Although there are many brands out there with budgets to pay influencers and want you to help sell for them, working with every single brand is not a good idea. You will come off as wanting to make money and not making a meaningful impact on your followers’ lives. This will discourage your followers from wanting to see your content and might end up with them unfollowing you.

Below I have three tips to follow when reaching out to brands.

So let’s get started.

Three Tips When Reaching Out to Brands as an Instagram Influencer

First, you will need to find the contact info of the brands you would like to work with, which can be done by finding an email listed on their website or Instagram. Usually, there is a ‘contact us’ section at the bottom of a brand’s website, and there you will be able to find a brand’s contact info.

If you can’t find any information, you can DM them on Instagram and ask for a specific person to talk to and get in touch with. LinkedIn is also another way to connect with brands, but the quickest way is to get into their DM.

Once you have their contact, the next step is to send out the first email.

Your first email needs to include some basic information about you, such as your name, IG Handel, your stats, and why you think you would be the right person the brand should work with.

Include reasons for how you can add value to the brand and what partnering with you would do for their brand. You have to make sure you show your authority and connection you have with your audience to brands. This is the chance you get to let brands know why you would be a great asset to their campaigns.

You can mention that you have a media kit and are happy to send it over for review in this first email.

A media kit will show more in-depth detail about your brand, you, and your follower demographic. It is a good piece of document you should have ready before reaching out.

It’s good practice to follow up on an email after one week. Your email can be as simple as checking in to see if they got your last email as they might have missed it. After about two follow up emails with no response is a sign that the brands are either not interested or too busy to respond. Your email might get lost in their inbox as well, and that’s why it’s always good to send a follow up email.

If you don’t get the response, you can try two more times, but the last email you send out should be professional and let them know that you will be in touch in the next month or quarter. Don’t be rude and let your anger out as this is a professional job, and you might miss all the opportunities with one rude email.

People who don’t know about how influencers work will assume an easy, no-brainer job where you only take a selfie then get paid by brands, which in reality isn’t true at all. 

But today, we are not going to get into the process of how influencer work; instead, we are going to talk about how to get more booked deals by being an influencer through brand collaborations.

If you are ready, let’s dive right into today’s lesson: Getting Noticed by Brands. 

Five Steps to Getting Noticed by Brands as an Instagram Influencer

I discussed this in lesson two about making good first impressions. Check it out to see what you should do first.

When it comes to standing out and being noticed by brands, you need to get this part right, or else brands won’t take the time to look deeper into your account. 

Brands want great engagement and a connection you have with your followers, but they won’t be able to notice that if they get turned off by how your account looks and if your Instagram doesn’t represent that you are an influencer.  

Brands love it when you can show that you authentically love their products before working with them.

Using their products and naturally showing that on your feed is a huge selling point for getting noticed by the brands you already love. Also, having product shots of a brand’s product is an excellent way to showcase your content creation skills.

Posting about a product is good, but leaving a genuine review and tagging the brand in your post is better. Be sure you speak from your heart and not sound over the top that this is ‘The Best Serum of All Time’ unless you genuinely feel that way.

When you tag a brand, that’s a quick way for brands to notice you and might take a look at what type of account you have.

Stories are a great way to share with your followers that you love a specific brand and help you get noticed by brands. When you post a story, tagging a brand you love, a direct message is created. Being in the brands’ DM can help to spark a conversation and make you more noticeable.

Almost all brands have a hashtag(s) they use that speaks to the brand they are. When you use their hashtags, you have a high chance of brands getting in touch with you. Most brands will have a product showcase where they are showcasing a specific hashtag on their website, newsletters, or other channels. It is your chance to be discovered quickly, as the brands’ hashtags are not as popular as other hashtags on Instagram. 

Remember Lesson seven: Growing with Hashtags?

You will also be able to gain new followers who are loving the same brands as you do. 

When you show that you are using their products, that advise brands to consider you to promote their products in the future.  

You might have a chance to feature on their Instagram or website, which will get you to a good start of the brand partnership.

I first want to say that Instagram hashtags are always different for every person. When you search #cupcakes, the photos you first see will be different from those of someone else who searched it at the same time. It has to do with what content you are most interested in, what accounts you engage with, and what Instagram’s algorithm thinks is best for you to see. So when you add a hashtag to a photo, keep in mind, Instagram will not show it to people who they think won’t want to see it. Crazy right? I agree!

