Exploring the Business Side of TikTok

[00:00:02] Canned Intro Welcome to The Partnership Economy. This podcast explores the power of partnerships through candid conversations with industry leaders. Join our hosts, Dave Yovanno, CEO and Todd Crawford, co-founder of Impact.com, as they unpack the future of partnership as a lever for scale and an opportunity to put the consumer first.

[00:00:23] Dave Yovanno Welcome back to The Partnership Economy podcast. This is your host, Dave Yovanno, and I’m excited to introduce today’s guest, Vana Han. Vana manages SMB Global Partnerships at TikTok, a brand that needs no introduction. Vana offers unique insight into TikTok for Business, as opposed to the user side or social media app that we’re all familiar with. TikTok for Business is focused on getting brands and advertisers to use the platform, and Vana has played a pivotal role in building TikTok’s monetization arm from the ground up. Today, her main focus is on growing strategic partnerships at the company. In this episode, you’ll hear how traditional partners didn’t quite fit the TikTok model and instead how agencies, creators and strategic partners have proved to be most effective. Vana also shares her greatest takeaways and challenges from working at a company that is rapidly growing with invaluable tips on how to build trust with your partners and your audience. And don’t miss the Lightning Round, where we discuss TikTok’s latest feature. I highly recommend staying tuned for this episode. To get us started, what does working on global partnerships for SMB at TikTok look like? Could you tell us just a little bit more about how you got started, what your role is there?

[00:01:43] Vana Han Zoom out a little bit. So essentially TikTok has two sides of the arm, right? So you have the user side, which is pretty much a household name by now. But a lot of people don’t know that TikTok also have TikTok for business, which is the monetization arm of the business. So the user side, it’s been around for seven years globally, and then the business side is only started to grow footing in North America about three years ago. So my role is I was initially hired two and a half years ago to build the North America and LATAM acquisition effort, essentially to get the SMB to use our app platform since then. So part of that program, I launched affiliate and partnership program. So this program has become so successful. Now, essentially, my role has transitioned to basically lead the global effort to grow the partnership.

[00:02:38] Dave Yovanno Yeah, growth creates opportunity. Like everything, everything needs to grow. So, I think a lot of a lot of businesses define SMB differently. So I’m curious as to how a company like TikTok defines SMB, so that small, medium sized businesses, I’m assuming? How does that compare with like how do you define that internally, TikTok, relative to like mid-market or enterprise, for example?

[00:03:01] Vana Han Yeah, you are right. That company has their own definition from company to company and also region to region. So the SMB segment will comprise companies that spend less than a million a year in the marketing vertical. So although SMB can technically have up to a few hundred employees, by definition, most of those businesses in this segment are small. So, for example, even though SMB by definition in Europe can be as large as 250 employees, but really 93 percent of those SMB employees have less than 10 people and they usually earn less than two million in revenue.

[00:03:45] Dave Yovanno You know, you’re part of, I think, what you would call a partnerships team responsible for affiliate and partnerships. How is that, you know, the team structured essentially, where do partnerships sit within the wider TikTok company?

[00:03:58] Vana Han The way that we streamline, there’s basically three buckets of partnership. And each company label it differently. So on our side we have API partnership. So that’s essentially any time like the partnership requires a technical integration. So impact is a good example. We have a technical integration with you guys through API. The second bucket is value add. Usually this one sits in in the either a brand team or upper funnel marketing team in most companies. So essentially you’re trying to build a long term value at type of partnership, co-marketing partnership with brands. And then you have affiliate partnership. So that’s essentially like it’s basically also value add, but it does have a monetary and referral component to it.

[00:04:48] Dave Yovanno And I think that that relates to a it’s kind of I want to jump right into it actually, and talk about additionally like the I think had talked about this like partnerships 101, the types of partners that you work with, I think you just described, some of the ways in which you weren’t, but the types of partners specifically. I know you’re working with at least three different types of partners that you’d shared with me in the past. Would you mind, maybe sharing a little bit of that with the audience in terms of what, you know, your team is largely responsible for?

