5 Instagram Growth Hacks You're Missing (And How to Fix Them)
If you’re a business owner struggling to monetize your Instagram and boost your brand visibility, this episode is for you! I'm sharing five things I wish I had known when I started my Instagram business account. These common mistakes often trip up entrepreneurs, and I'm here to help you avoid them.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
[01:58] Consistency in Content Creation
As a mom balancing work and home, showing up consistently for my podcast community has been challenging but possible with the right support. Shoutout to Linah, my incredible podcast manager, for making this possible. I’ve also found that creating mini-series episodes helps keep content focused and manageable.
[04:02] The Power of Collaboration on Instagram
Collaboration is key! I recently did an Instagram Live with Heston and Megan, which inspired today’s episode. If you're not already doing Instagram collaborations, start now. It’s an underrated way to grow your audience. Reach out to someone in your niche, pitch an idea, and make it easy for them to say yes.
[05:44] Instagram Growth Hack #1: Target Market Research
The first step before creating any content is knowing your ideal client. Doing target market research is crucial. Understanding who you’re serving and how you help them makes content creation so much easier. This clarity leads to endless content ideas because you'll speak directly to your ideal clients.
[08:26] Instagram Growth Hack #2: Narrow Your Focus
Go narrow, not wide. Instagram is saturated with content, so to stand out, you have to be super specific. Avoid being too general with your messaging. The more specific you are, the faster you'll grow on Instagram.
[09:51] Instagram Growth Hack #3: Customer Journey Clarity
Be crystal clear on your customer journey. After someone finds you on Instagram, where do they go next? Without a clear next step, you won’t make money on Instagram. Create a simple sales funnel to guide your ideal customers from discovery to purchase
[12:13] Instagram Growth Hack #4: Patience in Growth
Growth takes time. I was stuck at 650 followers for years before my reels started bringing in high-value followers. You need to be in it for the long haul. Keep practicing and refining your content strategy, and stay rooted in your why.
[12:51] Instagram Growth Hack #5: Networking on Instagram
Use Instagram to network with others in your field. Collaboration over competition is my motto. Reach out to peers, pitch podcast interviews, or invite them to summits. You never know what opportunities will come from simply asking.
Links mentioned in this episode…
Shoutout to Linah, my incredible podcast manager. Click here if you need a content manager!
JOIN HOT REELS: The 12-Month Instagram Content Lab
An intimate, strategy-packed mentorship for established business owners ready to create killer content that stops the scroll, grows your following and attracts your dreamboat clients (even if you have no idea what to post and feel like you’re always throwing spaghetti at the wall!)
Insta-Growth: The 30-Day Private Instagram Mentorship (SAVE $200 WITH CODE "PODCAST") - https://www.elizabethmarberry.com/insta-growth
Free guide to Monetize Your IG: Seven Simple and Proven Ways to Finally Make Money on Instagram
Apply for your FREE Instagram Breakthrough Call with Elizabeth
Quote
[08:26] "To stand out on Instagram, you have to be super, super specific. Go narrow, not wide."
TRANSCRIPT
S3 Ep25 - 5 Instagram Growth Hacks You're Missing (And How to Fix Them)
Elizabeth Marberry: 00:00
If you're a business owner who's been struggling to monetize your Instagram account and really boost your brand visibility, today's episode is definitely for you. I'm gonna be sharing with you five things I wish I had known back when I first started my Instagram business account. These mistakes are so common with business owners and entrepreneurs, and I'm thrilled to highlight these and really teach you what you can do instead. So you can learn how to leverage
00:29
free platform to work for your business. Let's do it!
00:35
Welcome back to the show. I'm so happy you've joined me for another episode of Strut It. I hope that you have been enjoying the show so far. Last week we just wrapped up a five part mini series on AI marketing and how you can use chat GBT to not only grow your Instagram but really use it to streamline all of your business activities. If you missed that definitely go back and listen. I've gotten a lot of great feedback about that series.
01:05
is marketing gold.
01:38
I'm recording this during my kids last week of summer and I wanna celebrate in how I've shown up for our podcast community. If you have children at home this summer, I know you feel me. I've really committed to showing up consistently for you. And one of the ways that...
01:58
I have been able to do this is because I was willing to invest in help. So I have this incredible podcast manager, her name's Linah Macharia. She lives in Africa. She is.
02:09
totally incredible at what she does and she edits all my episodes. She gets all of the marketing assets ready so I can just post them and email them out to my list. And if I didn't have her, I certainly wouldn't have been able to show up so consistently this summer. I also have been able to show up really consistently because I decided to do a podcast series and I am going to continue to do podcast series, meaning little bite-sized pieces of information
02:39
to keep these episodes short and sweet, so you get what you want and you can move on with your day. So that is always my intention to just keep it really succinct for you. And doing the four part mini series really helped me to just stay on track and just, hmm.
