107: 5 Instagram Growth Shifts That Took Me From 1K to 35K Followers
Have you ever felt like you’re doing everything “right” on Instagram and still seeing no growth?
In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on my own journey. I spent over a year stuck at 1,000 followers while posting reels every single day with almost no traction. Eventually, five specific shifts completely changed the trajectory of my growth.
Those same shifts helped me grow my personal brand to over 35,000 followers, scale my brick-and-mortar dance studio account to more than 60,000 followers on Instagram, and reach over 40,000 followers on TikTok.
Even better, these strategies are now helping my clients grow their audiences, attract dream customers, and increase revenue across multiple industries.
If you feel like you’re posting into the void, this episode will help you understand what actually moves the needle.
What You’ll Learn
01:23 – Why growth on Instagram often takes longer than people expect
04:14 – The first shift that changed everything: making a clear marketing decision
06:33 – Why talking about too many topics confuses the algorithm and your audience
11:06 – How clarity around your niche unlocks growth and visibility
12:28 – Why speaking directly to your ideal client dramatically improves engagement
13:55 – The power of storytelling and specific hooks in your content
14:25 – What real consistency looks like (without burnout)
17:19 – Why hiring mentors can dramatically shorten your growth curve
Key Takeaways
1. Decide that Instagram is part of your marketing strategy.
When you treat Instagram like a priority instead of a hobby, your effort becomes consistent and intentional.
2. Clarity beats variety.
Your audience should immediately understand what you do and who your content is for.
3. Speak directly to one ideal client.
When people see themselves in your content, they stop scrolling and start following.
4. Consistency builds skill and momentum.
Growth often comes after a long period of effort where results aren’t immediately visible.
5. Mentorship accelerates growth.
Working with someone who has already achieved your goal can shorten your learning curve dramatically.
A Truth You Need to Hear:
“Clarity scales. Confusion doesn’t.”— Elizabeth Marberry
Resources Mentioned:
Hot Reels Full Program Details
S3 Ep107 Transcript: 5 Instagram Growth Shifts That Took Me From 1K to 35K Followers
00:00
If you've ever felt frustrated with Instagram, posting consistently, seeing no growth and wondering what you're missing, this episode is for you. After being stuck at 1,000 followers for over a year, I made five specific shifts that grew my personal brand to over 35,000 followers and helped scale my dance studio account to over 60,000 on Instagram and 40,000 on TikTok. And the best part?
00:26
These same strategies are now driving real growth for my clients across multiple industries. Today I'm breaking down exactly what those five changes were so you can stop spinning your wheels and start building real momentum on Instagram. Are you ready? Let's go.
00:44
Welcome to Strut It, a podcast about creating bold visibility on social media with zero apologies. I'm Elizabeth Marberry, your host and Instagram marketing coach. I help small business owners get seen on Instagram and monetize their offers so they can make more money doing their sole led work. If you're tired of spinning your wheels on Instagram and you're seeking simple, proven Instagram marketing strategies that actually work, you're in the right place.
01:13
Let's dive in.
01:23
Welcome back to the show. It is my goal each and every week to simplify Instagram marketing strategy for you and your small business so you can really grow your visibility and drive more leads and sales with your organic content. And one of the things I have realized I have not talked enough about recently on the podcast is how long it took me to get to where I'm at. Because we are in this age where we kind of expect instant results, right?
01:52
We do the things for week after week, month after month, and then we're like, why didn't it work for me when it worked for her? And so I wanna pull back the curtain on my journey to hopefully not only inspire you to keep going and keep creating and posting content for your business, but to also normalize that growth sometimes isn't linear, whether that's on Instagram or in business, and share with you the five shifts that took me from sitting at 1,000 followers for
02:21
over a year to growing my personal brand account to over 35,000. And here's what you need to know before we dive in. I own two businesses. My brick and mortar dance studio, Wedding Dance Coach, has over 62,000 followers on Instagram and over 40,000 on TikTok. And I implemented these same strategies there. And they work, no matter your niche or business model.
