📈 Grow An Audience On Instagram Without Buying Likes 👍🏻
How do you grow your Instagram audience without resorting to buying likes? Danielle Welch, owner of Bridge Consulting and Design, shares her journey from working as a marketing consultant, freelancing on website design to building her own business. She gives us step-by-step tips on how to leverage your business online specifically on Instagram by effective content strategy, consistent presence, and being strategic in tagging your posts to grow your audience and reach more people. Join in for some powerful tips!
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📈 Grow An Audience On Instagram Without Buying Likes 👍🏻
I'm here with Danielle Welch. She's the Owner of Bridge Consulting & Design, which is a marketing and coaching company for small businesses and online entrepreneurs like you. She founded the company in 2018, after 5 years as a marketing sales consultant for 2 nationally recognized digital marketing agencies in Kansas City.
When starting Bridge, she knew she wanted to educate and empower small businesses and online entrepreneurs to not only know how to turn their social media marketing and run it, but also the why behind it. She's a proud female entrepreneur in the online space, and she's most proud of her roles as a wife and mom. We are so blessed to have her here with us. We are going to dig into all the details about using Instagram specifically for your business, and the ins and outs of how to make the most of this platform and how to shortcut your learning curve. Welcome, Danielle.
I'm so glad to be here. Thank you, Adrienne. This is exciting. I can't wait to dive in. There is so much to talk about Instagram. It's going to be fun.
Every platform is so unique and different. As we have gone through all of these interviews and trainings, even the differences I knew, there's more than what I even was aware of. I'm speeding this up. It's fascinating. Before we jump into the Instagram-specific content, some of the audience may not have met you yet. Could you tell us a little bit about you and your entrepreneurial journey? What brought you into the realm of Instagram?
I got my start in the industry for a few years now. In 2014 is when I stepped into the marketing and advertising world. I worked for two agencies that were nationally recognized. I was on the frontline of their marketing consultant team. It’s a fancy term for call center rep, honestly. I would field inbound calls or we did a lot of outbound calls too, small businesses that had been advertising in their local phone books, and my job was to educate and transition them to more digital stuff. If you can think about it, in the last decades, there are still businesses who are online. Is that not shocking to think about it?
Think about how many entrepreneurs even in this audience are maybe part online, part offline, and then COVID forced them to go online.
There’s so much to talk about there. To take you guys back in social media history, Facebook started to embrace business pages around 2011, 2012. That's when they also started doing ads. You could have a Facebook Business Page and it would show up everywhere. It was the hook and they got people in that way. It's way different now. I had to educate these local small businesses. When I say like local or small, I'm talking towns of 100,000 people or less. I cut my teeth in the industry doing that and fell in love with those types of business owners
Instagram Audience: It's important for you to know who your audience is or who your ideal client is.
I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. Your hometown hero business owners was where my heart was at. The major company that I worked for from 2014 to 2018, they went through two ownership changes, a couple of bankruptcies, in a fancy way like restructuring, and everything changed. I'm pretty passionate about saying that I feel like the big agency route for advertising isn’t for the local small business because every single local, small business need a little bit more hands-on attention. You can't have a one-size-fits-all. I started to resist the way that the company was doing things. It was both a mental decision at a heart decision. I saw some behind the scenes stuff and I was like, “I checked out.” That was what it was like.
There was a situation where I had a client who it was her and her husband. They have a plumbing company in a town of 50,000 people. They had the company for 30-some years. She ran the office, he was the tech, and he passed away suddenly. The company I worked for would not cancel their twelve-month contract until she would prove that he had passed away with a death certificate. If you've ever experienced that, that takes months. It was traumatic for me. I'm few years into this job, and that sealed the deal for me on, “They’re just a number.”
It didn't align with your morals, values and ethics. You knew it at the time.
It was a done deal for me. It was a $99 a month program that they weren't willing to cancel, and this was a multi-billion dollar agency. Seven months went by and I stopped selling. I nurtured my existing clients. If they chose to cancel, I helped them out the door. For me, I'm a believer in Jesus Christ and that's my belief system. God took care of me through all of that. I stayed on the top of the RUT chart and it was crazy. He began to show me, “I need to maybe consider doing something myself.” There was a desire for that.
