0 - 10k Followers LIVE Case Study

By: Thor Aarsand & Ben Oberg 

In this case study, we are going to look at the step by step process we
used to grow an account from 0 followers up to 10k followers.

WARNING:​ ​This report will be packed with value. Your current beliefs of
how and what works on Instagram might shift significantly. Don’t let it scare
you, change is good.

If you find so much value from this report that you want more valuable
information from both me, Thor, and Ben, then check out our FREE
webinar: C​ lick here to Reserve your Webinar Seat!

That being said, let’s get on with this Report!

(ps, you really should check out the webby)

The account grown = ​@progressforprofit

Before we dive into how we grew the account, we’re gonna have a look at
the niche and account first to establish the theme and strategy we went for.

Niche:​ Motivation / Business Advice

Content:​ Infographics / Quotes
Growth Strategies:​ Influencers, Story Ads, The Interaction Methods,
Fanpage Strategy, Hashtags & Explore Page and The Content Creator
Strategy
Goal:​ 10k followers
Timeframe: ​None set, however long it takes. We’re going with the flow.

Below is the outlook of the account right after we got started (image to the
left) and the content pattern we decided to use on the account (image to
the right)

We wanted to build the account in a niche we had a lot of knowledge in.

We’ll get back to why this is so important later on in this case study, but it
really comes down to practicing what you preach.

Anyways, let’s get started with the first milestone…

Milestone #1:​ ​Growing 0 - 1000 Followers

The first milestone when starting a new Instagram account is always the
trickiest. Why? Because you have no momentum.

You’ve got no likes, no followers, no one knows about your page.

What was our strategy when starting the page?

Starting Strategy:​ I​ nstagram Story Ads

The reason we chose​ Instagram Story Ads​ as our starting strategy was
because when you are starting from fresh, you have nothing to go off of. No
momentum to push you on to the explore page or rank in hashtags.

Instagram Story Ads however work no matter what. You can have 100k
followers or no followers. The strategy we use for Instagram Story Ads
work the exact same.
When setting up the ad on Facebook Ad Manager, we chose the objective
for the ad as Traffic. We’ve been experimenting with all the different options
but using “Traffic” always gives us the best CPC (cost per click).

For the Audience targeting (as seen above), you’ve got 2 different options.

Location - Age - Language - People Who Match X Interest.

The locations we chose were First World Countries (tier 1 locations). The
reason for this is because we want to be able to monetize our followers. If
you’re targeting for example Third World Countries, they don’t have the
same financial opportunities, making it less likely for them to invest in your
product.

Facebook is always going to run ads to the cheapest countries, so if you

only chose worldwide, you won’t run ads to USA or Australia, you’ll be
running ads to Pakistan and India.

Facebook looks for the cheapest place to run the ads. Always. That’s why
you have to be specific with the locations you chose.
Next you’ve got “Age”. We chose 18-38 because that is what we know to
be our ideal targeted audience.

For language, you want them to speak english so that’s pretty simple.

Then the interests are where it’s at. When you’re running ads, you want to
target people who are likely to be interested in your content.

Sooo…

You want to run ads to people with those selected interests. Facebook
knows this, so you can choose whatever interests you want.

Makeup, travel, Football, Business, Money, Watches etc…

Next up you chose your budget. We recommend doing no lower than $5 a

day. For our campaign with @progressforprofit, we were spending about
$10 a day.
For the formats you have 3 options. We always run the middle one. Most of
the time choosing video as our ad type.

You then upload the video for the video for the ad and you’re good to go.
You publish the ad and you’re all set.

Now some important things to note is that when you’re uploading a video
as an ad, it can maximum be 120 seconds long.

That does not mean to use the full 2 minutes. The best performing ads are
3-15 seconds long.

All our ads are 15 seconds long video ads.

This was our strategy from 0 followers all the way up to 1000 followers.

In total we spent $55 to get to 1000 followers with ads. This all comes down
to you creating a good ad copy. The better the ad is, the less money you’re
gonna spend and the better of an ROI you’re gonna see.
Stats so far:
Followers: 1000
Spent: $55

Milestone #2:​ ​From 1000 - 5000 Followers

The next challenge is getting the account from 1000 followers to 5000
followers. For this we stopped the ads to use some other strategies.

Now the only reason we stopped the ads was so we could track the exact
growth we would get from other strategies. You should however not stop
the ads when you’ve found a set that is performing.

We however, had to.

What strategies did we use?

Strategies:​ Influencer Marketing, 502 Strategy + Fanpage, Hashtags &

Explore Page

For the next 4k followers, we used a bunch of different strategies.

If you don’t know what the “502 Startegy + Fanpage Startegy”, I

recommend checking out our YouTube Channels (Thor Aarsand & Ben
Oberg), specifically ​this video about the 502 Strategy.

Now for hashtags and the explore page, here is what we did.

Actually, firstly we kind of made a huge mistake. You see, once we hit 1000
followers, we now had momentum. We had some ok engagement that
would enable us to rank in some hashtags.
What we failed to do though, was to research our hashtags and find ones
we could rank for. We just used the same sets of hashtags that we use on
our bigger accounts in the same niche.