[00:05:17] Vana Han This is fairly a new territory for us, just because the company itself, like the business model is new. So when we first started, we did a lot of like, tests, learning and iterate type of framework. And so what we find is traditional partners don’t necessarily work with our business model and also our strength of our product. What we did find is three type of partnership.

[00:05:42] Dave Yovanno And before you outline, I hate to interrupt, but like what what would you how would you describe traditional types of partners in that way?

[00:05:50] Vana Han I describe as the coupon loyalty type of partners. So what essentially worked really well in the retail or B2C type of space.

[00:06:04] Dave Yovanno So it sounds like you learned some things and you evolved. What has it evolved to? Where the types that you’re working with today?

[00:06:09] Vana Han Yeah. Evolved into a three type of vertical partner verticals that we wanted to go after, at least for, for the immediate, near future strategy. So one is agency. So that’s media agency. They could be like performance agency, performance marketing agency, social media agency or brand agency, but essentially they’re extensions of our team, right? So we refer to them as like train the trainers. We educate the agency, then the agency can educate brands and advertisers. So that’s that bucket works really well. The second one is content creators. So those folks are marketing influencers, marketing gurus, advertising platform. So they also contribute quite a bit in our program. And then the third one is strategic partnerships. So they’re bigger. They’re bigger what we consider as a whales. So they’re a Fortune 500 companies, essentially they have a SMB segmentation. So how do we partner with them. This is more going back to like the co-marketing opportunities with those bigger brands to help essentially SMB to empower their SMB segment within their audience to try our product.

[00:07:28] Dave Yovanno Very interesting. Would you say on the, when you describe your content partners, would you say creators kind of make up a majority of your the ones that are creating content for you?

[00:07:38] Vana Han Yeah, they make up about 30 percent. But along with agency, I would say those two segments make up about 70 percent.

[00:07:48] Dave Yovanno Now, I remember you talking about agencies like train the trainers. But I have to imagine there’s a lot of creators that are not as big as an agency, let’s say, but they are educators, really. They’re out there showing people how to use the platform. Would you agree with that?

[00:08:03] Vana Han Yeah, definitely. I mean, talking about influencer, it’s pretty it’s a pretty wide bucket, right? Like anyone that can influencer your audience decision making is considered as an influencer.

[00:08:16] Dave Yovanno You talked a little bit about the evolution of your own partnership strategy. I’d love the like level of that before we keep unpacking further in terms of like partnerships and, within your team and SMB. Yeah, I’m sure a lot of people would be curious to learn just a little bit about TikTok’s journey itself. You know, it’s like you’ve continued to grow and innovate so much as a company, you know. How has the company sort of evolved, you know, just during your limited time there?

[00:08:40] Vana Han It’s very interesting. It’s one of those things that you look outside, you’re like, oh, okay, this it’s this perspective. And then when you’re actually going under the hood and you actually get to see how the sausage is made. Oh, this is a different perspective. So definitely our platform is is young on both sides, user side as well as business side. So on the business side, we compare ourselves to like Google, Meta and other platform which has been around for a long time, for decades. Right. If you think about when Google went IPO, which is around in 2005, right. And then Facebook went IPO in I think 2011 or 2012. So they’ve been around for a while. And when they started, there was also less internet regulations about cookie deprecation GDPR. So they definitely have a head start. And we’re coming later, you know, along with a lot of other smaller companies who’s trying to like breakthrough in this space. So because we have TikTok have experienced that rapid growth experience, our users have much higher expectations from us. Right. Because they’re comparing with us with Google and Meta and X of such. So there’s a lot of hard work behind the scene that pours into our product growth to meet our consumers demand and also our own appetite to innovate.

[00:10:08] Dave Yovanno Yeah that’s excellent. And, you know, it’s fun to be part of such a high growth, you know, sort of experience. I have to imagine it’s a you’re learning a lot and it’s and it’s exciting. You got a great team just talking with you. So glad to be part of that. Bringing it back to your diverse. What you’ve learned is that you started with some traditional affiliates, didn’t quite work for your customer acquisition. You evolved into kind of a mix of content partners, a lot of them being creators, or at least 30 percent of them being creators. Agencies. You get strategic partners. It sounds like a pretty diverse program today. And I’m just curious how you’re finding some of these partners, right. So from like a discovery and a recruitment standpoint, maybe some pro tips there and, or, you know, some orientation as to how you, how you and your team kind of go about it.

