Growth Hacking Instagram

Note: This is the first chapter of Secret Sauce: A Step-By-Step Guide to Growth Hacking, available for purchase as a book and video course now. This chapter, which covers growth hacking Instagram, is one of the dozens of chapters.

Imagine this scenario:

A friend had just come out with a line of custom neckties. He sewed them by hand using fabrics he imported, scavenged off from vintage couches, and unburied at the bottom of fabric remnant racks. It was all very hipster, and since he planned to sell these ties for $80 apiece, he needed marketing advice.

Where do you start?

How do you gain an audience of people who want to buy $80 hand-sewn neckties? (Spoiler alert: he opened his online store two weeks later, and sold $4,000 worth of ties the first day with zero marketing budget. It has been his full-time job ever since).

The answer may surprise you — we ended up using Instagram. We’ll take you through exactly what happened within that channel, but before we get there let’s take you through the process for identifying that channel and our strategy. We need to focus on the thought process and methodology of knowing what network and strategy to use.

Beating the System

A lot of people view growth hacking as beating some sort of system. They figure out how to beat one system or find something that works on one channel, and then, holding that hammer, start to look at everything as if it’s a nail. You’ve probably noticed this if you’ve ever talked to a Search Engine Optimization agency. “You’re a hot dog stand? What you need is SEO!”

That is the worst way to go about it, because it works well enough to get results but not well enough to learn what will get great ones. It also works poorly enough that your cost of user acquisition will be too high to justify paying it.

Instead of looking down the list of networks you know how to beat, I want you to learn to break every marketing effort down into these three steps:

1. Understand exactly who your customer is
2. Figure out where people like your customer tend to congregate
3. Figure out how to make contact with them where they are

Even though we ended up selling $4,000 of a highly-niched product on day one because of Instagram, we didn’t start off knowing we would be using Instagram. That came as we explored the growth mindset.

The Growth Mindset

User acquisition is, above all else, a mindset. The tactics will always vary according to the circumstances of the network or audience you’re targeting, but the thought process is always very similar. We want to take you through the thought process from the very beginning. By the end, you’ll be able to pick this process apart and reverse engineer it — doing so will work on any other network and with any other product or service.

This is probably the most important chapter in this book, so pay attention.

User Acquisition

At the highest level, user acquisition (paid or unpaid) consists of two steps:

1. Creating something desirable enough that some subset of the human population wants it.

2. Getting in front of those people in the right way

Preparation

We approach every user acquisition problem the same way you should break down any complex problem. The first step is to stop and slow down.

Do not go nuts creating an account or posting or optimizing. Instead, grab a piece of paper and a pencil and start breaking things down into smaller pieces until you have a solidified roadmap.

As you’re thinking through this, do not inhibit or suppress your thought process. You want every thought and idea out on paper to sort out later, and your mind is the conveyor belt bringing those things to the table. If you stop the conveyor belt, you won’t have the idea to play with when you want it. Stream of consciousness here is great; just let thoughts flow wherever they may go.

We’re actually going to take you through our thought process in this instance, and you’ll see how at the end selling $4,000 of custom-sewn neckties wasn’t even a surprise; it made sense that it happened that way.

Learning to Think Like Johnny P.

> OK, so we have a bunch of neckties that are a little bit crazy. They’re not really my style. Who wants to wear a necktie that’s been made out of fabric someone pulled off a used couch?

> Johnny P. would wear this — that’s who. He’s always wearing weird crap like that. Vests with hide from a water buffalo, clothes some orphan hand-knit in Venezuela, color combinations that shouldn’t look good together, but do, somehow. Johnny is kind of a weirdo. But he also dresses really well. Sometimes it’s over the top, but that kid must put a ton of time and effort into the way he looks. Probably drops a ton of cash too. Ya, he’s the perfect person for something like this.

> OK, so I’m Johnny. What is Johnny’s day like? Who does he hang out with? What websites does he visit? I know he’s really into international film — he’s kind of a “designy hipster” — big beard, cardigan, teardrop hats and all. And most of his friends are the same way; I assume they all like similar stuff. How would I describe what Johnny is into?

