Case Study: How to Get 90,000 Followers on Instagram For Free in Under a Year
In the last few years, social media has changed the marketing landscape significantly. People spend an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes on social media per day.
Which is why so many marketers are asking themselves a serious question: how do I get in on that?
Traditionally our company has focused on B2B video production – it was, is and will continue to be our bread n’ butter. That being said, we wanted to dig into the social media side of video.
So in the last year we’ve gone out and
- Created an infoproduct and sold it primarily via social media
- Helped Kismet_Design scale to 90,000 followers for free (no paid) in a little under a year
The goal of this article is to breakdown how we did it, and give some practical insights that you can follow through on.
For any product designers looking to get into social media videos - we recommend this free community which was started by Kimset_Design with tons of free information.
But first lets talk about how applicable this strategy is to B2B instagram marketing.
Does Instagram work for B2B brands?
This article focuses on B2C, so we won’t claim things we haven’t done. However there’s good reason to believe that we’re past the days of “my audience isn’t on there”.
Today people are on social media all the time. I mean hours a day. The question is how do you capture people's attention?
And the truth is that B2C and B2B are closer than they are further. It seems there’s just more open mindedness towards experimentation in B2C. This makes the difference.
Yes, we went “Instagram Viral” – here’s what it took:
Lets confront the elephant in the room: why should you listen to us? Nothing like some credibility to set the stage, so lets look at our instagram campaign results.
If these interest you, you may be interested in reading the rest of the article:
- Over 77 posts we generated millions of views
- Top video got 2.9million views on it’s own
- This led to over ±30k USD in revenue
- Selling a high-end product (lamp for 800$)
- At peak was bringing in from 80-100 email subscribers per day
And the best part? Prior to using social media the whole brand was reliant on Facebook marketplace and ETSY. These were the primary sales channels.
That’s no longer the case. Most of the audience acquisition is now via social media, and it works like clockwork.
We turned Instagram into our main acquisition channel for an ecommerce brand.
Starting an Instagram video campaign: it’s messy, hard and brutal.
It needs to be said: the beginning was messy.
Having spent most of our time making explainer videos we had some misconceptions about how social media works.
Our first strategy was basically just showing off the product. No story. No fancy skills.
We went for ease of execution over everything else. And Ivan (owner of Kismet Design) was a bit camera shy at first. So the first videos are a reflection of that.
https://www.instagram.com/kismet_design/reel/Cp4I_HjvHFH/?hl=en
This video did under a few hundred views initially. Currently it has around 11k but that’s due to being shown after the account grew to the audience.
It’s a perfect example of our initial strategy “all we have to do is post, right?”.
There wasn’t any attempt at considering who’s our audience, what are our competitors doing, or reflecting on content which would attract the RIGHT type of content.
We just used what we had available: our locations, products and people. A good start, but hardly what you can call effective.
Our next videos were better… but still far from viral hits
These videos immediately started performing better than our first ones. Which at the time was a big win.
Here’s a preview of one of our first ones.
https://www.instagram.com/kismet_design/reel/Cu7XPW5viN0/?hl=en
Our thought process was: put the product first. Create controversy. But we didn’t really have any emotional charge for the viewer to keep on watching. Nor stop the scroll.
Here’s another one:
https://www.instagram.com/kismet_design/reel/Cu-2fL9LmpO/?hl=en
Another almost purely focused on the product. Not enough on the why, how, and behind the scenes, the context matters, the story where it is? Non-existent.
Lesson learned: you can’t expect people to “connect the dots” with your social media content. Spend the time to reveal basically everything to them.
Copying other peoples successful instagram videos is… a lot easier.
Whether or not Einstein said it, doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.
And it didn’t take us very long to figure out – what we’re doing isn’t working. When something doesn’t work you either give up or adjust course.
So we started to seek out groups and influencers who spoke about “how to win on social media”. We quickly realized there was no shortage of opinions on the subject matter, and as many different social media strategies as people saying it.
Something which stuck out to us was basically: copying creators who were in a similar niche and “winning” with their content. OK. This seemed simple enough.
Using our existing video production research skills we broke down what kind of content was performing well within our industry.
Market research on Instagram like a pro
First rule: take your time.
This MIRO board is just for finding the best accounts, content types, and getting a sense of the patterns they represented:
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVKzv9rRc=/
It’s obvious but quantity is a quality all of it’s own here. Make an account within your niche to exclusively search for other accounts within your niche.
The more hyperfocused your account is - the better. It will give you more natural and organic suggestions to follow through on.
The thought process we used was like this
- Not look for content formats / specific content
- Look for influencers/accounts dominating the niche
- Reverse engineer their content according
- Rank according to ease of execution and complexity
This step was about seeing the patterns, staying with it, and seeing more patterns. Not just moving into creating content but making sure we’re creating the right type of content.
Reverse engineering successful content on social media
This is primarily determined by a few things like
- How much time you can invest per piece of content
- What kind of tools, environments and shots you have at your disposal
- Your overall skill in video production editing/directing/shooting
- Something within your niche, brand voice and personal preferences
This helped us narrow in on what we could recreate. Kind of putting on tunnel vision glasses so you’re not looking too far and distant.
