How to Grow Your Instagram Following: A Strategic Plan

Want to quickly grow your Instagram audience? Looking for a strategy that attracts the right kind of connections?

In this article, you’ll discover how to combine an Instagram growth strategy with an ad sequence that can turn followers into customers.

How This Instagram Growth Strategy Works

Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users sharing millions of photos and videos every single day. That amounts to a lot of noise for Instagram marketers to break through to get their message in front of potential customers.

Simply focusing on run-of-the-mill Instagram growth tactics that you hear regurgitated time and again won't help you set yourself apart. You'll just be adding to the noise on the platform instead of building important assets for your business.

A better approach is the $1.80 Instagram strategy for custom audience growth. Gary Vaynerchuk's $1.80 Instagram growth strategy to grow your business or brand is all about creating micro-connections that gradually accumulate into an active and engaged community on the platform.

Even though it's called the $1.80 strategy, it's completely free to implement. The only resource costs are your time and attention. Once a day, you'll:

• Start by searching 10 relevant hashtags.
• Locate the top 9 posts for each hashtag.
• Leave a meaningful comment (your two cents [$0.02]).

The $1.80 Instagram growth strategy boils down to this equation: 10 hashtags multiplied by 9 posts where you leave your $0.02 = $1.80 in community-building effort.

Getting 2x, 5x, or 10x growth results with this strategy doesn't happen overnight, though. It requires you to stay consistent and make community-building a regular action for your brand.

As Gary states, “The number of Instagram followers you have means nothing if you can't build a community of like-minded people who care and engage.” It's those people who then go on to become customers, brand evangelists, and significantly drive your brand goals forward. Finding this pocket of people is as simple as becoming part of the conversation.

We used this strategy at The Ad Strategist to double the size of our Instagram following. More importantly, by implementing the $1.80 Instagram growth strategy, our Instagram engagement custom audience grew to almost 3x larger than our follower count.

Why is this important? The size of your warm custom audiences represents the number of users who've had a meaningful interaction with your business. This includes everyone who liked, commented on, sent, and saved your content; DM'ed you; or clicked the link in your bio. Of course, just because someone interacts with you doesn't mean they follow you on Instagram. And if they're not following you, it's unlikely they'll see your organic content and posts in the future.

That doesn't mean those users are gone forever, though. You can create a dynamic Instagram ad sequence targeting your Instagram engagement custom audience that converts those non-followers into followers and then customers.

Curious About How to Use AI?

We recently launched a new show that help marketers, creators, and entrepreneurs understand the business applications of AI.

It's hosted by Michael Stelzner and explores this exciting new frontier in easy-to-understand terms.

Pull up your favorite podcast app and search for AI Explored. (Look for the cover art shown to the right.) Or click the button below for more information.

I WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT AI

Running ads to this engagement custom audience resulted in 50%–100% cheaper lead costs in an ad spend study of over $45,000 with 349 ad set variations. So targeting an Instagram engagement custom audience creates costs per result that are significantly lower than if you were to target cold traffic.

Here's how you can start implementing this Instagram growth strategy in your own business.

#1: Create Your Instagram Engagement Custom Audience

To create an Instagram engagement custom audience, navigate to the Audiences dashboard in Ads Manager.

Then click Create Audience and select Custom Audience.

In the Create a Custom Audience window, choose Instagram Account as your source audience.

Next, select the correct Instagram profile and ensure Everyone Who Engaged With This Professional Account in the Past 365 Days is selected.

Choose a name for this audience that will be easily identifiable to you in the future and then click Create Audience. Remember that it takes up to 24 hours to reveal the size of your current Instagram engagement audience.

Now write down the current size of this audience to determine your starting point. I recommend tracking the growth of this custom audience weekly as you implement the rest of the $1.80 strategy to assess your measurable growth.

#2: Research and Incorporate Relevant Instagram Hashtags

Now that you're tracking your retargetable engagement, the next step is to find relevant Instagram hashtags for your business.

Open Instagram and navigate to the Explore tab. And start by searching for a relevant hashtag such as #facebookads.

You likely have a core group of hashtags you're already using in your own posts. Because it's best to search and engage daily, I recommend that you set up a spreadsheet to track all of the relevant hashtags you're using because the list will quickly grow.

If you're a digital marketing agency, you might start with hashtags like these:

Here's the most surprising part of implementing this strategy: truly understanding the quality of a hashtag. As a Facebook advertising strategist, I'd assume that #facebookads would be an ideal hashtag for posts. However, upon closer inspection, the type of content being tagged with this particular hashtag is:

• Extremely promotional (often for get-rich-quick–type schemes)
• Unrelated to digital strategy
• Entirely misleading
• Often extremely spammy

This leads me to the conclusion that we won't use #facebookads in our own Instagram efforts going forward.

Ready to Supercharge Your Marketing Strategy?

Get expert training and an unbeatable conference experience when you attend Social Media Marketing World—from your friends at Social Media Examiner.

Broaden your reach, skyrocket your engagement, and grow your sales. Become the marketing hero your company or clients need!