> Johnny is really into creating things; things being “authentic” and “real,” almost anti-corporate. Craftsmanship. Artisan. Those are the words I would choose to describe Johnny. To him things aren’t just to be used; objects have a heart and soul. Everything is art. Indie music, TV shows that most people wouldn’t care to watch.

> When I think Johnny, I think wood grain and thick wool. I think restored apartment in Soho. Very Thoreau, yet in a weird way very inner-city. New York or San Francisco. Very Urban-Rustic. He’s what would happen if you mixed Into the Wild and GQ. Is Americana a word for that?

> I hate this word, but you could call him a hipster. I don’t know too much about hipsters. He may be offended by that. I should ask Johnny about it.

> But OK, back to Johnny. What does Johnny do? What’s his daily routine? What websites does he use? He’s not really a big Facebook fan — well, at least he talks about how he hates it, who knows how much he really uses it? He’s always making fun of Pinterest, too, which is interesting — you think he’d be the Pinterest type. Definitely an iPhone guy, almost to a “make fun of Android” extent. He loves design; I wonder if he studied design in college or if he’s just into that stuff? Did he go to college? Oh yeah, I know that Johnny is on Instagram all. the. time. That’s probably because he’s into photography — most of the very arty/designy types are, to some extent. I wonder if that was the original audience of Instagram — if their first users were really artsy people who got into using the photographic filters? It was kind of like Hipstamatic I guess. Did Instagram come before or after Hipstamatic?

> Instagram, that could be interesting. So assuming that Johnny is on Instagram, he probably has a bunch of friends that are too. After all, Johnny isn’t everyone, it’s just his type we’re looking for. How could I find them?

After at least 30 minutes of this kind of brainstorming, we can start “digging.”

The Digging

> Alright, let’s find Johnny’s account. Who does he follow? Huh, it looks like he only follows friends and family. Or at least, these contacts seem to be friends and family, I’m not sure if they all are not; he has a lot of friends that look and act just like him. These could be celebrities in his world for all I know. I’ll find if there are any big accounts later. What words does he use, what kind of photos does he post? How can I find all these people?

> I could just look at the people that Johnny follows. But there’s probably a lot of friends and family; I know he follows me and I’m not the target audience. But who else does he follow? Who are the big hipster Instagram accounts? Not like Humans of New York hipster — that’s too “mainstream.”

> Here’s a picture of a lake. Hashtags #lake. Very understated. Not much going there, not much to work with.

> Here’s one with him in it. Oh wow, he’s cobbling his own shoes. Uses the #artisan hashtag. Let’s check that out.

> Eh, this looks mediocre at best. The first few photos are someone making chainmail, remodeling their house, etc. Not as targeted as I would have thought. Back to Johnny.

> Family photo. Next.

> Oh very interesting. He’s got on a suit from goodwill — that fits him really well. Hashtag #dapper. #Dapper — that’s very interesting. That’s very GQ. Not as artisan-y, but let’s check it out.

> Wow. These guys are all obsessed with clothes. Weird clothes. This dude made a coat out of hair extensions. That might be too crazy for Johnny, but crazily enough it seems to fit our niche. Whoa, how does this photo have 13,000 likes? Let’s check this dude out.

> Yeah, this guy is the type. He and Johnny would hang out and talk about clothes. This is the person we want. If we look at his posts the hashtag I see again and again is #dapper. And there are millions of Johnnys using that keyword. Here they are — the perfect market of people we want to reach.

So perhaps that is a little bit annoying, but If you take that apart and look at where the stream of consciousness started, you’ll find a few things.

Always start with the target market.

The biggest mistake I see people make is they start with figuring out how they can get a large reach. That is bad news. Start by figuring out the type of person you want to target, and where a bunch of them congregate. From that point we can figure out how to target them or get our message in front of them. You’ll see throughout the rest of the book that this can be the easy part. First we have to know who they are and what they like.

Sending out an email to 15 million random people would probably be less effective than engaging in a real conversation with a dozen of these folks. We just avoided a lot of wasted time.

1. Get in the mind of the people you want to reach

Later on we’ll do a bunch of testing and figure out where we were wrong, but your assumptions and playing around can get you a long way, especially in the initial stages. The most enlightening thing to do is talk with someone who falls in your target market (ideally you are that person), but for now we’ll just stereotype and try not to be too broad in doing so.

