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Before we get into the pitch I wanted to quickly go over What Not To Do When Pitching Yourself…

Never put yourself down or point out the “negative”. We only EVER want to focus on the positive.

Example of what NOT to do:

“Hi, I’m {Name}, I would love the the opportunity to be able to work with {X Brand}. I just started my blog a few months ago. I also created an instagram page to go with it. I know I’m just starting out and don’t have a ton of followers, but I would really love to promote your products! Thank you for your consideration.”

Everything mentioned is exactly why a brand wouldn’t want to collaborate or become a partner. All I did there was highlight how much of a newbie I was and then ask the brand for a favor (aka freebies).

You have something valuable to give to brands and that is your ability to create content and showcase it to your audience no matter how big or small.

Never just send in an email asking if they are looking for influencers.

Example of what NOT to do:

“Hi {X brand} my name is {Name} and I was wondering if you were looking for influencers to work with? I would love to work with you!”

This shows NO effort at all, I doesn’t highlight any benefit about you, it lacks confidence, and it is not a pitch.

Remember, you are pitching the brand to show them the value that you bring to the table.

Help Them Help You

If you just send a general pitch/proposal with zero ideas on how you can partner, you’re basically expecting them to stop what they are doing, go on your website and social media handles, try to figure out what you’re good at and then come up with the idea on ways you can work together. No one has time for that…

So figure out their goals – maybe they need brand awareness, fresh content for their social media or a new campaign video and let them know what you can provide to help them reach their goals. If you make it as easy as possible for them, it’ll be hard for them to say “no.” 

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Links Mentioned:

Land The Brand$ Masterclass: https://www.landthebrands.com/masterclass

Land The Brand$ Course: https://www.landthebrands.com/info

Instagram Account: https://www.instagram.com/thedailyinfluencers

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Complete Episode Transcript:

0:07
Hey there Welcome to the daily influencers podcast My name is Erica Marie Daily- former marketer and brand manager, turned your influencer marketing coach. On this podcast we help both influencers and brands, maximize their collaboration, grow on social media make more money and waste less time. Speaking of which let’s jump right into today’s episode

0:34
this episode is brought to you buy my free masterclass where we talk about landing paying brand deals with any size following and I know what you’re thinking you’re thinking, Well, my followings not big enough, when I say any size following, I truly mean any size following and I’ll just say a lot of my students actually come to me with very little followers, no experience pitching, and have never sent a pitch before. So if you think that you’re not ready or everyone else is further than you, that is not the case. And every single day I’m having influencers telling me that they landed their first paying brand deal. So if you want to take my hour and a half free masterclass all about how to land paying brand deals and make more money as a smaller influencer, go to www dot land the brand za with an S at the end.com slash masterclass. All right, let’s jump into today’s episode. I know last week, we were talking all about how to make yourself stand out using a USP when you’re pitching brands. And I wanted to get more into what you want to be doing when you’re pitching. But then I thought, why don’t I actually first start with what not to do in pitching because that’s equally if not more important than what to do and pitching because if you’re messing up right away, that’s going to discount you. If you’re sending Okay, pitches, that’s not horrible. And if you’re sending really great pitches, well, that’s great. So let’s first talk about the things that I don’t want you guys to do when you’re pitching. So I’m going to give you three things not to do and give you an example of somebody putting it in their pitch and then how we can turn it around. So number one is never put yourself down or point out the negative. And so we only ever want to focus on the positive in your pitch, there might be things that you’re not super great at. But we don’t need to emphasize that or talk about it, you want to find the things that you do really well and emphasize those things. So let me give you an example of what not to do using this example. Hi, my name is Erica. And I would love the opportunity to be able to work with your brand. I just started my blog a few months ago, I also created an Instagram page to go with it. I know I’m just starting out and don’t have a ton of followers. But I would really love to promote your products. Thank you for your consideration. So everything mentioned and this is exactly why a brand wouldn’t want to collaborate or become a partner. All I did here was highlight how much of a newbie I was and then ask the brand for a favor, aka freebies or consideration. Now you have something so valuable to give brands and that is your ability to create content and showcase it to your audience, no matter how big or small you are. And so highlighting that you don’t have a ton of followers or saying that you’re just starting out. That is not information that a brand needs to know. And you also don’t want to say something like thank you for your consideration. You want to do something, um, we had a term for this in sales, and I cannot think of it. But oh, it’s called assuming the clothes. So you want to assume the clothes and how you do that would say I look forward to working with you. That’s an assumptive close. So you’re speaking it basically into existence, like, Hey, I’m already saying that we’re going to work together and I can’t wait for that rather than thank you for your consideration, which is kind of like and we’ll see if this works out. So example number one of what not to do is never put yourself down or point out the negatives. Now this second one is never just send an email asking if you’re looking for influencers, you guys, as somebody who has hired thousands of influencers and probably seen over 10,000 pitches. This is something that I got more than you would think and especially if you’re sending this via dm, you got to think of this like a job. When you’re applying to be an influencer. You need to be pitching them with a why you’d be a valuable person for this position. If you just were looking for a job and you email them and said Hey, are you hiring? They’re just gonna brush you over. No, you need a research if we’re hiring, research our business and tell me why you’d be a great fit for our company. So an example of what not to do is hi brand My name is Erica. I was wondering if you were looking for influencers to work with I would love to work with you. Now real quick. How many of you guys have done this? Raise your hand if you’re guilty? Don’t feel bad because so many people have and it’s really not your fault. No one is teaching pitching well except me. And so you guys really don’t know what to