Some of the factors we used in the graphic above:
- Hook notes: if it stood out to us, since your first 3 seconds determines success
- Content bucket: categorically where does it sit
- Production points: what makes it good? What to take away from it?
- Production difficulty: pretty self-explanatory
- Reusability: some formats can be recreated repeatedly
- Views: some measure of success (not always accurate)
This didn’t tell us what to make, but it helped us wrap our minds around “what could we make?”
Template for breaking down any viral instagram video
After looking at many videos there comes a time to decide – which one will you actually reproduce?
To do this fast, you watch the video once, and basically try to remake it.
To do this “easy”, you watch the video and break it down with a template like this. Rank it with other videos which could be potential options, and decide once you have the full picture.
Why is this so key? Well it allows you to see what the video is really made up of
- How many shots will you need?
- How fast is the editing?
- What’s the shot type? (not all shots are created equal)
- And other notes (what makes it unique or additional work)
This can really help you grasp the concept of the video in a more raw form.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This saying comes to us from Benjamin Franklin.
So prepare yourself before shooting and your video won’t need weird post-production fixes, or additional scenes shot.
Our first Instagram success was copying viral trends
In an effort to fix our broken strategy we started to simply copy other people. At first the copies weren’t that great, because we didn’t have a template.
So we were doing it “by eye”. And sometimes, it was just impossible to get the same result because of factors we couldn’t control
- Design and environment weren’t matching up what we needed
- Our sense of “social media” editing wasn’t quite there (pacing a bit off)
- Accessories for videos had no budget, so make do with what we had
https://www.instagram.com/kismet_design/reel/CxoYAT0SSJ8/?hl=en
Afterwards we felt inspired to continue copying. We were seeing higher views, more watch time and following converting.
No it wasn’t the parabolic growth everyone wants, but it was – working. And when something is working double down on it!
https://www.instagram.com/kismet_design/reel/Cy96ebNL_fl/?hl=en
Similar to the first piece but slightly higher production quality. At the time this was a trend to use a song and show the “reality vs IG” kind of vibe.
We spent more time preparing for this. And our hopes were higher. But, it just didn’t pan out how we wanted it to.
Then… a breakthrough
This ASMR video blew up our Instagram account
Having seen a bunch of carpentry ASMR videos. We decided: lets do it.
Glad we did. This video got more views than all our previous ones combined. This was the “digital gold” we were hoping to strike.
It didn’t solve all our problems. It didn’t make us a million followers, but it gave us a sense of enthusiasm and desire to “keep on going” which is essential for social.
https://www.instagram.com/kismet_design/reel/Cy4wS0ILzNE/?hl=en
This brought up an interesting question of: who are we attracting? Who’s our audience?
We started to see that many different types of people were reacting to the content.
Your social media content builds your buying audience
The thing with our ASMR win that we quickly realized is that it started to attract other wood workers. And this wasn’t in-line with the audience of people who actually bought our products.
It brought up an interesting but hard to decide discussion internally: what kind of content will attract the right kind of audience?
There are clear tradeoffs between
- Going too narrow on products which restricts the total exposure
- Going too broad and attracting people not interested in the brand
- Focusing on specific skills which are only relevant to a small subset of people
This is a topic which deserves it’s own blog post because few people understand just how important it truly is.
Because building content for the wrong type of audience won’t lead to things like high follower counts or actual sales.
So if you’re spending 10-20 hours per video you really want to make sure it’s going towards the right things.
And you need to know where in your video sales funnel this video sits, and what it does. This isn’t as straight forward as it seems… there’s a lot of little nuances. It’s almost like you’re looking at a “reflection of a reflection inside of a reflection”.
So it’s hard to draw any clear conclusions from something like this!
Upon review of our instagram marketing strategy: we saw opportunity.
It wasn’t long when we started questioning our strategy again. As you should when you’re not getting the results you’d like.
In fact one of the simplest but hardest things to do in life: is question what you are doing. Not try to justify the results you have, but look further for the results you COULD be having.
To do that requires benchmarking. Not necessarily comparing yourself to others as your success is your success and not anyone else's.
But, you want to be aware: how do other people in similar situations perform? This can help you find potential optimizations and improvements.
For us it was clear: some of the bigger creators who we were looking up to got a significant amount more views and engagement than we did.
So we started to wonder…
Social media content: quantity vs quality debate:
As more and more people get on social media the quality naturally increases. It’s a kind of relativism which happens – quality becomes easier to attain as more people share processes on how to do something.
It’s happened with marathon runners for example. Today the best/worst runners are within 5 minutes of each other. If we go back 100 years, it was closer to 1 hour difference.
What happened is: better training, technology and distribution of information. So as everyone has equal access it improves their ability drastically.
Something similar is happening on social media.
5 years ago it was about putting up as much content as you could – the time tested quantity is a quality approach.
Today, we see creators putting up less videos but getting better results per video. They are spending the time to refine them and make something unique.
And something unique can get you millions of views because you stand out.