In the summer of 2018, I started freelancing website design. It was the only thing that my company didn't offer that wasn't a conflict of interest. I learned how to build sites on Wix. I learned how to build sites on old Squarespace back in 2018. I was targeting the local small businesses. Within three months, I replaced my full-time income. Then I was in a little bit of a non-compete. It was about six months later that I started doing social media stuff.
Within nine months of me going from my job to starting Bridge, I replaced my full-time salary and we had my first $10,000 a month, as far as revenue goes, which was awesome. Here's the thing. I delivered our second daughter. She was two months old when I had that $10,000 a month. I was working 40 to 50 hours a week in my business from home. I was like, “This is great money, but I am losing my mind.” That's when I made the shift. Late-2019, I made the shift to, “I have got to take this business from how I thought about business,” which was trading time for money to, “I’ve got to scale, and I have got to figure out different ways to systemize my business and serve my clients.” That's when I started creating online courses.
I started getting into not just doing social media service but teaching it. I got educated on trends that I would stay up on. What do you need to do here? I would host workshops and I created an online program. Now, I stay home with my two kids. We have a third on the way. By spring 2022, we'll have three kiddos at home. I homeschool. I'm able to work fifteen hours a week, maintaining a full-time salary for me. I have got a little team that I work with. Things have changed tremendously. That's my entrepreneurial journey and where I came from and where I'm at now.
Content creation strategy needs to be something consistent and delivering on that content is the foundation of all of it.
What I love about this story, and for the audience reading, I hope that this inspires you because you may have noticed in her story, there were these different pivots that had to happen. She had to follow her heart to know that it was time to do it. Be brave enough to step into doing it. The bravery is almost the hardest part of knowing like, “I'm going to this.” You feel those butterflies, and then to be a student of constant learning.
Every time you saw a gap of, “This is where I want to be, but this is where I am now.” You didn't wait for someone to show up and tell you what to do. You became a master of learning and you immersed yourself in learning how to fill that gap, which is fascinating. The great part about that is we get to learn from all of her expertise and shorten that learning curve for you, guys. How beautiful is that? What a fascinating story. How and when did Instagram take a starring role in your strategy, as one of the tools that you started to use? What made you fall in love with it?
For me, it started to take the spotlight in a lot of what I was teaching, in a lot of what I was creating for my clients. There are two sides of my business. There's the service side, then there’s the coaching or consulting side. It was 2020 where I recognized I have been teaching Instagram strategies and things like that to local small businesses.
Facebook has always been the leader for your local small businesses because the features that they have for business page is that people can search by recommendation. You can keyword search in Facebook. If you are looking for a local plumber or a dentist or something, you could see reviews. Facebook also has made some changes over the last few years. They did a data privacy due to their needing to increase their profit margins to business pages now.
I don't know if people know this, but I was in a Clubhouse chat with some of the people who are inside of Facebook. They are employees, some of the management positions, and they were saying that it's very common that we see Facebook business pages only organically reaching 5% to 7%. To increase that, you have to pay.
I know that Facebook owns Instagram, but they are still two totally different platforms.
They are totally different platforms, and they are continuing to show their differences. This is why I started shifting over to more Instagram because Instagram, I believe you can have a better organic reach. That's why I started focusing on it. A lot of the clients I worked with, ads aren't exactly in their budget.
Instagram Audience: If you're creating your content smartly, you have plenty to share across all those different pieces.
Their money was limited, and so I find that if Facebook isn't the organic platform for them anymore, what is it? It was Instagram. It was the Super Bowl 2020 before the world went crazy. Facebook ran an ad during the Super Bowl, promoting Facebook groups and Facebook community. You can go find it on YouTube. It would say, “A group for everybody. A group for people who want to walk their dogs and so on.”
It would have these interesting and eclectic group ideas, and it's like a community for everybody. Why would Facebook pay for a Super Bowl ad, which we know costs millions to promote groups in community? It was a flagship signal of, “This is the direction we are going.” What have we seen them do? They have moved the Facebook group icon into the bottom of your app. There's a whole new notification setting group for community groups. They are wanting to grow up more community, less about business pages.