5:00
To do unless you’ve been in this world. And that’s where I come in, because I worked on the brand side and I was the person receiving pitches and selecting which influencers we were working with. So kind of the reason I want to show you why this doesn’t work is it really shows no effort at all, it doesn’t highlight any benefit about you, it lacks confidence, and it’s not even a pitch at all. And to top it all off, it doesn’t say anything about how you would be a benefit to the brand. Because you guys got to remember when you’re pitching a brand to work for them, or collaborate, especially if you want pay, you need to explain why you are going to bring benefit to their company, because the whole point of them hiring you is because you’re going to benefit them in some way. And you’re going to give them a return on their investment into you. No brand, no company would ever invest into something that they didn’t think that they were going to get a return on that just isn’t smart business, and nobody would do it. So remember that you are pitching a brand to show them value that you bring to the table. So when you come at them, and you just ask them if they’re hiring influencers that does none of that. So what I want you to keep in your mind is never just ask a brand, if they’re looking for influencers, never ever, ever. First of all, when you do that, that’s going to be an automatic No, I know if somebody did that, to me, it would just automatically be No, I’d be like this person’s not professional, they are not putting any effort into this pitch. And it’s just not probably going to end up well. So I’m just gonna count this one out, move on to the next influencer, who actually took the time to research our business pitch something, you know, that shows that they’re valuable, and really, you know, put in the effort, because another thing you guys have to remember and you know, I have a lot of experience with this, because I’ve worked with so many influencers is that influencers do have a bad name a little bit because there’s a lot of times when brands will hire an influencer, and the influencer just does not follow through. They don’t do what they said they were gonna do. They just flake out and completely disappear. They take the money and run, they have a fake audience. I mean, there’s so many things that influencers do that has given it a bad name, because you know, there’s just all kinds of different people that are influencers. And so when a brand gets a pitch right away, that isn’t showing professionalism isn’t showing effort that just puts in my head when I’m hiring influencers, that I’m better off finding somebody who put in the effort and is more professional, because odds are they’re going to perform, they’re not going to be flaky, they’re not going to disappear. And they’re gonna follow through. So just keep that in mind. And by the way, if you pitch a brand, and they aren’t hiring influencers, they’ll just tell you, they say, Hey, sorry, we’re not hiring any new influencers right now, or we don’t work with influencers, whatever the case, but at that point, then you can say, Okay, great, and move on, but do not ask. Alright, the last one is actually more so for your proposals. But I’m also going to throw this into pitching because sometimes your pitch is also your proposal. And I call this one the help them help you, meaning help the brand help you out here. So let’s talk about the pitch and proposal process. So if you just send out a general pitch or proposal with zero ideas on how you can partner with the brand, you’re basically just expecting them to stop what they’re doing. Go on your website, go to your social media handles, try to figure out what you’re good at what you’re all about what you like, what your skill sets are, and then come up with ideas on how you guys can work together. And no one has time for that, especially not a brand. And you have to think if there’s influencers out there who are pitching with all these ideas, versus you who’s pitching with zero ideas, they’re going to go with the one that has takes less work, which is the person that has all the ideas. So another thing to keep in mind here is your media kit is so important to send out when you are sending your pitches and proposals. And if you guys don’t know what that is, then I highly suggest you take that masterclass and then hop into my course land the brands because they teach you all of this. But the reason your media kit is so important is because it highlights who you are as a person, it highlights who you are as an influencer. And it highlights your skill sets. So even if you’re not presenting the brand with ideas on exactly how you could work together or what type of collaboration you could do, they at least can just quickly look at your media kit, get a feel for you get a feel for you as an influencer and what your audience is all about. And then also get a feel for your skill set. So if you’re great at videography, and you have a big YouTube audience, and they know that you love cooking, perfect, you can do a cooking show with their products on your YouTube channel. And that’s going to be the best thing. But if you don’t tell them anything about you, they’re going to have to go and research it. And that is a lot of work for them. And so again, they’re just going to move to the person that’s more professional, gave them more information and made their job easier. So what I want you guys to do here, when you are coming up with a proposal on what you want to present them and what ideas you have, go to their website and do your research. Figure out what

