Speaker 1: Sometimes I get these emails from brands and it takes everything in me to hold back from typing a response Just like you want me to do what for a lipstick like I have to do a feed post I have to make a video and you're gonna send me a lipstick like don't you respect my time and the energy I put into these creative projects Hey everyone and welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here My name is Austin and I am a beauty and style content creator based here in New York City. Today I wanted to make a video about how to respond to collaboration requests as a creator. I often get the question, you know, like a brand reached out to me and I'm not sure where to go from here. Maybe they're offering me product but I would prefer to be paid or maybe I want to start working together to build that relationship with them and I just want to make sure I'm setting myself up for success in my email replies. I want to go over a couple of ideas for how to respond to a brand if they can pay you to kind of set yourself up for negotiations, how to reply to a brand if they can't pay you and if you want to continue working with them or hopefully do something paid with them in the future, and I also want to talk about a couple of ways to tell if a brand collaboration is truly legit or not. If you're new around here, please don't forget to subscribe to my channel. I put out new videos every Sunday with tips for beauty and fashion content creators as as well as beauty product reviews. So if that sounds like you, hit the red button down below to stick around. Don't forget to give this video a thumbs up if you like it or you learned something new. And as a reminder, I do also have my free email newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. I share tips for content creators, stories from successful entrepreneurs and more. So if you want in on that, you can go to austintucsone.com slash subscribe. So let's talk first about gifted and non-paid offers because I think this is kind of where I get the most questions about. So I think first of all, you need to decide for yourself if gifted partnerships are something that at this stage in your career, you are willing to take on. For me, I've been doing this for eight years now and I've worked with brands like Glossier, the New York Times, ASOS and Garnier on a paid basis. And I personally just don't feel like gifted collaborations are a good use of my time anymore. Every once in a while, there will be a rare instance where I accept a gifted collaboration. And that is probably just if I really, really love the brand and I really just want to kind of get in there and start building a relationship with them. I would say at this point in my life, probably about less than 5% of all of my collaborations are gifted. So if a brand reach out to you on a gifted basis and they're not able to pay you, I would ask yourself a couple of questions and just say, you know, is this my dream brand? Is this someone who I really want to work with going forward or will working with this brand help me potentially get offers from other brands in the future? And you could also think about If they are offering to gift you an item that maybe you wouldn't purchase yourself, so maybe they want to gift you a new camera or maybe they want to gift you a couch or something like that and it's a high kind of price point item. If that in itself is worth the cost of the work for the brand campaign, that might be another reason you want to accept a gifted partnership. So let's go over how you could respond to two different scenarios. The first one being they've reached out, they can't pay you, and you kind of have looked it over and feel like at this time, it's not worth it to move forward. If this is a brand that you still want to work with, I always default back to the same response to brands. And I say thank you so much for your interest in a collaboration with me. At this time, I don't have the bandwidth to accommodate unpaid collaborations. But if you ever have, you know, any budget updates or want to circle back next quarter, I'd love to discuss something then I'll be so honest right now. Sometimes I get these emails from brands and it takes everything in me to hold back from typing a response, just like, you want me to do what for a lipstick? Like, I have to do a feed post, I have to make a video, and you're gonna send me a lipstick? Like, don't you respect my time and the energy I put into these creative projects? As tempting as it can be to go off on that, if you want to keep the relationship with the brand, I do recommend being professional, and also realize that the person who's sending you the email may not be the final decision maker about whether they have budget or not, so So there's no need to really unload on anyone like that, in my opinion. But just so you know, my feelings on it. That is how I feel. So now let's say they can't pay you, but you do want to move forward. And you think that this is a brand that you could build a relationship with, or that could lead to other opportunities, or again, that the price of the product that you're being gifted kind of cancels out, you know, feeling bad or salty about them not being able to pay you otherwise, I would write back and say something like, you know what, I do love this brand so much, and I understand you don't have a budget, so I am willing to waive my current fee for this first collaboration together, but