Speaker 1: If you want to start landing brand collaborations and you've thought about pitching to a brand, but you have no idea what to say or where to even start, this video is for you. What's up everyone? I'm Millie. I'm an influencer coach. Welcome back to my channel where I post videos every week teaching you the latest strategies and trends on social media to help you grow your brand as an influencer. I've been in the influencer space for over five years now. I've worked with hundreds of brands. I also have a course that teaches influencers how to grow on Instagram and land brand collaborations. So I have quite a bit of experience under my belt when it comes to pitching, working with brands, all the thanks. When I teach on this topic, typically the most asked question that I get over on Instagram is how do I write my pitch? What do I say in my pitch? How do I talk to the brand? How do I reach out to the brand? So that's what we're going to go over. Before you start pitching, you want to ask yourself if you're even ready to start pitching and no, I don't mean do you have enough followers? You don't need to have any number of followers to start working with brands. I've helped my student Ryan land a paid brand collaboration. And so no, it's not about the follower numbers. When brands are looking for influencers to partner with, they look for three things, your parallel, your community, and your experience. Your parallels is basically the things that you have in common. They want to have things in common with you. Especially if your audience is their target audience, they're going to be way more willing to slide into those DMs, pay you a little bit of cash to reach your audience and then to your community. If they go to your Instagram and they see that you have a loyal community, people commenting on your posts, you replying to people's comments, they're going to see that as a lot of value. Brands are looking for influencers with a 3% engagement rate or more. And if you have less than 10,000 followers, you're actually at an advantage because you have a higher engagement rate than those over 10,000 followers. So that could be a strategy with your pitching. And then when I say experience, I don't mean do you have all the experience, but are you generally good at creating content? Take a look at your feed, an honest look at your feed and ask yourself, would a brand pay me to make something like this? If the answer is no, you just got to practice a little bit more. Content creation is key. Literally the main part of working with a brand is that you're creating content with them. So if your profile doesn't have content that would entice a brand or maybe the quality just isn't quite there yet, that's what you want to work on a little bit more is honing in on your content creation craft, not building your followers. Okay. Now that you know the three things to look for, and you're like, okay, Millie, I think I'm ready. I think I'm ready to start pitching. You have two goals with your pitch. It could be either or, or it could be both. One goal is to create a connection. The other goal is to serve. Your goal with pitching is not to land a paid brand collaboration, believe it or not. It's not to get free stuff. If that is your goal, if that is your intention, you are pitching from the wrong place. I know how exciting it feels or that feeling of doing your first collaboration and a brand wants to send you something for free and being like, Oh my gosh, I've made it. Like, I know we all want free stuff. We all want to work with our dream brands, but if you're pitching from that selfish mindset or if you're pitching from that place, you won't be able to land honest, genuine, great brand collaborations because brands can see right through that. They probably get thousands of DMS a day, plenty of emails a day with people asking for free stuff. So you want to stand out and you want to create a genuine email to them. So really when you're pitching, all you want to do is create a connection, ask to get on a call, grab a cup of coffee. You just want to connect with the person behind the screen. And if you do want to partner with them and land a collaboration, the collaboration is going to be one that is mutually beneficial. Not just you getting free stuff, but you know exactly how you can benefit the brand. And you want to come from a service mindset. Okay. Now that you kind of know the basics of what to look for, the intent of your pitch, let's talk about how to craft your pitch, how to write it. If you're still like, Ooh, Millie, I'm not sure. I definitely recommend starting out with third party platforms. If you're too intimidated to pitch, send a cold email. Third party platforms are where it's at. That's, I have a bunch that I recommend to my students that I think I have like a list of 10 that are my favorites. But the one that I want to talk to you about is called Socialbook, who is also the sponsor of this video. Socialbook is a top influencer marketing software for both brands and influencers alike. They provide endless social tools that not a lot of third party networking platforms have. So not only can you connect with other brands inside of the Socialbook account, but you can also work on your media case. You could create a link and bio with all of your links in the right place. They have a bunch of content creator tools within their website that can genuinely help creators take their content and their business to the next level. For brand collaboration, specifically you have a brand collaboration form that you fill out. You'll get to set your rates. You get to Mark what your interests are, what your niche is, and then you'll be able to connect with other brands that want to partner with you and are willing to pay your rates. For me personally, I partner with brands who have the same values as me. And one of Socialbook's goals is to help content creators grow and up-level their businesses. So that's why I really wanted to partner with them because we have similar values and we're both on the same track of wanting to help content creators. Yes, creating a Socialbook account is free. So if you want to get started by filling out your brand collaboration form or making your own media kit, I'll leave a link down in the description below where you could start setting up your free account today. Now let's talk about your pitch structure. This is a pitch that I use and I have used and I give to my students to use. It's a great general outline for you to copy paste and fill in with your information. Feel free to screenshot, do what you got to do. I also have a downloadable below. It's free. There's multiple pitch templates because sometimes there's different reasons for pitching. So maybe you just want to pitch to have an introduction, pitch because you have a specific idea in mind or pitch because you want to land a hotel collaboration. There's so many different types of pitches. So I put a few in a free downloadable down below. So you could grab that if you want to, but let's break down your pitch. First, let's start with your subject line. Your subject line, simple, straightforward, not too salesy. You could put the brand name, X, your