How to Get Instagram Followers with Meta Ads (2026 Updated)

If you're an online coach and your client acquisition strategy depends on posting and hoping to go viral and get clients, this is the cheapest way to fix that. Follower ads. Not DM ads, not opt-in ads. You don't need a VSL. You don't need a funnel. You pay to put your content in front of the exact ideal client avatar that you're trying to attract. They follow you. We message them and convert them into sales calls. First, I'm going to show you the numbers so you can see exactly how much you can put in, how much you can get out, at what budget you can get started on. By the way, you can get started on a very small budget. Exactly how to script and create your follower ads. The exact launch and scaling strategy, the KPIs, the targets that you need to hit, when to kill an ad, and the exact DM script to turn those new followers into booked calls. So let's get into it. So the most obvious question, how much do I need to spend? How much can I make? So first things first, the strategy that I'm gonna show you in this video allow you to get started for as little as $15 per day, okay? Normally we are going to launch 4 ads at $15 per day to start with, which means that's about $60 per day in ad spend. But again, you can get started at $15 per day. So here, if we spend $1,500 per month, which is about $60 per day, which is the official launch strategy that we want to implement. You can book calls for about $100 to $150 on average, about $125. From there, the show rate, this depends on your order system. Check this video on the channel if you want to learn more about how to increase your show up rates. Let's say $75, which is the average. Close rate, $35. Again, very, very average. Now, how much do you need to charge? I would say at least $2,000. So if your program is a 12-week program, 16-week program, try to extend it to at least 6 months, 12 months, and pitch that upfront. Or if you charge monthly, make sure you package it in a longer timeframe, right? So let's say 6 months, therefore you can charge at least $2,000. I would recommend at least $2,500 to $3,000. And then from there with these numbers, as you can see, you can hit a 5x ROAS pretty, pretty consistently. This is what our clients do all the time. So we use this exact system most of the time to get these results. So from there, what's a lot better versus just organic content? As you can see, we spend $1,500. If we want to scale it, I will show you how to scale this strategy to about $200 per day, which means about $6,000 per month. That is assuming that we can hold the 5x ROAS. And most of the time, the stats do drop a little bit over time at scale. We can still hold a 4x ROAS and spend $6,000 and make $25,000 out every single time, every single month. You don't have to wait for a video to go viral. You don't need to wait for leads to reach out to you. You have leads on demand every single month. Now there's ad coaches, business coaches that will tell you, hey, run DM ads, run VSL ads, run webinars. So you might ask, why is this the easiest way to start for an online coach that has an Instagram audience? Well, first things first, your followers will follow you forever, which means with the strategies I'm about to show you in this video, you will know exactly how to convert new followers into booked calls. Now, some of them obviously will not want to book a call right away. They will need some nurturing, but that's what your content does. And 2 months from now, you will see a snowball effect. 2 months from now, you will have people reaching out to you that followed you 2 months ago from your ads. Over multiple months, you will see a huge wave of leads that followed you in the past reaching out to you now, voting on your call taking actions now, applying for your coaching now. And if you compare that to DMs, if somebody messages you, most likely they don't even follow you, which means if they don't book a call right away, they pretty much disappear forever. Same thing if somebody opts into an ad. Yes, you have their contact information possibly, but again, if they don't take action now, they might not be following you, which means you kind of disappear from their life. But if they follow you, they will get retargeted with your content every single day. Now there's two types of follower ads. A lot of people call them boosted posts, follower ads. It's actually the same thing. Essentially, we pay Meta to show your content and you can create new content or use the same content. We pay Meta to show one or the other to your audience, to a broader audience outside of your existing following, which means you can either create a new content or boost an existing post. Okay, now I'm going to show you how to create new ads because that's what I would recommend. If you don't want to do it, if you want to get started faster, you can select an existing post from your Instagram and boost that, use that as a follower ad. Now If you decide to do that, you need to make sure that in the first 3 seconds of the video, you call out the specific avatar. Just because a piece