How Grind Basketball Grew Its TikTok By 12K Followers In One Week and Increased Sales By 35%

This week I’m breaking down how my friend Brian Blum, the CMO of Grind Basketball, leveraged paid ads via TikTok to fuel their organic content and grow...fast.

The acronym I created for it is CAP.

It stands for:

• Create - Create content centered around your content pillars.
• Analyze - Analyze specific KPIs to see if your organic content has potential.
• Pump - Pump ad dollars into any organic content that's KPIs show potential.

Here’s how it resulted for Grind Basketball:

• 12,000 Followers in 14 days
• Paid ads took the video from 20k views to 180k views
• After turning off paid, it organically reached 800k views
• Monthly visits jumped from 38k to 55k visits
• PPC campaigns converted 4x higher
• Sales increased by 35% from April to May and 22% from May to June

The key to this working is steps one and two, but number three is what makes it possible.

1. Creating The Content

On TikTok, valuable content is measured by watch time, shares, and saves.

So, as I broke down in last week's newsletter:

• Establish your content pillars
• Label your content types
• Create around this

The goal here is to create a piece of organic content that shows promising results.

Here’s an article that’ll help.

Tip: Search your niche in TikTok and use the top-performing content as the base for your content.

2. Analyze The Content

After publishing your content, track these three KPIs to measure a piece of content’s potential:

1. % Watch Time
2. Likes to Views Ratio
3. Saves or Shares

Within 24-48 hours, you’ll be able to determine whether to skip or pump.

For Grind Basketball, each piece of content that they put ad dollars behind first performed well organically.

This tells them that ad dollars will only fuel the content.

The goal here is to track specific KPIs to find the piece of content that has the highest potential to perform even better via paid.

3. Pump The Content

You created a great piece of content.

Its KPIs show potential.

Now it’s time to fuel it via TikTok ads.

Two things make this effective:

When you first post on TikTok, the algorithm determines who your content reaches — with paid TikTok ads, you can get your great content in front of the right people through its targeting.

Because of TikTok’s targeting features, you will get in front of people who potentially will invest their attention in you or your brand long-term. So, those shares and saves increase in value.

We’re going to run through it step by step:

1. You're going to select the campaign objective, “Community Interaction,” and then select the goal as “Followers.”

2. You’re going to target based on two different options:

Run an A/B test to see which ad group performs best.

• Hashtag Based
• Interest-Based
  
  Here's how:

Amplify. Gain Traction. Let It Glide.

The point of this is not to use paid media as the end all be all to growing your TikTok account.

It’s to amplify already great content past TikTok’s algorithm when posted organically.

And you’re using the paid media to amplify the content, gain traction, to let then it glide organically again.

So, here’s the timeline you should use:

1. Create content that’s posted organically
2. Analyze it over the next 24 to 48 hours
3. If it shows promising results, then run it as a Spark Ad
4. Spend $75 - $150 a day
5. Let the ad run for 7 -10 days
6. Turn the ad off after the 7 to 10-day mark
7. Let TikTok’s algorithm amplify your content

Brian also put together a free Notion template with 97 hooks, templates, and frameworks you can use to grow your TikTok here.