2. Find where the people you want to reach congregate

You want as large of a grouping of your target market as you can get. You also want that target market to be as specific as you can. You can’t always do that in traditional ways like finding accounts they follow or finding a big intentional group of them.

One of my favorite ways is finding a keyword or hashtag that a specific group has unintentionally adopted.

3. You’ll find you already know how to reach them

The interesting thing about following this process is that in doing to you accidentally figured out what your marketing should look like. In this example the words that stick out are “artisan” “dapper” and “craftsmanship.” Now we go into creation mode with a great understanding of how to build up a world that they want to be a part of.

Creation Mode

Our end goal will be to get in front of the market we’ve found, but more importantly, we have to have a home where they can land once we find them.

Looking back at the discovery process, you found the look/feel we were going for — words like “artisan,” “dapper,” and “craftsmanship.” Once we had that for guidance, actually creating the content was natural.

Not surprisingly, these photos were some of those that performed the best:

You can see they all went for that artisan handcrafted feel.

And now we know that many of the Johnnys of the world congregate on Instagram, just ready for us to pick them up. You’ll learn more about how we marketed to this “tribe” in the Instagram chapter, but for now we need to get some more nuts and bolts in place.

Instagram

Now that we’ve identified Johnny P. and his tribe, let’s figure out how to get in front of them. In doing so, we’ll work our way through some of the fundamentals of this network, and learn how we break down a channel as a growth hacker.

Setup

Continuing from the Thought Process chapter (which you should go back and read if you skipped ahead). This is where the fun stuff really starts.

Let’s get back to Johnny, our hipster-type artisan and his quirky neckties. We found a million people who we think may want what we’re offering and we created a few great photos that would resonate with that very specific audience. We spent a lot of time doing this — unique photos, tastefully posed and crafted. Nothing makes up for authenticity.

Now we need to optimize the funnel all the way down to help people get to a point of purchase.

Conversion Backwards

Once your market is identified, the next thing you should do is find the point of conversion.

This seems like we’re missing an important step — the tactics, but for now trust me.

What is the point of conversion? Is it a sale? Is it a new user? Maybe you know you have won or “converted” a website visitor if they download a free eBook or click a video to watch it. Once you identify this “point of conversion,” we can work backwards.

So let’s do just that with Johnny P. and our neckties.

Final Step: In this case it’s fairly obvious — the conversion is a sale. Someone puts a tie in their shopping cart and checks out. Simple enough.

One Step Back: Walking back from there we have to get someone to the point where they’re checking out the selection of ties.

Two Steps Back: Back up more and we’re at the point where they’re learning who we are.

That’s a fairly straight-forward conversion funnel, and working backwards was relatively easy.

As our marketing funnel grows and branches, the level of complexity of our marketing effort will increase. There will be more supporting work that doesn’t contribute to the end result later on down the road. But in the very beginning, we’re going to be like a mosquito — built to score and nothing else.

Now that we’ve identified the point of conversion, we know we have to:

1. Get people to know who we are — get them to the point where they can check out our stuff,
2. Make it easy to buy at that point.

It doesn’t get any simpler than that, but our chosen channel, Instagram, does provide a couple of wrinkles.

Channel Idiosyncrasies

Instagram is a little tricky, because no links are allowed in the posts themselves. If you really want to send people to a specific link, it’s common practice to add the comment “link in bio” to a photo, and change the link in your Instagram profile.

So we’ll put a link in the bio, but looking at this, I’m still a little skeptical that people will automatically click through and buy. That’s a big step to take for a first-time user.

How can we simplify that process?

We may have to warm someone up and add a little urgency. So instead of just going for a straight Instagram to store conversion, let’s add an interstitial step. It now looks like:

Final Step: Someone visits the website, puts a tie in their shopping cart and checks out.

One Step Back: They get an email that the store is open and they have a one-day 10% off coupon.

Two Steps Back: Someone sees our account, looks at some of the cool stuff we have, and notices that they can get 10% off when the store opens if they drop in their email.

Three Steps Back: We now need to figure out how to get someone to check out our Instagram account.

