a

00:12:09 Nikki Lindgren: Spark ad. Most of the ads we're seeing success with these days and we're running TikTok ads for

00:12:15 Nikki Lindgren: about 30 different brands or ads that are about 25 to 40 seconds in length. So it is some sort

00:12:23 Nikki Lindgren: of educational hook to really draw the consumer in. That being said, the watch time is still significantly

00:12:30 Kevin Mako: lower. That's great. So much good nuggets of like clear, actual insight here. Are there any last

00:12:36 Kevin Mako: tips that you want to give hardware startups for their TikTok marketing plans?

00:12:39 Nikki Lindgren: planning. Yeah, I think startups that have product that are ready to kind of put in

00:12:44 Nikki Lindgren: creators' hands, TikTok now has the creator content area of the platform. So you can go out and use

00:12:50 Nikki Lindgren: their platform to source creators to get UGC from. The other final tip I would leave would be related to

00:12:57 Nikki Lindgren: Spark ads in general. So I did mention that if you have a longer video, you have to first load as

00:13:04 Nikki Lindgren: organic TikTok and then pick it up as an ad. Similar, if you're working with a creator,

00:13:09 Nikki Lindgren: going to want to spark from their creator account rather than your own because then it has

00:13:14 Nikki Lindgren: that co-branding experience that feels a little bit more native to the consumer. Lots of great actual

00:13:21 Kevin Mako: nuggets there. Can you just talk a bit about what you guys do at Pennock and where people can learn more?

00:13:27 Nikki Lindgren: Yeah, absolutely. So Pennock is a paid media agency. We're helping consumer product brands figure out

00:13:33 Nikki Lindgren: how best to spend and utilize their marketing dollars to their advertiser dollars. We primarily

00:13:38 Nikki Lindgren: show up managing ads on TikTok, meta, Google, and programmatic, but really any pay-to-play

00:13:44 Nikki Lindgren: placement, we're helping our brands figure out how to get there and whether or not it's going to be a good

00:13:48 Nikki Lindgren: fit for them for their ultimate business objective, whether that's a KAC or ROAS. MER, we're really coming

00:13:53 Nikki Lindgren: into it from a scientific perspective to help the business grow. Super helpful stuff, especially for new

00:13:59 Kevin Mako: and emerging brands that may not know all of the ins and outs. I mean, we talked about a lot of things today

00:14:03 Kevin Mako: on the show, but of course, there's so much it goes into the details of doing it well. So if you're just

00:14:08 Kevin Mako: starting out and you're on a limited budget, learn about this and try and experiment with it yourself.

00:14:13 Kevin Mako: But if you want to take it more seriously and you want to scale, then that's where you need to bring in

00:14:17 Kevin Mako: the pros more unlikely and build out that multiple asset, multiple hook strategy, A-B testing,

00:14:23 Kevin Mako: all of these things, figuring out across different platforms, what works best, and then really finding

00:14:27 Kevin Mako: out where your best return on ad spend comes from, doing more of that while you continue to find

00:14:32 Kevin Mako: new channels and verticals and all the rest to really scale a great product and getting in front

00:14:36 Kevin Mako: of eyeballs. I mean, that's what it's all about. You've got to get it.

00:14:38 Kevin Mako: in front of people who are targeted that may want your product and hook them in, sell them on

00:14:43 Kevin Mako: why your product is so great, and then make that conversion at the end of the day. So, Nikki,

00:14:46 Kevin Mako: much appreciate it for all your words of wisdom today. As always, I will put the links below

00:14:50 Kevin Mako: to your company in the chat. So if anyone wants to link through, you could just pop below.

00:14:54 Kevin Mako: Nikki, thanks again. Appreciate all your help today. And we will talk again soon.

00:14:58 Nikki Lindgren: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Kevin. Thanks. Thanks. And take care.

00:15:01 Kevin Mako: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast. If you found some value in the

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00:15:11 Kevin Mako: questions, guest suggestions, or anything else, feel free to reach out to us anytime at our email,

00:15:16 Kevin Mako: podcast at MakoDesign.com. This show is hosted by Kevin Mako, North America's leading expert on product

00:15:24 Kevin Mako: development for hardware startups, and the podcast is produced by Mako Design, the original firm

00:15:29 Kevin Mako: providing end-to-end consumer product development services tailored specifically to hardware startups, small

00:15:35 Kevin Mako: manufacturers and inventors. Take your product from idea to store shelves at Mako

00:15:40 Kevin Mako: That's M-A-K-O-Design.com. Thanks for joining and see you again soon.