A Complete Guide to Pitching Brands for Partnerships.
From finding brand contacts, designing your pitch email (with template), to an effective follow-up strategy.
Hey Digital Insiders 👋🏾, in this post you’re going to learn how as a small creator or influencer you can land paid brand partnerships. If you found the info useful let me know in the comments, share and subscribe.
Content creation can be a real struggle, even for the biggest and best creators out there. It’s not just about documenting our experiences or sharing our talents; it's also the hard slog of audience building, promoting, branding, and the mental and physical toll that comes with all of that.
So, it’s not a bad idea to get paid for this labor, and I'm not just talking in views or followers (which is nice), but it takes money to sustain the creator effort.
Brand partnerships, if we can secure them, can be a very lucrative revenue stream, and the good news is it doesn’t take having a large following to do it.
The trick is understanding how to present value, says Jermaine McDonald of Learn, Grow, Invest, who landed their first brand sponsorship at 2k YouTube subscribers. At almost 10k subscribers, he says they have now made JMD $15-20M in sponsorship since 2020.
Jamaican born broadcast journalist turned full-time travel influencer and consultant at the Shakespeare Agency, Lisa-Gaye Shakespeare, agrees it is not about size but having a good pitch strategy.
Like Learn, Grow, Invest, Lisa-Gaye is considered a micro-influencer, though with a larger platform of 60k+ followers. Yet, she has found success plugging and pitching her way around the world (56 countries so far).
She has mastered the art of pitching to brands, which is to say positioning her brand as a source of promotional value for companies looking to reach audiences like hers.
On Threads Lisa-Gaye regularly discusses her methods and posts almost daily updates on the outcome of the on-average 25 pitches and follow-ups she does every day.
In our interview, she gave us the full breakdown, and when I say full, I mean she left nothing out about her 75% success rate email pitch strategy. It’s effectively everything you need to know about pitching.
Below, I have shared the full 90-minute interview as well as bite-sized clips for easier viewing.
How to find brand contacts
In this clip you’ll learn how to use Google search, LinkedIn, Instagram and websites to find the right person at the company to send your pitch.
How to create a brand pitch email template
In this clip you’ll learn how to create an email pitch template so like Lisa-Gaye you can send multiple pitches per day. She also shares her technique for crafting catchy email subject lines and her 3x3 follow up strategy.
Download the sample pitch document here👇🏿
Is your brand ready to pitch?
You can watch the full interview to learn how to get your brand pitch ready, how to get paid and what are some contract non-negotiables.
I hope you enjoyed her passion and enthusiasm and you learned a lot. If you did be sure to like this post, leave a comment, subscribe and of course show your appreciation and follow Lisa-Gaye on Instagram.