[00:10:53] Vana Han Yeah. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier, is through a lot of test, learn and iterate framework. But the our initial approach is two ponds. So we look at our internal data to look at like what’s working, what’s not working, like what vertical. This is industry vertical. Just a lot of data points. I think that’s the beauty of being on the brand side. And also being on the platform side is there’s a lot of economics that you can look into and dive into the data. The second approach is we look externally to our end user. Right. So like essentially we’re trying to make a connection between our product and our end user to see how we can empower them. That’s our mission end of the day on the business side. So essentially looking into SMB, how do they behave, where do they go read their news and really just put their hat to just put that like customer hat and centric kind of mindset and then draw the user journey of like, okay, if if our end user is going to those influencer resource to learn about how to launch TikTok ads, then we should partner with those people, right, to have a better education and better user journey. So those are the two approach that we used.

[00:12:12] Dave Yovanno Yeah. And yeah I think that’s that’s smart. And you know I think that’s good advice for you know, people especially people just kind of getting started into, you know, the partnership economy essentially it’s not over complicated. Do exactly what you just said. It’s like, you know, follow your customer’s journey. Like where are your small businesses sourcing information, you know, how to run their business and tapping into it that way. Those, you know, where they’re sourcing information, those are your potential partners. So it might be good to like hear a couple of examples. Just to make it even more tangible, I think for our audience. Like what could be some some examples, I guess in any of those categories, like your content creators agencies and your strategic partners, what would be some examples that you could share so that kind of understand that that journey a little bit better?

[00:12:59] Vana Han A good example will be we actually partner with our own marketing science team, and we did a survey last summer essentially to survey globally our, our advertisers. Like where do they get their information, particularly information about how to use our product. And we were so overwhelmingly like find it interesting. The results come back and tell us that, hey, they’re not coming to our own platform. We basically have so many team members, right, from product team to product marketing team to marketing team, creating all those really helpful resource centers and marketing materials to basically give people information about best practices. But surprisingly, 75 percent of our customers say that they go to influencer websites to learn about how to use our product and learn about those nuances and how to hack it. And like, oh, this is really interesting. Then we did a follow up and to ask them specifically, where exactly did they go to learn about those informations? So that’s a good example of like leveraging both internal data resource as well as like external customer journey to figure out like where should we go. Like how do we how do we find the right angle.

[00:14:19] Dave Yovanno You know, are you finding that across the board? Well, I use that in my own search. Like, and I think I wonder if this is just become trained societal behavior where people just don’t think that the brand has the answers. They think somebody else has the answers over, you know, they’re going to get to the bottom of it more quickly, or it’s more recent or something like that and, yeah.

[00:14:38] Vana Han It’s okay. My kids think I don’t have answers. They go to their friend, so it’s okay.

[00:14:43] Dave Yovanno Exactly. And that’s the thing. It’s like, you know, that that kind of creates, you know, I guess a sauce for you to kind of, you know, get in there and draw alliances with those sources of information and, you know, create an incentive, I guess, to to get them to do more of that and refer you customers essentially.

[00:14:59] Vana Han Yeah. I think the key here is building trust, right? Like influencers, it’s just easier for them to build trust through their authentic voices.

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[00:15:24] Dave Yovanno If creators make a, you know, not the majority of your content sort of partnerships. What are some other, you know, types, I guess, of partners that make up the content category agency.

[00:15:38] Vana Han It’s a pretty fine line between creators and agency because the agency, when I say agency, it’s mostly unmanaged agency. So they’re not like the big six of the world, right? They’re more like met to themselves or SMBs. So those type of agency and consultants, they do create a lot of content. So we actually consider agency as part of the content creation bucket.

[00:16:03] Dave Yovanno You know, on the flip side, what are some of the challenges that you faced when when setting up some of these partnerships?