Finding a Non-Intrusive Touch Point

So we now have:

1. Our customer identified
2. A point of conversion identified
3. A funnel to conversion created

All that’s missing is our customer. We have to get in touch with them somehow.

We need to find a touch point where we can reach out to someone new, make them feel welcome, and smoothly tip them into our conversion funnel.

Generally, these are already available on the network you’ve started exploring, if perhaps less obvious. So let’s think about the functionality contained within the network we’re using, and really dissect the existing network.

There are five obvious ways I can get in touch with a Johnny using Instagram:

1. Tag him in a photo
2. Comment on one of his photos
3. Like his photos
4. Follow him
5. Send him a direct message

It seems pretty simple, but this is actually enough of a framework to work from; we just have to utilize as many of these as we can to reach all of the Johnnys of the world, as effectively as we can.

Let’s walk through them one by one to identify the promising ones.

Tagging in a photo.

This one seems spammy to me, and you have to be following me first in most cases. Next.

Commenting on photos

Very promising, could be pulled off, but would definitely take a lot of time and effort. I don’t know if I have enough time to write 1,000 unique comments, although that would work. Let’s keep that in our back pocket and look for something a little more simple.

Liking photos

Liking photos is easy, and no one hates it when others like their photos. It’s possible the likes will be buried amongst dozens of other likes, but I know that I notice it when people like my photos, and I’ll often go check theirs out. This isn’t a bad strategy.

Following

The most obvious and easiest way would be following. You show up independently to them for a few minutes, and they’ll most likely check you out. Having more followers is a good thing as well, so I almost feel like I owe you something for following me.

So let’s take these things and develop a strategy around them.

Follow, Like, Like, Like

At this point, you’ll want to pull out your phone, log into your account, and start playing. Take half a day, a whole day, it doesn’t really matter, this is all part of the learning process. That’s exactly what we did with our first Instagram experiment. Start playing with the channel and where its boundaries lie. Reach out to people, make contact, find touch points. Do so in a sincere and meaningful way, even if the process is arduous and extremely time consuming.

The difference between spam and initiating a conversation is the thought and effort you put into it.

After about a day of experimentation and testing, we found the method that works the best for us is something we call “follow like like like.” The process is simple — go to the most recent section for the hashtag we chose to target and select the top picture. Follow that account, go to their photos, and like their most recent three photos.

This shows the user that not only did someone who is kind of like them follow them, but they also dug a little bit and really liked what they found.

Here’s the crazy part: When we did this, the follow-back percentage approached 25%. Meaning for every four people we followed, one would follow us back. Why? Because it was authentic engagement; we actually cared about the people we were following, and they could see that we actually cared about them. They weren’t bothered to be contacted; they were honored and grateful.

Interestingly, from a growth perspective, we could see a decent amount of traffic going through to the pre-launch landing page we had set up, and we saw the emails filling up our list.

Going to Work

We kept following this process for a week before setting the product live, and by the end of the week we had 10,000 followers.

In one week, with one simple process, all accomplished manually, and something everybody reading this could do. Each photo we posted was getting over 300 likes, and other people were being tagged in each of the photos by their friends.

The content was great, and people really cared about what the company was doing. They joined our tribe and started fighting for us. And, perhaps best of all, it was all done legitimately, without (we hope) annoying too many people.

We also did it completely manually. It did get tiring spending literally all day liking photos on Instagram, but it was all worth it come launch day.

Targeted following

If you’re following a lot of people, there’s a really good way to see if you are targeting your actions well enough; see if you can actually enjoy your feed. If following completely ruins the Instagram experience for you by filling your feed up with junk you don’t want to see, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Be very, very selective about who you follow. Make it as tight of a network as you possibly can, and as directly targeted as you can.

Fool’s Gold

Another of the biggest mistakes I see people make on social networks is to use the number of followers as the most important metric. There are plenty of accounts that will follow back just because. If you’re looking to pump numbers you could even go through the #followback hashtag and get a bunch of follows from people who won’t care about you and will never see your posts. Congratulations?

We’re not looking for those — we’re looking to generate interest and create a community around out photos, not get a bunch of ego boosts that won’t help us at all.

Launch Day

Launch day came, and, as stated before, the company sold over $4,000 of inventory. This had been a side-project up until that point, but the creator was able to quit his job and go full-time doing what he loved. He hasn’t gone back since. He’s been able to control growth at a level that works for him.