This made it impossible for us to rank, and for the most part, our hashtag
results looked like this...

Almost nothing.. Due to bad research.

Once we realized this, we changed it up. Our engagement at the time were
around 100-200 likes per post, so that is the hashtags we chose to use.
Hashtags where the top ranked posts got all form 50 - 300 likes per picture.

That was the perfect range and would enable us to actually start ranking.
By continuing to grow the page and implementing the proper strategy for
hashtags, we were able to start getting results as you can see above.

Good rankings in hashtags and actually growing followers from those

rankings.

This brings us on to the final strategy we used at this point being

“Influencer Marketing”.
To really give us a boost in followers, making it easier to rank in hashtags
and on the explore, we wanted to use Instagram Influencers.

If you’re looking to grow 1000 followers overnight, this is the strategy for
you.

You simply invest money into these influencers, to have them promote your
page on either their story or on their newsfeed.

This strategy alone probably stood for 3000 of the followers we gained
when growing from 1k to 5k.

Now when using influencers to grow your page, it’s not a simple job.

You don’t just pay them and expect the results to roll in…

You have to be smart with the angle you take and what influencers you
use.
Here is a simple guide to succeeding with Instagram Influencers:
- Find Influencers with quality engagement
- Start with influencers who have 20k-100k followers
- Check their comments (look for organic comments)
- Check their likes (look for small accounts liking their pics, because if
they are getting likes from a lot of big pages, it’s likely that they are
using powerlikes or some other source of engagement boost)
- Start by buying newsfeed promotions
- Create a good ad copy (the image you use for the promo)
- Create a good caption for the image
- Test the ad copy on 3 different influencers on different times (To track
your results accurately)

The most important thing here for you to know is that some influencers with
1m followers might perform worse than influencers with 30k followers. This
is why you need to test.

The influencers and the ad copy are the 2 keys of this equation. Both need
to be on point for you to succeed.

Here is an overview of the ​size, money spent and followers gained

from the influencers we used…

Influencer #1
Size:​ 550k
Rate: ​$60 (24 hr newsfeed promo)
Gains: ​150 followers

Result rating:​ ​Very Bad (D-)

Influencer #2
Size:​ 500k
Rate: ​$53 (24 hr newsfeed promo)
Gains: ​600 followers

Result rating:​ ​Pretty good (A)

Influencer #3
Size:​ 420k
Rate: ​$150 (24 hr newsfeed promo)
Gains: ​700 followers

Result rating:​ ​Not very bad, but definitely not good (C-)

Influencer #4
Size:​ 1,5M
Rate: ​$143 (24 hr newsfeed promo)
Gains: ​1000 followers

Result rating:​ ​Decent with a minus (C+)

Influencer #1
(We tried the same influencer one more time with a different ad copy)
Size:​ 550k
Rate: ​$60 (24 hr newsfeed promo)
Gains: ​400 followers
Comment: ​Just changing the ad copy 3x’ed our results
Result rating:​ ​Decent (B-)

Influencer #5
Size:​ 1,1M
Rate: ​$80 (24 hr newsfeed promo)
Gains: ​250 followers

Result rating:​ ​Decent (B-)

Very interesting data if you look into it. Obviously the follower count of an
influencer has nothing to do with the results you get. This is why it’s so
important that you find influencers with quality engagement.

You might also want to look for the demographics. If your goal is to
monetize, then you don’t want followers from third world countries, but
rather from places like the US, Canada, Europe and Australia.

Once you have a couple influencers in place, it’s time to work on the ad
copy. For this we want to show you an example, but the keyword to a good
ad is CREATIVITY.

Think outside the box. People have been doing Influencer Marketing for
years. It’s nothing new. That’s why you have to step up your game.

Posting something like “Follow @yourusername for awesome content” with

a screenshot of your page is a dumb idea. That won’t work.

The ad copy we’re gonna show you below is one we used for ​@lifebythor
and it did very well.
In this ad there are a couple of key elements that aren’t typically used in
Influencer Marketing…

The key elements are:

- Storytelling
- The Carousel Format
- Relatability
- Emotions
- Interest
- Doesn’t look like an ad
- Curiosity

Check out the ad below and see if you can connect the dots on all of this...
People love a good story. Combine that with relatability, sparking emotions
and interest and you’ve got them hooked. The fact that this doesn’t even
look like an ad is also super helpful.

Now don’t use this ad copy yourself. Why?

There are multiple thousands of people that are reading these exact same
words as you are reading. So if you want something that doesn’t work, it’s
doing what everyone else does.

And because I know that a lot of the people reading this are lazy and can’t
be bothered to come up with an original concept, they’re gonna copy us.

Obviously we don’t mind. Now that it’s exposed, a lot of people are going to
use it, which is fine… It’s just going to make it less effective. That’s why we
recommend YOU, to think on your own.

However, now you got an idea of how a potential ad copy can look like and
you understand why this one particularly did perform.

