For online brands, social media marketing can seem like a goldmine of opportunity—simply post a short video and watch the dollar signs grow. If only it were so simple.
Paid, sponsored, and promoted social media tactics can quickly balloon the budget of a small business. In 2021 alone, brands around the world spent almost $116 billion on social ads. So the question is this: How can brands take advantage of the power of social media without breaking the bank?
Enter organic TikTok marketing: driving revenue without the ad spend. It’s a little tricky to get right—you are, after all, at the mercy of the algorithms—but with the right content plan, you can crack the code and reap the rewards. Here’s everything you need to know about building an organic TikTok strategy into your marketing plan.
What is an organic TikTok strategy?
An organic TikTok strategy is a content marketing plan focusing on creating high-quality content to improve user engagement—impressions, likes, comments, and follows—without paying to boost it. It’s the opposite of a paid strategy, in which business accounts pay for impressions—either by promoting their posts or creating sponsored ad content.
Benefits of organic TikTok growth
There are plenty of ways in which an organic TikTok strategy can benefit your business:
Save on marketing costs
Paying to boost your content can get expensive. Promoting a TikTok post starts at about $2 per day, and paying for a basic TikTok ad starts at about $5 per day. On the other hand, organic growth doesn’t cost anything. With the right kind of high-quality content, you can see growth for free (or, at least, for the price of creating the content).
Boost real engagement
Organic growth is all about reaching new audiences who actually care about your brand and want to interact with your content. This means that as you grow, so too will audience engagement, with more followers watching, liking, and commenting on your content (a.k.a. showing brand love).
Strengthen loyalty
When you connect with users who care about your content, they’re more likely to stick with you in the long term. Loyal customers are the ones who continue engaging with your content, make repeat purchases, and recommend your product or service to others—making them a valuable asset for growing businesses.
Best content for gaining organic TikTok growth
There’s no one perfect format that guarantees organic growth—the algorithms are more finicky than that. Instead, try experimenting with different types of content to see what sticks best with your target audience. Here are four types of content creation that your brand should consider for boosting organic growth on TikTok:
Original
Original content means you create your TikTok videos from scratch. This is a great way for business owners to center their content on topics that are authentically meaningful to them—a key driver of organic growth.
“If you feel like you could talk about something for 10 minutes, make a video on it and try to cut it down to two [minutes],” says Charlotte Palermino, co-founder and CEO of skin care brand Dieux Skin, in an interview with Shopify Masters.
Viewers will feel your enthusiasm for the topic and see your expertise first hand—making them significantly more likely to like, comment, follow, and make a purchase.
Series
A staple of TikTok content, series are multi-part videos that let you deep dive into a particular topic. You’ll often see these numbered in the title or video text. For instance, these TikToks from Dieux are labeled part one and part two in the videos.
If someone discovers your post and likes what they see, they’ll know they can go to your profile for more similar content. But be careful of overdoing it—many TikTok creators end videos with a cliffhanger to coax users to follow for more, but this can quickly come across as inauthentic.
Trend-based
Trends are the lifeblood of TikTok, so don’t be afraid to duet, stitch, or incorporate trending hashtags, audio (like songs and sounds), and jokes. On-trend content is more likely to appear on others’ For You pages than content that isn’t as timely.
🌟Knowing where and how to find trending sounds on TikTok can boost engagement around your content. Here are eight easy ways to find trending sounds on TikTok.
Community-oriented
Develop more videos that put you in direct dialogue with your target audience, addressing their questions in FAQs, Q&As, or TikTok LIVE videos. Interacting with your followers via community engagement content creates a thriving family around your brand. TikTok’s built-in Q&A tool lets you receive questions from followers via comments or your profile page. Addressing these questions gives you more opportunities to create meaningful connections with your audience.
Tips for gaining organic growth on TikTok
Organic growth can be hard to game—some videos go viral and others don’t, and it’s often difficult to understand exactly why. But if you’re working to grow organically on TikTok, here are some techniques to try:
Tell stories
Offering a narrative in a video helps capture viewers’ attention and show the human side of your brand. Try telling your brand’s story, describing the way your product features solve a specific problem, explaining a concept that’s important to you, or recounting something that happened to you during the workday.
“One of our most viral videos right now on TikTok … is just talking about packaging,” Charlotte says. “It’s just a video about plastic and aluminum, and it’s doing incredibly well because it’s about storytelling.”
The video tells a brief story while addressing a follower’s concerns about the labeling, giving Dieux an opportunity to explain why its packaging is changing and how it’s better for everyone.
Take advantage of hashtags
TikTok uses hashtags to make recommendations on users’ For You pages, which means including the right hashtags in your captions can help your content land in front of more users.
Stick to a handful of specific hashtags that are relevant to your niche. For example, this video from Firefly Slime has more than three million views and just two hashtags: #instantsnow and #asmr.
Provide value
For organic growth, Charlotte recommends an honest, informational approach to TikTok—not a marketing fireworks show.
“We don’t feel too salesy,” she explains. “I find that when a customer feels duped into buying something … there’s a lot of bad blood there.”
When you create honest, authentic content, you’re building a trusting relationship with your customers.
“I want people to understand what our products do and what they don’t do,” Charlotte says. “When you do it that way, you have a high loyalty rate.”
In the end, it’s about letting your customers choose.
“I hope that we feel educational,” says Charlotte, “so you are empowered to make a decision.”
Post regularly
If you want to grow your follower count and gather the attention of your target audience, a regular posting schedule is a must. While activity is important for most social media platforms—it helps build brand awareness among your followers—it’s especially important on TikTok, since TikTok’s algorithm prioritizes videos from active accounts. This means posting often will boost the chances you’ll show up on the For You pages of new customers, further widening your reach.
How regularly should you upload TikToks? While there’s no hard-and-fast rule, this 2024 benchmark report from RivalIQ says that, on average, brands post about twice per week.
TikTok organic FAQ
What is the difference between organic and paid TikTok?
Organic TikTok strategies are unpaid, which means that a brand posts its videos on TikTok and lets the algorithm do its work naturally. The strategies rely on producing specific types of content, such as participating in TikTok trends or sharing your brand’s story, to help reach potential customers and foster community engagement. For paid TikTok strategies, brands pay to boost their videos, either by promoting their posts or creating paid ad content.
Is organic TikTok content free?
Yes, using an organic growth strategy on TikTok is free, meaning that you don’t have to pay to promote your videos or create sponsored posts. Instead, you create and post videos like any other user and let the algorithm work for you. With the right content, unpaid TikToks can still go viral.
What are key organic TikTok metrics to track?
Similar to other platforms, key TikTok metrics to track for organic content strategies include video views, average watch time, audience engagement rate, and overall follower count.
