How to do Growth Hacking on Instagram?

With its 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is a must-have social network for most businesses. Even if some brands have switched to TikTok or LinkedIn in the last few years, Instagram has such a large audience that it is almost certain that potential prospects for your business are there.

Several brands still use Instagram as their main acquisition channel and every year try out new tricks to gain followers on Instagram. They A/B test, automate, develop strategies and fast track themselves though their growth: they hack their growth.

What is Growth Hacking?

For the uninitiated, Growth Hacking consists in generating rapid and significant growth in turnover through a set of marketing techniques.

For a long time, the most common technique used by growth hackers was to run a Follow/Unfollow bot. There was a growth in the number of subscribers, but not always an obvious impact on the turnover.

So, are there other growth levers to use in 2022?

Growth Hacking applied to Instagram

When it comes to Growth Hacking for your business, there is one model (framework) that comes up time and time again and for the simple reason that it has proven itself: the AARRR model.

What is the AARRR model?

Invented in 2007 by the American Dave McClure, entrepreneur and business angel of over 500 start-ups, this model can be applied to your product as well as to some of your acquisition channels. It is extremely useful because it allows you to structure your marketing approach by working distinctly on the 5 crucial stages of your conversion funnel. Each of these stages can be worked on independently of each other, but also in a non-chronological order.

This model is also called the "Pirate Metrics" framework.

AARRR and Instagram

• Acquisition:  A user discovers your Instagram profile
• Activation:  They like the content, they decide to subscribe to follow your future content
• Retention:  You keep in touch with her
• Recommendation:  This subscriber recommends you to other Instagram users
• Revenue:  Reinforced by this relationship of trust, a CTA or call to action (buttons, links, etc.) finally converts this subscriber into a customer

Optimizing the 5 steps of the AARRR matrix

Let's look at several possibilities to optimize these steps to generate extra growth

Acquisition

• Define your content pillars, key themes used in your content strategy on Instagram, so you never run out of content.
• Produce polished content with beautiful visuals.
• Vary the publication formats if possible: photos, videos, carousels, stories, reels
• Post regularly on Instagram as the algorithm always favors the most active users. To help you with this step, there are a myriad of content scheduling tools.
• Use the right Instagram hashtags to reach a wider audience
• Use the Follow / Unfollow technique, as it still works well on Instagram. However, aim for users in your target audience on competing accounts or hashtags related to your area of expertise.

Activation

• Encourage users to subscribe to your page by adding a small text on all your posts "👉 Subscribe"
• Creating competitions is a good way to increase your number of subscribers by rewarding only those users who interact with your account. The more interactions you have, the more likely you are to convert that visitor into a subscriber and then a customer.

Retention

• We'll say it again in case it's not clear, but the best way to stay in touch with your subscribers is to publish inspiring content regularly.
• Sharing content from your users on Instagram is also a great way to engage, retain your community and improve your page's results. The Kurato Instagram tool allows you to automate almost all of this. The software collects and analyzes thousands of posts to suggest the ones that are most likely to engage your community. The time savings are just phenomenal.

Referral

• Encourage, where possible, your users to tag friends to generate new subscriptions. To achieve this, write a little text in your post descriptions. "If you like this content, mention a friend @".

Income

• Use the Instagram Shopping application if you are doing e-commerce. This feature allows you to capture some of your Instagram traffic and redirect it to your website's product page. This way, you can tag a product for sale on the photo of a post with a clickable link to buy it. Instagram Shopping is a must to increase your sales and therefore your income.

It's up to you 👍