of content did well on your page, which means it went viral, that's actually the exact opposite of what we're trying to do. Because if it went viral, that means that it appeals to a broad audience, which means if you pay the platform to put it in front of new people, it's going to push it to a broad audience, which means a broad audience and no clients. If you have a very specific post and you boost that, it's going to show it to more people like that, which means your ideal clients, therefore getting you leads. Now, if you create a new ad, which means you script out a new video, which I'll show you exactly how to do in this video. I'll give you the exact frameworks, the exact templates, everything. You have most control over using the exact language, the exact pain points of your ideal client. So we deliberately tried to kind of force the platform to show it only to that person. Therefore, new followers that are actually qualified and will turn into booked calls. So first, to script out your ads, I'm going to give you the exact frameworks, the exact templates you can paste into your Claude or ChatGPT, and it's going to create them automatically for you. The scripts are going to be perfect based on our winning ads and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in ad spend, you can use our exact scripts, essentially adjust it to your niche. So first things first, check the first link in the description, go to file and make sure you click download and download as markdown. Next, open your Claude desktop app. I would recommend desktop versus just browser. Desktop is better. Open Cowork and from there create a new project, create new project, and then name it, for example, follower ads or ads if you're planning to use it for other ads as well. So create project and then from there, again, once you've copied all the all the information from that document which I showed you, you want to go to instructions and paste all of this right here. It's going to be a very long prompt. You want to paste it like this into the instructions and click save instructions. From there you can ask it, can you please write scripts for me? And click send. Now make sure you are on the smartest model possible. So for example, Opus 5 for the time of recording is the best one. So by default it's most likely going to be Sonnet. Simply use Opus because it's the best, you're going to get the best out. Now before we start scripting, we need to make sure that Claude understands who is it that we want to target with these ads. Of course, like if it doesn't know who you're trying to attract, it's not going to be to create good scripts. So there's two ways. First, you can check this video on the channel on how to create content. I gave out the exact prompts that you can use so Claude generates forms for you that you can fill out. It's going to save you documents, a offer document and a voice document. So all the scripts sound exactly like you. But this project also allows you to skip that. And as you can see here, it's going to simply create like a quick interview with you and you can answer questions. So who is this batch of ads aimed at? You simply click. It's going to give you a couple of options. What weight loss number should they hook you? So as you can see, this is specifically in the health fitness-related context, but you can do it for whatever niche. Do you have real client results I can name in the ads? So for now I just said use placeholders. And which objections should the without stacks remove? So basically the way it works is it's going to say, hey, if you want to get these results without the things that they don't want, so like without cutting out carbs, without going to the gym 6 times per week in the fitness context. So you can simply multi-select and then it's going to start creating a file. We will get into the actual strategy in a second, but you can simply tell it, can you write 4 ads for me? The reason I say 4 is we usually launch 4 at the beginning. It might ask you, so I'll just say for untested angles, it's going to start scripting them out. Now, once it has it, as you can see, it's going to give you the exact script. You can tell it to turn it into a document if you want. It's also going to give you recommendations on how to record it, which we will talk about in a second. Now, I also wanted to show you a great example of a follower ad targeted specifically towards a very similar avatar, which is women working in 9 to 5, right? High achieving women, busy professionals.

Are you a 90-kilo woman who wants to lose 10 kilos, but you have a demanding career and you're stuck behind a desk all day? You spend 10 hours in the office, you're mentally exhausted by the evening and struggling to find time to focus on yourself. If so, drop me a follow. Go through my content where I teach driven women like you to lose weight without giving up foods you love or doing endless HIIT workouts so you can feel confident again. Stop avoiding mirrors and regain your energy. If that's you, follow my page, go through the posts and see how this works for busy professionals just like you.

