Analysis Reveals TikTok’s Influence On Customers’ Buy Journeys

TikTok shares the second installment of its Path-to-Buy Report, a research that reveals TikTok’s impression on shoppers’ buy journeys – from discovery to consideration to post-purchase evangelism.

The most recent analysis offers manufacturers a number of attention-grabbing insights into how they will harness the platform not solely to drive culturally related conversations but in addition to supercharge their gross sales.

As well as, the report demonstrates how TikTok’s platform and neighborhood can drive impression past spur-of-the-moment impulse buys.

Customers are likely to share joyful content material about big-ticket buy objects akin to holidays and new automobiles, which in flip drives motion amongst different shoppers who’re desirous to take part within the dialog each on and off the platform.

Key highlights of the most recent analysis embrace:

• TikTok has a robust and constructive impression all through the acquisition journey. In reality, 50% of customers report that they’re extra prone to really feel joyful, excited, or completely satisfied concerning the merchandise they’ve bought.
• TikTok seems to be a word-of-mouth market that’s pushed by post-purchase actions. Customers flip to manufacturers, creators, and trending subjects to find new merchandise.
  • 58% of TikTok customers uncover new manufacturers and merchandise on the platform.
  • 44% found one thing they instantly went out to purchase.
  • Discovery occurs on TikTok 1.1x greater than on different platforms.

It’s additionally price noting that what occurs on TikTok doesn’t keep on TikTok.

• TikTok customers are 56% extra prone to analysis new manufacturers or merchandise on the platform than on different platforms, even for bigger-ticket purchases like automotive and journey.
• Nevertheless, these TikTok-inclusive journeys additionally see:
  • 65% of customers conducting extra on-line analysis.
  • 57% of customers looking for extra particulars on the place to purchase merchandise.
  • 54% of customers additionally conducting in-person analysis.

TikTok’s distinctive discovery patterns and robust engagement habits within the analysis course of additionally implies that glad prospects amplify manufacturers and merchandise post-purchase.

• 58% of TikTok customers satisfied one other particular person to make use of a product
• 49% of TikTok customers advocate merchandise to those that are searching for them.
• 47% of TikTok customers persuade others to purchase merchandise that they noticed on the platform,

Matt Southern, Search Engine Journal’s Senior Information Author, lined the primary a part of TikTok’s world analysis research again in February in an article entitled, “TikTok a Key A part of Customers’ Path to Buy.”

That analysis discovered that the trail to buy on TikTok regarded extra like an “infinite loop” than the standard path to buy.

Screenshot from TikTok.com/enterprise, February 2022

And in an article that I wrote in December 2020, which was entitled, “The Way forward for web optimization Lies within the “Messy Center” of the Buy Journey,” analysis by Google’s shopper insights crew within the UK additionally discovered that customers loop between exploring and evaluating the choices obtainable to them till they’re able to buy.

Screenshot from Thinkwithgoogle.com, July 2020

And I outlined the same looping course of for locating new movies and sharing compelling content material in my e-book, YouTube and Video Advertising, which was revealed again in November 2011. And I’d been impressed to create this mannequin of video search and sharing by studying about analysis that was performed earlier than I used to be born.

In 1948, Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet revealed The Folks’s Alternative, a research of the 1940 U.S. Presidential election. They discovered a two-step circulation of communication. Step one, from media sources to opinion leaders, was a switch of knowledge, however the second step, from opinion leaders to their followers, additionally concerned interpersonal affect.

Greater than a decade in the past, I used the two-step circulation mannequin to clarify how YouTube labored. Harnessing this perception enabled creators and entrepreneurs to leverage YouTube’s distinctive energy because the world’s largest video search engine in addition to the world’s largest video sharing website.

So, TikTok’s newest analysis is supported by a sequence of comparable findings over 80 years. That implies that whether or not you need to construct model consciousness, generate certified leads, enhance site visitors, or enhance conversions, social video works far more like word-of-mouth advertising and marketing and loads much less like mass media advertising and marketing.

And recognizing that is the important thing to creating digital advertising and marketing methods that may harness TikTok’s impression on shoppers’ buy journeys – from discovery to consideration to post-purchase evangelism.