Photos get ‘likes’, Captions get sales!

How much attention do you pay to your Instagram post captions? Sure, you may focus on the images and videos you post but as a brand or business, it’s imperative to remember that captions help to keep your audience engaged. Approach your captions in the same manner as you approach any valuable piece of marketing or sales content. Real thought and strategy should go into what is written and how it’s written. Here are three tips to guide you;

Give your audience a reason to click the ‘more’ button – On Instagram, you have one short sentence before they see the ‘more’ button; this means when they are scrolling down their feed, they only see a short preview of your captions. You can start with the topic of your post and tease something you’re about to reveal or set the expectation for how people should engage with your post e.g. If I wanted to make a post that speaks to me offering assistance to businesses in the area of social media content ideas, an effective caption would be ‘Feeling stuck and struggling with ideas for your social media content? Here’s a tip for you (Save this post because this tip is ??)’.

Keep your captions visually organized – You have little control on the visuals of your captions. Be sure to add line breaks and emojis strategically to make your captions easy on the eyes. Furthermore, separate the list of hashtags from the caption with line breaks or dots to avoid clutter.

Incorporate a range of effective calls to action- See ‘link in bio’ is not the only effective call to action. When you add ‘calls to action’, you get your audience used to interacting with your content and engaging with you. When that habit is created, they would be more likely and ready to follow your directions when you have a sales post. Additional calls to action include: double tap if you agree, share this post to stories so your friends (include benefit to friends) or save this post.

Candice Sealey is the Founder & Principal Consultant at Ignite! a Full-service Marketing & PR Consultancy that helps businesses/brands to stand out and communicate the right message to the right people at the right time through Strategy, Marketing, Media services and Design solutions. She is also a freelance content writer, advertising copywriter, voiceover talent, media personality. Follow us on FB & IG 784-432-2223. Email: igniteresults