handle, done, simple. That's all you got to do. Next is the first line of your pitch. You want to introduce yourself, who you are, what you do, who you do it for with a hyperlink on your name. So I'm going to say, Hey, what's up? What's marbling? Just kidding. I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say, Hey, what's the brand I want to pitch to? Mr. Coffee. I love Mr. Coffee. So I'm going to say, Hey, Mr. Coffee, I'm Millie. I'm an online educator that teaches influencers how to grow their businesses from home. And I'm a huge fan of your brand, or I'm a, I've been an avid customer of yours for over 10 years now, right? Make it personal. You want to have that personal connection. Speaking of personal connection, the next two to three sentences, get even deeper with why you love that brand. Do your research, go to their website, look at their about page, look at what sort of nonprofits they support, create a personal connection. So with them, I can say, when I went off to college, my parents gave me a coffee machine to use in my dorm. And I still have it to this day. Parentheses, we're going 10 years strong. And then I'll say, I recently did a poll on my stories, asking my followers if they're coffee lovers or tea lovers, these were their results. Okay. So I create the personal connection, but I'm also tying it into my audience's interest in that brand. So one, personal connection, two, it's a brand I love, I use, I know I'm going to love their products. Three, I'm connecting it to my business, to my brand and to my audience. I'm going to hyperlink the stats. And I'm going to say, here's a few quick stats about me. And this is where you're going to highlight your best assets, your best assets. This isn't going to be just your follower number, because if you're not confident in your follower number, maybe you could highlight your engagement rate instead. So list a few things that you're really confident in. I have a 10% engagement rate. This is my average story views. I have 10,000 email list subscribers, right? So you're just highlighting some of the best things about you. Even if it's your experience, like I've been a professional photographer for five years, maybe that's something that is a huge asset to them. And then this is where you could either wrap up the email or you could pitch them a specific idea. After I say my stats, I'll say, I saw you recently released your iced coffee maker and wanted to know if you needed help marketing that product. As you can see, my audience is avid coffee lovers, and I'd love to partner with you in promoting XYZ. Is this something you would be interested in? Would love to hop on the call. XOXO gossip girl. No, I'm just kidding. XOXO. Why do I say XO? Follow your joy, Millie. Okay. That's as simple as that. So you can pitch a specific idea, or if you don't have an idea, you just want to partner with the brand, you're going to say something like we'd love to see if there's an opportunity for us to partner together, whether now or in the future, do you have time to hop on a call to discuss your marketing goals for this year? Say something like that. Most of the time, if you're like Millie, I don't want to hop on a call. Most of the time, they are not going to hop on a call. They're going to be like, Oh, we're actually busy, but we can email. But the fact that you're willing to hop on a call is going to make you stand out above and beyond everybody else. Okay. Now, believe it or not, the conversions of pitching is lower than catching. And when I say catching, I mean like if a brand pitches to you and they're like, Hey, we want to partner with you. That collaboration is almost a done deal, right? You just got to negotiate. But pitching and cold pitching brands, the conversion of actually them saying, yes, not as high up there. You're not going to land every pitch that you send. It's just a matter of fact. So don't be scared of hearing no. And don't be scared of getting ghosted because I hear no's all the time. I get ghosted all the time. Some of my favorite brands, I pitch to them and they ignore me. I follow up three times. They ignore me. I even had a brand that I wanted to partner with. Oh, should I call them out? Should I call them out? I'm going to call them out book of the month. I said it. Okay. I love book of the month. They're a monthly subscription box service. If you're a reader, I love reading and I'm such a fan of them. I've been subscribed for two years. I get a new book every single month. And I post on my stories. I talk about my book sometimes and I've converted some people to book of the month lovers. If you're curious, I'll drop a link down below because I'm obsessed and I hope you'll be obsessed. I could read together, buddy read anyway. So I've pitched to them and they've turned me down multiple times because my audience is not in alignment with their audience. And that's okay. Like it's totally fine. They have every right to say no, because it's true. Majority of my audience isn't looking to read fictional books. And that's just that they did say no for now. So it was like a comeback later type of a thing, but really what they're looking for are like YouTubers that are booktubers. Hayley Hughes, love Hayley Hughes. She's partnered with book of the month when she had less than 10,000 subscribers. So like they would rather partner with Hayley Hughes over me. I'm not saying, Oh my God, but if you're somebody who's stuck on subscriber number or follower number, I have 200,000 subscribers here. And so you would assume, Oh you could get any brand deal, but that's not what brands are looking for. They really want to connect with your audience and they want people who have similar passions as them and their audience types. So it makes total sense for them to want to partner with Hayley over me because my audience, they want to be influencers. They don't want to be book lovers. You know what I mean? So don't be afraid to hear no, don't be afraid to be ghosted because that's literally the worst that could happen. I hope this video was helpful. If you have more questions about brand collaborations, let me know in the comments below. I do have a few other videos on brand collab so I could do a little series here on my channel if this is something you're interested in or if you're like, no, I'm serious. I want to make bank. I want influencing to be my full-time job. I want to make multiple figures and brand deals. Take my course, shameless plug. I do have a course that literally teaches how to land paid brand collaborations as, as an influencer. It's everything from branding growing on Instagram to monetizing Instagram from affiliate marketing, brand collabs, all the things. So I'm going to shameless plug sponsored by myself. What's up? And if you're really serious about landing paid brand collaborations, check out the Modern Influencer. I'll link it down below. If you've made it this far and you're not already subscribed, what are you doing? Who are you? Be sure to hug that subscribe button and turn on the bell notification so you don't miss when I post my next videos and I'll see you in the next one. Thanks so much for watching. Follow your joy. Bye. Okay.