02:49
And these are the same strategies that I teach my clients. So let's go back to 2020, 2021. I was stuck at a thousand followers and I was posting a reel every single day for over a year. And again, just did not grow. No momentum, no traction, low views, and just not fully understanding like how this content connected into my business or marketing and sales funnel.
03:19
I am so grateful for that season of posting all of the content that flopped and failing forward and learning as I went because if you're in that season right now, you are building the foundation of everything that is about to click in for you. Like you can't skip chapters one, two and three and go to chapter 20, right? You just gotta read the book one chapter at a time. So if you're listening to this podcast,
03:48
You're doing that, I know you are. And I'm so grateful for that year that I did not grow because I learned so much and I built my content creation skills, my video marketing skills. So let's get into the five shifts that actually changed the game for me so you can start to really grow your visibility on Instagram. Number one, I made a
04:14
that Instagram was part of my marketing strategy? Now that seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Like you're like, well, Elizabeth, of course I made that decision. I'm listening to this podcast or I read books on it or I binge content about it. But I wanna pause for a minute. Have you actually made a clear decision that you're gonna prioritize Instagram as one of those key pillars of your marketing strategy? Because
04:42
Let's be honest, there's lots of different ways to market a business. There's lots of different social media platforms. So when you make a clear decision, you're no longer in the energy of, I'll post when I have time, or I should probably be on Instagram for my business. So I'll kind of dabble here, dabble there, but I don't know. I made a clear decision that Instagram was one of the primary ways
05:10
I was going to build visibility for my business. And once I made that decision, I stopped treating it like a hobby or nice to have or extra thing that I had to do. I blocked time for it in my marketing calendar every single week. Because if you're a small business owner or you have a small team, marketing needs to be a consistent thing that you do every single week. And here's what happens when you make a clear decision. You stop saying, don't have time.
05:40
and you start saying this matters and I'm gonna prioritize this. And a lot of people don't have a strategy problem, they have a decision problem. Instagram started working better for me when I stopped being so casual about it and decided this was going to work for me and I was going to keep working at it until I figured out what resonated with my audience, what grew my following.
06:06
what actually grew my email list and what drove leads and sales. But it started with a clear decision and intention about how I was gonna use the platform. Number two, I stopped talking about too many things on my feed. So when I first started posting on my personal brand, I was building a coaching business, but I was speaking to multiple niches within that business.
06:33
So my first coaching business that I ever launched was called Confident Feminine Body Program. And it was a program that was all about helping women to essentially make peace with our bodies, make peace with food and discover joyful movement. Because if you know any of my backstory, I was a former professional dancer. I struggled with disordered eating. I had a really unhealthy relationship with food and exercise.
06:59
And so what I did in my program was I was just teaching women how to come back into their center, how to eat more intuitively, and how to discover joyful movement that would be sustainable for them. Even me describing it to you right now, I'm sure you're hearing multiple niches inside of that business, meaning I would post about intuitive eating and food.
07:24
I would post about anti-diet culture, you know, really disrupting the narrative that women need to be smaller to be valuable or that people in smaller bodies are necessarily healthy in quotes, right? So I was talking about anti-diet culture. I was talking about movement, joyful movement. I was talking about empowering women with mindset and energetics. And I was all over the place. I will never forget that one of my business besties,
07:50
She looked at my wedding dance coach accounts, my business account for my brick and mortar dance studio. And she said, okay, I look at your account, I know exactly what you do. I know exactly who you help. I know exactly your offer, right? When I look at your personal brand, I have no idea what you do. You are all over the place. And I was speaking to multiple niches, right? And it was confusing. It was confusing for the algorithm, because it didn't know.