I think the future of Facebook community groups is you are going to have to pay for memberships. That's my opinion. I think that's the direction that we are going to go. Think about it. What did they do with Facebook when it was free for businesses and now you have to pay to play? There have been some changes.
All of that to say at the beginning of 2020, and then obviously when the world changed, everything became more about we can't reach people in person as much anymore, especially as local small businesses. How can we show up for them? It was all about video. This was around the time that Instagram was trying to compete with TikTok. Reels started taking precedent.
Instagram announced that they are now a video sharing platform, not a picture-sharing platform. They have recategorized themselves. For me, it was my shift to focusing on Instagram for my clients, which came solely from recognizing these types of new online business owners with low budget, “What can they do organically?” which might mean more work on the frontend, more content creation, more hashtag research, and more personal outreach. What can they do organically if they don't have the money for ads? Instagram is the best place for that. That's why I made that shift and that focus to Instagram.
For those of you reading, this is hugely insightful. Everything either takes time or money, you know that. If you have more time than you do money, and you are looking for organic free growth strategies, this is where it's at. Let's dig into the goodness. If someone is wanting to get more organic reach, they are wanting more eyeballs on their stuff. What's the first step you would have them take on Instagram? If they are getting started or maybe they have been on there, but they haven't leveraged it to its full potential, how would you have them start from the ground up?
I believe that in order for you to do this consistently over time, I like the up into the right trend. I don't like the highs and the lows. I like a progressive trend up. Everyone would like to see that in the revenue charts and everything in their business. Think of your organic reach in the same regard. That's the vision that you want. The ground level that I teach a lot on is you have to be consistently creating content. You've got to consistently be showing up. If you look at it from a pyramid standpoint, a pyramid or a house, the foundation, it has to be strong, wide and big. You don't build a house on a teeny-tiny foundation, and then it's like a tree. It doesn't work like that.
You have to be confident in who you are as a business and what you are serving your audience and your clients.
You've got to have a wide foundation there. Content creation strategy needs to be something in consistency, and delivering on that content is the foundation to all of it. The reason is because when you add on top of that engagement strategies or hashtag strategies, which we can talk about, none of that matters if you are posting once a week, or if you post seven days this week and nothing the next week. It's all about consistent action. That is the firm foundation that I teach on.
I spend the most of my time wrestling with people through that because content creation is also the thing that hangs people up the most. Once I can get people to commit to it, and we can have agreement that this is going to serve every other strategy better. It's like #Research. You do it once a month and then have that as a monthly task and use a bucket of 4 or 5 hashtag groups interchangeably. It's not something you have to do every day. It builds upon and it makes everything else that you do better when you are consistently putting out your own content.
I couldn't agree more. Another thing that I hear a lot both within my own communities that I talked to and out in the broader world is people saying, “I don't know what to say or how to say it.” What advice would you have for them when it comes to creating that foundation of coming up with a solid content strategy for the person who doesn't know what to say or how to say it? What would be your advice to them?
I have been asked this question before, and I feel like people don't like my answer because it's not the easy answer. Wouldn't it be so wonderful if I could give you this formula and people do? There are people out there in our industry who are like, “This is the step-by-step formula.” I have right here Social Media Success for Every Brand, the new book by Claire Ortiz, which was foreworded by Donald Miller. It is a five-step program essentially to turning your post into profit.
There are strategies out there of what your content should say. That's important to have the structure, but here's what I always talk about with this answer. First of all, you have to be confident in who you are as a business and what you are serving your audience and your clients with. I was on a coaching call with a gal, and we were working through the reason she hasn't taken action on her content creation is because she's worried about things not sounding perfect.
We identified this perfectionism trait. She was like, “I'm worried about people judging what I say.” I said, “You are making a decision based on this minor possibility that someone might come in and blast you for what. You are missing all this incredible opportunity to reach the people who need your message.”