[00:16:09] Vana Han My number one challenge is product education. We’re fairly a new platform. TikTok ads manager. So that’s one of how to educate people to use our product and understand, like what are the barriers at the customer base and how do we address that. That’s one. And then two is just helping like our platform is is could be intimidating because we are one of the platforms that you have to have TikTok first creative. So you can just repurpose your creative, from Google or Meta Instagram and then just like repurpose onto our platform. It’s what we call TikTok First Creation Imagery. You have to create our format first, and then you can actually repurpose that into other like into Google, Facebook Reel. So that’s the biggest challenge is like for particularly for SMB where one, is the budget constraint, two, is their time constraint and three, is their resource constraint. Right. So like us in our space like signal and pixel, it’s very crucial to the marketing campaign success. And a lot of SMB needs that level of education and resource to be able to do those things.

[00:17:31] Dave Yovanno What about just advice in general for people who are trying to manage custom partnerships on a larger scale? How do you balance personalization, for example, with scale?

[00:17:42] Vana Han That’s an interesting question. I actually learned this from you from last year’s creator event that you guys host in LA. And I remember you were on the stage and you provided a survey results saying that, like, I think it was the topic around what do creators view commission structure. And actually the survey come back, which I thought it was counterintuitive. They don’t care so much about the money. Money is part of it. But what they prioritize is building the long term relationship with the brand. And the walk away from me is that’s really like we should really treat partners, even though it’s a very such a big program now. It’s only been around for a year and a half, but each partner, they’re different. You just have to treat them like a person and as a friend and family, right, versus just a number in your program. And so that’s what I started to do is I start doing that to, you know, simple things as when I’m communicating with them via email rather than, you know, writing a kind of business like type of email. I just make it really personable. Like, sometimes I, like mistakenly just put like typo in there or I will just do lowercase, kind of like I’m typing text messages to someone. So that’s like a very simple like small trivial thing to do. But I just get more response. And I feel like people connect with that, right, in like the same message that we’re trying to tell our internal team and creators be authentic. So I think that’s what it is, is like when you’re trying to build relationship, rather be small or at scale, it should be authentic. Like I’m hosting an event in New York. This is my very first affiliate summit. Like we ask partners like, hey, what do you want to eat for breakfast? Rather than making that decision for them, they just feel like, oh, you’re including me in part of your decision making. That’s great. Even as small as to, like, what type of bagel do I want?

[00:19:43] Dave Yovanno Yeah, I’m glad you call that out, because it’s so important. And I remember that research that we talked about at that event last year, and I think it, it the it showed that same data point on both sides of the table. Brands wanted longer term partnerships as well. So you had creators that wanted longer term partnerships. They don’t want this one and done type of thing because and brands didn’t want it either. They want to invest in a longer term relationship on both sides. And it makes sense. Right. Like this isn’t that, you know, you had mentioned traditional affiliates at the start, right, that very transactional nature where, you know, you’re giving them an offer and if it’s not high enough, they just say no and move on to the next campaign. In the world of partnerships, and it sounds like, you know, you very much agree because you just articulated it. Probably the best I’ve heard. You know, it’s it’s deeper than that, right? There is time invested, right, to get to know your platform. Right. They got to understand it like, believe in it because it’s going to come across in the message, the content that they’re publishing. And you don’t want that to be wasted time, right? You want that to endure. And on both sides. Right. There’s brand association here. It’s not like I said, it’s just not this transactional campaign that’s kind of a one and done sort of thing. That is probably one of the most important points that defines this category, right? That and the fact that you’ve got someone else who is talking about your brand. This isn’t TikTok running an ad talking about themselves, right? This is a partner, a creator, you know, a business that you have an integration with whoever. They’re the ones that are talking about you. You know, there’s time invested and, you know, to really get the payback on that, it needs to be, a relationship that extends beyond just a, a quick transaction sort of thing.

