How To Contact Brands For Collaboration

Brand collaborations are one of the best ways to monetize your blog. Influencer marketing is super popular with companies, mainly because the ROI is way better than traditional ads and outdated marketing strategies. In fact, influencer marketing budgets are going up every year with big companies, which means more opportunities for you and your blog! 

If you’re not familiar with influencer marketing, it’s basically where brands use bloggers or social media users with a big audience to market their products. It’s like when Kendall Jenner posts an Instagram story rocking a new Adidas tracksuit. Or, like when Chiara Ferragni uploads a blog post about the latest Louis Vuitton collection. Those posts aren’t completely organic; they’re sponsored by the brand and these influencers get paid big bucks to showcase their content. (Here’s more on how brand collaborations work!) 

Obviously, those are huge influencers, but brands are actually more and more often looking to micro-influencers and mid-tier influencers because they’re much less expensive and usually have a more personal connection with their fans than big celebrities. Again, all this spells HUGE opportunity for you! However, if you’ve never reached out to a brand for collaboration, the idea of reaching out to brands and pitching a collab on your own can be super intimidating. 

So, if you’re tired of waiting for brands to come your way and you want to get started with influencer marketing ASAP, we’ve got you. Here’s our guide for contacting brands for sponsorships:

How To Contact Brands For Collaboration 

Step 1: Interact with the brand on socials often. 

Before you even think about pitching a collab, you should be regularly interacting with the brand on social media. Comment on their posts, share their posts, and tag them in your own posts using their products! 

This is important because brands want to work with authentic users of their products. If you don’t genuinely love what they do, your content won’t be very persuasive to your audience. So, show the brand some love on social media!

Step 2: Make it clear you use their products. 

Along that same line, make it obvious that you use the brand’s product on your Instagram page. Create content for free that shows what you could offer in a collab. Maybe you leave a review, take some really cool pictures, or even dedicate a whole blog post to a product round-up. Just make sure your blog and social pages show the brand you use the product and can handle creating high-quality content for them! 

Step 3: Ensure your brand values match. 

Even if you love a product, a collaboration isn’t always a great fit. Beyond the product itself, brands have values and messaging that may or may not match what you do. So, before you consider marketing for brands as an influencer, do a deep dive into the company and make sure you’ll be good partners. 

For example, let’s say you love a certain brand’s faux leather jackets and suede hats. You feature them all the time in your Instagram and LTK posts. However, you regularly post about your firm anti-fur stance and all your outfits are totally vegan. If the brand you’re pitching to also has plenty of garments with real animal fur, scales, leathers, etc. a partnership between the two of you probably wouldn’t work out.   

So, make sure you and the brand vibe well together and share similar values before you ask them to pay you for a post. They’ll only consider a collaboration if they think your audience and influence will align with their branding and bring in more revenue. 

Step 4: Find the contact information. 

Once you’ve done all that, it’s time to find contact information for the collab! This can honestly be one of the hardest parts of getting a sponsorship. Most brands don’t have a PR email address readily available for just anyone, so you’ll need to do some digging. Here are the contact options from best to worst for pitching a collab. 

• Best: PR Email – If you can, find their PR email address because this will link you directly to the person in charge of handling collab inquiries. These are sometimes on the Contact Us page of the brand’s website or on LinkedIn. 
• Better: Instagram Linked Email – If the brand has an email button on Instagram, click that. This email will hopefully connect you with someone who works directly with the Instagram and social media side of things. 
• Good: Ask a Fellow Influencer – If you have connections and relationships with other influencers who have worked with the brand you’re hoping to contact, tactfully ask them for the contact info. Make sure you’re ready for a collab, though. It can put a fellow influencer’s own credibility in jeopardy to carelessly give out brand information to someone who isn’t ready for sponsorship. 
• Okay: DM Brands on Instagram – This really isn’t the best option, because often social media managers run Instagram accounts, and they have little connection to the brand itself. However, you may get lucky and they could pass your information on to the right people! (Plus, if it’s a smaller brand, the person who runs the profile might actually be the right person to contact too. You just never know!)

Step 5: Freshen up your media kit. 

Your media kit is like a summary of your brand. It’s something the brands can quickly scroll through and determine almost immediately if you’re going to be the right fit. It should not only include things like your brand vibe and messaging but also useful insights into the success of your blog. If you’ve made one in the past, freshen it up before sending it out to brands. A media kit should include:

• A short bio
• Performance data 
• Audience demographics
• Engagement rates
• Example posts
• List of content offered for collab (Reels, blog posts, etc.) 

Step 6: Send them your pitch. 

Finally, it’s time to send them your pitch. When contacting brands, you should always send an email that’s totally original and customized for this company. Copy and pasted collabs are obvious and will be immediately rejected. 

Start by explaining who you are and what you do, then note relevant experience or achievements, and then get right to what you want to do. Don’t be vague either, but give them specific on what kind of content you’d like to produce for them. Finally, explain why the partnership is a smart choice for the brand. 

Keep it all under 3-5 paragraphs to make sure it gets read all the way through. Of course, also include your media kit!

Landing brand collaborations takes the right strategy!

When pitching to brands, you have to be super intentional to represent yourself well and adequately communicate how the company will benefit from partnering with you. Once you get your foot in the door with your first collab, more will come your way and those pitch emails will get easier and easier! Soon, you’ll need to hire a blog manager to handle all the sponsorship requests!

At least, that’s the goal, right??? If you want more information on how to grow your brand and monetize it, head to the InfluencerSEO blog. We’re experts in blogging and influencing, and we want to help you make your brand everything you’ve dreamed of! Let’s do this!