First and foremost, you've got to be confident in who you are, and you should be. You showed up to this summit to invest into yourself. You are learning so much here from me and other speakers, and you have access to so many resources. If you have a coach, which I encourage as an online business owner, you need a coach. That's one of the things that keeps me saying, and also keeps me from rambling, which I do a lot.
Instagram Audience: There's something really reassuring about the consistency of a message of them seeing something from you consistently seeing something more than once.
You need to have that coach so you can go to them and tell them your insecurities, your worries, so that they can flip the script on that, and tell you who you are and pull out the greatness in you. If you don't have confidence in you, you are going to fake it until you make it, and that's going to be shallow and your audience isn't going to be able to connect as well. That's my first thing with that. What do you say and how do you say it? It's got to come from a place of confidence and authenticity. That's not the answer everyone wants. They want the keys to, “What do I say?” First of all, be you.
I love that advice because maybe something you say pushes someone away. If it's pushing them away, they are not your ideal person. It's okay to let them go home. Let them go because you are going to attract other people who are your perfect people.
What do we want? Do we want quantity or quality? For me, I would rather have high quality. We talked about this a little bit earlier. I have a Facebook group that is high quality. It may not have tens of thousands of people, but it's high quality with high engagement. I know they are my people. They know I'm their person. I would rather have that than thousands of people who may or may not even know who I am. With quality, then you can gain quantity.
What's the next step? What I love about Instagram is what I hate about Instagram. Let me put this out there. It's interesting to me that it's the only platform out there that offers every feature. You have your traditional posts. You can share videos, pre-recorded or live video. You can share Instagram TV. It has Stories and now it has Reels. It has everything all in one platform, which no other platform has all of those things in one place. It's nice because they offer all this variety, but it can also be overwhelming because it's like, “Where should we be spending our time?”
First of all, it's important for you to know who your audience is or who your ideal client is. There are there statistics. There's data out there you can find. Even if you critically think about users and age groups and demographics, certain demographics like certain types of content over others. Here's something from a content creation standpoint. I love to teach this strategy of taking a pillar piece of content and breaking it down into micro pieces of content. This is like Gary Vee 101. He's the first person I learned it from, and I love it because you can take a ten-minute Instagram live video.
Here's the strategy. I'm going to break it down for you, guys, because this will allow you to create a piece of content for all of the different features. It doesn't have to be a huge time set. Go on Live on your Instagram, 10 to 15 minutes on your phone. It doesn't have to be a huge production. I do a lot of my Instagram Lives walking around my house, in my office, or wherever I'm at. If I'm hit with a moment of inspiration, I'm going to get on a roll. That's how I become. Roll on your topic. When you are done, it's going to say, “Do you want to download this video or do you want to push it to IGTV?” You could do both. I download it because I know I'm going to take that video and I'm going to go share it in my Facebook group.
Pillar piece of content is my live video, or it could have been something I pre-recorded. Download that video. I'm going to put that into my Facebook group immediately. Add a caption and it lives there. I have got that video downloaded. I'm also going to upload it back to IGTV, so it lives there. It's an evergreen piece of content. It's bingeable content. Bingeable meaning it’s short enough, and it's on topic to where after they get done watching it, maybe they are on the elliptical at the gym, and it's going to automatically feed them another video. That's why podcasts are so great.
If you don't have confidence in yourself, you're going to fake it until you make it. And then that's just going to be shallow and your audience isn't going to be able to connect as well.
Pillar piece of content is done. Because I have downloaded that video, I could take that video. I could throw it into an app called InShot on my phone, and I could chop out little 1-minute segments or little 30-second segments, and create micro pieces of content that I can put into my Feed, upload as a Reel, upload as another IGTV video. I could take that video, throw it into a program like Temi.com and have it transcribed, and then I can pull quotes out. I can make cool graphics.
All to say, my focus was the 10 to 15-minute video, and then I can take that and I can chop that baby down into a bunch of different pieces of content. I can put it in my Feed, my Story, my Reels, repurpose it from my IGTV. I could even send that to my email list if I wanted to and pointing them back to my Instagram. When you focused on that pillar piece of content, you can hit all the platforms, but it is important to know where are people spending most of their time? Most people spend time in Reels.
