My benchmarks are (as a procurement professional myself) reliance, clear value and contractual freedom. We jumped into [Service Name, e.g., High Social] 8 months to pilot in support of our flagship TikTok account (@drinkolipop). Vendor on boarding was very simple from my point of view. The ability to clear service agreements and month-to-month commitment terms despite being a startup helped us to de-risk. It fulfilled the fundamental function that we purchased it for: providing us with a constant flow of organic, regionally-biased followers who are into gut-healthy products and functional drinks.
Operationally, the 24/7 account management and reporting to our marketing team fostered transparency. Each month I get performance dashboards contingent to follower growth on campaign timelines to make it easy for me to drive ROI of this marketing investment. The service has done an excellent job of running steadily with no large outages – which is really all one wants out of a contracted provider. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The biggest pain point from a purchasing and financial management perspective is we don’t have direct platform integration with our marketing stack (e.g. – Sprout Social, Google Analytics). This creates a manual reconciliation for our finance team when crediting sales lift, as the service’s success metrics (followers, engagement) exist independently of our e-commerce conversion data.
And yes, while it’s an effective service, the model of how much is actually charged per referral is shocking to say the least. Rolling out this capability across several brands or foreign TikTok accounts would have required a custom enterprise agreement that the vendor was reluctant to negotiate at first. Portfolio companies should have even more flexible tiered pricing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.