How to use captions for social media posts

Captions are multifunctional in some cases, especially on social media platforms. They describe the picture as well as act as a  heading or are the entire post. In cases where the caption is the entire post or summary as the case may be, it is important to hook the readers with the first few words to ensure the reader reads the post to the end. For cases where the caption is also the heading, it is important to craft a great caption that would capture your readers’ at first glance and make them want to read the entire post.

Having a great caption doesn’t only capture the readers’ attention, it also gives a voice to the picture and allows you to reach out to the readers in more ways than you can with only a picture. A caption is an excellent way to showcase your brand’s voice and will attract more people to your business if done right.

What does ‘Brand Voice’ mean?

Brand voice refers to the personality and emotion a business uses to communicate. A business’s brand voice is usually integrated into every means used to reach out to customers, from images to captions, posts, videos, press conferences, tweets, replies down to the very words used. What is your brand voice? How do you want your customer to perceive you? What feelings or emotions can be associated with your brand?

For Coca Cola, their brand voice can be defined by these three words. Experience, joy, friendliness.  Nike is associated with inspiration and motivation. From their motto ‘just do it’ to their ads and the campaigns they engage in, the brand voice of Nike is the same. In showcasing your brand’s voice consistency is key and Disney brand voice consistency can be seen in all Disney products, movies, pages, and theme parks. With Disney, everybody knows and expects to be transported to a different world which is what Disney is about. Are you consistent with your brand voice across your posts, videos, ads, and captions or you are always changing your brand voice? If your brand was a person what word would people use to describe it’s personality?

Showcasing your brand’s voice through captions

Having clarified what a brand voice means and identified your brand voice let’s see how it can be applied to captions. Remember that a caption describes what the picture is about therefore you must ensure that the caption you are crafting is related to the picture you want to post alongside it. Before creating a caption, ask yourself the kind of message you want to pass across. Once you have settled on the kind of message you want to pass across, proceed to draft  the caption. Now you know what you know your brand values are and the way you expect your brand to come across to people does your caption reflect that in any way? Perhaps you have identified your brand voice as funny and informative, if someone that isn’t you read that caption would they think the caption is funny or informative? If yes proceed to post the caption if no reword your caption in such a way that it reflects your brand voice. 

In addition to ensuring your caption reflects your brand voice, an important to keep in mind is the platform on which your caption will be posted. For example newspapers, blogs and magazines tend to carry a more formal and serious tone while social media platforms tend to carry an informal conversational tone. Posting a caption with emojis on a social media platform would be welcome depending on the content while doing the same on an online newspaper or magazine can cause your readers to regard your business as unserious.

Final Thoughts

Know how to use captions for social media is critical to capturing and engaging your audience. Writing great captions that reflect your brand’s voice takes time, consistency and constant practice the more you write captions that reflect your brand’s voice the better you get at it.

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Now that you know what a brand is, how do you incorporate the idea into your business to cause a growth in the business? That is where brand management comes in.

Successful Brand Management

Before we go into what brand management is, let’s look at brand perception, which is an important element in branding. Brand perception is the process where a customer or consumer puts a face to a brand. It results from a customer’s experience with a brand and is the basic element that elevates a business or product into a brand. Your customers own brand perception – so no matter what you say or do, your brand is what people think and say about your brand.

Successful Brand management involves using various techniques to improve the positive perception of your brand. It is a process that takes a bit of time and it enables the price of the brand to go up without any negative consequence. It also involves building and maintaining brand equity. Suffice to say, brand management is the process of creating and maintaining a strong brand identity.

When branding, it is essential that you focus and highlight values that your customers cherish, which is evident in the fact that 64 percent of people say shared values is the major reason they value a brand. For more on this, see How Shared Values Improve Your Brand Marketing.

4 Principles for Creating a Strong Brand Identity.

Perhaps you don’t know how to get started on creating and building your brand identity. Here are four effective principles for you.