It's the hot new thing. I love that advice and I do the exact same thing in my business. I love that you do that. It doesn't have to be overwhelming that they have all these different features. If you are creating your content smartly, you have plenty to share across all those different pieces.
I get the question too, “What if I share the same thing in all the different places?” I said, “Why is that a problem?” Someone said, “I want to share a quote into my Reels with some background music, but I also want to share the quote and a static image into my Feed.” I said, “Then put it to the Reels, just don't force it to go to your Feed, so then you don't have it side by side, same thing back to back.” You have options to play around with. More content and more of the spaces is better than not. I always err on the side of more is better. It’s the opposite of less is more. More is better in this case.
I get the same question a lot. It's interesting because there's something reassuring about the consistency of a message, of them seeing something from you consistently. Seeing something more than once isn't a bad thing. It builds trust. They are like, “It’s super consistent. They stand for what they stand for. They are not in left field over here one day and then totally in a different ballpark the next day.” Consistency isn't bad.
Consistency is the key to your success in all areas of your business, not just social media. I have a weekly coaching call with my coach. If I don't show up for that, I'm not consistent with that, then I'm missing something. If I don't show up for my clients, if I'm not posting on a regular basis, or if I'm not email blasting. Consistency in the gym. Is it easier to go to the gym and workout when you've been going every day or every other day? Once a month, you try to lift or run the same as last month, you've done nothing in between. It hurts bad if you let time go in between. Consistency is what's going to give you the predictability of your progression in your company. Consistency in all areas is key.
Now, we have a solid content strategy. You know how to show up across all the different facets of Instagram if we choose to, or whichever ones we choose to show up on. What's the key then to growing your followers and getting actual leads and sales from them?
Instagram Audience: Consistency is, what's going to give you the predictability of your progression in your company. So consistency in all areas is key.
Instagram has hashtags, which is one of the best ways for your content to be seen organically in front of people that are not already following you. There are a lot of debate around hashtags, and what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing with hashtags. As long as they are available, use them. Instagram has 30 that you can use. Use all 30, but you have to be very strategic with those.
I'm going to primarily focus on hashtags because that's how you get your content to reach people organically, but I'm also going to talk about how you can use hashtags to find your ideal clients so you can do some engagement activities, which is going to be more leap-based. With hashtags using all 30, you want to try and find hashtags that are being used anywhere between 10,000 and 500,000 uses on Instagram.
How you find this is you open up the Instagram app on your phone. If you are reading on your computer and you've got your phone, do this with us. Open up your Instagram app, go to the magnifying button, which is your Discover tab. Type in #OnlineBusinessCoachForWomen. It's just what came to my head. I used that hashtag in a blog about this. Type that in. It's going to tell you a number. It's probably 480,000 at this point. That's a good hashtag amount. That number 480,000 tells you how many times that hashtag has been used on Instagram.
The reason you don't want to go over 500,000 is because, you'll see on that Discover page where you are looking at the hashtags, it will say, “Top posts and recent posts.” You click on the recent posts, typically anything 500,000, 1 million, 2 million uses. You are going to see a piece of content is dropping every single second with that hashtag, but that 10,000 to 500,000 range, it could be minutes or days before there's another post. Your content has a longer shelf life on that hashtag, which is key.
I have heard a lot of people talk about being conscious about the size of your hashtags, but I never heard anyone until now break it down and explain that the size of the hashtag impacts the shelf life of your content.
If it lives there longer, it has a longer opportunity if someone's searching specifically for that hashtag to see your content. You can follow hashtags. I follow #EntrepreneurMindset because there's always good entrepreneurial quotes and shareable content. It shows up in my Newsfeed organically. It's very important to the shelf life.
The way that our Instagram profiles are set up with our Feeds, when someone comes to our profile, it's evergreen. This content is so much more evergreen than a content on Facebook. Your Facebook business page, if someone wants to see a post you made ten posts ago, they’ve got to scroll and scroll. On Instagram, it's right there in your Feed. That's why sometimes you'll see a new follower will like your most recent posts, and then they like all of your posts past that for the next ten posts. It's bingeable, organic and evergreen content.
