We are sharing a case study from Fanuel Kebede. A dropshipper and eCommerce brand owner explaining how he was able to generate over $116 000 revenue in 48 hours. All this came from him using a Tiktok influencer to promote his dropshipping product on Shopify.
Product Hunting
2020 was a rough year for everyone, especially business owners. With grounded planes, travel restrictions, irrational fear of China, and shipping delays. Everything was complicated.
With everything going crazy during quarantine, his girlfriend decided to spend time doing product research for his online store. She found something that would be a major game-changer for him and the customers, thanks to the obsession with All Things Mental Health.
Together they discovered a wellness product with boundless potential and zero competitors. Yes, that's right, a blue ocean with no other sharks inside.
Preparing the Brand Launch
Rounding out the gear, they began preparing for the launch of a lifetime. As you know, when creating an online brand, there's a lot that goes behind the scenes before anything exciting happens. Things like creating a site, a logo, social media pages, etc. Everything seems to move slowly at the beginning.
According to Fanuel, establishing a successful online brand requires the following:
- a unique product;
- a narrowly defined market;
- a social proof;
- a clear line of communications with your potential customers.
Here's how he used those four things to launch this brand.
After finding the product, the next step was to define the market. Within the wellness industry, there were tons of niches, especially at the peak of the pandemic’s craziness.
After listing all the possibilities and making an educated guess, he narrowed down the market to a much smaller group of potential customers.
At this point, he had a massive product and a laser-targeted niche. He then began brainstorming ways to get the word out there. Because just having an online store does not mean anything if your customers don't know that you exist, to begin with.
Starting with TikTok
With this brand, he wanted to get creative and decided to completely ignore the typical method of advertising, which is through Facebook and Instagram paid advertising. He decided to try his luck with a quickly emerging platform at that time, which was TikTok.
The aim was to see if it would be possible to post a video, go viral and get customers sent straight to our site for free. TikTok's feed, unlike other platforms, doesn’t automatically let you watch what you want but rather forces you to watch whatever they think is most interesting for you. Other platforms have so many different places to search for content, but Tiktok puts it right on your face.
The great thing about that though is that anyone can go viral. You don't need followers, fancy camera equipment, or any insane production to have solid content like on other platforms like Youtube or Instagram. With TikTok, all he had to do was to put some engaging content that creates curiosity and wait.
To get started, Fanuel sent products to a few friends and asked them to create TikTok videos with them. He got around 10 different Tiktoks to post and he uploaded all of them on the same night and went to sleep.
The Results
On the next day, Fanuel woke up to one of the posts having almost 30 000 views. Over the next few days, it kept going until it almost hit 600 000 views. Things escalated quickly.
The views generated close to $100 000 in sales with zero advertising costs and that happened within a week.
Scaling with a Tiktok Influencer
Fanuel got an idea to work with an influencer. The influencer was to be one with millions of views. He started contacting some of his favorite Tiktokers to see how much they would charge to promote the product.
Fanuel began to notice that so many of these creators he followed had risen to fame in a short time. They were so inexperienced as influencers that even the creators with an audience of millions were all on their own. They had very little understanding of what their platform was worth.
After tons of emails back and forth, Fanuel found an unbelievable deal with an influencer who had 1 500 000 followers. This agreement was only $1 400 for one sponsored post.
Fanuel went on to send the product to the influencer. She tested it out and created a killer video. Everything was ready to launch in his first influencer collaboration on Tiktok. Immediately after posting, the video went crazy.
In 48 hours, the $1 400 turned to over $116 000. All thanks to Tiktok.
Over the next two weeks, that single video brought in $250 000 in sales.
To be clear, though, this was not the profit. After taking off all the costs, including product costs and all the other expenses for preparing the brand, Fanuel had around a 60% profit margin.
Final Advice from Fanuel
"The biggest takeaway from this experience of making over $250 000 in less than 2 weeks, was that it pays to be creative and to try new techniques outside the box. It also pays to take chances. Selling products online is a very competitive space, and less than 10 online stores will end up being profitable.
You should stay consistent no matter what the venture is, and understand that success is only found on the other side of failure. So, whatever your venture is, keep at it. Don't let failure stop you from pursuing success."
