Toucan Talks: Why Growth Stalls, and How to Break Through
A session on what to do when the easy growth has gone: building for lifetime value rather than the first purchase, breaking the creative conversion plateau, and using TikTok Shop to open a second demand channel.
Building audiences that drive lifetime value
Most sellers optimise to ROAS and ACOS, and both of those metrics only ever explain the first purchase. Paige and Paula made the case for planning around customer lifetime value instead, walking the four funnel stages and showing how awareness planted early lowers acquisition cost months later, while loyalty feeds the next cycle so each year of the flywheel is more profitable than the last. They also dealt with the awkward case: the shopper who skips the queue and arrives mid-funnel, carrying higher CPAs, lower conversion and shorter retention because brand preference was never established. On the organic side they covered the three pillars, search optimisation, promotions and virtual bundles, including a content rewrite that lifted the 90-day average number of keywords ranking in the top ten organic spots by 89 percent and added 38 keywords that had not ranked at all, plus Subscribe and Save as the retention engine that bridges the gap between awareness and consideration.
Unlocking growth through optimisation-led creative
Ads drive traffic, creative converts it, and Ben's talk was about the point where traffic keeps rising and conversion flattens out. The talk took the four creative touchpoints in turn, main image wins the click, listing imagery explains and persuades, A+ reinforces value, and the Brand Store deepens consideration, and set out the specific changes that move each one: product scale, vibrancy, shadow and camera angle on a main image, championing key visuals and adding a range shot to a listing set, and the shift from standard to Premium A+ with scrollable modules, hover hotspots and comparison charts. The Brand Store section set out the Studios process of research, wireframing, implementation and review, and the metrics worth watching afterwards, sales per visitor, dwell time and bounce rate. The through-line: creative is not cosmetic, it is one of the strongest performance levers on Amazon.
Your full-funnel media channel
Emma covered Amazon's video and audio estate as a single full-funnel buy. Amazon reaches 82 percent of UK households every month, and 56 percent of UK advertisers say they plan to increase streaming TV spend over the next two years, with most of that money moving across from social, display and search. The session took the room through Prime Video's ad-supported reach and the brand lift it delivers against UK norms, interactive video ads that turn a streaming spot into an add-to-cart or learn-more with a click of the remote or a QR scan, buying Netflix and other premium streaming apps through a single point on Amazon DSP, Twitch as long-form low-ad-pressure inventory, and Fire TV reaching people in the minutes before they even start streaming. It closed on measurement: brand lift and attention studies at the top, Amazon Marketing Cloud joining it up underneath.
How TikTok unlocks incremental revenue
Dania's session set out what makes TikTok Shop different, virality, an affiliate community, algorithmic personalisation and discovery-led demand, and how the platform collapses discover, search and buy into a single funnel. Most of the talk was the affiliate playbook: mass outreach first, then targeted outreach to creators who fit the category, then loyalty built through higher commissions, community chats and creator competitions. The worked examples were a haircare creator competition that grew affiliate sales month on month and lifted video volume by 11 percent, a cleaning brand launched with an affiliate-first strategy where creators drove 72 percent of sales from a first batch of samples, and a founder-led beauty launch that grew revenue and orders several times over quarter on quarter. It finished on the halo effect: TikTok creates the demand, Amazon captures it.
Discovering growth opportunities through TikTok Shop
TikTok Shop joined us to close the session with the platform's own view of where the growth is: the categories opening up in the UK, the tools sellers are underusing, and how TikTok expects the shop side of the app to develop over the coming year.