Tiff's Treats Leads TikTok Engagement With a Recipe for Kindness

Tiff’s Treats’ Opportunity

Tiff’s Treats is a true home-baked entrepreneurial venture, starting as a phone delivery cookie brand in 1999, and eventually transitioning to the online era and establishing itself as a social media darling. Today, the brand has expanded to 92 locations across the United States, with a social media audience that transcends the reach of its brick and mortar.

The food industry is robust and competitive, with many great brands catering to the same niches. Tiff’s Treats was tasked with identifying what made the brand different from others. The answer to this question became apparent after looking at its customers and their content, as Tiff’s products are most often used as gifts for any occasion, from celebrations and milestones, to expressions of condolences. Tiff’s Treats distinguishes itself by delivering not only warm cookies, but a warm experience, using social media to build community and spread kindness.

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Using Strategic Insights to Build Community

Trying to beat the algorithm is like an endless marathon. Despite this challenge, Tiff’s Treats has an uncanny ability to hit the For You Page and go viral on a regular basis, receiving millions of views and reaching global audiences outside of its market. Although marketers often try to reverse engineer virality, Tiff’s Treats understands that the most sustainable content strategy is experimenting with ideas and leveraging insights to make an impact.

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Experimentation is necessary to keep up with daily shifts in platforms and attention spans trained on short bursts of content. Two years ago, the brand was primarily posting photos, but these days the team has pivoted to posting 95% video content, which is a leap of faith many brands have held back on. Tiff’s Treats has no fear of failure, and its confidence allows it to break traditional social media conventions and evolve to meet changing consumer preferences, which are key to standing out in a crowded industry. Tiff’s Treats succeeds by being highly adaptable and bold.

The brand’s ultimate goal is to expand its follower base and cultivate meaningful community engagement. Engagement is a two-way street, and Tiff’s Treats uses TikTok to spark conversations. Dash Hudson’s cross-channel analytics play a pivotal role in the strategic side of community building, as the brand debriefs on high-performing content and pinpoints key attributes that drive engagement, such as visually appealing cookie imagery or simply the presence of people whose faces convey powerful emotions. This continuous cycle of testing, learning and applying insights allows Tiff’s Treats to constantly level up its TikTok strategy and continue earning high views and profile visits.

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"We looked at last year and asked “What are the content types that are working? What are the common attributes of those content types?” Dash Hudson has been really helpful in answering that. We did a lot of research in the beginning of the year to identify what those attributes were, and from there we started to test and learn."

Madison Stahly,
Social Media & Influencer Manager at Tiff’s Treats

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Standing Out in a Crowded Market With Audience Stories

Tiff’s Treats differentiates itself in a saturated market with Cookie Kindness — a new take on UGC where the brand shares customers’ personal stories and gives back to its community. Its content isn’t just about selling cookies, as videos of warm cookies sell themselves. Instead, it emphasizes its unique role in celebrating life milestones, which are often emotional and extraordinarily relatable, and strike a chord with TikTok audiences.

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The brand noticed a post of a young boy who used all of his allowance money to buy his parents an anniversary gift — Tiff’s Treats. Moved by his kindness, the team contacted his parents and surprised him with a delivery of his favorite treats, along with 10x his allowance and a personalized video from the brand’s founders. When the brand recapped the initiative on social, it did so without expectations, and when the team saw how much engagement it got overnight, they assumed someone amplified it, however, its success was completely organic. This became the first viral video in Tiff’s Treats Cookie Kindness series, which remains the common denominator in what makes stories from Tiff’s Treats’ community so special. It is a content series rooted in the company’s core values. As opposed to highly produced media campaigns, these videos are as raw and organic as they can get — filmed on iPhone, capturing people’s delighted reactions in real-time on the street, which cuts into the core of what makes both Tiff’s Treats and TikTok what they are, making Cookie Kindness the perfect blend of brand and channel.

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Tiff’s Treats uses Dash Hudson to identify audience stories, such as posts around Cookie Kindness. The team also uses Dash Hudson’s Library and Vision AI to identify top content, manage influencer relationships and deliver comprehensive reports, which are easy for internal teams to understand, whether they are familiar with social or not. For Instagram, Tiff’s Treats prioritizes sentiment analysis, as it serves as an important window into how the brand is connecting with audiences. Sentiment on Instagram ebbs and flows, particularly when fan-favorite cookies sell out, but the brand works to ensure it remains overall positive by being responsive to audience requests. In one scenario, the brand unveiled a showstopping social campaign (nothing gets people clicking like free cookies), and entries hit capacity after five minutes. A true bittersweet moment, as this massive social media win was contrasted with disappointed fans. Dash Hudson’s Community tool allows the brand to cut through the volume of comments, debrief and incorporate learnings into future campaigns without getting bogged down by the noise.

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"When I started 2 years ago, we were posting photos. Now, you won't really see us posting photos. We've completely shifted to video content. I would say it’s probably 95% of our content. We try to stay competitive on social, and internally we are always joking about trying to beat the algorithm. With video content, we can tell our story, too, and keep audiences interested."

Madison Stahly,
Social Media & Influencer Manager at Tiff’s Treats

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A Data-Driven Approach to the Content Lifecycle

Tiff’s Treats takes top-performing organic content and amplifies it across all of its marketing channels, including paid ads and in-feed placements, which feel more authentic. Its organic social is primarily for brand awareness and community building, and as a growing brand, getting its cookies in front of people for the first time remains the goal. That being said, TikTok content still plays a crucial role in its 360-degree approach to the content lifecycle. The brand skillfully spreads its top-performing organic content across other marketing channels, including its more sales-driven channels like email and e-commerce, ultimately creating a brand presence that takes the best samples from multiple formats. Great social content can drive traffic everywhere, and breaking siloes between marketing channels can uplift every format, as storytelling that resonates with audiences is what truly matters.

The brand uses Dash Hudson to identify and leverage Instagram UGC and potential influential partnerships. For paid media, decisions are often made based on the cost-efficiency of campaigns, with organic performance being the greatest indicator that content will perform well in paid.

Tiff’s Treats only amplifies content that outperforms its benchmark, which goes against the convention of putting paid spend behind low-performing posts that weren’t able to find an audience. Using organic insights to inform paid media removes biases from the equation, ensuring the brand is always putting its best content forward. In the past, the brand amplified anything it liked, without parameters. It also amplified content too soon out of an earnest desire to see the post do well. Now, its focus is purely on identifying high-performing pieces, which also helps with the overall health of its platforms. Social media users don’t like ads, and they’ve caught onto in-feed placements — when done poorly, it feels like a speed bump in their scroll. A key focus for Tiff’s Treats is creating content that blends naturally into users’ feeds, maintaining authenticity and a sense of community.

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"Dash Hudson has been the most helpful tool throughout my career, and I can’t recommend it more. It’s become a comprehensive platform in managing so many facets of social. I especially love the creators section. We do a lot of work with influencers, and we do all of our management and reporting there."

Madison Stahly,
Social Media & Influencer Manager at Tiff’s Treats