Listen. There is no single best Instagram strategy for business growth. There is no hack. No get-rich-quick scheme. There is only showing up, doing the work, and consistently learning how to better communicate with your ideal clients.

That being said, I am an Instagram strategist for female founders. So, of course, I don’t get paid just to sit there and look pretty. There are a few key things you can do to grow your audience, find aligned leads, and ultimately turn ambiguous audience members into your new favorite clients. And I’m going to tell you all of them, because I think gatekeeping is lame.

Ready?

My Favorite Instagram Strategy for Business Growth

When it comes to growing your business on social media, I like to follow the growth → nurture → convert strategy. I call these three categories your content buckets, which means that every single post you share should fall into at least one of these buckets. The buckets form the sales funnel that takes your audience from strangers to aligned clients.

Here’s how it works.

Growth Content

Growth content is the very top of the sales funnel. This is the brand awareness stage. You can’t sell to people who don’t know you exist, right? So this content is designed to get you found by strangers. Growth content is often the most fun to create, since you’re finding and recreating fun trends that help you land on the discover page and in new people’s feeds!

Nurture Content

Nurture content is the next stage of the funnel—the slightly slimmer part. After people discover you (via growth content), you need to warm them up. This is where you pull back the curtain by sharing lessons, personal stories, and behind-the-scenes content to build connection and trust. The point of nurture content is to make people care about your business and you.

Conversion Content

At the very bottom of the funnel, you find conversion content. This is where you sell. All the growth and nurture content means nothing if you’re not eventually getting some of those people to work with you.

The goal is to move people from cold (strangers) to warm (ready to buy). Not everyone who follows you will become your client, and that’s okay!! But the ones who do will move through these three stages before they inquire. That’s why you need all three types of content working together—not just the type of content you feel the most comfortable making.

Putting Your Strategy into Action

Understanding the content buckets and sales funnel is the essential first step… but that’s not the whole strategy. You’ve got to guide people from vaguely interested in you to “I must work with her ASAP.” They won’t get there on their own. This is where you need a consistent posting schedule, to continue engaging with your followers, and to share content that helps you connect with people you actually want to work with.

Part 1: Consistency

Here’s the bad news about marketing on Instagram. There is so much content out there that most of it goes in one ear and out the other. If you post once or twice and hope that your ideal clients are going to instantly recognize your brand… you’re going to be disappointed.

That’s why you’ve got to show up consistently. And when I say that, I mean you must be posting consistently schedule-wise, and your posts must be visibly consistent. The goal here is brand recognition.

Part 2: Connection

And beyond all that, you’ve gotta connect with other people. For some reason, people have got this crazy notion that social media doesn’t have to be social. Like hello?? It’s literally in the name.

If you want to connect with like-minded people (both future clients and fellow business owners), you need to engage. Reply to people’s stories. Comment on their posts. Repost the things that resonate with you. Start conversations in the DMs.

Seriously, running a business is fucking hard. Surrounding yourself with people who understand that and support you makes you happier, healthier, and makes business more sustainable. Your business can’t thrive if you’re not thriving. You have to take care of yourself—and building a community is a huge part of that. You might be surprised by this, but the people you connect with online often end up being your biggest cheerleaders, saying your name in rooms you’re not in, and sending referrals your way.

I know because I’ve lived it.

Part 3: Alignment

When you’re posting consistently and connecting with others, you’re going to get traction. The final step is making sure you’re getting it with the right people. This is such an important topic that I have a whole other blog post dedicated to it, but I want to touch on it here, too.

Your clients don’t need to be clones of you. But they do need to be people you enjoy working with. This is why I encourage you to share your fundamental values on Instagram. You don’t need to put everything out there—boundaries are important—but think of the alternative! Constantly filtering yourself and worrying about saying the wrong thing to your clients sounds like an exhausting way to run a business.

This is why I harp so much on including personal posts in your strategy (it’s usually in the “nurture” part of the sales funnel). The more you put your personality out there, the more you attract people who actually like you as a whole ass person. Working with people you genuinely like makes everything better. You laugh more on calls, time flies by, and you just enjoy your work. You can’t attract the right people if you’re hiding who you really are. Read more about how to create personal posts in this blog!

Get Your Custom Instagram Strategy For Business Growth

The things I’ve shared in this blog provide the foundation for every strategy I build for my clients. But, lucky for you, I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all strategies. If you really want to grow your Instagram following and use this incredible tool to connect you with the right people, you’ve gotta dig deep. You’ve gotta figure out what makes your business different from everybody else’s. You’ve gotta understand who your ideal clients are and how best to sell to them. And then (and this is the hardest part) you’ve gotta actually get out there and do it.

It might sound intimidating, but when you have a personalized strategy that doesn't just consider your business goals, but your actual, human life, it gets a lot easier. And that’s exactly what the Content Strategy Intensive does.

This isn’t a template. It’s a personalized strategy that dives into your target audience, competitors, content strategy, brand pillars, and gives you a step-by-step guide on how to get your Instagram from where it is to where you want it to be.

Because you can get there. You might just need a little help.

Click here to learn about the Content Strategy Intensive, and fill out the form to schedule a call where you can ask me all your questions about it and see if it’s a good fit for you. I can’t wait to hear about your goals and build a strategy that helps you reach them!