The secret to creating a great Instagram caption is to take a massive amount of ideas and widdle them to a few specific key points targeted to your business. This can be a difficult thing considering each caption is restricted to 2,200 characters and 30 hashtag limit in the caption and another 30 in the comments. However, if you understand the essence of posting on social media you’ll know getting more followers and engagement is not about quantity. It’s solely about the quality.
Big businesses usually lag behind nimble social media marketers, because of one thing. Fear of doing the wrong thing that will reduce their bottom-line. They hire experts from all over the world, get them more Instagram followers and think if they just hit that magic number of 10k followers they will start monetizing their Instagram account and sell more widgets. But, that mentality of being an aggressive and fearless marketer is exactly the mentality you need to succeed on social media. You’ll see exactly why when you’re on Instagram.
Instagram captions should be optimized for the type of mobile traffic your business attracts. Sure some Instagram users still enjoy using the web page to create, I’m one of them, but I still keep in mind that every user will see your posts on mobile.
10 Instagram caption ideas for success
- Use your caption to tell your audience about a new product, but don’t sell
- Promote a new piece of content on your website short preview
- Create a trailer video for a product then use the caption as a transcription
- Highlight an influencer that supports your mission
- Offer free advice to your clients
- Run a contest
- Entice your clients to submit a survey by visiting your website
- Host a mini ask-me-anything and promote it with a boosted post and caption
- Highlight the hashtags you post your work and draw more traffic to them
- Share your weekly schedule on social media to encourage more participation
Instagram business account bio
The first thing you need to do is register your business account with Instagram. Make sure you have your Facebook business page already set up, then connect the two. After you’re done with that, you need to start working on your bio, profile picture and start identifying hashtags and influencers in your industry. If you’re new to Instagram, I recommend starting with a personal account get fully acclimated to the platform’s tools before starting one for your business. The old adage of “practice makes perfect” really holds true on Instagram.
Before you start posting the best captions on Instagram, you need to have a targeted bio, equipped with a short description of what your business does and any hashtags you frequent. You need a properly sized profile picture image of 110 x 110 pixels.
Your bio link also needs a link. This is so vital to monetizing your business if you’re not going to directly sell products on Instagram. That link is your only connection your target audience has to make a purchase from Instagram.
What your audience sees in their feed
An Instagram caption always falls second in importance to what is seen in a customer’s Instagram feed and your stories these days. That feed will show highly personal, visually stunning, and down-right shocking videos and images from all walks of life. You might feel intimidated when trying to market your tech company or small business and you should be.
On Instagram, you’re not just competing with your competitors. You’re competing with your audience’s attention away from bikini models, celebrities, cute dogs, musicians, and much more. It’s tough to get the attention of your audience over the plethora of eye-candy their feed has.
That being said, it’s totally possible to market any brand that wishes to beyond a visual brand on Instagram, and creating the best possible captions you can think of on every post is essential to “closing the deal” on Instagram.
It’s best to have the idea that your Instagram caption is a sales pitch, their news source, and their entertainment all in one. You really shouldn’t sell too much within Instagram captions. What you should do is sell your company’s mission, vision for the world, give free advice, ask questions, answer their most burning questions, motivate them to pursue their deepest desires, refer them to better information on the internet (hopefully that you’re providing), and more. It’s correct to get personal on a micro-level on Instagram. Those small personal reveals show humanity and that is something many businesses lack and purposefully neglect.
It comes back to knowing your audience…
Know your audience on Instagram with this insights tool
Knowing that your audience likes your brand and related companies is not enough to beat their feed. Now that Instagram video posts are now on auto-play, you have to understand the importance of proper visuals, captions, memes, scripting and copywriting.
The Instagram and Facebook audience insights tool can help…
Audience insights will, of course, tell you about your demographics, financial status, education, and more, but that’s not what you should be concerned with if you’re posts are not getting the engagement they deserve. If your likes are down or decreasing it means you need to improve the things your audience sees and hears immediately. Those at-a-glance moments are what determine whether your captions will even get read.
Focus on what your audience likes besides your industry. For instance, look at the demographics (job titles), page likes, and locations for people interested in wine on audience insights.
These people have like all kinds of things besides wine. Obviously, right?
Using this information you can create more content outside of your industry that ties back to your products. For instance, you could create a post with a caption, in list format, for unknown travel destinations with wineries not in California. Then boost the post in the areas that you list in the caption.
You could even take this a step further to get more growth outside of people searching for wine stuff by highlighting travel destinations with wineries using hashtags about travel. This is a great way to bring more growth to your Instagram profile and if you link to your website, you’ll get more traffic and customers.
Use all the tools on Instagram
Using your Instagram caption as a blog is not a bad idea. The same way using the direct message, or DM, as a feature beyond a chat platform is a fantastic idea for business development. This is called social selling and it’s a fantastic thing to do if your audience is on Instagram already.
In 2,200 characters you should be able to easily get your point across to check out the link in your profile find more in-depth content on your website, medium, or YouTube.
Instagram for business is a fantastic tool to grow your brand in a visual way if you use the tools available, such as: Instagram tv – IGTV, stories, stickers, polls, and more. Did you know you can zoom in and out within your stories?
Instagram image insights for 2020 and beyond
Beating the Instagram algorithm with captions is a strategy that many have tried and failed. What you should do is use all the features Instagram has available to grow your brand. This allows you to side-step the algorithm, which pushes people away from non-paid posts. Using the boost functions are more important now that ever, so that means your content much improve so you don’t waste your money on boosting poor content.
Instagram video posts are now on auto-play which makes it advantageous for brands to improve their video content skills. If you can’t invest the time into making your video work better, than by all means hire a videographer and Instagram brand specialist to help you get the most out of it.
Improve your image quality with Adobe Lightroom and use tools like Canva to ensure your images are properly formatted and the highest-quality format.
Experiment with Content, not Sales Pitches
As a closing statement, the keys to success on Instagram are not just in creating catchy captions. They are about capturing the full spectrum of what quality content really is. It’s not just about your brand and the products you sell. It must include Instagram trends outside of your brand.
Being well-rounded is the secret to capturing a wider audience and growing revenue on a platform that doesn’t necessarily work very well for sell products directly. Did you notice that I didn’t talk about selling using the functions on Instagram? That reason for that has two reasons.
- Without an amazing brand and large engaging following on other platforms, it’s not worth it for a business to sell products on Instagram solely. Trying to build a brand on Instagram and sell within posts is dangerous for a new brand. Your posts will come off too needy and not perform well.
- There is a much better approach to selling within the app with this article on selling with Instagram ads. Selling on Instagram requires you to understand what is best for your brand. Don’t be afraid to try new content ideas, but be prudent when trying to sell directly.
