TikTok and Shopify have today announced a partnership in the UK, helping Shopify merchants create and run ad campaigns directly geared towards the highly engaged, 100 million strong TikTok community in Europe.
The partnership underlines how TikTok and Shopify are helping businesses embrace new ideas, trends and insights. Helping Shopify merchants to stay ahead by authentically engaging with the TikTok community in a simple, scalable way. Since launching its TikTok For Business platform, TikTok has seen brands make real connections with users by embracing the creativity that makes the platform unique.
In the past year, Shopify has seen high growth in the UK market with the number of new store creations on Shopify increasing 116% vs. 2019. Some of the UK’s fastest growing brands use Shopify’s all-in-one commerce platform to sell online, from high-growth companies such as Gymshark, All Birds and Lounge, as well as the next generation of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
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Shimona Mehta, Managing Director, Shopify EMEA, added: “The past year has been one of immense change for retailers, who have had to be agile in a rapidly evolving retail landscape. Today, the way that entrepreneurs start, run, and grow businesses has permanently altered, as has how consumers shop.
“Brands are having to compete like never before to get the attention of buyers. The goal is for businesses to make it easier for buyers to discover their brands. With this new TikTok partnership, Shopify merchants in the UK can connect with new customers in a way that can help them build their brand, drive sales and create engaged communities”.
Through the partnership Shopify merchants of all sizes can access core functions of the TikTok For Business Ads Manager, comprising its easy-to-use tools to create and manage ads on the platform, without leaving the Shopify dashboard. Highlights include:
- “1-click” pixel: Shopify merchants can install or connect their TikTok Pixel, a small piece of code that businesses can place on their website to find new customers, optimise campaigns and measure ad performance, with a click of a button, making it quicker and easier to track conversions.
- A One-Stop-Shop for TikTok Campaigns: Merchants can create campaigns, target audiences and track performance in one place.
- Creative Made Simple: Everyone has a story to tell on TikTok, and the TikTok channel enables Shopify merchants to create native, shareable ads that resonate with the community. TikTok’s intuitive creative tools help turn merchants’ products into high quality TikToks in minutes.
- NEW Advanced Matching: This new feature lets Shopify merchants more effectively retarget audiences to better match TikTok ads with website conversions, and enrich audiences for retargeting.
- Free Ad Credit: Shopify Merchants on the Trial and Basic programmes will get $100/£74/€82 in ad credit after they’ve registered and connected a new TikTok For Business account to Shopify and spent $25/£18/€20 within two weeks.*
Lisa Friedrich, Head of SMB at TikTok Europe, commented: “The businesses thriving today are continuing to innovate in order to find the best ways to engage with customers. As the home of joyful creativity, and with a hugely diverse audience, we are very excited about how this new partnership will be able to help brands in that quest. Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen such resilience from founders and entrepreneurs across Europe, including the UK, who have brought energy, creativity and new ideas. They will be at the heart of future economic growth. This partnership will hopefully be a game-changer for Shopify merchants in the UK, helping them quickly, effectively and accurately reach target audiences online, and convert that into spend.”
Enabling Shopify merchants to tap into TikTok’s vibrant community to stay ahead
TikTok is home to a vibrant and engaged community, and continues to see tremendous growth across every age group. As a content-first platform, it is ideal for new and existing brands to reach customers and achieve success. According to Kantar, 67% of its audience is aged 25 and over, and 83% of those browsing TikTok say that seeing trending content has inspired them to make a purchase. The partnership will help merchants stay ahead of trends by making it easier for them to tap into the creativity of the TikTok community, be discovered, and optimize their marketing campaigns.
Brands already thriving through the partnership
Shopify and TikTok have already teamed up with a number of innovative businesses in the UK and more widely in Europe to showcase the power of TikTok and Shopify’s partnership and the results speak for themselves:
Taiwo Adegbulu, co-founder and co-CEO, Omolola Jewellery, said: “When our regular stockists were forced to close, Shopify and TikTok became even more critical to the success of our business. Shopify has given us a simple platform to run our online operations since we started Omolola Jewellery, providing helpful data and insights that remove the guesswork from running a business. Advertising on TikTok has complemented this perfectly. As well as being a fun and unique experience, it has opened up a completely new community of jewellery-lovers we can reach with our products. Over 1.8 million people have engaged with our ads since we joined the beta programme – not just in the UK but around the world too, which is really exciting as we look to break into new markets. The TikTok and Shopify integration has made the purchasing journey much smoother for potential customers. This helped us achieve a huge sales increase of 335% compared to December last year and attract hundreds of new customers during the important festive period.”
Dan Marsden, Co-Founder and CEO, Lounge, said: “We’re always looking for new and creative ways to reach and engage with customers, so partnering with TikTok and Shopify on the beta programme seemed like a no-brainer. The user journey from platform to purchase is super seamless. We have been able to serve ads to our core target market on TikTok, then drive them straight to the product page on our Shopify hosted site with fantastic results. 100% of the sales we generated through the new partnership came from new customers too! Our overall business goal is growth and new audience acquisition while nurturing our existing customers. The TikTok and Shopify partnership will definitely help us to achieve that goal.”
Scott Dickson, Founder, Phox Water, said: “Pouring our efforts into driving sales via Shopify and TikTok has turned out to be the best thing we’ve ever done. While our products have always attracted environmentally-conscious customers, TikTok has introduced Phox to a community of people for whom sustainability is a lifestyle. It has made advertising easy and the response has been amazing – there’s definitely an audience for new ideas and eco-friendly innovations on the platform. The integration with Shopify helps us convert this increased interest to sales really easily. On top of this, Shopify maximises the number of new customers we can acquire, keeps costs down and tracks key metrics as we grow. Alongside helping to boost our sales by 42% since joining the beta programme, we’ve expanded our workforce over the last year to meet growing demand.”
Danny Gray, Founder, War Paint For Men, said: “TikTok and Shopify have allowed us to share our brand story in a genuine way and connect with audiences that we hadn’t been able to reach before. This includes Gen Z who we are now successfully engaging with through the platform on their own terms – something that can be tricky for brands to get right! The pandemic impacted our retail potential due to physical shops having to close their doors, and we quickly realised we needed to build out our own direct to consumer channels. Shopify helped us do that at what felt like the click of a button and access new markets at the same time.”
This partnership also helps to build on TikTok’s commitment to support SMBs following the launch of the TikTok SMB Hub last year, a new platform which provides simple, cost-effective advice to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) attract new customers and retain existing ones in their key markets.