While simply “vlogging” or doing a selfie style post can be hit and miss. It works for some people, but as more people do it, it’s no longer a special way of standing out – so the relative skill level evolves and audiences expect more.
That isn’t to say that simple content formats or types are irrelevant. Actually far from it, they are a lot of what we’re experimenting with in our upcoming plan.
It’s quite amazing in terms of effort to result what they can achieve.
So how did our account explode thanks to social?
(here’s our sales dashboard after a few weeks of doing content and doing a drop)
The account started to explode. Why? Because we decided to try a more risky type of storytelling – seeing that copying other creators wasn’t working.
We started to brainstorm: what was unique about our story and how does it stand out?
This led us to developing one of our most powerful hooks to date “1 year ago I decided to quit my job…” and it worked – really well.
Our mindset shift was this
- Lets talk about Ivan the product creator not his products
- Lets connect with emotional charges as per Robet McKee
- Remove the corporate/salesy feel and replace with authenticity
Yes, the editing was constantly improving and we had more shots to choose from which helped us create higher quality videos without spending the same amount of time on production.
Here’s the result:
https://www.instagram.com/kismet_design/reel/C023mOhrnPp/?hl=en
This video pretty much took all our previous content and multiplied the results by 10. Then it kept on growing, it didn’t stop. So we realized well… this is working!
Our first storytelling video got millions of views, it got us hooked
After this we saw how powerful storytelling on social media was. Prior to this we had used it almost as a billboard just trying to advertise what we do.
But what if we became a source of inspiration for people, and ability to see into the life of someone else going through a struggle of creating their own furniture business?
The next hook which worked very well was about “you don’t need to go to school to be a product designer”. The controversy got people reacting positively and negatively as you can see from the comments.
[need to screengrab comments – but don’t have IG account]
IT challenged people's beliefs and gave an opinion on it. Plus shared Ivan's personal journey, the result was a video which did very, very, well.
https://www.instagram.com/kismet_design/reel/C094y00ShSF/?hl=en
This kept the audience growing almost parabolically.
The exponential rise of the content was showing us a new direction forward which was more effective than anything we’d done prior.
We still had other content types to try out, but none of them came close to the power of storytelling content. Which is incredible. The opportunity to tell stories is more alive than ever.
In fact, the new strategy for growing the account is centered around storytelling content. Out of everything which has been done its shown the most potential.
So why not double down on what works?
Why don't most brands succeed on social media?
First of all it’s a lot of work. The kind of content which works isn’t just put up promotional content of ourselves… its requires a bit more digging deep than that.
Clients will say “yeah we want a story” but most clients have to stick to pre-approved corporate guidelines which amount to a vote about what and how messaging should be delivered.
And most brand marketers are not natural storytellers. In fact over the last few decades marketing has become more about distribution than anything else. So a lot of brands force themselves into the channels where customers are by brute force (read money).
They are far from reaping the rewards of properly structured organic content.
And the few brands which do stand out they are not necessarily easy to copy because their strategies come from a philosophy executed into a marketing strategy
- Redbull for example with their events based marketing strategy
- Nike with motivational aspirational type videos
- Patagonia with a unique twist about what outdoorsy sports means
Simply said: most brands are too sales focused on social media
The new currency is attention and keeping it requires higher quality creativity.
It means experimentation, taking risks and seeing what ends up working for you. Yet for most brands this goes against how they have been taught to do marketing.
In an effort to prove effectiveness they shoot themselves in the foot.
And the proof is that most branding focuses on
- words, sentences or slogans
- Few generic words/feelings
While storytelling focuses on:
- Emotional value shifts: how we move from one state of emotion to another
- Cause: why/the reason it happens
It’s two different mindsets.
When marketers say storytelling, they really mean something else. Which is why we don’t see a lot of B2B brands especially do any type of storytelling. There just isn’t an understanding of what it is, nor budget for it.
Which is not to say it wouldn’t work for them - just that it’s so far outside the wheelhouse of the average marketer. They focus on everything but storytelling.
Product demos, interviews, podcasts, etc… but none of those things are story. And often only have a small limited amount of story within them!
Can this social media strategy apply to B2B brands
It won’t happen overnight, but as social media continues to reward stories - marketers will naturally shift to where the money is.
- Why is founder-led marketing all the rage lately?
- Or brands like Basecamp and AHREF being able to gain market share
- Notice how many brands are becoming less serious?
That’s because B2C reveals what works in B2B as well. It’s not as “different” as we might think. Actually there’s increasingly more cross over between the two.
It’s going to be a risk and it can only pay off if you commit to it. Take it as seriously as your paid ads media spend. Don’t worry about it not working, instead focus that energy on how to make it work.
A good start would be reading up on classical storytelling theory. Which is what authors and script writers base their work off of. This is closer to what marketers should be doing.
Yet so few people talk about it. Today the idea of storytelling in B2B is similar to an oasis in the desert. People talk about it, few have seen it, and even fewer believe it actually exists.
Yet when you’re in the desert, it can keep you going.
If you liked this post about organic social media content, you may enjoy this one we did about our paid social media strategy - which gets up to 700% ROAS.
