How To Grow Instagram Followers With a Small Budget

Discover how to grow Instagram followers with a limited budget, which is ideal for beginners and new accounts. Growing Instagram followers is important for getting more sales, authority, popularity, and brand awareness. 

However, with the right approach, there’s no need to spend a large amount on generating followers. You can buy Instagram followers, but free methods also exist. We’ll cover them in this article to give you more options.

Finally, read the article to the end for insight into how we can help grow your Instagram account. Here at Plixi, we specialize in helping all types of Instagram accounts get to the next level.

How To Grow Instagram Followers Organically

When you have a small budget, organic Instagram growth is the right approach. This means you don’t need to buy Instagram followers or spend too much on advertising. In this section, we’ll cover how to grow Instagram followers organically.

Offer Different Types of Content

To increase your chances of capturing every follower in your niche, it’s a good idea to vary your content strategy. This ensures that your high-quality content caters to different needs and interests. Consider the following content types when generating Instagram followers organically:

• Entertaining content: Instagram is mostly known for the entertaining content that users publish. Therefore, you should always look for ways to make your content more captivating. This includes when you are marketing products or putting together educational content. Check out your competitors when you’re stuck for ideas on creating engaging content. 
• Educational content: Consider creating educational content that your target audiences will find useful. For example, if you sell gym equipment, you can show users how it’s used for the best results. Alternatively, you can provide the top recipes for a particular type of food that you’re selling. Good quality educational content can also minimize the burden on your customer support department. 
• News content: Consider adding industry-related news content to your social media channels. Some Instagram users will follow your account simply because they want to receive a steady stream of news. However, make sure your sources are fast and accurate. This ensures the quality of your news is among the best on Instagram.

Increase Engagement Rate

You can increase the engagement rate of your content by making it more interactive. For example, you can ask users to comment on your posts to share their opinion. Also, you can take a proactive approach by being the first to comment. 

Still not sure how to create highly engaging Instagram content? Look at the best-performing posts on Instagram for various industries. You’ll notice a pattern that you can emulate with your Instagram channel.

Collaborate With Other Instagram Content Creators

You can collaborate with other Instagram content creators to grow your follower count on a low budget. For example, you can ask them to mention your account within their content, and you’ll do the same in return. This allows you to take advantage of the hard work other content creators have done in growing their following. 

When collaborating with other Instagram content creators, you need to consider the following:

• Consider their audience: Ideally, the content creator’s audience aligns with your own. Therefore, you’ll increase your chance of getting new followers interested in your content. Hence, take the time to inspect their audience and look for similarities with your own. 
• Provide value: You’ll find that the amount of value you can get from other IG content creators increases when you offer something. This means sharing what you can provide content creators for the collaboration. If you’re low on funds, you can look for smaller creators that will charge a low amount. 
• It’s a number game: Your chances will increase the more content creators you contact. Getting more content creators onboard reduces your risk. That’s because you can rely on others when one collaboration breaks down.

How To Grow Instagram Followers for Business

Are you wondering how to grow Instagram followers for business? You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the number of strategies available for business follower growth. These tips can help take your Instagram business account to the next level and increase sales. Also, your brand awareness on social media will dramatically increase. This makes it easier to execute any social media marketing campaign.

User-Generated Content

You can leverage the content creators already on Instagram via user-generated content. Businesses can associate themselves with content they have been tagged in through UGC. Instagram UGC is a viable method for businesses offering a commission-based model for affiliate marketers. 

It’s advantageous for Instagram businesses on a low budget because there’s no need to pay for marketing upfront. Instead, you may affiliate marketers with a commission only after the customer has paid you.

Also, you can grow your Instagram content quickly when popular content creators are on board. You can also seek these content creators out and offer them better terms.

Use Instagram Insights

Instagram business accounts can access Instagram Insights, which is an in-house analytics platform. Here are a few of the top ways you can use Instagram Insights to grow your follower count:

• Identify top-performing posts: You can look at the posts that contribute the most to increase your follower count. Perhaps there are commonalities that you can emulate in future posts. This ensures that future content has a better chance of boosting your follower count. 
• Engagement: When learning how to grow followers on Instagram, you’ll need to consider the engagement rate. After all, IG users visit the social media platform to interact with others. Using Instagram Insights, you can determine the content that naturally receives the highest engagement rates. 
• Hashtags: Instagram Insights allows you to see the performance of hashtags in relation to your account. Hence, you can discover the hashtags that lead to the most incoming traffic.