So when you create your own copy, you want to try to integrate as many of
the key elements mentioned as possible.

Storytelling, The Carousel Format, Relatability, Emotions, Interest, Doesn’t

look like an ad, Curiosity..
Milestone #3:​ ​Growing 5000 - 10,000 Followers!

For the final part of the challenge, the final 5000 followers, we pretty much
doubled down on what was already working.

We continued with the 502 Strategy, The hashtags and Explore page as
well as running influencer campaigns.

At this point, we also had enough data and experience on our ad

campaigns through FB, that we decided to optimize them. Basically use the
info we’d gathered from growing our audience, and making the ad
campaign more targeted towards the same kind of audience we currently
had.

What was the result of this? We were now paying less per follower from the
ads. Simple.

Now there was one problem we ran into at the early stage of part 3.

We ran some shitty influencer promotions. We got offered to buy 2k

followers for $100. Not from a website, or some fake bot service. We paid
an influencer account to continue to run promotions to our page until we
had gained an extra 2k followers.

We sent him over the content for the promotion, however this is where the
problem occured. The page we ran the promotion on was not a business
specific page.

Because of this, the promotional content is even more important. Why?

Because you don’t want all of that pages followers, you only want to extract
the business interested people (the people who would be interested in our
content). So the content used for promotions on this page was crucial.

Now the problem that happened, is that the influencer neglected our
content, and used his own content for the promotions. Super cheesy
captions and images to push traffic to our page.

Pictures like “Do you have acne? Follow this page to learn how to remove it
in 24 hours”. Not the kind of followers we wanted...

So what happened after we gained 2000 followers from these promotions,

our engagement dropped by over 50%.

These are screenshots of our page before the 2k promotion. Current

follower count was around: ​4500 followers.
With 4,5k followers, the engagement rate on the account was pretty damn
good! Average likes per picture was 550 likes, which gives an engagement
rate on 12%.

Now after the 2k promotion, that would all change...

The followers came in, and the page now had jumped from 4500 followers
to around 6500 followers.

About 400 of these followers also unfollowed the account over the next
week, which really hurt the health score of the account.

So this is how the page looked like after the promotion.

Absolutely terrible engagement…

Now why is this?

Because when we now made a post, the page would reach more of the
newly gained followers, however because none of these followers cared
about the content, the conversion from impression to engagement was
horrible.

This makes the content look bad in the eyes of the algorithm, and
Instagram then decided to not show the content to more people because it
was “bad” content… When in reality, it was just my newly un-targeted
followers that made the content look that way because they weren’t
engaging.

That’s why more followers isn’t always a good thing. You don’t want any
kind of follower, you want targeted followers.

We had really done-did it at this point. What would you do if you found
yourself in this situation? Give up? Start a new page?

Well those were not options for us, as we had over 20k people paying
attention to the challenge. So, we had to work our way around it.

So this is what we did…

We experimented.

A lot.

Initially what we had was business interested followers. At this point our
audience was more mixed, not just business interested people but also
people with all kinds of interests.

So we needed to find a content style that still would satisfy our business
interested followers, but that also appeals to the masses.
This is what we came up with.

More visuals and text to complement the meaning of the image.

If we compare the engagement we had from before to what we are getting

now we’re seeing a quite significant change.

We averaged about 200-300 likes on the account at this point.

After changing it up, our engagement literally blew up.

Our average engagement rate jumped from 200 to 400 likes per picture.

That’s a DOUBLE in engagement rate just from changing up the content.

You see how important the content is. I stress this in so many of my videos,
but it’s true.

No matter how important you think content is, it’s more important.
No matter how good you think your content is, it’s probably not that good.

At this point we’re chilling at almost 8000 followers. We continued on with

the current content strategy but now hoped to have converted more of the
random followers into a business mindset.

So we have been ever since experimenting with dripping some

business/quotes content in here and there. If the picture is appealing and
had a nice visual touch to it, it will perform well.
As you can see, slightly changed up content, but killing it in engagement.
This picture got ranked on both the explore and in hashtags and brought in
a lot of traffic to our page.

“Thor, why are you not showing us insights of these posts”?

Because we’re constantly running influencer campaigns, and for best

results we’re keeping the account on private. This creates a lot of curiosity
when people go over to check out the page and has helped us increase
conversions a lot!

Yes, you should do it too when running influencer campaigns.

The only pain in the ass doing this is that you lose all your account insights.
On this account we’ve just been hopping between a public profile and a
private one. We haven't bothered to turn it into a business profile after each
promotion.
Frankly, when we did that, we felt a suffer in engagement as well. If that’s
Instagram trying to force us to spend more money with them, we can’t
really tell. We don’t have enough data to accurately say, but it's an
interesting insight.

From here on we just kept doubling down on whatever was working until
we reached our goal.

And BOOM, just like that. We hit 10k!

For more training from both me and Ben, check out our free training
presented by Ben.

Click here to register for the webinar!

All the best fams<3

Appreciate you reading all the way till the end.
Check me out on Instagram: ​@lifebythor