Hey

Instagram nowadays is a little bit hard to grow but it is possible. I run some ig accounts (business and themed ones) and here is my advice:
- Follow / unfollow method ( a popular method that all you have to is go to competitor's accounts and follow people that comment + like on their posts. Instagram has some limits thought. I actually do not recommend this method if you want to grow a really engaged audience as most people will follow you because you followed them and won't engage. What I currently do, is love bombing them with 5-6 likes, 2 comments, and if they have a story I'll reply something related. So they check out my page, and if they like it they will follow me and also love-bomb me.)
- Stories are very important to have an engaged audience. You should always use stickers that are are ineractive. (Like create a poll, or a which you prefer, q+a etc) Because when they react to your sticker, then IG will show your content more frequently to them. But don't overdo it. Upload 3-6 stories every 24 hours. You can also schedule them. Every 3 hours is good to have your account pop up in the beginning of their story feed.
- Reels. Reels are very important and can help you get to explore page faster. I don't really use them so I don't have any advice on them.
- Consistency. I use the facebook suite to schedule my content and post every day the time that my audience is most active. If you post consistently, then IG will reward you by showing your content more. It can take some time from 12 days to 2 months to really see a difference. That's why I create all my content in a day, to speed things up. Also, have some exra content in case something goes wrong so you don't really miss a day.
-Engage, engage, engage. Every day you should engage on IG at least 30 minutes with your ideal audience, competitors, followers. Instagram is a social media platform, and you have to be social.
- Hashtags. Create a hashtag research. Find small hashtags and study what popular posts they have. How many likes/comments/type of content etc. Then, you can see if you have a chance to rank or not. For example, if you get on average 50 likes, you won't rank on a big hashtag that posts have 1k likes. You need to work your way up.
You could use
10 hashtags that their average post likes are smaller than your average (because it's easy to rank)
10 hashtags that their average post likes are the same with your average (medium difficulty to rank)
10 hashtags that their average post likes are a little big bigger than your average (hard to rank but will bring traffic)
Every post mix and match your hashtags. Track when you make it on the top posts to use the hashtag again. (If you can afford to pay for a tool, I recommend you Flick, it's amazing!)
That's all I could come up with now haha. There's a lot more to it. Hope I helped you!