Take Advantage of Your Unique Selling Proposition

The unique selling proposition (USP) of your brand is what sets you apart from your competitors. It is a key to brand differentiation and is a much deeper way of separating brands apart from their names. You can think of it as what you have that your competitors don’t, or a quality that is unique to your brand. It could be “highest quality,”  “lowest cost,” “first ever,” and so on. Having a strong USP is very crucial especially for businesses in highly competitive industries and niche markets.

Before creating your USP, you need to understand where your business fits in the market, and what makes it different from others. Once you discover what makes your company or product stand out, turn it into an interesting message, and use the message as the backbone of your marketing.

Develop Your Brand Internally

It is very vital that your brand is developed from within your company. Before you can create a brand that will drop everyone’s jaws, you need full buy-in from your workers and stakeholders. This allows you to incorporate various helpful views from all the parties involved to create a strong and unique brand.

Your employees are ambassadors for your brand, so it is essential that you get the necessary buy-in, so your brand can be communicated from various areas of your company. This ensures that there is a consistency in all employees’ interaction with customers. About 23 percent of revenue is attributed to the consistent representation of a brand.

Circulate Your Brand with Influencers

One of the most effective marketing strategies is having someone do the marketing for you. The third-person effect has to do with the fact that someone who doesn’t have a vested interest in your brand would be more believable and trustworthy. Using an influencer further improves the result, as they have already gained trust from most of your target audience.

Maintaining a good relationship with an influencer is crucial here, but you should ensure that you respect their impartiality.

Use Brand Management Software

Another result of various innovations in technology is the availability of software for brand management. This software is quite important because it makes it easy to maintain a steady brand. Processes and products may change, likewise, personnel can change at any time, but your brand remains solid as a rock. Using a software will allow you to maintain your brand regardless of any change in administration or personnel in the company.

Final Thoughts

The value of a strong brand identity cannot be overemphasized, as it forms the basis of a fast growing successful business. A positive brand perception is the best marketing tool you can ask for, as your brand will speak for itself. This basically means that the bigger your brand, the less you have to spend on recognition, then you move from recognition to building brand loyalty in your customers. If you don’t know how to go about all these, then this article is a good place to start.

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Have you ever wondered why similar companies try the same marketing strategies but get totally opposite results? Many people will say, “doing the same thing doesn’t guarantee the same results.” While this is true, one of the primary reasons for the same brand marketing strategy yielding contrasting results is different values.

Brand marketing involves raising the visibility and awareness of your brand, thereby improving your brand recognition. Having shared values with your customers is one of the best brand marketing strategies you can adopt. Let’s see why.

Benefits of Having Shared Values With Your Customers

The term “shared values” has to do with sharing core values. Let’s look at some of the benefits.

It fosters brand loyalty

Brand loyalty is every manager’s dream. It is the reason why long hours are spent developing a strong brand marketing strategy. Shared values are actually vital factors in any purchase decision. About 64 percent of consumers admit that they have strong relationships with brands because of shared values.

Customers that are aligned with your business values tend to stick with you even if you don’t have the most competitive price. This is backed up by the fact that about 73 percent of customers don’t mind spending more on a brand they love.

Your Customers Understand Your Purpose

The easiest way to communicate your business purpose and goals is through your values. Having shared values with your customers will help them understand your business purpose. When building your brand marketing strategy, it is essential to consider your company values. This way, you can adequately communicate what your brand stands for to your audience.

Build Transparency and Trust

A few decades ago, much of the information available for public use today were termed proprietary information. I guess that’s one of the perks of the information age. This has made it essential for businesses to show a high level of transparency to their customers.

When you have shared values with your customers, you give them the idea of openness and transparency. It makes sense that when investors and customers see that you have nothing to hide, they want to transact with you.

Now that we’ve seen some benefits, let’s look at how we can go about implementing this into our brand marketing strategy.