[00:21:22] Vana Han Yeah, yeah. And I think another thing I learned is listening. I don’t mean that just often just get on the phone with partners and listen to them talk, but it’s really proactive listening. It’s like if they reach out to me, they’re voicing some kind of concern or challenges or just they have great ideas, actually, take that note and action on it. So an example will be last Q4. One of my influencers reach out to me and he said, hey, like I do a lot of work to promote you guys. But what happened is your attribution model is is wacky. And I was like, explain the wacky part to me. And he said, well, okay, so we know that user will register on your platform, but it takes some times between when they register to actually launch a campaign, because it takes time to create that like really good, flavorful and authentic video and then insert into the campaign and then launch it. Right. So usually from registration to campaign launch takes some time. I was like, yeah, that’s true. And he said, well, what happened is when I refer a advertiser to your platform and automatically that the advertiser will sign up and get an automatic email, the email will say, you know, do X, Y, Z to launch your campaign. And because it’s the last click attribution, the email gets the credit. But I spend all that time educating the user. And I was like, it’s a really good point. But then back when I was listening in back of my head, it’s like, oh my gosh, you’re asking me to go to the company and ask the whole entire company to change attribution model. But I did it. I actually built a case. I went internally and I changed the attribution from that phone call. Right. And we prioritized affiliate channel over email channel in our attribution. And I was I was really glad that I had that conversation, and I was really proud of myself. And I actually moved mountain for him.

[00:23:27] Dave Yovanno You’re going to love. I love hearing that and you’re really going to, you know, you’re going to be in New York with us next week at iPX24, the opening presentation that I give and the discussion that I have with, Kayla, Michelle, Michelle’s from Shopify, actually, Kayla’s from Zenni Optical. We’re talking about exactly that, the the challenge that we have with measurement attribution, the focus on incrementality, how hard it’s gotten with the many touch points because, you know, traditional affiliate, which we’re talking about has largely been a last click attribution model for the last 20, 30 years. And with the introduction, you know, the opening of this category to include the many different, content creators, there’s there’s creators, there’s publishers of all types. There are so many more touchpoints in the customer journey that you’ve got to track and, you know, factor in to how you’re compensating these guys for them to keep working for you. Right? And if you’re not isolating their incremental value and compensating them for it, that’s further up funnel than last click, they’re not going to continue to do that work. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about actually in that very first session next week. So look forward to introducing you to Kayla, Michelle. And I think you guys would have a lot to share with that. So thanks for sharing that with us here.

[00:24:40] Vana Han Awesome I’m excited.

[00:24:42] Dave Yovanno All right. So we’re heading into the Lightning Round section. So if you’re up for it we’d love to fire away a few questions at you and get your quick response. You up for this?

[00:24:52] Vana Han Let’s do it.

[00:24:53] Dave Yovanno All right. Cool. What’s the most popular payment structure for the partners that you work with? You know, for example, is it a flat fee? Is it more commission based? Is a combination of the two?

[00:25:04] Vana Han I would say a combo, if I have to answer this really quickly. But it’s a complex it’s actually more complicated than that. Regionally the preference is different by partner segment. It’s also different creators. They prefer flat fee versus traditional affiliate prefer commission structure. We also run into Japan, which is a very unique market. Right. Their permit structure is different in Brazil, which is also unique. The payment structure is different. The norm is different.

[00:25:34] Dave Yovanno What upcoming TikTok features would you say you’re most excited about?

[00:25:38] Vana Han Oh, I’m so excited about so many things. And I’m so happy that we had this recording right now because we just made the announcement at TikTok world a couple weeks ago. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to share with you. I am most excited about our imagery ads that’s rolling out right now. It is in beta, but this will open doors for a lot of SMBs, a lot of our partners, it has been our bread and butter, but it also has been a hurdle to basically use the native format. Right? Like essentially that’s how Facebook did it, like Facebook, which basically was like, oh, Mark was like, no, we’re only going to do native ads. And then when IPO got the pressure be like, yeah, we’re going to open up. So more or less doing the same thing. But I’m excited from the end user perspective because I think this will help them solve problems.

[00:26:33] Dave Yovanno So for those who aren’t aware, what are imagery ads?

[00:26:36] Vana Han It’s a static ads. So we’re no longer restrictive to that. You can only use video ads on our platform, right, which is more organic and a paid approach, which works great. But imagery ads will open doors. So that’s number one I’m most excited. It’s it’s very simple, but the fact that we finally made a decision makes me excited.

[00:26:58] Dave Yovanno Big change.

