I say to clients think of the three C’s: content, consistency and community.

Create content (short form video being best on Instagram at the moment) that provides value to your clients audience. You’ve got less than 3 seconds to grab someone so hooks are important and making it super clear straight off the bat on what’s in it for them.

As people have said – be consistent. Sure, two posts a day is ideal BUT this will obvs depend a lot on resource available to you to create that much content. Instead I’d say create a strategy that’s realistic to start with – If your client is currently posting 3 x a week, first aim to up that to 5 and assess from there. Better to be consistent so your audience knows what to expect from the channel than go all guns blazing with 3 posts a day for a month then not be able to maintain that.

Community is important and one a lot of people overlook. They’ll post their content and then think “woo job done” but your team/your client needs to be actively engaging with your audience, promptly responding to comments etc. That way your audience feel valued and are more likely to stick around. I’d rather a client have 5k engaged followers than 10k that never engage with the content or convert into the behavior your client wants.

Also, really track your content analytics to analyze what’s performing/what isn’t to spot performance trends in what you’re putting out there and then you can adapt your strategy to most effectively use the resource available to you to create more content that resonates with your audience.

Finally – as you say, organic growth will be slow. If they’ve got budget for paid then that will be a key component.