11 Influencer Questions YOU Asked Me About Working With Brands
Wanting advice or guidance on how to work with brands is totally normal. It’s often intimidating to approach someone to ask questions. If you read my blog post on how to work with brands, I’ve gone to PR companies, peers and more and taken all of their input and formed my own insight on how to move forward so I’m hoping to help you form your own opinions and give you knowledge that can help you in your future partnerships with brands.
Of course, COVID-19 has made working within hospitality tough, not only for restaurants and hotels or food business’ and drink brands, but also for us bloggers, influencer and contractors who work with brands, creating content and producing paid ads as a form of income. The amount of paid work out there has significantly changed — it’s harder to find work with much of a budget, and understandably so. How can we work together best now and anytime to make sure we support each other? I’m going to leave this questions up to you to answer and at the end of this post, feel free leave a comment on how you think we can best support each other.
Anyway, what is this post about? I asked you guys what questions you had on working with brands off the back of my previous blog post, so here are my answers:
Do you ever approach brands first - if so, what do you say to them?
100%
I stand by the quote “if you don’t ask, you won’t get”. I think people who get contacted by brands and never do any reaching out are incredibly lucky and fortunate but I also think they could be missing amazing opportunities for building relationships.
I’m not advising you to go ask for free things or take advantages or businesses, but instead, approaching brands is more about connecting and building relationships and what you may (or may not) get out of it will just be a benefit to the relationship made.
If anyone tells you to not contact a brand or that they never have, ask them why, and then tell them: go get your dreams! If you never told your partner you loved them, never asked someone on a date, never connected with someone on Instagram, would those relationships have come to you or blossomed the way they did?
How many followers do you need for brands to partner with you?
The short answer is: numbers do not define you and you will add value to a brand as long as the content you share is high quality and the audience you have is engaged and interested.
The long answer is: This is totally dependent on you and the brand you’ve established.
Ask yourself: are you blogging for the passion or for the partnerships?
If you answer partnerships without hesitation, then maybe re-evaluate what you are doing and sharing because sharing for the sake of sharing and getting free products/paid partnerships will not pay off in the long run in terms of building your engaged following and a trusting audience. Brands will notice whether you’ve shared everything or selected what you choose to share. Brands will appreciate your effort of building toward your own brand, personality and identity and will look to work with you for your unique selling point and audience. This may sound kind of like what your mom may have said “be yourself and the rest will follow” but it’s totally true.
I’m going to give you a scenario. Put yourself in the brand’s shoes:
You have a product that you want to raise awareness about using high quality imagery that is on-brand with the product and will be shared with the correct audience.
Would you:
A) search for any influencer in the industry, select the top 10 that have a good following and press send on your email?
B) put together a curated list of influencers who create imagery that matches what the brand represents, has a following that seems engaged even though they may have less followers than the top 10 and also stand for what your brand does and then press send on your email?
Ok, let’s be honest, some brands won’t care if you’ve shared about a competitor the day before or post low quality images, they’ll just want the most publicity, but most of them will care so moral of the story is no matter your size, if what you’re putting out is high quality, unique and engaging content, everything will happen ♥️ just don’t rush because it does take time.
What would be the best way to contact brands? How would you word the first message?
If you’re asking in terms of where to contact them, I always recommend email. It’s the most professional, allows you to connect with potentially the correct person (marketing or PR vs. the person behind the IG) and gives you more space to express yourself! If you can’t find an email address, try their contact form on their website or drop them a DM.
Ok, ok, don’t tell them all your feelings, but do share in this email a few main things:
- who are you?
- why are you reaching out?
- why are you reaching out to this brand in particular
How do you know how much to charge for a post?
I’m going to explain my experience how I figured it out and what I’d recommend.
So, here’s how I figured it out and what I would not recommend doing:
I genuinely was in the deep end and someone told me to download the app @tribe which is an influencer marketing platform. It has an area where it tells you pricing and basically the minimum recommended was £50 so that’s what I did. Once I realized that I was spending hours creating content and spending money on food and props for each campaign, I soon realized this was not going to hack it so...
I sucked it up and ask other bloggers.
Luckily, a couple of my friends have quite a large following and have been doing this for a while so I sent them a shameless: I’m so sorry but I have no idea what to charge, can you help?
How do you start talking about pricing when you’re approached by a brand?
I don’t go straight for the kill and just reply: what’s your budget?
That’s not really my style (I don’t actually know anyone who would send that, you’re all such friendly peeps) but also, I like to know more first. As I mentioned in my blog post, it’s not necessarily about the money, but about the relationship you are forming so being blunt may get you money but it may not get you the trust and investment you would like in partnering with the brand in the long run.
I ask them about the campaign, I need to understand what they want to get out of it, and what I will need to do (a post, stories, etc).
Once we have clarified all of this information, then I may ask them what their budget is or if they have any budget for the campaign.
Simple as that 💌
Do you contact brands you want to work with or do they usually come to you?
I’m going to answer this personally instead of whether people would reach out to brands because we all know my answer to that:
go get ‘em!