[00:26:59] Vana Han Yes, yes. The second one is TikTok One. So TikTok One is essentially our creator solution. So that’s a one, holistic platform lock in that you can connect to millions and millions of creators globally. So you can basically post your creative request or brand request, then we find the right creators to help you basically fulfill that content creative requests, and then it will automatically upload it into your account. So you don’t even have to like download the file and then you can just test the crap out of it.

[00:27:35] Dave Yovanno As we wrap up, I did want to ask what trends in general are you focusing on for 2024 in the social platform space and the partnership space, anywhere?

[00:27:45] Vana Han I try to avoid falling trend, but I think the AI conversation has been a hot topic and it’s unavoidable. So I do think navigating through that space, like generative AI creation, especially content creation, is going to be interesting in the next couple of years, right? Like in my own perspective, I think it’s like, how do we achieve a balance between the AI efficiency versus the human creativity?

[00:28:15] Dave Yovanno Yeah, I would imagine, yeah. Especially in the creator space that’s having a meaningful, you know, effect on just how they operate. I think everyone sees the value in how gen AI can assist with creating content or, you know, just, tying that with automation to make, you know, our the work that we do more streamline. I think we would both agree that it’s up for debate, I guess, and whether or not that kind of technology would ever replace the connection between a creator and a person, right, the audience, if you will, right. That authenticity that you had mentioned, in that personal connection, I guess. What, just what are your thoughts on that? Do you ever see, you know, gen AI and more advanced technology, you know, that digital assistant replacing people, in the way that people are connected to creators today?

[00:29:05] Vana Han Yeah, this. We’re actually rolling out a product called TikTok Symphony. And it’s 100 percent AI generated content. But we’re also navigating the space of like, you know, given that it’s 100 percent automated. There’s a lot of benefits, particularly in my segment, which is SMB, right? They don’t have to spend a lot of production money and also investment into creating the the content that’s beneficial. And it’s already been optimized while they’re recreating it. But how do we actually make sure that one user know that this is AI generated? And then two is how do we do a hybrid approach of like using the organic, already authentic content to incorporate into the AI content? So all those things we’re still navigating through?

[00:29:55] Dave Yovanno Yeah, just personally, I’ve seen for the first time just this week, actually, I noticed that I saw a tag that’s heading that said AI generated. I can’t remember if it was an ad or if it was a post, and it made me think for a second. Like it didn’t what? AI generated? Maybe it was assisted, but it’s almost like, you know, I didn’t value the content as high, knowing that maybe it was AI generated kind of like, yeah, that’s kind of a waste time. It’s not real. Maybe I don’t want to waste my time with that sort of thing. So it’s really interesting how that plays out, how creators can, you know, develop a strategy around that. But I believe that we are humans at the end of the day, and humans want to connect with other humans personally. And I know that gen AI and other advanced technologies can be amazing digital assistants to help humans communicate better, relate to one another better, you know, do their work better and with higher quality. There’s no doubt. But I really, a bit of a pessimist that, you know, I think that that technology can, like, replace the human connection that is innate all of us. But that’s just a sample size of one opinion.

[00:31:04] Vana Han I guess I can connect to that.

[00:31:06] Dave Yovanno Okay, Vana. Thank you so much for joining me in such an incredible conversation. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in. I thoroughly enjoyed this episode with Vana and learning more about TikTok for Business, especially as it goes through a hypergrowth phase. Many of the tips Vana gave can be applied to all businesses, and I wanted to highlight two that really resonated with me. The first is to have a customer centric mindset. Then I highlighted the importance of knowing and understanding her SMB clients, including their behavior and daily routines. And I truly believe knowing your customer in and out will always help you drive your business forward. The second is to treat your partners like people. One of the top requests of partners in this industry is to create long term relationships with brands. In order to do this. Brands have to build and nurture these relationships. Vanna gave helpful tips on how she treats partners like friends, and maintains a casual dialog with them throughout the partnership process. It’s a refreshing approach in today’s fast paced digital world. Finally, it was also interesting to hear the biggest challenges Vana currently faces around sustaining growth and using partnerships to provide platform education. I’m excited to watch Vana continue to excel and see what TikTok does next. Thank you, Vana for joining us on The Partnership Economy podcast. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in.

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