for any future collaborations, I would really appreciate if we could consider my fee and find a way to make that work. If it just ends up being a one-off collaboration, then whatever, you agreed to do it gifted, but that way at least, like, if they want to work together in the future or if you really blow them away, now you've just proven that you've done such a great job and that you are worth your rate going forward. I would also say for gifted campaigns, you know, think about the amount of instructions or guidance that the brand is giving you. So if they are giving you a million and one instructions for a gifted campaign, that to me is kind of a red flag that they don't really want you and your creativity that they kind of just want content produced exactly how they want it to. So I would kind of just take a look and ask to see any requirements for the collaboration. You know, I think that there are certain requests that make total sense, like, please make sure it's shot in nice light and that the photos are clear and that they're high res or whatever it is. But if they're suddenly giving you a million like kind of micromanaging creative directions, I would maybe think about whether or not that is worth your time to do unpaid. If you want any more info on my thoughts on kind of all different types of brand collaborations and how you can work with brands, I do have this video right here on my channel that I will link down below in case you want to check it out after this one. Now let's talk about how you should reply if a brand is offering to pay you. First of all, round of applause for yourself. I mean, a brand reaching out to pay you for content is an incredible accomplishment, and you should really just be excited and proud of that. I think one thing I like to do when I receive a collaboration request from a brand is to write them back and kind of remind them of what they probably already know, which is that I'm a great fit to work together on a paid campaign. So for example, if a beauty brand reached out to me and said that, you know, we're going into holiday season, and they wanted to, you know, find a creative way to showcase a red lipstick of theirs, I could say, you know, I was actually just having conversations with my followers on Instagram and talking about how we don't really know what we're going to do this holiday season or if things will still be the same, especially given everything happening in 2020. So I think this is actually a great opportunity for me to show your product as a solution to their problems of not knowing what to do for holiday makeup. I think providing some kind of social proof or evidence that they really are reaching out to you and you're a great fit for this and just kind of reiterating it back to them just strengthens you as a influencer that they could partner with in their mind. I would at this time also reply to them and send them your media kit so they can get to know your audience better and call out any sections in the media kit that again reinforce their brand or what they're looking for and say, you know, I feel like our target audiences are really aligned. As you can see, my audience is 75% women obviously in the United States, ages 24 to 35. So I feel like this really would be a perfect collaboration. And one really important thing here is to make sure that you are not sending rates in your media kit. Honestly, if you have them in your media kit, I would just take them out. I could probably do a whole other video about media kits and what you should include in them. But I really, really advise against including rates in a media kit. The reason for this is that every brand project is so different and you could easily be missing out on money if you are just sending rates to a brand. If at all possible, I would reach out to the brand and try to get a gauge on what their budget is first based on what kind of deliverables they are looking for. Once you know more about their budget and what they're looking for, then you can figure out based on their budget, what type of deliverables you'll be able to provide them. For example, I had a brand reach out to me once and they really wanted to work together on a dedicated YouTube video, meaning a full video that was totally focused on them as the sponsor where the product was incorporated throughout the video. And to the surprise of probably no one YouTube is my highest priced deliverable that I offer because video takes the most time and effort to create. So they wrote back to me and said that their budget was actually x instead of y, which was what I was going to be charging for a YouTube video. But I realized that their budget was more in line with my rate for Instagram stories. And I said, Hey, you know, if you want for that money, I can do three to five Instagram stories about your brand or product. And we ended up being able to move forward with just an Instagram story partnership. I think that worked out well, because I still got to work with the brand, showcase what I was able to do and give them, you know, great content that they paid for. And now they know going forward what the expectations and the budget is for a video on my YouTube channel. So I don't have to justify my rates later on or try to explain why they are the way that they are. We've kind of already gotten that out of the way. If you want to learn the eight different factors that can drive up the price of a brand deal or