10:00
their goals are. And this is something I teach my influencers to actually ask about in their pitch, so that when they do propose, they can actually propose on exactly what the brand said their goals are. So maybe the brand needs brand awareness, or maybe they need fresh content for their social media, or a new campaign video, and let them know that you can provide these things to help them reach their goals. So how do you know if they need more brand awareness? Well, if they don’t have a big social media presence at all, that’s probably something that they want to work on. So how can you as an influencer, bring them more brand awareness and bring them more followers to their social media? Or maybe you look at their Instagram, and they have horrible pictures, they’re not posting a lot. So you could say, hey, it looks like you need some fresh content for your Instagram so you can post more frequently, why don’t I put together a proposal where I send you a ton of different pictures that you can use on your own social media. Or maybe they need a new campaign video, maybe they just launched a brand new product, and you know that they always launch a campaign video with a new influencer, you should propose how you could be that person for them. So just a little bit of research on these brands, it’s a little bit more time for you, but it’s going to make you stand out so much more. And when you’re not doing this, again, that could just be an instant no for the brand, because they just don’t have time to do that work for you. So what I want you to remember is if you make it as easy as possible for them, it will be really hard for them to say no to you, you’re going to go to the top of the pile because you made their job easy. You look professional, you know what you’re doing, and they probably can count on you. And that goes a really long way. Say Hope you guys take these three things to heart, do not I’m just going to wrap it all up again, do not ever put yourself down or point out the negative. Instead, we want you guys to focus on all of the positives about you because there’s always going to be positives about you. And then never send an email asking if they’re looking for influencers. Never ever, ever. If they aren’t, again, they’re going to tell you, you want to send a full on pitch. And in your pitch. You want to help them help you make it as easy as possible. Alright, you guys good luck out there pitching. If you need help, again, go to my masterclass, it’s absolutely free. It’s an hour and a half, I do a q&a at the end. I’ll put the link in the description box below if you guys want to go check that out and you don’t remember what the URL is. And then if you need even more help, I have courses I have coaching that you can do i do private one on one calls. So if you have any questions, reach out to me. I’m happy to hop on the phone with you and see what your goals are and see how you I can help you and what the best fit for you would be.

12:43
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked what you heard, it goes a long way if you could take 30 seconds and leave me a five star review and share this podcast with your friends. Alright you guys, I’ll see you on the next episode.