I call this one Operation Unicorn Rocket.
If you’re a food & beverage brand with under 5k IG followers and follow this 90-day program, you’ll finish at or above 10k followers. But don't worry; this strategy is designed to work regardless of your following. Let’s PREPARE FOR LIFTOFF.
Before we start, here are some details:
Housekeeping
- This is a FREE 90-day program that will grow your Instagram following
- FREE because you don't have to pay us (unless you want us to handle this entirely), but you do have to pay for things (like boosts, influencers, COGs, shipping, etc.).
Investment
- Someone's Time: Now, although you might be thinking, "Hmm...I'm busy. I should offshore this with someone on Fiverr or AI or blah blah blah," that won't work. I'm happy to be wrong. But I don't see it working. Someone like you, a co-founder, or YES AN AGENCY OR FREELANCER needs to understand the nuance and politics in CPG, specifically food & beverage.
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Brand Hosted Giveaways (3x): One per month. On the first of each month, launch a giveaway for an exclusive bundle of your products. End it the last day of the month. Randomly select the winner. Get ready to boost the next month's the next day. Do this three times.
- Boost this $1,000 per month for a total of $3k.
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Influencer Hosted Giveaways (15x): You must send 25-50 influencer kits out well in advance to land five (5) influencer giveaways monthly for three months. That's a 10-20% conversion rate from seeding to agreement of a giveaway. You might get some stories and posts, but you want to identify who loves the product. And work with them to run a giveaway hosted ON THEIR PAGE. Stay organized and send out the winners' products once you get the information. Ask the influencers to send reach, impressions, etc., so you can add them to your tracker. An average total investment of 40-60 sends + $150/giveaway.
- Assuming $25 all-in for your COGs + freight, that's $3,500 ($2,250 in cash for giveaways + $1,250 for COGs + freight).
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Brand Partnership Giveaways (6x): Similarly to IHGs (Influencer Hosted Giveaways), you'll want to plan and land six (6) brands willing to do giveaways with you. But here's the kicker: they must have bigger followings. Tell them you'll boost the post $500-$1000 to make up for being smaller. This usually works. But you have to make sure they're the right brands, and the amount you boost is fair to them. If you have 2,500 followers, it would be tough to convince a brand with 100k real followers without boosting A SHIT TON. So keep that in mind.
- Costs: six (6) winners + $500-$1,000/giveaway boost. $4,650 on average.
Conclusion
Your total comes to $11,650 / 3 = $3,716/month for 3 months to drastically grow your Instagram to over 10k followers.
This is not to mention the MILLIONS of impressions and reach you'll get. If you normalize the investment by followers + CPM, it'll look something like this.
Assuming you start at 2,500 followers, if you grow to exactly 10k followers, your cost per follower is $1.55. But what about all of the reach and impressions? Using CPM, if you got 5M impressions (making that up), you're at a $2.33 CPM. Now imagine if you geotargeted your giveaways to support retail velocities or retail launches. Imagine focusing all your boosts in one region, with hometown brands, to support hometown retailers. A lot of good things can happen there, but expect your CPM and CPF (cost per follower) to go up with that level of granularity.
Final Considerations
- Boost on desktop: If you boost on mobile, 30% will go to Apple's app store. Don't do that. Boost from your desktop.
- Boost Audience: If you've ever bought fake followers, used fake apps, swapped IG accounts with your cousin who was in a band and got followers (true story lol), this is not for you. You need to boost to people similar to your followers. If your followers are all bots living in a click farm, guess what? You'll be boosting to robots living in click farms. If that's you, START A NEW IG ACCOUNT and pay people not to take shortcuts.
- Boost Destination: Select "Visit Your Profile." You're not going for an online purchase. You're trying to win over a follower with a compelling giveaway offering. YES, they want something free. But it's your subsequent content's job to bring them down the funnel and convert them online or in-store later.
- Collab Post: When you make the collab post, the small brand must post and add the collaborator. That way, the small brand can boost the post! If you don't do this, you won't be able to boost. Alternatively, if no one is boosting, you want the bigger brand to make the collab post. Got it?
That's it. It seems like a lot, but all you need is a little elbow grease and a pallet of energy drinks, and you've got this. Or pay a team like ours to knock it out. We got you.
Hope this helps!
