Let’s be honest—Instagram has been a little stingy with reach lately. If you’ve been showing up, sharing your offer, and hearing crickets, this episode is your permission slip to stop posting more and start posting differently.

I’m taking you behind the scenes of my Post With Purpose birthday sale waitlist strategy—specifically what I tested before the cart opened that helped me fill the waitlist without a discount, bonus, or a million posts. Spoiler: it wasn’t about fancy Reels or algorithm hacks.

Inside this episode, we’ll talk about:

• Why reach + buyer behavior are changing (and what to do about it)
• The “non-promotional” post that got me 22% engagement—and how it led to waitlist signups
• How I layered in personal content strategically to boost sales posts
• Why it’s not always your content—it’s who’s seeing it
• What to post during a long launch window to keep momentum without burning out

If you’re planning a sale, launch, or even just trying to get more leads from IG right now this is the strategy shift you need.

👇 Tag me on Instagram @socially.yours.strategist with your next personal post—I’ll hype you up and help get it seen.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Plan it, Post It, Profit and plan a month of Instagram posts that lead to sales in just 5 days!

Join Plan it, Post It, Profit and plan a month of Instagram posts that lead to sales in just 5 days!

Plan 1 Month of Instagram Content That Leads to Sales in 5 Days! Join Plant It, Post It, Profit!

If you have been showing up on Instagram and wondering why no one is clicking, buying or even seeing your promotional content, this is the episode for you.

At the time of this recording, I am wrapping up the wait list period for my big Post With Purpose birthday sale that is happening.

By the time you listen, the sale will be all over but the waitlist itself.

More than half of my waitlist signups came from Instagram before the cart even opened.

Okay.

And it wasn't because I was posting more, it was because I posted a little bit differently.

And I want to share what that strategy was, why I came up with it, why it works, and how you can use it.

Welcome to mompreneur Mastery, where we build businesses, raise families and skip the hustle.

That doesn't actually help.

I'm Sydney o' Brien, certified Instagram strategist, mom of three and your no fluff.

Guide to making more sales with content.

That'S strategic, simple, and you can actually make in the small mom cracks of your day because Instagram shouldn't feel like a full time job you're not not getting paid for.

If you're ready to stop posting just to stay visible and start sharing content that actually converts to sales and gets you clients, you're in the right place.

Welcome back to mompreneur Mastery.

I am Sydney o' Brien, your host and today I want to take you a little bit behind the scenes of the Post With Purpose first birthday sale and show you what I tested during the waitlist period and what made a way bigger difference than I expected.

Okay, so first I want to preface this with this wasn't some random experiment.

It came from what I have been seeing and hearing everywhere from my clients in dms, during Vox or office hours and side posts with purpose, talking to other business owners and other kind of communities.

Everyone is saying the same thing, right?

Engagement is down, views are down, and it feels like the people who do want to hear from you aren't necessarily seeing your content in growth and engagement is just really hard right now.

Now look, I am not out here trying to make you care about likes, right?

Vanity metrics do not pay the bills and I will die on this hill.

But if you are out here building your content around a solid strategy, then having more of the right people seeing your content means more touch points, right?

And those matter, especially right now.

Because something else is shifting too, and that is buying behaviors and buying timelines.

Again, this is something everyone is talking about.

I'm seeing it, my clients are seeing it.

Other people in like other Business groups and communities are seeing it.

People are taking longer to go from the first impression to saying, I'm in.

Gimme that.

Right?

So instead of doing a quick open and close sale window, I gave myself a longer Runway this time to have this wait list.

And I use that extra time to test something because it is longer and we still, especially for social media, still want to keep attention.

Right.

And keep it exciting and fresh.

So during this waitlist period, I said what would happen if I leaned more into connection focused and engagement focused content in between the waitlist promo posts?

All right, And I want to note one more quick thing here.

There was no like early bird discount for being on the waitlist.

There was no extra bonus, no extra kind of incentive for being on that waitlist.

People were joining just straight because of the content.

Like whether you're on the waitlist or you buy during the sale window, it's the same thing.

You're getting the same offer.

The only incentive was you get the offer sooner.

That's it.

And I think that really matters, especially if you feel like you need to offer a huge bonus or drop your price just to get people to sign up.

You don't, you absolutely do not know your worth.

So during this waitlist period, prior to opening the waitlist, I was following my standard five steps to sales strategy, right?

Growth, engagement, connection, trust and sales.

And then for the sale, I was selling more the wait list.

But now what I did a little bit differently here was because I had that longer kind of open wait list period instead of normally I have like an open cart period for a sale.

If it's a flash sale, like a day or two, if it's a big launch, maybe like five to seven days.

This was like two weeks that this was open, maybe longer.

I'm honestly kind of blanking right now because I'm recording this at the end of the day and it's been a day.

But when I got to these sales posts, instead of just doing straight promo content for that long, cause that's a long time, I alternated from promo content to personal like engagement based content.

And my thought here was one, to keep it exciting and fresh and two, to increase my reach and increase my connection.

Right.

So before I get into how that turned out, let me describe one of the posts.

So one that got me a ton of engagement was a profile photo post.

Okay, so this wasn't a fancy reel or a fancy like canva graphic carousel or anything.

It was just a couple photos of myself.

