10 Frugal Ways to Boost Your Instagram Strategy

It may sound obvious, but your Instagram profile is the cornerstone of your marketing efforts on the platform. It’s like an electronic storefront, especially given that you can’t natively include links in your posts until you reach a minimum number of followers (a number that changes so frequently, I don’t list it here). You never needed any followers to add a link in your bio, which you could change as frequently as you added new posts, touting the old “link in bio” to the post. With the new Instagram link sticker, you no longer face a follower minimum to use the swipe-up on Instagram Stories.

When filling out your profile, include who you are, what you do, and who you serve. Use keywords (actually phrases) associated with your industry to make your reels, images, and stories easier for users to find.

Building relationships that result in user-generated content is golden on almost any social media platform. These are your best content creators because they are impartial and reflect your target market. Therefore, encouraging users to share photos or videos that show your products is a great strategy. For instance, my kids’ orthodontist gave the kids t-shirts for his business. Every month, he gave away an iPad to patients who posted images of themselves wearing the t-shirt in an interesting or novel context. Needless to say, he got a ton of UGC. More on contests in a later section.

But don’t stop with encouraging users to generate content. Repost this content with the permission of the creator as a means to build trust and a sense of community. Plus, it helps your content creation efforts to ensure you post consistently to boost your Instagram strategy.

The seductiveness of AI is tempting, as it’s an inexpensive way to create content and manage operations, but it’s important to be human. Users don’t respond well to content that’s so polished and perfect that it stinks of AI. Termed AI slop, this content raises questions of information integrity and poor quality that lead users to prefer content created by a human.

Social media involves a community, so beyond being human, users expect a two-way interaction. Don’t simply post and forget it. Instead, spend a few minutes each day replying to comments, answering direct messages, and engaging with content from other accounts in your niche. Be genuine and active.

For instance, a client built the company’s revenue by targeting specific large clients in their industry. They posted favorable content about these targeted clients that touted their commitment to sustainability and values shared by their customers. This attracted the attention of these target firms, resulting in higher sales.

Since Instagram Reels exploded on the scene, the ability of this tactic to boost your Instagram strategy results has forced firms to direct their efforts toward creating this type of content. As you can see from the relative engagement of users with various types of Instagram content, the potential is mammoth, especially given recent changes to the algorithm that we mentioned earlier.

This engagement, then, helps you reach new followers, which helps boost your Instagram strategy. You can create short educational, instructional, or community-focused videos (such as behind-the-scenes or highlighting individuals or employees) using audio trends to enhance your discoverability.

Hashtags help users find content that fits their interests. The “right” number of hashtags is open for debate. While Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags, five on Reels, some experts recommend 3-5, while others say a number between 10 and 15 works best [source].

More important than the number of hashtags included is the specific hashtags you choose. You should use a combination of branded hashtags and niche-specific ones that match user intent when viewing Instagram.

Cross-promotion on several platforms, including your blog, helps boost your Instagram strategy. While this image is a little old, it is still valuable in choosing which social media platforms might work for cross-promotion. You want to choose only a few, since you need the bandwidth to publish fresh, valuable content on each of your platforms at least once a day (although several, such as X (Twitter), require more frequent posting schedules).

Choose your platforms carefully, focusing on those likely to fit your target market profile. This serves several purposes. First, it increases your reach as users might favor one platform over others or only use one of the options favored by their demographic. Second, multiple exposures increase recall and spur consideration and purchase decisions. Finally, the various formats favored by different social media platforms allow you to change up your messaging or at least how you implement the message so it resonates differently with users. Since we know there’s variability in the way users process and even notice different types of content and different phrasings of your message, this maximizes your ability to boost your Instagram strategy.

You might not be able to afford a celebrity like Taylor Swift to help promote your products, but you might find micro-influencers on Instagram who offer a reasonable price (even free). In fact, with an engaged following, these micro-influencers often deliver a bigger bang than what you might experience when using more expensive celebrities, especially if they fit your niche market.

You might also consider developing relationships with non-competing small businesses that share your target market as a means to support each other through collaborations.

Your strategy might be as simple as doing an Instagram Live together, guest post swaps, or a reciprocal shout-out.

Giveaways are a great way to build engagement, build your subscriber list, toute your products, or boost your followers. They also don’t have to cost an arm and a leg.

Using your own products as the prize is a great way to introduce followers to the quality and utility of your products. Use a product from a collaborator to build your relationship or make it stronger (such as the one used in the image above). Or, use a branded product that’s well-known to your followers as a way to increase engagement with the post.

The best contests involve simple rules, such as “join our list” to encourage more entries. Avoid contests where performing the required action dilutes the follower’s chances of winning, such as requiring a user share the post with multiple friends. Contests like “tag a friend” result in more entries, which may discourage some users from entering the contest.

While Instagram Stores don’t create as much engagement as Reels, they’re still a valuable tool to boost your Instagram strategy. Because they don’t require as many resources to create, you can easily use them to build top-of-mind awareness among followers. By employing interactive stickers, such as polls, questions, quizzes, and emoji sliders, you encourage the type of engagement that meets the demands of the algorithm for sharing your posts.

Regardless of how well you implement the other nine tactics to boost your Instagram strategy, you need analytics to assess how well your current efforts are working and which ones succeed best to optimize your strategy.

Instagram provides data for free through its professional dashboard (you need a business profile for this to work). You should set aside time every day to view your key metrics to determine which posts perform best with your market, what times your followers (and prospective followers) are most active, and to understand who your followers are. You can use this data to tweak your strategy to focus on what’s working and suggest what might work best in future posts.

Another source of data comes from marketing automation tools like Buffer. Scheduling posts through these tools not only makes your life easier, since you can schedule a month’s or week’s worth of posts at once so you don’t have to interrupt your day every time you must enter content, but it also provides data. These tools now incorporate AI to suggest the best times to post, as well as provide analytics about how users respond to your posts. By tagging individual posts, you can follow a click generated by an Instagram post through your website to understand the contribution of different types of post content to conversion.