As an “artisan” who insists on “handcrafted” products, he’s been able to build traffic and revenue at a pace that allows him to maintain his goal of producing quality product without forcing him to abandon his own principles of creating truly hand-made (as opposed to bulk-manufactured in China or Vietnam) softgoods.

As a marketer, there’s nothing more rewarding than letting the makers support themselves by doing what they do best. In addition, we made the process easy and repeatable so he can manage his own Instagram account rather than paying a consultant to do it for him. That’s another indication that this process generated legitimate results.

What we did seems obvious in retrospect, but I often wonder how many makers there are in the world that have a great product and no way to get the world to see it. My guess is the number is very high.

There are other methods to grow your Instagram account, which can work in addition to the follow, like, like, method mentioned above.

Since you already have the right foundation in place, we’ll go through these (and other methods) much more quickly.

Influencers

Perhaps the fastest way to grow an Instagram account is to use already-existing networks of influencers in your space.

There are marketplaces where you can contract Instagram influencers by the hour or by the day to post promotional posts for you. Two of the biggest are Shoutcart and Instafluence.

These work very well if you know how much revenue you’re going to bring in and are a little bit farther along, but they can be very expensive, especially in the beginning. Instead of using these networks specifically, we’re going to reverse engineer that method and build out our own ad-hoc influencer network to drive down the costs.

Rolling Our Own Influencer Network

One of the ways we’re going to beat this system is by finding people with larger yet untapped audiences.

If you have 1 million followers you are probably approached for shoutouts several times per day. If you have 100,000 followers you are probably approached several times a week (and more if you’re on a shoutout selling network). If you’re approached that often, you can piece together some semblance market-based pricing (using what people are willing to pay), and likely have an idea of what the price of such a service should be.

What the price should be is “expensive.” We want to find the people who don’t know it should be expensive yet.

In my experience, those with between 50,000 followers and 100,000 followers are virtually never approached for shoutouts. Because of this, they have no price set for a shoutout, and we can often buy shoutouts from those folks for cheap.

Buying a shoutout from an account with 1 million followers has run people I’ve worked with as much as $20,000. Yet I’ve purchased dozens of shoutouts from accounts with ~50,000 followers for $5–10.

Let’s assume, for a moment, we put in the legwork to find 20 accounts with 50,000 followers and paid each of them $10 for a shoutout. We pay $200 to reach the same number of followers other folks are paying $20,000 to reach. A $19,800 savings by putting in a little more work and creativity — that’s exactly what growth hacking is.

Your numbers may be slightly different, but $10 per shoutout serves as a good starting point.

Audiense

In order to do this, the first tool we’ll use to find influencers is Audiense (formerly known as SocialBro). Audiense has a free trial that will let us find and target instagram users by niche, sorting them by number of followers (though it will convert to $39/month).

So in this case we would create an Audiense account, enter our niche (we’ll say “fashion”), and see that (at the time of writing) there are 490,492 people we can target.

Now we want to filter this for influential people, but still not so influential that they have a price for shoutouts. Let’s say we want to target 10,000 to 50,000 followers for this test.

We now have a neatly curated list of people to approach for shoutouts, and we can sort or filter them in any way we see fit. (We may, for example, choose only to target males, as we’re selling neckties for men.) It’s time to start wheeling and dealing.

This is the manual part where you’ll have to find a way to approach these people and see waht works. Don’t be afraid of that part; it’s the last mile of the marathon.

Affiliate Deals

Perhaps the best (and definitely cheapest) way to structure these types of deals is to shoot for some sort of affiliate structure: If my cost on a tie is $20 and I sell it for $80, let’s agree to split the profit with the influencers. That means for each sale we each make $30.

This is more difficult to set up and manage, but it aligns the incentives of all parties involved. If you have an influencer who sells five ties with one post, you can bet they’ll be doing everything they can to promote your product in the future.

In a later chapter we’ll show you how to create a unique URL. You can give a unique URL to each affiliate to place in their bio — it will look like http://www.someurl.com/?utm_source=aff&utm_medium=instagram&utm_campaign=usernamehere.

