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One of the great perks of running your own website is getting to work with brands. Brands want to work with bloggers, and social media influencers, in a variety of ways. These include paid collaborations on your blog, sponsored social media posts, product reviews and more. While work WILL come to you, in time, you can get yourself out there, and in touch with brands, by pitching to brands that you want to work with. This guide tells you everything that you need to know about pitching to brands.
How to find the right person to contact
The first step to pitching to brands is finding the right person to contact.
LinkedIn: Look for the company and then search through their employees. Look for anyone with brand partnerships, marketing, PR (public relations) or even sales listed within their job description. LinkedIn is a great tool as you can directly message people via the website – so ensure that your own profile is up to date.
Search online: Look on Google for email address for specific brands. Search for PR contacts or look for press releases. With press releases there is often an email contact listed at the bottom for any enquiries. This is usually a great person to contact to arrange product reviews or to register your interest for future collaborations.
Social media: If all else fails then consider sending a direct message on Twitter or Instagram to the brand account and ask for the person who deals with media enquiries. This can yield great results in finding a name and email address for the correct person to pitch to.
If all else fails considering using the ‘info’ or ‘help’ email address for a website, usually listed on their ‘Contact’ page. While you may not always get a response typically your email will be forwarded on to the right department, at the very least. You can also consider asking for the name and email of the correct person in your initial email.
What to say in your pitch email
Now that you’ve found an email address, or contact, you may be wondering what to say in your email.
Start off with a strong title – this is what is hopefully going to lure the reader into opening your email. As the person you’re emailing may be inundated with 100s of emails every week, or even every day, standing out is important. Go for something catchy but don’t make it long. ‘Media collaboration’, ‘brand collaboration’ or ‘enquiry’ may all be simple enough to capture attention without being misleading.
Include your stats. This can be social media followers, engagement rate, readership rate etc. Avoid attaching additional documents like media kits or rate cards, as they are just expecting the reader to click something else. Also, if you don’t have huge stats then consider focusing on your best areas, whether this is high Instagram engagement or strong photography. Make sure to link to your blog and social media channels at this point.
Talk about what you can offer. Keep it short and mention past relevant collaborations with 1-2 links.
Keep it short and snappy and stick to just a few paragraphs for your entire email. Sending walls of text is going to be off-putting, particularly if you’ve never spoke with this person before.
When is the best time to send your pitch email?
Definitely send your pitch emails during the day. Tuesday – Thursday seems to be the best time to get brands to respond, rather than just deleting your pitch email (which WILL happen). Consider sending pitches between 10am – 4pm. If you’re not available during these times then prepare your pitch emails in the evening and send them using Boomerang for Gmail. This will allow you to pre-write your emails and send them at a more sociable hour – ideal for night owls!
What happens after you send off your pitch email?
Not heard back? Give it 1-2 weeks and then consider a friendly chase. If you’ve pitched over a busy period, Summer holidays, Christmas, etc then give it a little bit longer.
When chasing, keep it polite and breezy. Check if your original email was received.
Also, keep an up to date media kit, without rates on, with details of all your current stats (update it monthly) and send this over if brands want further details of the kind of campaigns that you can offer.
Now that you’ve got all of the information you need get yourself pitching! Good luck!
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