🔥 As a valued reader, you can save $970 on an All-Access ticket if you act now. Sale Ends Tuesday! 🔥

GET THE DETAILS

As you research hashtags and carry out your daily $1.80 growth strategy, make note of the highest-quality hashtags you find. Then use those in your organic content's written captions to give yourself the greatest opportunity to visibility on the Explore tab of your ideal customers.

#3: Identify and Engage With 9 Relevant Instagram Posts

After you've found your Instagram hashtags, it's time to filter through the content you've found to determine whether it's relevant and valuable for you to leave your $0.02. Not every post is created equally—especially in a world full of spam bots and automation.

Take a few seconds to analyze each Instagram post you come across. I recommend clicking the full post to:

• Read the caption.
• Quickly measure the engagement rate (likes and comments vs. total followers).
• Click the account profile image to check out their bio and the rest of their profile.

Remember, this strategy works across any vertical: B2B, B2C, SMB, etc. It's the process of culling through the noise to find the gems that most of your competitors aren't setting aside enough time to do.

Here's what to look for when analyzing accounts.

How Much Effort Is Being Put Into Writing an Informative Caption?

A lot of low-quality accounts tend to ‘phone in' the caption description and jam as many hashtags into the caption as humanly possible—in the hopes that it will help them rank on the Explore tab.

Well-written captions crafted with meaningful thought aren't an easy feat. The Instagram users who are putting in the time and effort to write their own story-driven captions tend to be active community members outside of their own profiles as well. They're invested in their own Instagram success and your $0.02 interaction helps them signal to the algorithm that their content is also relevant.

What Is the Engagement Rate?

In my algorithmic experience, engagement is king. If an account has 200,000 followers but barely hits 500 likes and comments on a post (0.2% engagement), what does that say about the quality of their community?

On the flipside, never discount an account for having a low follower count. If they have 200 followers and still have 30 likes and comments per post (a 15% engagement rate!), it shows they're building a small but mighty community. Engage away!

Is This Profile Something You Would Naturally Engage With?

Yes, you'll be deploying this strategy for your social media growth efforts. However, it's important to make sure the comments you're leaving have the potential to create strategic and long-term value for your brand and for your potential future community. Otherwise, as with anything, you'll be wasting your time and getting lost in the weeds.

Now onto the fun stuff! This one's simple: Be social on social media. At this point in your efforts, all that's left is to leave your $0.02 on these newfound pieces of content.

Let's talk about leaving your $0.02 for a moment. There's a difference between crafting a meaningful comment that shows you want to be a part of the larger conversation vs. leaving a comment of three emoji hearts and then bouncing.

If all you do is leave emojis, don't use the $1.80 strategy. Spend your time elsewhere on actions/tasks that move the needle in your marketing.

Here are some best practices for being a human on social media: 

• Share your own experiences. Is there something in your life (or behind the scenes in your business) that's relatable to the original caption? Share that!

• Ask open-ended questions. The goal here is to get people to come back to your Instagram profile and engage. If you only talk about yourself and your own experiences, it lessens your chance of developing a meaningful conversation with the other person.
• Don't be a know-it-all. Let other people share their perspective and worldview. We, as humans, love to share about ourselves often. Remember that this exercise is not about YOU. It's about the incredible humans you serve in your marketing.

#4: Monetize Your Efforts With an Instagram Ad Sequence

After going through these steps, you've started to build two powerful marketing assets:

• A captive community of current and future customers who drive real revenue
• An engaged custom audience available for retargeting with paid advertising

The first of these two assets, a captive community, will fuel your organic Instagram efforts again and again. Next time you publish a post, these followers will be hungry for your new content. Because you've now engaged in conversations with these users, they're more ready to engage and respond than total strangers.

The second asset is an engaged custom audience that's retargetable by building a $5/day Instagram ad campaign.

When you pair a $5/day Instagram ad sequence with the $1.80 Instagram growth strategy, every image you post, DM you send, and heart you tap is automatically and effortlessly leading people toward becoming your customers. Having a low-cost Instagram ad sequence that's always running in the background is a simple way to turn followers into fanatical (read: paying!) customers.

Watch this video to see the entire process in action:

Conclusion

Set aside time each day to execute this strategy. For me, it's only 15 minutes a day when I'm in an Uber or waiting for a meeting to begin. For you, it might be a 3–4 PM daily.

Your Instagram growth won't happen unless you put in the time and effort daily, track your results, tweak what isn't working, and continuously and relentlessly improve upon your efforts. A year from now, imagine your account at 2x, 10x, 100x growth and what that could mean for your business goals.

With a simple $1.80 Instagram growth strategy paired with a $5/day Facebook advertising strategy, you can rapidly grow your Instagram account with followers who turn into customers.

Get More Advice on Instagram Marketing

• Grow and engage an audience on Instagram.
• Improve your Instagram reach.
• Schedule Instagram stories and posts in Business Suite.

Discover Proven Marketing Strategies and Tips

Want to go even deeper with your marketing? Check out the Social Media Marketing Podcast! Publishing weekly since 2012, the Social Media Marketing Podcast helps you navigate the constantly changing marketing jungle, with expert interviews from marketing pros.

But don’t let the name fool you. This show is about a lot more than just social media marketing. With over 600 episodes and millions of downloads each year, this show has been a trusted source for marketers for well over a decade.

CHECK OUT THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PODCAST NOW