Using this kind of a URL, we can track eCommerce conversions by source/medium, and know how many sales came through our affiliates.

In the Admin section of Google Analytics we can also grant “read only” access to our account for the affiliates to see. Just click Admin, User Management, and add permissions for an email to “read and analyze.”

Passing Likes

A fair number of big influencers may not want to jeopardize the authenticity of their account. For those, there is another interesting solution.

When looking at the notifications section of Instagram there is the option to select, “following” and see all of the activity of all of the accounts you follow.

If a big account doesn’t want to sell shoutouts, you may be able to convince them to occasionally like your photos.

Initially I was shocked at how many people will notice this by looking at the actions of the people they follow in their notifications. I’ve seen accounts pass as many as 100,000 followers in one month. People do use that section, and a lot.

You may be able to find a large account that doesn’t generally like any photos, and pay them a much lower premium than you would have to pay them to post on your behalf.

Regramming

Another method of growing your Instagram account is a little more experimental, but it’s free. It’s known as regramming.

Simply put, we’re going to find people who post photos in our niche that get a lot of likes, share their photos (with permission) and hope they draw attention to our account because it shows how awesome they are.

We might reach out to a big account and say something like, “Hey, I love your photos. I’m trying to start a hashtag of surfing shots called #youcanthandthissurftho. Can I regram your pic to my account? I’ll give your @ handle a shoutout.” Almost everyone will say yes — you’re offering to grow their exposure for free by tapping your audience.

The interesting part is that many of these accounts will regram your photo.

What they don’t realize is that in doing so they also allowed you to inject your account into their feed. I’ve seen regrams from one account alone pass over 15,000 followers.

It also carries with it the side benefit of getting closer to the influencers who drive a lot of traffic and conversions in a hashtag, but for our purposes this is secondary.

Making the Most of Your Instagram Posts

There are a lot of blog posts out there about how to create a great Instagram post, and most of it is common sense so we won’t delve too far into that. What we will talk about is the stuff that accompanies a post — the comments and hashtag.

What surprisingly people understand is how hashtags work. There are a lot of people (and I mean a lot) who constantly go through hashtags as their way of finding new posts to see and new people to follow.

The search results page for a hashtag on Instagram has two sections: Popular and Recent.

The goal, given that such is the case, is simply to use the right hashtags so that we get in front of those people. In essence the more we post with a hashtag and the more hashtags we use the more we’ll be seen. So let’s find the best ones.

A really great way to find popular hashtags is using tagsforlikes. It monitors Instagram and gives you a list of the most-liked hashtags within a given category (injecting its own hashtags, which is a little annoying, but what can you do).

There’s even a tagsforlikes iPhone app if you want to have these hashtags easily accessible.

What not many people realize is that your posts don’t only show up based on the hashtags in your original post — they also show up for the hashtags in your comments. That means that if you really wanted to, you could sit there and drop in five different comments full of hashtags and push your photo to the top of hundreds of hashtags. The timestamp for your photo, however, remains the same, so if you really want to be seen you have to do it quick. You will get the majority of the likes from people who don’t follow you in the first 10–15 minutes you post a photo, so optimize for that.

Cheater Posts

There are two posts that work endlessly on Instagram, and they work better than you would ever believe. They are:

1. “Double tap if you X!” e.g. “Double tap if you need pizza more than a relationship in your life” (a double tap on Instagram likes a photo).
2. “Tag someone who Y!” e.g. “Tag someone who needs this in their life” or “Tag someone who is a great artist”

It doesn’t make too much sense, but people will like and tag those posts all day. Yes, this works.

Creating & Scheduling Posts

If you’re not a designer you can use canva.com to create beautiful images that are exactly the right size for your social media channels. If you want to really be able to step away from Instagram you could create 100 posts in Canva, then use something like Hootsuite or Buffergram to schedule them.

Both solutions are pretty cheap, and they’ll let us line up posts long in advance.

Instagram seems to not be a huge fan of apps that allow scheduling, so sometimes they are cut off from the API, but I’ve never seen them put a user’s account in danger, so long as they’re above board.

Apps (bots) like FollowLiker also work for scheduling, but are more complex and appear to be operating against the ways Instagram would like to see them be used, so we won’t recommend them here, even though they do work.