Please read this section with these questions:
1. What are the benefits of having personal IP attributes on a TikTok account?
2. How should individuals or small teams arrange project budgets?
3. How should small teams selling goods on TikTok optimize the supply chain?
Individuals and small teams are more flexible on the road to TikTok monetization, but they are also more challenging. So after analyzing the monetization path, I would like to give the following five suggestions to individual and small team TikTok entrepreneurs.
1. Building a good personal IP attribute can achieve twice the result with half the effort
Whether it is an expert account or a product-carrying account, if it has personal IP attributes, it will greatly improve the interaction rate and fan stickiness, especially the expert account. Because fans prefer to interact with a real person, just like we will follow Dong Mingzhu, but are unwilling to follow the official account of Gree Electric.
IP is inseparable from personality. It must have characteristics, preferences, and personality to trigger one explosion point after another and make fans active. At this point, having characteristics is often more important than looking good. Let fans be familiar with your characteristics and get used to your characteristics, this is to establish a good personality.
But personal IP also needs to face some negative situations. If someone likes you, there will definitely be someone who doesn’t like you. We can’t make everyone like you, so let the part of people who like you like you more.
If you are an individual who sells goods, you can also show it on TikTok as a small boss. Many fans will like you because of your attitude towards the product, your seriousness in doing things, your interesting personality, and your creative design, and will pay for you. Many craftsmen, artists, and designers do this. Fans are often willing to pay a higher price to buy your products because they like you, appreciate your ability and spirit. You can search for “smallbusiness” on TikTok and look at the practices of such experts to find inspiration.
Second, choose a sector with the most advantages and specialize in it
Small teams have limited manpower and cannot take care of everything. Like large companies, each sector is assigned a department to do it. So you have to focus all your energy on one place to get results.
For example, if you are good at teaching foreigners to learn Chinese, then concentrate on shooting dozens of short videos every day, editing them in one go and posting 2~3 videos every day. At the same time, polish the course outline and record it one by one. The course is your product, and you must take it seriously. These things can be taken care of by one person, and they can be done very well. But if you disperse your energy on this road, want to make videos and courses by yourself, take advertisements and bring goods, and want to teach others how to do TikTok, then it is very likely that you will not be able to do anything well.
Doing a simple thing well is not simple, and doing every ordinary thing well is extraordinary. Focus your energy on what you are best at, get results, and put real money in your pocket, then you will have the confidence to recruit troops for yourself. At this time, it is very appropriate for you to develop other sectors based on the basic business.
3. Reasonable arrangement of project budget
Small teams have even less budget, and they can’t prepare three to five million yuan to go overseas like big companies. So we have to be strategic in budget arrangement: [Pit 18] We can’t spend all the budget in one step, which will cause the project to be stuck and have no money to advance.
I know a rich second-generation who came back from studying abroad. He doesn’t want to inherit the family business and wants to do TikTok. His father only gave him 100,000 yuan and said that if he lost all the money, he would give up on it. He had no plan or concept for the budget. He rented an office, hired two people, bought two Apple phones and started to make accounts. For videos that he was satisfied with, he was willing to spend money to put them on. He did it for three months, and the account data was not bad. Some people also started to find them to do paid advertising. However, the money he had on hand could not support the rent and labor wages, and the money from advertising monetization had not yet reached the level that could support these expenses. In the end, because the bet with his father was unsuccessful, he gave up the TikTok project and went home to inherit the family business.
Maybe this is not a bad ending for him, but for an ordinary individual entrepreneur, this 100,000 yuan may be all his assets, and failure will bring a big blow to the family. As an individual or a small team entrepreneur, you can temporarily not spend money that is not necessary in the early stage (such as renting a beautiful office building, designing a trademark, spending a lot of money to buy a domain name, buying expensive professional equipment, and investing a lot of paid advertising). Wait until you run the closed loop of the business model, and then arrange a reasonable budget and expenditure according to the project stage, combined with the TikTok five forces model I mentioned in Chapter 2.
Tips
The attitude of a powerful trader towards spending money must be: be very generous when it should be spent, and be extremely stingy when it should not be spent.
Fourth, we must constantly optimize the supply chain during the sales process
I mentioned in the previous section that the supply chain is a problem faced by individual entrepreneurs when making videos and live broadcasts. When you don’t have orders at the beginning, you can’t get the best source and price, so you can only use a slightly higher cost to complete the business closed loop test. Once the model is running, you need to continuously optimize the supply chain. Regarding how to optimize the supply chain, I will share with you some useful experience.
When choosing a supply chain at the beginning, if your understanding of the product is not professional enough, then talk to a few more factories. Ask more detailed questions when talking to the first one, and ask the manufacturer what other professional standards or production steps this product has to eliminate blind spots in the understanding of the product. Then, talk to the second company with this knowledge, and talk to the third company with the knowledge of the first and second companies… and so on. After talking to more than a dozen companies, you can basically establish a relatively complete understanding of this product, become a half-expert, and also establish your own supply chain reserve, so that you can choose to adjust when you encounter problems in the future.
When your business closed loop has been run through and there are a steady stream of orders, you must prepare more than 2~3 sources of goods for yourself. Because once a supply chain cannot keep up in time, there are others to standby, at least you will not be unable to ship on time, resulting in adverse consequences such as return orders, complaints, and low scores.
When the number of orders increases, talk to the supply chain about price and stocking issues. At this time, the initial disadvantage no longer exists because of your increased sales, and the manufacturer will still give you cheap prices, good services and priority supply qualifications. And your previous understanding of the product and multiple supply chain manufacturers can also help you control quality and price at every link. Being cheap is not a skill, but being cheaper than others and making money is a skill.
This step-by-step approach can ensure that there will be no major problems on the supply chain side, and it will grow with the business.
Fifth, strengthen the sense of the Internet, the effect of the expert account may be better
The expert account type will have a lot of room for content development, and we have many choices for the direction and topic of creation. But because you may not have a personal understanding of the situation in the target market like the locals, or you have been to this country but now you are not subject to the continuous environmental impact, and there is no way to keep the latest information, so you need to enhance the sense of the Internet.
Go to the social media of the target market more often, not only TikTok, but also other popular websites and apps. The first advantage is that the more you browse, the more familiar you will be with this market, and you may find more product directions and marketing inspirations; the second advantage is that you can find your own creative inspiration here, and when you publish a video, you may bring a topic, which may have unexpected results.
Because the influencer account has a lot of room to play, it can also achieve better results when it is hot. But if you are an influencer in a certain vertical category, such as a teacher who teaches Chinese, you should use this method with caution. You can selectively take advantage of hot spots, but the content must be related to the content in your account and in line with the content that your fan portrait is concerned about. Otherwise, it will damage the experience of your fans, because even if the video is popular, but the fans attracted have wrong tags, it will also lead to inaccurate account crowds, which will not be worth the loss.
In addition, when using this method, pay attention to protecting the security of the account, do not publish or promote wrong values or violate laws and regulations, and have very extreme views.
If you haven’t decided which way to go, read the contents of the entire sixth chapter again and again. If you want to make better decisions, you must first understand how many options there are in total, and be clear about the considerations and results behind each option. The two sections of this chapter provide you with this information to help you make better decisions.