Branded Hashtags

Business Instagram accounts gain access to branded hashtags, which are uniquely related to your brand. It’s important to use these hashtags to build a brand identity on Instagram. This ensures you can grow your follower count on Instagram for users who are looking for your brand. 

Make sure to mix up the use of branded hashtags with regular ones to optimize your traffic strategy. Also, don’t use more than 3-5 hashtags per post. Otherwise, the post will look too spammy and detract from the user experience.

How To Grow Instagram Followers Quickly

Are you looking for how to grow Instagram followers quickly while on a tight budget? There are multiple strategies available that can supercharge your Instagram follower growth. Give each of these a try to beat the competition without breaking the bank.

Use Existing Digital Assets

You can promote your Instagram account from existing digital assets. This can catapult your IG account to new heights in a short space of time. Here are some of the top places to consider prompting your Instagram account:

• Email list: Do you have an email list that you regularly supply with information, promotions, and educational content? Then, you can make them aware of your Instagram account. Add a bit of incentive by hosting a giveaway on Instagram. With just a few emails, you can send a horde of potential new followers. 
• Website: You can capitalize on an existing website that generates a significant amount of traffic. Add Instagram buttons and links that take users to your IG social media content. This can be to your profile page or specific posts. Ideally, make the transition from your website to IG natural. Give users a genuine reason to check out your social media accounts. For example, you can post exclusive product pictures not seen on your website. 
• Other social media platforms: Do you have many followers on social media platforms like Facebook, X, TikTok, and more? Then, send them over to Instagram and encourage the click of the follow button. It will be beneficial even if just a fraction of users convert to Instagram followers.

Print Ads

Print ads in the right places are relatively inexpensive and potentially not used by competitors. While most brands concentrate on digital ads, you can look for channels offline. However, it’s important that you target relevant users on Instagram to make the ads cost-effective. 

Also, use QR codes to allow people to scan the print ads with their smartphones. You may increase the conversion rate. After all, you can’t expect many people to bother entering your Instagram URL.

Research Competitors

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when learning how to grow your Instagram followers. In fact, you can research competitors to see what strategies they are using. Here are a few ideas to consider when researching competitors:

• Top competitors: Ideally, you should be learning from only the top competitors in your niche. That’s because their strategies are the most likely to work. To identify the top competitors, use the most popular hashtags in your niche to search for posts. You may notice that the same small number of competitors appear toward the top of the search results. These accounts have cracked the code on Instagram and know what they are doing. 
• Notice the small details: It’s important to analyze competitor posts in detail. Learn how to grow a following on Instagram by emulating the post format of successful competitors. This means paying attention to the use of templates, post frequency, wording, picture quality, and more. 
• Become a follower: Make sure to follow your competitor accounts. This may give you access to more posts, exclusive content, and Instagram Stories. 
• Be unique: Don’t copy competitor content that you come across. This is in bad taste, and your audience will notice. You’ll be known as a copycat Instagram account and will fail to generate the follower count you need. Instead, use competitor research for inspiration to improve your existing ideas. 
• Organize your research: Don’t attempt to do competitor research casually by trying to remember all the details. Effective research will uncover a lot of useful information. However, it needs to be categorized first. Use software and other tools to take notes to make the right conclusion and decisions from the research.

Is Growing Instagram Followers Hard?

In conclusion, growing Instagram followers is straightforward with the strategies in this article. Consistency and patience is the right approach. Also, don’t forget to leverage your existing skills and assets to cut costs. This ensures you can grow your IG following on a small budget. 

Also, when learning how to grow your Instagram followers, make sure to deploy different strategies. This increases your chances of success instead of putting all your eggs in one basket.

Do you want additional help taking your Instagram account to the next level? Then, take advantage of the professional services we provide here at Plixi. Our approach involves the use of Instagram influencers and an in-house algorithm. So what are you waiting for? Start growing and gaining Instagram followers today.