It was in the comment I mentioned how I was just one of those rare days where I looked like an actual functioning adult instead of the mom goblin I am 98% of the time.

So I took a few pictures of myself and I posted them and asked my audience to help me pick a new profile photo.

And I kind of honed in on that, like the moment of it in the caption, so that it was still relevant to my audience and was still relevant to the pain points that I was talking about in my promo content.

So there was relevance there.

I want to point that out.

That's very important.

Now, this post had an engagement rate of 22%.

If you are unaware, the average engagement rate on any Instagram post is between 3 and 4%.

So that's huge.

And I know this wasn't a promotional post, and it does seem like a vanity metric, but wait, just hear me out, because here is what happened next.

Because it had such high engagement rate, that post got pushed to more people.

People that haven't engaged with my account for a while, but have been followers for a little while.

So I know they were like my people.

And not only do they engage with that post, but because they engaged with that post, they saw my previous post, which were the Waitlist promo posts, as well as my next posts, which were again, more Waitlist promo posts, and signed up for my waitlist because of those.

So because they interacted with that engagement post, Instagram was pushing those posts, those old posts and the new posts into their feeds.

And because they were now actually seeing them, they were taking action.

All right, so the post didn't do the selling, but it is set up within that strategy to still work.

So I get the sale.

Another example recently, it was Mother's Day, right?

My audience is mom business owners.

So that is super relevant for me to post about.

I posted a quick Mother's Day message, just a little reel about, like what mompreneurs really want for Mother's Day.

It was like nothing super fancy or special, but again, because it was meant to get engagement and it did, engagement shot up.

I think that one got 20% engagement, which is much, much higher than the 3 to 4% average across Instagram.

And the same for a post I made about juggling content while my kids were home.

You know, it was very relatable, still tied to my audience.

The post itself was not promotional, but I was able to talk about pain points that I'm also using in the marketing for the wait list and the big post purpose birthday sale.

So it is tied together, but it's pretty Loose, but it's not promotional.

It is strictly for engagement.

So all of those posts, those engagement posts that I shared, the engagement rates on them were between 18 and 22%.

Meanwhile, my actual promotional posts, the engagement rate on them in all of these promotional posts for the wait list, I was asking people to comment for more information and then manychat would send them a link to sign up and then they did.

But the engagement rate for those posts were between 9 and 11%, which is still above average by quite a bit, especially for sales content, because sales content normally has a lower than average engagement rate.

So still like I'm very happy with those numbers.

So every time I posted something a little more personal, and that was specifically to get engagement, I saw a ripple.

People would engage with that post and then Instagram would resurface my previous content.

And then when those people saw those promo posts again, they were ready to sign up.

So I was getting those touch points.

I needed to get leads for my big sale because after they sign up for the waitlist, they go through like a little sales emails funnel about the actual post with purpose birthday offer, which is still going on.

So I don't have final statistics on that, but I will come back and share how that strategy played out.

So this strategy worked because again, the rest of my strategy was already in place.

I wasn't relying on personal content instead of strategy, but I was using that personal engagement content to support it, knowing I had that long window of waitlist time that I wanted given the change in buyer behavior that has been happening.

So this content helped my followers actually see my promo content and engage with it and convert into leads for that wait list.

So if you are not getting the result you want from your sales content, it might not be the content itself.

It might be that your audience just isn't seeing it or that they're not seeing it often enough.

You're not getting enough of those touch points to feel ready to buy.

So with buyer behavior changing and with personal content performing better than ever, people are very sick of the corporate like over aesthetic, overdone kind of posts on Instagram.

Personal branding is the way to go.

Now is definitely the time to start weaving those personal posts in.

But keep in mind how I was able to tie it back to business.

It can't be super unrelated.

It should have some relationship to what is going on in your business now.

This is not to replace your sales content.

This is not to replace any other part of your strategy.

It is just to help solve support it.

Especially if you have that longer launch Runway or a longer open cart period or anything like that.

Because when people are connecting with you and they're connecting with your content, they stick around.

And when they stick around, they start to trust you.

And then when they trust you, that is when they buy, that is when they hire you, when they convert, when they sign up for your lead magnet, your wait list, whatever it is.

Okay?

Simple as that.

So if this episode gave you something to think about, I want you to go create whatever personal post it is and then send it to me on Instagram so I can be one of those people engaging with it and getting you more views.

My handle is ocially yours Strategist, and while I'm already seeing great results from the shift, the cart hasn't officially opened for the birthday sale yet, so I don't have final sales numbers to share.

But once the sale wraps, if you are interested, I'll be back with another episode breaking down what happened after the waitlist period, how the rest of the sales strategy worked, how many people converted, and what I'm going to be tweaking next time based on that data.

So let me know if that's something you're interested in hearing about.

Thank you so much for listening and I will be back in your earbuds next week.

Thanks so much for hanging out with me on Mompreneur Mastery.

If this episode gave you more clarity.

Or a little boost of confidence, I.

Would love for you to follow the show, leave a review, or share it.

With a fellow mom building her business on her own terms.

And hey, if something really clicked DM me on Instagram, I am ocially yours Strategist and tell me the one thing you're doing differently after listening.

I love hearing what is landing for you.

Until next time, here is to less stress, more sales, and a business that.

Actually fits your life.