How to Implement Shared Values into Your Business Strategy

Shared Values as a Winning Formula to Business Success looks at the importance of shared value with employees with strategic planning. It is important to note that customer shared values should also be considered as it will set the tone for finding your ideal client and devising your marketing plan. Let’s look at how you can go about this.

Make them feel like part of a community

The idea here is to make people from different demographic and background feel like part of a collective unit. From the conversations you start, share, and join, you can demonstrate to your ideal customers that you share the same values as they do. This then leads to the growth and stability of your brand.

You can find an excellent example on the Virgin website, where Richard Branson shares tips on business, startups, politics, and so on. By creating a kind of community where different matters relating to the company values can be discussed, you make your customers feel like part of something big.

It’s not all about saving the world

Of course, saving the world is very good. In fact, we should all aspire to do so. However, what we are talking about here is humanizing your brand. Ensure that posts made about your brand are relatable to your everyday customer. The post should seem like its coming from someone everyone would want to have a drink with.

Figure out what your customers really want

Take time to understand and figure out what your ideal customers really want. Some customers would rather discuss issues with themselves rather than bringing it up with you. It is your job to figure out what these issues are.

By connecting to your customers on various social media platforms, you can keep yourself updated on what they feel about your brand.

It’s not about you

The most important thing to note is that it is up to you to align with your customers, rather than the other way around. While growing your brand community, ensure that you contribute contents that are in line with the values of your consumers. The trick is to focus on bringing people closer together. This is as opposed to trying to bring them to your brand.

Final Thoughts

The benefits of having an excellent brand marketing strategy cannot be overemphasized. One sure way of achieving this is by having shared values with your clients. This helps your customers understand your brand purpose. It also builds transparency and trust, and ultimately brand loyalty.

If you haven’t considered the idea of having shared values with your customers, then, you need to consider it today. There is a way shared values form a sort of connection between your business and your customers. This connection is what makes them keep coming back.

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Speak Your Audience’s Language

Your target audience should guide the way in which you present information. While it is important that details are reflected accurately, brands should not forget that regular people, who are unaccustomed to specific technical jargon, may not immediately understand or care to delve deeper. Explain and describe your products in a way that offers real world value. Where possible provide visual content that further clarifies and demonstrates the actual usefulness of your product and/or service.

Embrace User Created Content

Social media channels are the perfect litmus test to discern how well your brand performs in the field. These tools allow users to interact and engage with brands in a way that is more meaningful and honest. Whether they are praising or being critical, listen to your users, allow their collective voice to shape how your brand evolves and improve. Take the time to address their concerns or express your appreciation, this will ensure that you are not simply building a customer base but developing worthwhile relationships.

Master the Art of Engaging Story Telling

Every brand has a story and this story deserves to be given a voice. Yours should not be viewed simply as a means of garnering wealth but as an actual item that is worthy of consumer admiration. Craft content that shows what your company does, what goes into the creation of your product, and how you aim to give back in some way to the community. This should be an ongoing process that includes shared stories about staff in the field, real life interaction with customers and factual accounts of your products’ application.

Be True to Your Brand Not Someone Else’s

Your brand should not try to emulate others simply because they are in your industry or have achieved success using a particular route of winning over customers. Trying to re-create what others are doing may backfire especially if it is strikingly different. Do not, for example, try to fashion your brand as a luxury one if it simply is not. Know what your brand is about and market it in a way that highlights its strong points, not someone else’s.

Be Transparent, Remove the Mask

Do not attempt to mislead the public with gimmicks or smooth over any issues with deceptive marketing. Fix current problems and address issues as they may arise. Always seek to better your brand, learn from past mistakes, and continually push improvement not merely the appearance of it.

Marketing your brand can sometimes be a trial and error process. As technology shifts to tip the balance in favor of the consumer it is important that your brand makes a lasting impression while staying true to the products and services you actually provide.

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