So first, to break down the structure of the actual script, we usually start with the hook. Then we do a pain stack, a soft call to action plus authority plus without stack, which without doing this, without doing this, without doing that, the things that they don't like. Then we tell them the dream outcome, the final CTA. Now you will notice that in this video we told them to follow us twice. That's very important because some people have a very bad attention span. As you can see, this video is just 30 seconds long, which means it's quite short, but we have to give them a chance to follow us earlier in the video as well, around the 10th second, we've already told them to follow us. As you can see, there's a couple of B-rolls in between as well. So that prompt is going to give you some recommendations for that as well. And as you can see, the editing is so simple. It looks very organic. That's the whole point. It cannot look like a super scripted professional ad. It should look very, very organic, very authentic, like a regular piece of content. You can show your clients again B-rolls, client results, and then again at the end, tell them to follow you. Quick break. If you want us to come in and script your ads, create your ads, edit your ads, launch your ads, manage your ads, give you reports on an ongoing basis, also help you with content, help you with appointment setting, DM setter plus AI setter, and help you with backend operations so you can scale your business. We essentially scale your business done for you. If that sounds interesting, you can check the second link in the description. Back to the video. So to kind of reiterate, speaks to one person in the you format. Are you a woman over 190 pounds? Social proof on screen, environment matches. So again, he's targeting women working a desk job. That's exactly who he calls out. So that's exactly why he's sitting behind desk with a laptop, right? It makes a lot makes sense. But imagine if you just sat down in a freaking basement with really bad lighting. Who would that attract? Kind of everybody and nobody, right? But if you're sitting behind desk with a laptop, it's going to attract the person that you're trying to attract. And optionally also bureau cuts. And again, tell the person to follow you twice in the video, in the middle and also at the end. A couple of, a couple examples of matching environments to make it easier for you. So busy professionals, desk or office, laptop visible. Moms could be kitchen or for parents overall. Training focused, it could be gym and anyone, it'll be just a simple uncluttered wall. Make sure that you have good lighting. Ideally get a ring light, kind of something like this. But if you don't have one, simply be in front of a window. Make sure that the lighting is good. Window should not be behind you. It should be in front of you and then record it like this with a clean background behind you. A bit more on the frameworks as well. As you can see, there's 3 primary frameworks that, that are in the project instructions by default. So it's going to use these. So there is the niche hook, dream outcome, negative health consequence. Frustrations and pain, visual and verbal CTA, social proof, final CTA. The second one is a bit shorter. So hook, soft call to action, authority bridge, the without stack, like I said, without the things that they don't want. Final CTA. The last one is hook, pain stack, soft call to action, and without dream outcome, identity restoration, and lastly, a final CTA. This project is also going to automatically script out the captions for you. The captions are usually very similar. We essentially want to tell them to follow my account. You want to link the account. That's very important. Put the handle so they can click it. In the caption. Now, how do we actually launch these ads? How do we test these ads to make sure that we are not burning money but we have good testing potential, which means we are not killing them too early before we even gave them a chance to, to prove themselves, right? So for the exact testing strategy, I recommend to launch 4 ads at a time. So we are going to script out 4 ads. By default, that, that Claude project is going to give you 4 ads. So you simply want to record each of them. Then from there you want to launch them at $15 per day. So as you can see, the total budget would be about $60 per day. Like I said, you don't need to launch all 4 at one time. You can launch just one, you can launch 2 depending on your budget. From there, what you want to do is you want to spend about $60, which means if you launch at $15 per day, you have to wait about 4 days and then reevaluate. I'll show you the exact targets in a second, but you want to check that you are getting followers for less than $1.5 per follower and you are paying less than $2.2 per qualified follower, and you check that they are indeed your ideal clients. If that's correct, you're going to move forward and start increasing the spend. If it's not, if it's out of KPI, which means we are not hitting the targets, you want to go ahead, talk to your Claude project, and script out new ads, record new ads, and test it again. Now, if it is correct, you are getting followers for less than these numbers, which is great. You are going to increase the spend to $20 per day immediately, then wait about 24 hours, increase it again. And then depending on how quickly you want to increase the spend and scale, you can increase it by about 20 to 30% every 2 to 3 days. And the max I would ever push one individual ad to is about $50. Above that, it fatigues very quickly, which means you are going to have to replace it very, very often, like every single week. But if you cap it at $50 per day, you're going to be able to keep it for longer. Feel free to take a screenshot of this page. This is exactly what I went over, so when to kill and scale the ad. And now we are going to get into the actual numbers and how to launch them in your Ads Manager. To be exact, at first we are going to launch them on your Instagram app itself. Before we get to the launching, I'm going to show you the maths behind it. So we try to get a qualified follower again for under $2.2 $2 per follow. So about, let's say, $2. From there, the reply rate to the first DM when we send them an opener, which means we want to message every single new follower, should be about 33%, which means 1 out of 3 people message you back. Conversation that get a call offer, which means you start a conversation, again, 1 out of 3 people reply to you. 6% of the total should get the call offer. And then how many of the call offers turn into the booking? We try that to be about 70%. From there, we have the show up rate. Obviously, let's say 70% of people show up. Up and the close rate, let's say 35%. And lastly, the program price. Like I mentioned at the beginning, try to charge at least $2,000. So let's say you charge $2.5K, the show rate, you have good systems for the show-up rates, which means it's like 75%. You can easily get to a 4x ROAS. It's not hard at all. So as you can see, you need to spend about $100, well, $150 per booked call, right, with a qualified person, and then about $200 per call taken. And then depending on your close rate, you're going to be able to close a lot of people. Now, as you can see, the cost per conversation is actually cheaper than if you were to run a DM ad itself, because with DM ads you can get a DM, a lead for less than $10. Here, this is an actual conversation for $6. So now let's get into exactly how to launch your follower ads. So again, there's 4 ads that you want to launch at the beginning or a bit less if you have a smaller budget. So what you want to do first is post all of them, all of the ads that you want to launch on your Instagram organically as the caption, use the caption that Claude gave you. And then from there, once you've done that, you want to go to Instagram desktop. The reason we do that from desktop versus uses a phone version is because on the phone version it's going to charge you a fee. Apple is going to charge you a 20 to 30% fee for no reason. So first, go to your profile, find the video that you're trying to boost. Again, if you have multiple, you want to do it one by one. Let's say this is the one that I want to boost. You click Boost Reel. From there, we want to go through the settings. So first things first, on the right, disable both of these options, which means you don't want to use the Advantage+ creative and don't show it on Facebook unless you are generating leads on Facebook. Click and then from there, make sure that the objective is visit your profile. So again, we are paying Meta to tell people to essentially visit our page and follow us. Next, we want to set up the targeting to attract the best quality of people that we can. So you want to scroll down who should see your ad, click create your own. So first name your audience. So let's say woman 30+, this working woman, which is the avatar that we created the scripts for earlier. Make sure you disable Advantage+ audience. It doesn't work well. For the locations, make sure you select your location. So let's say United States, select the location of the people that you're trying to attract. And then save. For interest, keep them empty most of the time. It doesn't really matter. If you use the scripts that the AI gives you, you are going to be using a lot of qualifying language. What is more important than any interest, any settings these days, is the qualifying language that you use in the actual ad. AI of Meta is going to analyze the video format of the video that you have, is going to analyze the transcript of the video, which is going to find people that would resonate with that visual format, which means, for example, for desk working woman, you sitting behind desk with a laptop, Meta is going to find more people that would resonate with that, right? Which means desk working woman. Then it's going to analyze the transcript of your video and find the fact that you call out women over 190 pounds, uh, that want to lose weight, that are sitting behind desk most of the day. So who do you think Meta is going to find? That exact avatar. So interest, you can test some interest like fitness interest, wealth interest, but most of the time you don't need to mess around with that. At all if you do a good job with your creative. Age, so let's say 30+ to let's say 45 is my avatar. Gender, always separate those, okay? So if you try to target both genders, do them as separate ads. So let's say in this case it's going to be obviously female and you want to click save. So as you can see, it's pretty much as easy as that. From there you want to go to the budget. Again, you launch individual ads at $15 per day. Make sure it's set to run this ad until I pause it, so you don't set a set time frame, if that makes sense. You can run it forever until you pause it. Make sure you select a payment method and simply click Boost Reel. So as you can see, launching ads is very easy, but what do you do from there? Again, you want to follow the previous procedure that I showed you, test it for about 3 days, and then if it performs, you want to increase the spend. If it doesn't, you want to script out new ads. Now going to how do you actually track metrics, because you have to be tracking it, right? It's actually very, very easy. So what you want to do is you want to have a spreadsheet that looks a little bit like this. Let me know, you can just DM me if you want to get it on my Instagram. Now from there, you want to be tracking individual ads. So as you can see, cost per follow, new followers, spend, today's insight followers, yesterday insights followers. The most accurate way to track how many followers you gained is actually from the Instagram app itself. So when you're in your Instagram app, you want to go to the dashboard and click view insights on your boosted post. And from there, you have two tabs. You will have ad and all. Ad is very, very inaccurate. As you can see, it's showing that nobody followed me from this ad. Next, when I go to all, it's showing that 17 people followed me. So you always want to look at the all. It really has a hard time attributing followers to organic video versus ad. But if this is an ad that you posted, you know that all the people came from the ad itself. They didn't really come from organic, right? Because it was a very direct call out. So you always want to go to the all and then track the followers from here. So as you can see, you have to be tracking this for every single day, like every single day of every single month to track it properly. And so let's say today's insights followers is 17, like I just checked yesterday. Let's say yesterday I was tracking it and I saw it was, let's say, 5. We gained 12 new followers. And then I can also see it in the summary right here. Then I input how much I spent that day. So let's say $15. Like I said, the launch strategy is going to tell me that we are getting followers for about $1.25 per follower, which is a KPI. We just need to make sure that the quality of the followers is actually good. And again, I track that per individual ad. As you can see, I have the same thing for each ad. So from there, I can simply see a summary right here and the total, uh, totals from Insights, right? So I can see that in one place, and then I can see a breakdown of each individual ad if I want to look at it from a high-level overview. I can see a summary of all of them. From there, I also have a tab where I track individual ads, so like the ad name, so I can kind of figure out which one it is. And then the ad number 1, for example, I try to keep it the same like here, so ad number 1, at number 2. So I try to keep it the same. And then the active status is at active, date launched, days of, uh, you know, running from this launch date, cost per follower. So it's going to be taken again from here, straight up from here. And then followers gained, as you can see, this was the number that we had earlier. Total spend, current budget per day, and you can also put the link to that individual post. So it's so important that you track it because what you don't track, you cannot change. Again, if you want this spreadsheet, you can just DM me on Instagram, I'll send it to you for free. So now you know exactly how to generate followers, how to scale, and exactly when to kill an ad if it's not performing, how to identify whether an ad is good or not. But how do you actually convert those followers into booked calls, which is all that really matters, right? So first things first, you have to have a set strategy, and you have to be testing about 3 openers at a time. I'm going to give you the best opener that we've ever found, to be honest with you, when it comes to response rates, because it doesn't sound like everybody, right? People are following multiple coaches at a time. So if everybody messages Hey, thanks so much for the follow. Are you on a fitness journey or just enjoying the content? Well, you probably don't reply to anybody because you get those messages all the time. So what you want to do is use an opener that is a bit unusual, unconventional. So the one I'm going to show you here is, hi, I'm just doing a bit of research on my audience. Do you mind if I ask if you're based in the States? Do you mind if I ask if you're based in the UK? Depending on your location, of course. And you want to send this a couple of hours after they followed you. So you can set this up inside of ManyChat. Yes, ideally you want to do it manually. So you have the name, you can set it up in ManyChat as well. So it messages every new follower. And again, you want to wait at least 2, 3 hours before you message somebody. So it doesn't look like auto messaging. It looks authentic and organic. Then from there, if they don't respond, this is a secret sauce. If they don't respond, I gave you a couple of openers, a couple of follow-ups here. So if they don't respond for one day, you want to message them like name. So like Steve, right? Another variation, am I being ghosted? Aha, hey name, just so you know, this is Steve, not a robot. Or you can also create a voice note. Now, a secret sauce with voice notes, you can send a voice note to your second account and then long press and click forward and forward it to this lead. And then it looks like it was sent specifically for them. This is a secret sauce for your appointment setters or for yourself. You can do it with whatever follow-ups you want, even for organic conversations. If you want the full training on DM scripts, so like what to do from here, because this is just how to start the convo, but how do you actually qualify them, book them on a call, check this video on the channel right here where I break down the full DM script playbook. Now there's a couple of things that are keys when it comes to success over time, because like I explained in the beginning of this video, it creates a very big snowball effect over time because people that followed you 2 months ago are now applying for coaching because they've built trust with you over the last 2 months, for example. So the keys to success for that is first things first, enough middle of funnel content, which means content that builds trust, builds connection, helps people to get to know you as a person. People don't buy coaching programs, people buy coaches. So there's a video here on the channel. I know I'm linking a lot of them on how to create content content pretty much automatically with Claude. So check it out right here. Second, unscripted beliefs. So post yourself off the cuff, you know, post yourself without scripts as well, right? Be yourself. Again, people don't buy programs, they buy coaches. Next, social proof. So every single day on your Instagram stories, another video on Instagram stories, but every single day on your Instagram stories, show social proof. So show client wins, show before and afters, show transformations, build that, build that trust that compounds over time. And, and lastly, have a very consistent call to action schedule on stories and on feed. Again, the previous video on the Instagram stories that I showed you, it shows you the exact templates that you can use, but you need to be posting this consistently so you give those people a chance to apply to work with you. Again, a real chunk of these followers reach out to you on their own months later, so that is the compounding effect that you paid for. So make sure you actually utilize it. So that's how to launch ads, but how do you actually increase the spend on them? Because it is not doable from the Instagram app. You have to log into your Ads Manager. So it's Ads Manager, uh, it simply looks like this. So type in Ads Manager, log into your Facebook account, and find the ad account that you are running the boosted post from. It's very, very easy. You most likely will have just one, so it's going to be that one by default. Find the boosted post that you're running. So as you can see, Instagram post is going to say the caption, as you can see, Comment Masterclass. You want to click Edit. So it's going to be active, of course. You're going to be able to see 4, if you launched 4, and you want to click edit. And here what you can do is go here and scroll down a bit and find the budget. So that's where you want to switch the budget, increase the budget, right? So like I showed you earlier, you launch at $15 per day and then you increase it to $20, $25, $50. This is usually the max. So that's it, that is where you do it, right? You have to click into the individual ad and then increase the budget right here and click publish, and it's going to get updated. Like I said, it— you cannot do that from the Instagram desktop or your Instagram app You have to do it from the Ads Manager. Implement this and you are going to gain followers. You're going to gain leads and stop the hamster wheel you've created for yourself by just posting content and relying on that to get clients. If you want the full breakdown on converting those new followers into booked calls in the DMs, check this video right here. It's the full DM script playbook. Now, if you want help in setting all of this up specifically for your business, for your avatar, for your offer, check the second link in the description. If you like the video, make sure you like it so you see more videos that keep you engaged and watching until the end. And also subscribe the channel for more videos like this, and I'll see you in the next one.