Here are some screenshots of three different hashtags searched at the same time on two different accounts.

Seven Keys to Grow Instagram with Hashtags

Best practices for growing your reach on Instagram are about diversifying your selections from rare, small, medium, and large hashtags. By small, medium, and large, I mean the number of total posts a specific hashtag has gotten. 

I categorize them into five categories:

Popular: More than 1M 

Large: 250K – 1M 

Medium: 100K – 250K 

Small: 50K-100K 

Rare: Lower than 50K 

Hashtags like #summer have millions of posts, 476 million at last count, and are what you would call a POPULAR hashtag. A hashtag like #summertimefun has about 800,000 and is a LARGE hashtag. A MEDIUM hashtag would be #summerlovers that have less than 250,000 total posts. A hashtag like #summertimemadness has a little bit over 50,000 and is a SMALL hashtag. A RARE hashtag would be #summerfridaysjetlagmask that has less than 3,000 total posts. 

The most number of hashtags you can have in a post is 30 hashtags.

When picking out your hashtags, your goal is to mix them up;

Popular (More than 1M): Use 0 to 1 hashtag

Large (250K – 1M): Use 3 to 5 hashtags

Medium (100K – 250K): Use 5 to 10 hashtags

Small (50K-100K): Use 8 to 12 hashtags

Rare (Lower than 50K): Use 1 to 3 hashtags

The reason for this is the likelihood of people seeing your posts. If you select all POPULAR or LARGE hashtags, your post will not be viewed by millions of people. This is because new posts are continually being uploaded, and your post will drop down where not many people will look for it. On the other hand, if you use only SMALL hashtags, your photo will stay up on that hashtag for longer because fewer people are using it. By spreading your hashtags to RARE, SMALL, MEDIUM, and LARGE, you are giving yourself a better chance of being discovered by more people and growing your reach.

There are many myths and rules people are coming up with to try to trick the Instagram algorithm, and it has to do with where you place your hashtags.

After my trials and errors, I have found that the place where you put your hashtags has nothing to do with your reaches and impressions. It’s no right or wrong about where you choose to include them. So feel free to do whichever way you wish.

Here are three places you can have your hashtags.

• In your caption
• In your comments
• In both caption and comment sections

Make sure your hashtags are relevant to the picture you are posting. 

Depending on your niche and the type of content you usually are posting, you should have a list of your hashtags categorized.

You can download the worksheet from the Influencer Library and start building out your hashtags library.

I recommend updating them at least once a month. As some hashtags can become very popular quickly, it’s essential to update them so that you are always having a mix of different size hashtags in your posts.

Here is a list of apps out there you can get to generate a list of SMALL, MEDIUM, and LARGE hashtags related to keywords you enter. 

1. Ingrammer 
2. All Hashtag  
3. Hashtag Generator Tool 
4. Sistrix 
5. Daily Purpose

Before your about to post on Instagram, you might want to consider engaging 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after. When you engage around the time of your post, you are showing Instagram that you are active and increase your chances of them pushing your content to more people. This sort of tactic might not work for everyone but is worth trying. A best practice is to be authentic in your activity level and to engage as much as you want.

There are a lot of engagement groups on Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms. They were created to share Instagram posts, and have others engage with each other to drive more engagement and trick the Instagram algorithm.

The primary purpose of these groups is to help support each other by commenting on others’ posts who contribute to the group. I used to participate in those groups, too, as I saw it helped my account by getting a boost of engagement and reaches. Now I do not join anymore. It was enticing as you knew whatever content you posted, you would get engagement results even though it wasn’t all AUTHENTIC engagement.

Although these groups do give your post more reach, it is by no means organic. You have to engage with others’ content, even if you have no interest in the posted content. When you stop contributing, that ENGAGED COMMUNITY suddenly stops engaging. That’s why it’s essential to build AUTHENTIC engagement through quality content and to share through a proper hashtag strategy.

Some Instagram coaches will recommend you to participate in these SUPPORT GROUPS as they see it might benefit you now but are not looking at your future.

What I would like to tell you is to STOP contributing to those engagement groups if you are not already a part of them. Think for a moment, are you being genuine and having a significant impact on REAL followers by requiring other people to comment on your post even if they aren’t interested in your content? Just so that you can trick others into thinking you have a more ENGAGED COMMUNITY? It’s your choice to make!