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Zola is no longer just a wedding website. Late last year, the e-commerce company introduced Zola Baby, a new baby registry service from the one-stop-shop for all things wedding-related. New services typically involve new customer acquisition efforts. But Zola CMO Victoria Vaynberg said this latest effort revolves around word of mouth, rather than spending on advertising to find new shoppers.
The company has experimented with outdoor advertising in the past and is now actively using TikTok to increase brand awareness. In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, we spoke to Vaynberg about Zola's TikTok strategy, growing in new categories, and navigating today's ever-changing digital landscape.
Below are highlights from the conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
About the expansion of the Zora Multiverse
To be honest, we haven't spent any paid acquisition money on Baby at this point. [registry]. It's really organic growth through our own existing community. From a wedding perspective, we're often part of a couple's journey over 12, 15 or 18 months, so we talk to them over and over again through this experience. I know couples are recommending Zola to each other. We're growing very organically. We are just promoting Zola baby to our own audience and doing some PR work. But yes, we haven't spent there yet. This shows that my husband and I want to take the authentic customer experience we had with Zola to the next level.
Test and learn channels
We love testing and learning. We definitely have a tried and true channel. We focus on search. These are people who are searching with very high interest. So this is a big piece of the puzzle for us. He is no different with SEO when it comes to creating content that attracts people. [We] We test it back and forth with all kinds of big players: streaming, audio, social, etc. Throughout busy and engagement seasons, we frequently run campaigns on the go, so you can work from anywhere. The digital landscape is difficult, especially in this category, but you're definitely trying to figure out how to stand out the most on TikTok. TikTok is definitely where the target demo spends a lot of their time. That's definitely where we value both organic and care the most. On Instagram, it's understandably more difficult to make progress from an organic standpoint. So we started trying to balance them.
Feeding the Beast Short Video
Thankfully, we have team members in-house who are always comfortable filming content. Another good thing is that internally he is one of the most engaged people on TikTok. So there's a real level of authenticity. It's someone who is engaged and works here so has a lot of information about the wedding planning process. The good thing about TikTok is that despite how loud it has to be, it's still your phone in your hand. Not that much equipment.
