The Tok'ening

It’s been 1 year since we launched our TikTok account.  I documented some of our progress previously on this site as we attempted to build a following (Previous TikTok series)

The past year was spent testing everything we could think of when it came to TikTok content.  To state that the TikTok algorithm is a confusing one to figure out… would be an understatement, to say the least.  We would post TikToks we thought would garner a bunch of views and engagement to see them perform poorly.  Some TikToks we thought would perform mediocrely… performed amazingly.  We continued down the path of testing and focus as failure was never an option.  Towards the end of last year, we decided to double down on content.  To be clear, content has ALWAYS been a major focus of the BattlBox brand.  We simply wanted to lean into it more.  Brandon added a full-time video editor to his team to ensure we always had fresh content to post and our frequency could increase.  We are talking content across all channels, but TikTok is always a part of the content we are producing.  There is not a single internal meeting around content planning that does not involve TikTok.

At times throughout the past year, I imagine that some of my team thought I was crazy.  We were putting a lot of time and resources into TikTok and not seeing an immediate return.  Occasionally, we would see a TikTok featuring a specific product do really well which meant we would sell some of that product on our site.  This was however an occasional occurrence, not a regular one.  Furthermore, we are a subscription box first, not a marketplace.  

As we finished out last year we had a goal of 300k followers.  It did not seem that we were going to hit it.  We had been stuck in the mid 200ks for a couple of months.  On 12/20/2021 we posted a product review.  It did really well compared to recent TikToks we had made, quickly getting a few hundred thousand views.  

It was a response TikTok we posted to a comment on it 6 days later however that blew up.  It quickly caught momentum on the FYP and was on track to become our biggest TikTok ever.  Our follower count (as always the case) started to grow fairly quickly as well and our goal of 300k was actually going to be possible.

Previously, when we had a TikTok do well, we were nervous to keep posting additional content.  In short, we were fearful that a new TikTok might make the previous successful one slow down.  Not this time, we continued to push new content and we have not stopped.  We obviously hit our goal of 300k.  

As we rolled into 2022, we started to see something interesting.  Our traffic from TikTok was growing as expected, but we were also finally seeing success on TikTok from our advertising efforts.  We had been testing TikTok advertising the whole time we were working on the content side but had not seen anything scalable.  Here is a screenshot of our top traffic sources in January.

Next, here is our post-purchase survey data for all new customers in the month of January.

As we continued to see success with both Tiktok organic and Tiktok advertising, it was time to scale and that is where we are today.  Increase the content frequency and increase ad spend.

So what is The Tok’ening?  It’s the day we were looking for.  It’s the day in a post iOS issue world where we can find something that can replace the success Facebook used to give us prior.  What in the world am I talking about?  The January data I just shared does not suggest that at all.  Oh, my bad.  Let me show you February so far.

This ladies and gentlemen is The Tok’ening.  

Is this sustainable and the new normal?  No clue.  

Are we going to keep leaning in on both organic and paid?  Absolutely. 

On the organic side, we are now up to 378k followers and finally hit 3M likes.

On the advertising side, big shoutout to Eric Carlson and the SweatPants crew for being able to run this dual-threat playbook with us.