In terms of my paid work, typically I am reached out to, which I am eternally grateful for (especially right now as my work has changed dramatically).
In terms of gifted partnerships or experiences, a majority of the things I share now are from brands reaching out to me, but some are from outreach I have done, too. The reason behind my outreach? I only want to share products I genuinely love and would recommend to a friend.
Check out my blog post on curated content which is a good off-shoot to this question.
How to contact a someone about a partnership when they aren’t running any campaigns?
Just because a brand isn’t running a campaign doesn’t mean you can’t say hello.
Do you ignore your friends unless it’s their birthday? Maybe a bad example but you guys catch my drift.
Speaking with brands isn’t about just having a campaign to join, but establishing a relationship, so drop them a note, ask them how they’re doing with what’s going on, ask how you can help, just pop them a message — it doesn’t go unnoticed.
Colleen from @crucomms gave me the PR perspective in my latest blog post:
“If you are looking to continue to forge relationships with PRs and different PR/Marketing companies, don’t be afraid to reach out and ask them what their clients are up to and promote what works best for you and your audience.”
Do you think it’s essential to purchase a digital camera in order to work with brands?
I think it’s totally dependent on what your end goal is with your content creation. If you’re creating content for your own feed, the brand will want you to use whatever camera (or iPhone) you use for your own page. They’re signing up to work with you so they’ll want you to create content like that on your page.
If the brand is asking you to create content for their own Instagram page, for marketing materials or anything else, they may request that you provide non-phone or higher quality content. Some iPhones have amazing quality but you can often tell the difference (especially with food as it’s usually a closer shot). So if your goal is to also create content outside of just Instagram stories and posts, then I would recommend getting a camera.
That all being said - some cameras can be more fiddly to use. Don’t do anything you don’t feel comfortable with.
From personal experience, I didn’t get a camera until I felt it was necessary and I really wanted to learn more and expand my photography knowledge. I always think it’s best to do what is best for you wallet, for your comfort and for what makes you happy. If you’re happy and brands have been happy with the content you’re providing on a phone, the only reason to get a camera would be because you want to and you potentially want to expand outside of just Instagram posts on your own page!
How does it work if you share a discount code? Do you get X% of each sale or just one off fee?
This may be surprising but... when I share a discount code, unless there is an affiliate link attached or it’s a “mutual beneficial offer” like use my code and we both get £5 toward a purchase, I get absolutely *zero* from your purchase except the satisfaction that someone used a code I created with the brand.
For example, my @bloomandwild code Gem Tfp if you enter it at checkout, I will get £10 credit toward my next purchase and *you also* will get £10 off of your purchase. No commission earned or fee they have paid me to share.
For my current Peaky Blenders code GEMTAKES10, I purely got this code in conversation with the brand (as I’m a big fan) to help promote them on my page in the hopes that some followers may be interested in a delicious coffee / subscription and purchase something to support a small independent business ♥️
How do I get brands to notice me without having to approach them?
• be your own brand: make sure your feed represents the best you can put out to the world and brands will take notice. This means, having your own personality, having your own unique content and sharing engaging content with you followers.
• make your feed BEAUTIFUL: this comes with quality images, natural and appealing edits and a theme. You can buy other people’s presets (like mine 🙋🏼♀️) or just edit a certain way to make your images in sync with each other. I wrote a blog post on this and I’m going to leave a swipe up here so you can check it out.
• share what you love: I’m under the impression you want to work with brands you care about, who wouldn’t? So share what you love, share about the brands and products you love and tell them you love them. Only good can come from that.
• be uniquely yourself: If you copy what other people do, don’t have the best quality content you ca put out and don’t share your passion through your page, sadly brands will notice, and of course, some won’t mind but the good ones (hopefully will) and will choose to work with you because they want to work with your UNIQUE self ♥️
How do you politely tell a brand that you don’t want to work with them? i.e. the fit is wrong…
It’s always better to be honest. This has happened to me before on Instagram and in my job as an Account Manager and with most situations in business, it’s better to be open and honest from the beginning than to have regrets, a nasty relationship or bitter feelings down the line.
There are a few ways to politely say no, but the one I’d recommend is to be short and sweet, no filler, no beating around the bush. Simply saying:
“I appreciate you reaching out to me in regard to partnering together. Unfortunately, I don’t feel that X product or X brand would fit well with my own brand and audience.”
...Is perfectly fine! Of course, add in some friendliness and a nice sign off (if you watched my YouTube video... none of the “peace out ya’ll” business) but something nice and offer to stay in touch 💕
Just think, if you reached out to a brand and they didnt want to work with you, they would either ignore you or politely tell you thanks but no thanks and stay in touch and that’s exactly what you can do, too.
It’s so interesting to get questions from you guys…
And helps me know what is best to share! I hope this helps you and you can use this to refer back to at any time.
Drop a note in the comments if you also have anymore questions that I didn't answer and if you haven’t read it, check out my original blog post on How To Work With Brands and PR Companies.
Read more:
5 Tips For Growing Your Instagram That Nobody Really Tells You
7 Questions Answered: What I Wish I Knew When I First Became An Influencer
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