08:17
where to put my content. This is a recommendations based algorithm. So they're going to need to put it in front of people who love exercise content, right? Or love intuitive eating, anti-diet culture content. But I was confusing the algorithm. It didn't know where to put my content. And I was confusing my audience. And so even when I did have a couple of videos that popped off and I got 10,000 views or 20,000 views, which I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. I'm famous.
08:43
It didn't do anything for my business. didn't grow followers. I didn't get leads or sales because my account wasn't optimized, right? It was not clear what I did and who I helped and who my account was for. And it was around this time that I made a big pivot in my business and decided to shut down that first coaching brand and really focus in on growing my brick and mortar business that year.
09:12
I had just recently auditioned for Shark Tank and made it to the final round, spoke with the executive producers, did all of the next steps. I didn't get my business on the show, but I remember one of the questions they asked me in the application was, how many social media followers do you have? And at that time with my wedding dance business, I think I had had about 650 followers, like not very many.
09:39
And that's when I realized, oh my gosh, social media is so important. Like I need to get my ducks in a row, right? It was kind of a wake up call too, because side note, I am such a Shark Tank fan. And if you're wondering what the heck I'm talking about, Shark Tank is a TV show where there's all these investors and entrepreneurs go on the show and they pitch their business to try to get an investor. So to me, it was just such a fun journey to almost make it on the show, but
10:08
When I got that call from Shark Tank and I knew that they were interested in me and my business, I was like, I must be onto something. It kind of gave me this confidence in my business. And so that's when I made a big pivot and I decided, okay, with this personal brand, Elizabeth Marbury that I'm growing, I am actually gonna focus on growing it as the CEO of this business. And I'm gonna really focus on creating dance content because I owned a dance studio.
10:38
So I was like, the CEO of this business, get to know her, she's a dancer. And when I really focused in on that business owner dance vibe, that was just like my one lane. That is when my account started blowing up. So when you would come to my account, you would know exactly what I do and who it's for. Now, of course, have, after our
11:06
massive success of growing my brick and mortar social following and increasing revenue by 84 % in 12 months and driving over 5,000 people to my email list all through organic marketing. That is when I really officially launched my Instagram marketing coaching business. And again, went through another pivot on my personal brand. So I hope this story is giving you permission to
11:30
I don't want you pivoting all the time, but you get to grow and evolve and follow those breadcrumbs of your business. So once I got clear on my zone of genius and what my content was gonna be about, things really started to move. So the lesson here is for you, my beloved listener, when your audience, your target audience lands on your profile, they should instantly know like what this account is about, who it's for.
11:59
And if they have to try to like piece it together like a puzzle, it's not gonna happen. They're gonna leave, you're gonna lose the follow, right? Clarity scales, confusion doesn't, right? Number three, I started speaking directly to my ideal client's struggles. Now this one changed everything. I started to really be much more specific in my hooks, my captions, and sometimes I literally would write,
12:28
hooks and I still do this to this day, it still works as if I was my ideal client. Right? So even today, I'm posting a reel of clapping for all the small business owners who keep posting even though their last reel got 37 views. And I don't feel that way anymore. I don't feel like, oh, my reels are getting 37 views, but I know my ideal client is going to absolutely resonate with that. Right? So writing your hook as if you are your ideal client can work really well.
12:59
When people can see themselves in your content, they stop scrolling, right? They feel understood and that connection is what will drive the growth. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast. The general hooks, the general content that anyone could just go and search on chat.gbt, that's not working, right? What you want to think about is your personal stories or your business stories or your client stories or customer stories. Storytelling is such a fantastic way.
13:27
to grow on Instagram right now. So the more specific you can be in your hooks, in your lived experience, in your expertise, in your authority, the mistakes you made, your hot takes on the industry, the myths that you wanna bust that you are seeing that don't work for you. Maybe they work for someone else, but they don't work for you. Be willing to take a stand for something, right? The more specific and bold you can be and the more you can really speak.
