How I hacked Organic Instagram Growth and Got Real Results in One week.

The Dollar Eighty Strategy ($1.80) Explained.

About three months ago, I left an established tech company and became self-employed helping early-stage startups and small businesses achieve their business goals. I soon found myself working with Biomed, Industry 4.0, Software, and Ecommerce startups and companies.

While working with tech companies is my well-earned comfort zone, eCommerce is a whole different ball game. In the eCommerce business, things move very fast. The tempo is different, and so is their digital presence. It is way less LinkedIn, and much more of Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. While I am a casual user of these platforms, I am nowhere close to being an Instagram marketer.

A client of mine sells premium B2C products with high-profit margins. Their goal for this year is to grow their revenues by 300%. We have kicked-off our work together with the overall G2M strategy, and a marketing plan.

After a few weeks of progress, my client texted me, “We need to brainstorm about Instagram strategy. We have been posting, advertising, and doing everything by the book, but there is so little activity there. Our customers are on Instagram, our competitors are killing it there with hundreds of thousands of followers, and we are just so behind”.

I set out to do some research and soon enough, I came across a strategy that all the Instagram marketers swore by called “Dollar Eighty”. Coined three years ago by GaryVee, it has a simple and memorable formula:

10 hashtags X Top 9 Posts x $0.02 = $1.80

Which means:

• Identify the top 10 hashtags which your potential customers are following
• Click on 9 top trending posts in that hashtag
• Leave your 2 cents on each of the nine posts.

Two cents times nine posts times ten hashtags equals $1.80.

In GaryVee’s words:

“Do it everyday, and it’s as easy as that. The overall process is incredibly simple. No matter how much value you provide, this is still a game of numbers. You have to be willing to give yourself more at-bats. Everyone else is only leaving .02. You’re leaving a $1.80 Every. Single. Day. I promise you will get results. The better your .02 is, Value and authenticity, the more you will grow.”

GaryVee is known for not recommending anything that he hasn’t tried and tested. Plus, the strategy sounded so easy to implement. I pitched it to my client, and we agreed to test it for one week to see where it gets us.

The Process

I did it for one week. Leaving a comment on each of the 9 top posts for ten strong hashtags took me about an hour a day to complete.

To be honest, I didn’t get it right at first. In the beginning, I was too “selling”, insincere, didn’t read the post texts, or just left a generic “wow, this is amazing” in the comments. Somewhere around day four, I think I started getting the essence of the strategy and did the following from then on:

• I stopped selling or promoting the product completely.
• I stopped hijacking the competitors’ posts with my comments.
• I stopped leaving meaningless, canned responses, e.g., “This is so cool!”, “I love it”, “This is beautiful.”
• I made sure to both like and follow the original poster.
• I invested a few moments of thought about what the original poster was talking about, trying to connect to their sentiment — I extended support, celebrated their achievements, provided my honest feedback to their thoughts, and sincerely wished them luck with their personal or business goals. In short, I became more social.
• I skipped posts that were clearly and openly promotional.

In total, if you account for my first days of not doing it quite right, and the other days where I’ve decided to skip commenting on some openly promotional posts, it was less $1.80, and more like $1.40 on average.

The Immediate Benefit

The immediate benefit of implementing this strategy is getting out there, and doing the fieldwork. It gives you experience, knowledge, and perspective.

• I’ve identified the influencers in my client’s target market.
• I’ve discovered amazing profiles that my client should be connected to for a variety of reasons (inspiration, potential collaborations, and much more).
• I’ve learned about new trends and things that kept my target audience engaged.
• I’ve seen how other people created engaging posts.
• I got better at Instagram!

What happened next was CRAZY!

I have never seen a relatively low-maintenance organic strategy having such a drastic effect over such a short period of time. We ran it just for one week to test the waters (Now that we know how effective this strategy is, we will be scaling it up in the next few weeks).

The Numbers So Far

After only one week of doing dollar eighty, my client’s IG metrics boomed! What was even crazier is that they kept improving even after I’ve stopped.

Garyvee says you should do it Every.Single.Day. I can’t even start imagining the growth that will be experienced by those committing to this approach for one month. Or a year. OMG. This is a nuclear chain reaction waiting to happen.

The numbers (measured 2 weeks after the test, in comparison to the previous month)

• Profile visits + 100%
• Website taps + 61.1%
• Email button taps +50%
• Followers + 8.5%
• Content interactions +23.1%

Sales on IG

The growth of DM messages with order placements was+700% compared to each of the previous months, including the months when my client invested in ads (and they do know a thing or two about targeting)!

Website sales

In addition to the orders placed directly on IG, the website conversions that originated directly from the Instagram channel grew by 290%.

And we are not at the end of the month yet!

Bottom line

If Instagram is one of your brand platforms — don’t miss out on the benefits of implementing this strategy. No, it is not a miracle; it is you putting in consistent work into building up your momentum and being rewarded for it.

Side notes

My client happens to sell a very sought-after product, popular worldwide, so if yours is a more niche product or service, or your target geo is more limited, it might take a little longer.

You need to make sure that you have a decent IG page, your product is competitively priced, and your customer service is impeccable. In my client’s case, they checked all of these boxes, and they still struggled with IG presence. That is, until Dollar Eighty.

Personal takeouts

Number one. Dollar Eighty strategy works. It is not a shortcut but a real way to grow your brand through being ultimately social. I will keep recommending it to all my clients with IG presence.

Number two. I will definitely be experimenting with the Dollar Eighty magic on LinkedIn. Sure, the approach will have to be altered. Most of the content on LinkedIn is more complex than an Instagram post — image or video clip. It will take more than a few minutes for a worthy two cent comment. So I do foresee fewer two-cents for LinkedIn. However, based on the experiment I ran three weeks ago, my intuition tells me this is another gold mine yet to be explored.

I will try this out on LinkedIn, and I will keep you posted.

Best,

Liel

P.S. If you’d like to connect — feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn