How to Spend 2x Less on Post Promotion and Gain 2x More Followers: PPC Case Study

Solution

Boosting posts helps increase brand awareness and attract new audiences who haven’t previously interacted with the brand’s page. In this project, post promotion became the key tool for growing the client’s social media community.
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Since we and the client were essentially building the audience acquisition path from scratch, only testing new hypotheses could show what truly resonates with users.

Each hypothesis was tested over 2–3 weeks — enough time to evaluate its effectiveness and decide on the next steps.

Hypothesis 1

We started with a classic Meta Ads campaign.

A classic Meta Ads campaign is a standard advertising format (for example, with objectives like Engagement or Traffic) aimed at maximizing reach within the target audience to increase the number of followers.

For the Facebook page, this approach worked extremely well: we even exceeded the goal by 533% — the audience actively engaged with the content, subscribed, and easily joined the community.

However, the situation on Instagram was different: a classic Traffic campaign with creatives featuring the “Follow” button brought in only one-third of the targeted monthly followers.

This showed that reaching the priority audience on Instagram is much more challenging — and that achieving the KPI would require different approaches.
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Therefore, we continued using classic campaigns for Facebook, while for Instagram we kept testing new formats and engagement methods to find the most effective solution for this platform.

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Hypothesis 2

To improve follower acquisition on Instagram, we launched an additional campaign focused on Traffic.

We used Lookalike audience segmentation based on the account’s current followers. This allowed us to reach a broader audience aligned with the brand’s interests and demographic profile.

Unlike previous campaigns that used classic creatives, this time we used Reels videos, which showed a significant improvement in performance:

• The cost of engagement for Reels was $0.05, compared to $0.15 for classic creatives.
  This means Reels attracted users 3 times cheaper.
  
  
• In April, the Reels format generated three times more interactions than classic creatives, confirming its effectiveness in reaching and engaging the audience.

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Compared to campaigns with classic creatives, this approach allowed us to increase the number of Instagram followers by 73.33%.

However, within a month we were able to achieve only 43% of the subscriber growth target set by the client. In addition, the cost per follower remained high — $3.24. 

Therefore, we continued searching for more effective solutions to meet the client’s goals.

Hypothesis 3

Sometimes the best solutions turn out to be the least obvious — and that’s exactly why we decided to test another hypothesis.

When all the standard options inside the Ads Manager were exhausted, the PPC Promodo team suggested an alternative approach: boosting posts directly from the Facebook business page.
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This method unlocks an additional objective that is not available in the regular ad account — “Maximum profile visits.”

In other words, simply clicking the “Boost” button under a specific post gives access to a goal that cannot be selected in Ads Manager.

To test this hypothesis, we selected five video Reels that had shown the best results in the previous “Traffic” campaign.

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At the testing stage, we set a minimal budget of $5 per day for each video to see whether this approach would influence campaign performance and subscriber growth.

And it worked.

Already the next day, we saw an increase of +80 new followers in just one day. On average, the daily growth ranged from 60 to 100 followers, which was a result we hadn’t been able to achieve before.
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Thanks to this approach, we were able to double the number of followers month over month and halve the cost per follower.

Results

Our experience confirmed that classic methods for growing a social media community can work, but the best results come from solutions tailored to the specifics of each business.

The MOTUL brand was open to testing new hypotheses, and it was precisely this mindset that allowed us to find an approach that exceeded expectations: the cost per follower dropped by almost 50% compared to classic methods.

By the third month of collaboration, we achieved a stable and consistent growth of followers.
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Thanks to the new approach, we reduced the cost per follower and accelerated audience growth to 8% instead of the expected 3%. As a result, we successfully attracted a new audience and expanded the MOTUL community.

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