13:55
directly to that one ideal client, not everyone on Instagram, not the billions of users, that one ideal client, you are going to build resonance and resonance builds followers. Number four, consistency actually matters. I know everybody says this, but it's true. And I wanna say this in a really grounded way, okay? Because I know you're already doing so much in your business. Consistency doesn't mean burnout, okay?
14:25
It doesn't mean posting seven days a week if you hate your life. It means picking a rhythm that works for you and sticking to it long enough for your skill to catch up with that effort. So it goes back to that first point of have you already decided to prioritize this? Because what I see is that when people are in that in-between of, I wanna do it, but I'm gonna only show up at 50 % because I don't really have time to do this,
14:54
it doesn't work and they end up hating Instagram, right? If you're gonna make a decision, then put it in your calendar and you're gonna do it no matter what, right? Like you are going to show up no matter what, if you're feeling it or you're not. And spoiler alert, next week I'm bringing on Brock Johnson. Oh my gosh, such a fangirl moment. I'm bringing him on and he is gonna walk us through his exact workflow because I think this is also the piece where you might say, no, Elizabeth, I've decided.
15:24
and I do wanna post seven days week, but I have no idea how to structure the system behind it. We're gonna get into that next week. You are gonna love it. It was such a good conversation with Brock. But remember, there's often a lag time between your effort and your results. And most people will quit in that lag time. That year of daily posting where I was posting a reel every day, I kept going when there was no evidence it was gonna work and it built my content creation muscle.
15:54
It increased my marketing savviness, right? It sharpened my messaging, it strengthened my hooks, and it made me faster and better at getting on camera, creating content, editing content, scripting things. Like, it all compounds and it all gets better, but you have to be willing to stick with it. And the more you post, the more you're gonna grow. So sometimes I'll have clients come to me and say, okay, I've been posting, but I'm not growing. And I say, well, how often are you posting? And they're like,
16:23
well, a couple of times a week for a month. And I'm like, okay, well, that's like eight posts in a month, right? Knowing that most people aren't gonna see the post or you're probably not gonna necessarily knock it out of the park with each and every post. That's why there is a bit of a volume game here. Not to say post crappy content. Obviously we're trying to post the best quality content we can, but the more you post, it's a numbers game, right?
16:49
you're gonna be more likely to find the content type, format, hook that is gonna resonate with your ideal client. So the more you can post, the faster you're gonna grow, but it has to be sustainable for you. So there's a balance here. Finally, number five, I hired people who were ahead of me. This is the one I wish I had done sooner. I didn't hire my first coach until I had been an entrepreneur for almost a decade.
17:19
And once I did, everything accelerated. Because when you work with someone who has already done the thing that you are trying to figure out, when you work with someone who understands content strategy, positioning, messaging, audience growth, you stop guessing and you really shorten your learning curve. And frankly, you avoid years of trial and error. And that is exactly why I built Hot Reels.
17:49
which is my 12 month Instagram content lab, is in this high touch group mentorship program, you learn in one year what took me about five years to figure out. We go deep into content strategy, you get my feedback on your content. We talk about structure and systems and workflows to ensure that you are really understanding how to weave this into your busy life. Because let's be frank, none of us are full time content creators.
18:19
We're business owners, we have businesses to run. And so I teach my methods, I teach different frameworks to work with different energetics because some of us need a very strict plan and some of us need to be more intuitive with our energetics. So I really try to offer what is going to work for you because there's not one way to do this, right? The most important thing is that it resonates with you, your heart, your mission, your life, your capacity, right?
18:48
hard to read the label when you're inside the box. And that is why hiring the right mentor or coach is a total game changer. And I want you to know that this is not just about my results of growing my two accounts. Here's what's possible for you. So, Martine, she's a Pilates studio owner in our group. She celebrated two high ticket clients who found her through Instagram. She made $3,000 in a single day and she has under a thousand followers.
