How 3 brands are using TikTok to drive awareness & sales (2024)

As TikTok continues to be a major powerhouse in retail, brands are fitting the platform to their own needs.

Cakes Body, which sells adhesive-free nipple covers, uses TikTok largely as a sales channel and has made millions of dollars from TikTok Shop. Meanwhile, Duolingo, a language-learning app, does not sell through the platform but uses TikTok to raise brand awareness, joke about its owl mascot and connect with anime and K-pop fandoms. And Zenni Optical, an eyewear company that sells glasses for as low as $7, turns to TikTok to show off its products and jump on trends like “brat summer.”

Already, the three brands are finding that the strategies are paying off. For example, last month, Cakes Body became the highest-grossing store on TikTok Shop, it told Modern Retail. It is now on track to do $15 million in sales from TikTok Shop this year alone.

Here’s a closer look at how the companies have made TikTok their own, as well as their advice for other brands looking to do the same.

Cakes Body: Affiliates & cross-posting

Cakes Body’s founders, sisters Casey and Taylor Capuano, started the company during the Covid-19 pandemic. Initially, they put $5,000 into the business and began posting organically on TikTok to build reach. Within the first six months, the brand sold out three times, according to its marketing director, Krysta Lewis. Then, during Cakes Body’s first year in business, the company did $1 million in sales without any paid advertising at all.

Cakes Body is likewise seeing sales soar on TikTok Shop since joining that platform in January. But it wasn’t always smooth sailing, Lewis said during an eTail East panel moderated by Modern Retail on Wednesday in Boston. Cakes Body initially hired contractors to reach out to about 300 creators each week about working with the brand. Then, Cakes Body saw sales start to rise on TikTok Shop around March and April.

Being patient and posting consistently (about two to three videos a day) has been key, Lewis said. “It did take a while… but eventually, it did pay off,” she explained. “I know some brands who’ve jumped on the platform. They give it a month, and then if it doesn’t work for that first month, they give up. You really need to just let the momentum ride and do the proper outreach.”

Cakes Body has more than 110,000 followers on TikTok, and 3 million people have liked its videos as a whole. Today, it works with “thousands” of affiliates, Lewis said, and has gotten to the point where influencers are reaching out to Cakes Body, not the other way around. Cakes Body requires its affiliates to have at least 1,000 followers and asks each of them to post within 10 days of receiving a free sample. If they don’t, then they’re docked by the TikTok Shop platform, Lewis said. “It’s a really nice safeguard put into place to make sure people are actually posting,” she said.

Duolingo: Memes & keyword mining

Like Cakes Body, Duolingo also joined TikTok during the pandemic. Many of its early videos play on memes about its owl mascot admonishing people for not doing their Spanish or Italian lessons on the app every day. “Once we started joking with our community, saying, ‘We understand too — Duo is an owl that kidnaps people and is terrifying,” we saw instant growth,” Melissa Yeung, Duolingo’s global social media strategist, said during the eTail East panel on Wednesday.

That fact that Duolingo is “in on the joke” has actually led people to go off TikTok and download the app, Yeung said. The company conducts a survey of new users and found that 20% of its new users year-over-year came from social. About half of that, or 10%, came after discovering the brand on TikTok.

Duolingo has 12.7 million followers on TikTok, and nearly 300 million people have liked its TikTok videos. All of its posts involve the owl mascot, and recent ones touch on trending topics like the Olympics, Formula One and “rat boys.” Duolingo’s best-performing content on TikTok isn’t always the content it expects, Yeung said. Duolingo is a language app, but “if we show someone learning something, it never drives growth for us,” Yeung said. “We’ve always had the mindset of entertainment first, and then growth is just going to come along with that.”

Niche fandom marketing has also proven helpful for Duolingo. The company built a keyword-scraping tool that goes through comments and identifies which hashtags people use the most. It was through this that Duolingo was able to learn about a game called “Genshin Impact.” A Duolingo staffer then went to an anime expo dressed as a character from the game and made a TikTok about it that got 150 million impressions. “We found an audience and a fandom that had an existing overlap with our audience, and we were able to easily step into that,” Yeung said.

Zenni Optical: Trends, tips & tricks

Zenni Optical, an eyeglasses and contacts company, joined TikTok in 2021 not long after it received an influx of new customers in the early days of the pandemic. Today, Zenni Optical has 334,000 followers on TikTok, and 1.5 million people have liked its videos.

Zenni sources TikToks from many avenues: in-house content creators, influencers, user-generated content and external creative houses. Many of its videos touch on pop culture moments like “Barbiecore” and “brat summer,” showing different glasses that fit into each aesthetic. This week, Zenni jumped on a TikTok trend of saying “very mindful, very demure” with a video with the caption, “See how I wear Zennis to play golf? Very demure.”

Meanwhile, some of Zenni’s other TikToks offer tips for eye exams or how to find the best frames for your face. Others show creators trying on different glasses and asking viewers to weigh in. Zenni also makes TikToks featuring its celebrity partners like Keke Palmer. A February TikTok of Palmer trying on different glasses and thus different personas (“entrepreneur Keke,” “mom Keke,” “actor Keke,” “pop star Keke”) has nearly half a million views.

TikTok has been so effective in getting people talking about Zenni that the company is increasing its TikTok spending by 100% from last year, Veronica Alcaro, Zenni’s vp of brand, told Modern Retail during eTail. “TikTok allows us to capitalize on trends in ways that we have never really been able to before,” she said.