With quality, you can gain quantity.
I feel like Instagram know what they are doing. That's the strategy for hashtags that range 10,000 to 500,000. The other thing is just to make sure your hashtags are relevant to your business, the topic that you've written about and your ideal client. I could use it as an example here. You have this beautiful background, and you've got flowers and you've got a bookshelf. If she was to take a picture and make that her picture on her Instagram post and use #Bookshelf, #Flowers just because it's in the picture, that's not relevant, but people do that.
People will hashtag irrelevant hashtags to their posts because they are trying to cross reference. Instagram does not like that. If it is irrelevant, they have a way of seeing it. You can get hashtags banned because it’s a misuse of them. It's very much like Pinterest. I don't know if anyone's a Pinterest user. If you click on a pin and you expect to go to a website that’s going to show you this awesome chili recipe, but it takes you to some ad for some cleaning product, that pin will get banned. The same thing with Google. Instagram has the same thing set up where if it's not relevant or it's not what people are expecting to see, like #BeautyBlogger is a hashtag that gets people's content banned because it gets misused a lot.
It’s crazy. There you go on hashtags for organic content. Hashtags for lead generation. Use hashtags that people are using by using the search button. For me, I do social media marketing services for local small businesses. I love to use the #SupportLocalBusiness or specific cities. I will say #SmallBusinessOlathe, which is the city I live in or #SupportKansasCitySmallBusiness, and I can find businesses that are using that hashtag. Now I can follow them and I can start to engage with their content. Meaning I'm going to like their posts. I'm going to provide meaningful feedback on their posts, not just a heart emoji, “Love this.” I'm going to engage with their content.
What that does is that starts to get whoever that social media manager is for that company or the business owner, they are going to start to see my name. It's going to create familiarity with me. “Who's this @Danielle.BridgeCD lady? She's liking my stuff. She's talking to me in the Stories.” When I do an outreach message and I DM them to introduce myself, and ask them if I can get to know their business a little bit better, and I love supporting local small businesses. It's not a cold message in regards to, “I haven't even followed you. I have done nothing to help promote your social media page,” because engagement of other people's accounts is like you scratching their back. I'm building rapport with them before I ever even reach out to them. It's that nurturing relationship. You use hashtags to find those people.
You can use them to help people find you, but you can use them to also find your ideal clients. It's a win-win on both sides of the coin.
Let’s say you are a health coach, and you want to target people who are wanting to improve their lifestyle. Maybe it's a weight loss journey that somebody wants to be on. Go follow the #MyWeightLossJourney, and you are going to find, people who could be your perspective clients. Engage with their stuff.
You also have an opportunity there to see what type of content is being created around that or things that people are sharing so maybe you can get ideas of content to create. What are the problems that people are talking about? Then you can create a solution for that. Hashtags are a cool way to research for your ideal client, ideas, and many other things to grow your company.
Now we have a solid content strategy. We know who we are speaking to. We know how to find them by using the right hashtags. We know how to show up in all the different places across Instagram if we choose because of that smart content strategy. We know how to use hashtags help them find us so that as we start interacting with them and showing that we care, they start to see our name over and over. By the time a message gets sent, they are going to read it. It's a super simple daily method of operations you can go through of what Danielle took us through. How helpful is that? I understand you have even more help for us. You have a free gift for the audience. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
This gift is nine ways to grow your business by using social media. What's cool is these nine steps or ways are broken into three different categories. Profile optimization, which you need to have that in place from the very beginning. Content batching strategy, how I teach to batch your content. Whether it's the pillar piece of content or what you'll see inside the guide, how to save time with content creation. The third category is all about engagement. It hits on some of the things that we hit on, but it's good continuing education for you. You guys will enjoy that. I believe that's going to be able to compound on what we talked about.
Thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise with us. I'm motivated to go and make sure that I'm making the most of my Instagram now. Whether people are brand new to it and they are now getting into it, or whether they are wanting to take it to next level, we have some super actionable tips here. Thank you so much for your time.
It's been wonderful. Best of luck to all of you and your businesses. Thanks again for having me.
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