19:18
Caroline, a podcast strategist, was ready to give up on Instagram. Seriously, she was like, I am so ready to give up. I hate it. After joining Hot Reels, her video views skyrocketed, sometimes 7x higher than previously. Her engagement increased and she celebrated her highest revenue month since her brand pivot. Osla, an Etsy shop owner, joined Hot Reels at around 2,000 followers and grew to over 70,000 followers in just 12 months. And she said,
19:47
Before the program, I had zero confidence on social media. I've posted hundreds of reels now and refined my messaging and grown my account in just 12 months. And Elizabeth's coaching really pushed me outside my comfort zone in the best way possible. Her feedback is gold and her strategies work. I know it's awkward for me to toot my own horn, but thank you, Asla, you're amazing. Krista is a chronic pain relief coach and she generated 30 new leads in 30 days and increased her reach 10x.
20:17
And in her exact words, she said, Hot Reels has completely transformed her marketing. I know I could go on and on. I love my clients. I celebrate every single win that they have. Dani joined Hot Reels at just under 2,000 followers and graduated from the program with over 22,000 followers. She also added an additional $100,000 in revenue to her business, not just from growing her event and wedding business on Instagram.
20:42
but also launching a coaching program to teach others how to do what she had done. And that happens a lot in the program where you might come in focusing on growing one part of your business and then you learn these skills and you're like, actually, I wanna apply this to this other thing too. That's what I love about what I teach is it's evergreen. Like once you learn this skill, you can go leverage it everywhere, TikTok, YouTube shorts, LinkedIn.
21:10
I could go on and on. These are real business owners just like you who decided to stop guessing and start growing. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, I'm in, I don't wanna spend another year stuck at a thousand followers. I don't wanna keep throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. Then Hot Reels was built for you and doors open next month. I'm so excited. Last time we opened, we sold out.
21:35
We keep the group intentionally small and intimate because I am in there coaching you, giving you feedback, reviewing content, helping you refine your strategy. I'm not a coach that thrives on hundreds and hundreds of people being in my programs. I want them to be small and intimate. I wanna get to know you, your business. I adore my clients so much. So my VIP wait list for Hot Reels is officially open right now. And if you want first access to one of the limited spots,
22:03
you definitely want to get on the wait list. Here's what to do. Head over to Instagram, make sure you're already following me over there at Elizabeth Marberry, M-A-R-B-E-R-R-Y, and message me with the keyword hot, H-O-T, and my sexy robot assistant will send you over the wait list link. You can also check out all the program details and investments.
22:31
or you can go to elizabethmarbury.com slash hot. That's elizabethmarberry, M-A-R-B-E-R-R-Y dot com slash hot. It takes less than 30 seconds to join my VIP wait list. And don't forget, wait listers not only get first access, but I always throw in some super hot bonuses that really help you to increase your ROI. So you definitely wanna get your name on the wait list. Go do it right now before you forget.
23:00
To wrap it up, if you're in that season right now where you feel like you're posting into the void, keep going, keep creating, keep serving that ideal client or customer. And if you want more support in actually implementing all the strategies we talked about today, you know where to find me. Connect with me over on Instagram, send me a voice memo. I check each and every DM. I love connecting with my listeners. And...
23:27
Don't forget to tune in next week where I'm bringing on Brock Johnson onto the podcast. We're geeking out all things systems, workflows, and he shared with us how he is driving more leads and sales on Instagram. Thank you so much for listening and I can't wait to strut it with you next week. Thank you for listening to strut it. If you're ready to start leveraging Instagram to grow your business, then you're going to want to grab my free monetize your IG guides.
23:55
where you'll learn seven simple and proven ways to finally make money on Instagram. You can grab your guide at ElizabethMarbury.com slash freebies. That's ElizabethMarberry.com slash freebies to get my monetize your IG guide. If you've got some incredible value from today's episode, be sure to leave a review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.
24:23
and I cannot wait to start it with you again next week.