03:03
just simplify my content creation process because I don't know about you, but sometimes.
03:08
you know, I have no shortage of ideas and I can tend to overcomplicate things at times. So doing the four part series and kind of breaking up a bigger piece of content into four pieces really helped me to show up for my community this summer. So I share that with you in the hopes that if you're going through a chapter of your life where it's hard for you to show up, I invite you to A, seek support, whatever that looks like for you, and B, think about how you could possibly chunk up
03:38
one of your big ideas into smaller ideas so that one concept can work harder for you and go longer. So that one concept could really...
03:52
So you can go deeper on one concept and create less content than constantly having to create new things every day.
04:02
So today's episode really came from an Instagram Live I did today with.
04:09
Heston and Megan, they invited me on to a weekly series they have called The Social Roundtable. I'll be sure to tag them in the show notes here. And the topic of the IG Live was eight things we wish we had known when we started on Instagram. And it really got me thinking about, gosh, if I was starting over again, what would I want to tell myself? And that's really where this episode idea came from today. So shout out to Heston and Megan. And side note,
04:39
wanna highlight something for you. If you're not already doing collaborations on Instagram, I highly recommend that you start to do that. Reach out to someone else in your niche with a similar following size to you and.
04:52
pitch to them, say hey I had this idea, I was wondering if you would want to do this. Make it easy when you're pitching to someone, make it very easy for them to say yes, you do all the work, you say it's on this date, at this time, here's the topic, are you in, are you out? But that has been a really great way for me to grow my audience recently as I've been doing a lot of IG collabs and I highly recommend doing that. I think it's one of the most underrated ways of growing your Instagram account.
05:22
So if you're not already doing that, I invite you to start to think about who you would love to do an Instagram live with, who do you want to collaborate with maybe on a real and go do it. Experiment, test, and that's how you will learn and grow.
05:38
Okay.
05:44
So let's get into five Instagram growth hacks that you're missing and how to fix them. So the first thing that I wish I had known when I started my Instagram account for my business was that the...
05:57
Absolute first thing that you need to do even before you start creating content is start with who is your ideal client or customer. This means doing your target market research. Now target market research is work, right? It takes effort and a lot of businesses and brands kind of skip this step and then that is why content creation feels so hard for them.
06:27
you're serving and how you help them, content creation gets so much easier because you'll speak the language of your ideal clients. Once you identify their exact struggles, what keeps them up at night, what do they desire, what do they really want, why do they want that thing, and how is your product or service the solution to their problem? Once you're clear on all of those things, you will have endless content ideas.
06:57
because you'll know exactly who you are talking to. So lots of different ways in which you can do target market research. You can interview your favorite past clients and customers asking them why they chose to work with you, digging into when they were working with you, what were they struggling with, what did they want, how did you help them connect the dots from A to Z and all of that.
07:29
You can also do research, you can use AI, you can use Google Gemini, Chad GBT, to go into depth into your target market research and really create different customer avatars for your different offers, because if you, let's say you have a coaching business, you probably have different offers for different groups of people, so you might even have more than one target audience, more than one customer avatar. So if you do, that's totally fine,
07:59
on who you are talking to and once you feel that clarity, I promise you will no longer struggle with consistency because you'll just be so excited to get on Instagram every day and just talk to your people. I mean, that's really all we're doing is we're talking to our people. The second thing I wish I had known when I first started my Instagram account was go narrow, not wide. I'm gonna say it again, go narrow, not wide.
08:26
So Instagram is highly saturated with content, more so today than two years ago, and it's gonna keep going in that direction, right? So to stand out on Instagram, you have to be super, super specific. And a lot of times on my Instagram, people message me and be like, I don't know what's going on, my account's not growing. And I go and look at their bio and their profile, and I can see why they're not growing. It's that it's all too general.
08:54
It's all too general. So let me give you a specific example of I help statement that's too general. I help women make money online. Okay, so the good part about that is you identified a group of people, women, and their desire to make money online. Now, how can we make that statement so much more specific? Listen to this. I help fitness studio owners double their profits working only 20 hours a week.
09:24
Do you hear how much more specific that is than I help women make money online? So in your niche, in your expertise, I want you to think about how specific you can be in calling out your target audience and create content for that person. And that will help you to grow so much faster on Instagram.
09:51
The third thing I wish I had known before I started my business Instagram account is if you want to monetize your Instagram account, you must be crystal clear on your customer journey. Meaning, okay, they followed you, they liked your content, they saved it, they love you.
