Influencer Pitches and Brand Partnerships

January 24, 2020

In today’s social media driven landscape, influencers can play an important role in helping market brands and drive business. Wielding so much social media prowess, influencers find themselves inundated with requests from fans, colleagues, and businesses for partnerships and product placement.

Understanding an Influencer Pitch

Image via Flickr by kailayu168

A well-crafted influencer pitch helps you make a connection with the influencer and explains why your partnership would be mutually beneficial. Basically, a single e-mail, a thoughtful, direct, perfectly worded e-mail, could be the difference between success and fame for your brand, or obscurity. But no pressure. Here are some steps you can follow to make your influencer pitch as effective as possible.

Establish Specific Goals

Setting specific goals for your influencer partnership is a key step in figuring out who to approach, and how to approach them. Ask yourself what you are seeking in establishing a relationship with a particular influencer. Specific goals can be a product review, increased traffic to your website, more brand recognition, and more followers on your own social media. When crafting your pitch, mention these goals. Additionally, explain to the influencer in your pitch how a partnership could help the influencer and makes the lives of their followers richer.

Attracting the Right Influencer for The Right Brand

Before you make your pitch to an influencer, really get to know them. Explore their social media and understand the themes they share. Most importantly, make sure that your brand fits in well with the content they generate. The number of followers an influencer has is obviously an important metric to consider, but numbers alone do not mean the influencer can help your specific brand.

Research potential influencers, make sure their brand is related to your brand. Try and discern whether or not the influencer is making authentic connections with their audience. Sometimes a micro-influencer may be a better fit for your brand than a celebrity with millions of followers. Micro-influencers, influencers with up to 30,000 followers who are creating genuine relationships with like-minded followers, can be a powerful marketing tool for your brand.

Additionally, your odds of forming a partnership with a micro-influencer or local influencer are much greater than your chances of catching the eye of a mega-influencer. If the influencer seems like a good fit, make a point of liking or commenting on the content. Influencers want to see followers, shares, likes, and clicks.

Quality not Quantity

When crafting an influencer pitch your goal should be a high pitch-to-acceptance ratio. This saves time for both you and the potential influencer. Working with influencers to promote your brand is an exercise in both business and interpersonal relationships. You want to create both a beneficial business relationship, and a satisfying personal relationship.

Don’t waste an influencer’s time spamming them with generic pitches. While mega and macro influencers may have staff to help sift through the deluge of pitches they receive, micro and local influencers are generally working diligently on their own to generate content, maintain relationships, and develop new partnerships.