collaboration, I did this video a couple of weeks ago explaining all of those things, and it'll help you negotiate higher rates from brands. So I would definitely suggest checking that one out. I think another huge thing to point out here is in this reply email, I would ask the brand what their KPI is. And if you're not familiar with KPI, it's a marketing term key performance indicator. So how are they measuring the success of this campaign? Because I think the sooner you can figure that out, the better chance you have of creating a successful campaign. I also think you'll just score major points with the brand if you ask this because you'd be surprised how many influencers don't think to ask about this at all. So is the key performance indicator sales of the product? If so, do you have a code that they can track your sales from? Or is it really just about brand awareness? Will you just be tracking, you know, website clicks through Instagram, swipe ups and things like that. The sooner you can find that out from a brand, the higher chance you have of creating a successful piece of content that will convert the way that they are hoping that it will. The last thing I want to talk about in this video is basically how to tell if a brand collaboration is legit or not. Because I see in a lot of Facebook groups, especially, you know, I'm in the reward style Facebook group, my friend Kayleigh has a group for micro influencers, I'm in these groups all the time. And so often I see screenshots from an Instagram DM, you know, from a brand that reached out to a creator and creators asking, Is this for real? Is this legit? Or is this a scam? And by scam, I don't mean like you're going to get money stolen from you, I guess I just mean that you are going to end up putting a lot of work into something that's going to have absolutely no return, and that they're kind of just looking for mass content as opposed to quality content with a purpose. So as an example, you might see on Instagram, you know, people get comments saying like DM this account to collab or DM our main page and those spammy comments are so irritating and nine times out of 10 I would say those are not worth your time. They might call it like a paid collaboration but what it might actually be is an affiliate partnership where you might make a small commission if you sell a certain amount of the product and you might get a code to kind of track that. Again there's nothing wrong with it but I just want to clarify that that is not a paid brand collaboration and that that is a lot of work for often a little bit of payoff. Other warning signs I would look out for are if you get an email from a brand and they call you dear if they call you babe if they call you influencer I've gotten that one a couple times like dear influencer and I'm just like really really you can look at my name and also I would look for if a brand is just trying to call you by your Instagram handle. I feel like that happens a lot when brands kind of scrape a bunch of accounts all at once to kind of do a mass email blast. And it just feels so impersonal. And if they didn't even care enough to like write you an email and put your name in it, I think that's automatically a red flag for me. I would say if they also ask you to pay for either the product or the shipping that that is super shady. And that is not how brand deals work. And the last thing I would say is if a brand wants you to promote a product that you've never even tried. One example I can give of this is I actually reached out out to a pretty major beauty brand a couple of seasons ago because they were going to be in New York for fashion week. And I was hoping to, you know, be able to meet with someone from the brand, maybe try some of the products and just learn a bit more about them. I was super turned off by the fact that they replied to that email and they said, you know, we're always looking for ambassadors for this brand. So here's your code Austin15, like share it with your audience and they'll get 15% off. And they hadn't even sent me product yet. They hadn't asked me about my skin type and I hadn't tried the product. And I was so shocked that they already had like a code set up for me, just for me to go out there and start talking about it when I've never even tried it before. So anyway, those are a couple of red flags to watch out for if it feels weird to you. If you feel like it's impersonal, it's probably not really worth your time to pursue. Alright, everyone, and that wraps up my thoughts on how to reply to brand collaboration offers as a creator. I hope this gives you confidence when you are talking to brands and that you learned something new from today's video. As I mentioned earlier, don't forget to subscribe and stick around for new videos every Sunday. I do lots of videos with tips for content creators and I'll actually leave a full playlist down below of all of my creator tips. So whether you are new to this game, or you've been creating for years, I'm really here to help you kind of level up your content and feel confident about what you're putting out there. Don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and leave me a comment down below letting me know what your biggest takeaway was or what other videos you might like to see from me. Thanks again for watching. Have an awesome rest of your day and I will see you in my next video. 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