10:09
Now what? Where do they go after they find you on Instagram? And you would be amazed at how many business owners don't know the answer to this question. And I want to tell you sweet friend, if you don't know your next step for your ideal customer, they won't either and you're not going to make any money on Instagram. So you need to create a super simple sales funnel. For example, driving someone to a lead magnet or
10:39
there. That's just one example of a funnel. Obviously if you don't have an email list that funnel won't work for you. So that's one of the things that I dive deep into with my clients. If you want to learn more and get support from me just DM me and we'll chat.
10:57
The fourth thing I wish that I had known when I was stuck at 650 followers for my dance studio account for years is that growth will take time.
11:14
I created hundreds of reels before I had one go viral and bring in thousands of high value followers, meaning followers who were my actual ideal client. I've had videos that went viral that brought in that.
11:31
didn't bring me any followers because my profile wasn't positioned correctly at that time and I didn't know what the heck I was doing. But my point to you is that growth will take time and you must be willing to play the long game here. This is not like a get rich quick scheme. This is not like, oh, I go and post a reel every day for 30 days and now I have 10K followers. Could that happen for you? Absolutely it can if you know exactly what you're doing and you have a really solid content strategy and all of that.
12:01
We need to get in those reps. We need to practice creating a lot of content and really dialing in our messaging and all those things. And it just, this is just part of business. It takes what it takes.
12:13
and you have to have that mindset of being in it for the long haul and not giving up. And what always helps me is just to root back into my why. Why am I doing this? What are my business and life goals? And what are my service goals? Like how do I wanna serve my people? And that service heart always helps me to continue showing up and giving value to my audience.
12:38
And finally, the fifth thing I wish I had known before I started my Instagram account is I want you to use your Instagram to network with other people in your field.
12:51
I'm a huge fan of collaboration over competition. There's more than enough for everyone. We gotta have that abundance mindset. There is absolutely more than enough clients and customers out there. There are billions of people on this planet. So get out of your head, start collaborating with other people in your niche, DM people with a similar following size than you, maybe a little bit bigger than you, but not like crazy, and send them a voice memo.
13:21
to your podcast, invite them into your summit, reach out, think about how you could support them in your pitch, right? Make it an easy yes for them. I'll give you an example. One of my newest clients in Hot Reels, she's a business coach, a brilliant business coach. She has been coaching, you know, business growth for years and years and she just recently started her Instagram account. So if you go on her account, you don't, you can't see her experience, right? Because she's
13:51
her do is really optimize her bio, her profile, and really dial it in so it's super specific and then helping her refine her content strategy so we can get all of those ideal business coaching clients on her email list and so she can start to convert them into her paid offers.
14:09
And now I met this amazing woman because she pitched me, she invited me into a summit where I could speak. And the way she pitched it, it was a no brainer for me. I was gonna get in front of all of these new people, like thousands and thousands of new people. I would be able to pitch my lead magnet. It's a prerecorded interview that takes 20, 30 minutes. So I knew I wouldn't have to show up live. I could do it at my leisure. It's recorded.
14:39
of getting it out there. She's in charge of all the marketing and I only have to do a couple.
14:44
Different emails, but it was just a very easy yes And what I loved about her and in talking to her is that she reached out to some really really big Influencers and leaders in the space and they also said yes to her and she has you know Like a hundred followers on Instagram But it doesn't matter because it was the way in which she pitched and she made it really easy For me to say yes to her opportunity So get out of your head that you have to be at a certain spot
15:14
before you can take action on your dreams, on your desires. I'll leave you with this story. When I first started my podcast, there was a specific podcaster that I had been listening to for years. In my mind, she was podcast famous. Like she had, you know, she was just huge in the podcasting world. And I remember I sent her a voice memo on Instagram. And at this time, I think I might've had like 1200 followers. So not a ton.
15:40
And I said, hey, I just launched this podcast. I love your podcast. Here's what I love about it. You know, I gave really specific details and I said, I would absolutely be honored to have you on the podcast. Here's what I'd like to talk to you about. You know, I gave her like the talking points and would you be interested?
15:57
And she got back to me and said, yes. And I just couldn't believe it. So another story about you have to ask. You will be amazed at the huge opportunities that you will land simply because you had the courage to ask for what you want.
16:15
Okay friend that wraps up today's episode. I hope you got so much value out of it If you did, please share this episode with a business bestie or colleague That really helps us reach more people and if you haven't already and you love the show, please rate and review on your favorite Listening platform that really helps me reach more people and continue to Give you this free content And lastly I would love to hear from you in my instagram
16:45
DMs, yes, it's me. I do have DM automation, but I go through and I read every single email.
16:52
Every I go through and I read every single DM. So please DM me Let me know what you love on the podcast Let me know what you want to hear more about if you have more questions I'd love to meet you. I'd love to hear more about your business and your big vision and goals So don't hesitate to have courage and reach out to me. And yes, I will respond to you I'm sending you love support and i'll see you next week.