How to Pitch to Brands and Get Paid Brand Deals

If you’re just starting out as an influencer, you may not be able to get paid brand deals yet but you may be able to do some collabs, meaning get free products and featuring them in your channels. It really depends on a lot of different factors including your audience, brand, content, and engagement.

So if you are just starting out, I definitely recommend doing as many collaborations as you can even if you’re not getting paid yet, so that you build up your portfolio.

Here are the 5 steps to pitch to brands as an influencer:

1. Do your research.

Look for brands that have the same audience as you, because those will be the brands that will want to work with you.

You can also find brands who have already worked with influencers before because influencers tag them in their sponsored posts.

2. Find the contact.

So you’ll want to contact someone on the PR or marketing team. You may be able to find the PR contact in a recent press release or through the agency website. You can also go to the brand’s website and look for a contact. You can also try to find a contact via LinkedIn or Facebook. Some people have reached out directly through DM on social media.

Everything is on the internet, so you might have to do some digging, but you will find something and hopefully it will get to the right people.

3. Send your pitch (include media kit).

When you send your pitch through email, you’ll want to create a customized, personal message so it doesn’t look like you copy and pasted it and sent it out to everyone.

You’ll want to include specifics on the brand and why your audience aligns with the brand. Including a media kit in the pitch is great as well which is either a one-sheet or a proposal type document that’s a few pages that has information on your brand, audience, demographics, platforms, numbers - like your followers, blog visitors, and everything that a brand would want to know. Some like to pitch directly through social media, you can do that too.

4. Follow Up. Once you do send a pitch and haven’t heard back, try again after a couple days or a week. They may be really busy and haven’t gotten to it yet so you don’t want to keep sending too much, or you may be annoying.

Try back once or twice and if you’re doing it through email you can send them a message on social media saying you sent them an email and you’d love to work with them.

5. Deliver. So let’s say they do respond and they do want to work with you either on a collaboration or paid partnership.

With a collab, they’ll usually send you the product and once you do get it and create the content, make sure you follow up with them when it’s posted and see if they want to share on their channels.

If they want to do a paid partnership, you’ll want to send them a rate card, which is like a price list with all your services and how much you charge. You’ll agree on the rate and deliverables and what you’ll provide and when, usually there’s a contract that’s signed by both parties.

Make sure you read the fine print with all the terms and conditions, as well as any exclusivity requirements. Once it’s done, you can follow up with a report to show them how well the campaign did so they’ll want to work with you again.

So those are the 5 steps to pitch to brands as an influencer and get paid to do it. There are influencers of all levels of following pitching to brands right now, so don’t believe it when they say you have to have a BIG following to work with brands, to reach out and get paid.