Don’t underestimate the power of Instagram captions.
An eye-catching photo will spark interest, but the secret sauce to engaging your followers lies in Instagram captions. A well-written caption can go a long way towards building trust and authority in your niche while also driving people to your website or lead magnet.
There’s more to writing great Instagram captions than plugging in some hashtags and emojis — you need a compelling message that’ll connect with your audience.
In this post, we explain how to write compelling Instagram captions to encourage engagement with your followers and drive leads back to your website.
Insert line breaks to boost readability
Instagram captions with a large amount of text can be challenging to read while scrolling on a mobile device.
Line breaks provide additional space that makes it easier for the reader to digest information and make your caption more searchable and shareable.
Home and Jet does an excellent job using line breaks to detail facts about the Trevi Fountain on a trip to Rome, Italy. The extra whitespace allows for a quick scan of information and encourages readers to engage if they enjoy the content.
Not only is this Instagram caption formatted nicely — it also provides value to the reader. The reader comes away from the interaction learning interesting facts about the Trevi Fountain. If readers enjoy what they learned and resonate with the value add, they’ll feel more inclined to like or comment on the post.
Use emojis to add emphasis
Emojis are the quickest way to add personality to an Instagram caption. They can illustrate a point, make a joke, or add emphasis to engage your followers with your caption and make them feel more connected to you.
Meme accounts, like @epicfunnypage, are wildly successful by turning Twitter screenshots into Instagram posts. They often add emojis to the caption to continue the joke or add emphasis, encouraging users to respond with more emojis in the comments.
Here are some examples of how to use emojis:
- Repost another user’s content: Use the camera emoji to provide photo credit and tag the original user so they can like and repost on their own story.
- Convey emotion: Emotionally charged captions are great because they allow people who have never met you to see how you feel about something happening in the post.
- Make funny jokes: Those little guys were made for memes and puns.
Include a call-to-action to capture leads
If you want to generate leads and increase engagement with your followers, it’s essential to include a call-to-action in your Instagram caption.
A call-to-action is a statement that encourages the reader to act — buying something from you, visiting your blog post about the best content promotion strategies, or entering a contest.
Take Freepik, for example. Their design contest offers $1,000 to whoever creates the best digital vector art using their tool, and the first step requires participants to follow them on Instagram.
Not only does Freepik score more followers on Instagram, but they get their audience to engage with their post by clicking the link in their bio and using their design tools.
Add hashtags to reach a wider audience
Using hashtags can be a great way to reach a wider audience and increase engagement with your followers.
Hashtags help categorize your content, making it easier for people to find relevant posts in their feed. For example, if you post a photo of your beautiful new office space and use the #officeinspo, people searching for pictures of offices will be able to find your post and save it for future inspiration when decorating their office.
But how do you know which hashtags to use for optimal results?
If you are a B2B company, you can use firmographic data to determine the best way to engage with your customers, including on social media. Data is a valuable resource to help you design better content, use the proper tone, and leverage high-performing hashtags for your audience.
On National Honest Day, Tailor Brands uses hashtags to get small businesses to interact and share what they need to grow. Tailor Brands specializes in full-service business building, so this is an excellent way for them to warm up their Instagram leads.
Hashtags let you connect with more people than just your followers. They help you reach relevant groups of people who wouldn’t know about you otherwise.
They also help drive traffic towards your content by making it more visible on search engines like Google. Hashtags act like keywords for SEO, which means more targeted traffic visiting your website or landing page where they might convert into customers.
Wrapping up
Instagram is an excellent platform for brands to connect with their followers on a more personal level.
By including line breaks, emojis, calls-to-actions, and hashtags in your captions, you can significantly increase the performance of an Instagram post. You want to make sure that when someone finds your post, they can easily read it and are interested in what you have to say.
Instagram captions are an underutilized marketing opportunity, and — as is so often the case with social media — it comes down to consistency and quality.
The right Instagram caption can help your company’s social media strategy go from good to great, which can help you win over new customers and make more sales.
If you are interested in taking your Instagram ads to the next level, let’s chat. We’re here to help!