A Complete Guide To Land Your First Instagram Sponsorship in 2019

One question people ask me often is: how do you get Instagram sponsorships?

I’ve written a piece about how I landed my first $10,000 in brand collaborations, but I wanted to go a bit further. In this post, I’m laying out concrete steps you can take to get paid to advertise on Instagram in 2019.

Should you accept free product-for-post partnerships?

First, I want to weigh in on a debate that has been raging in the blogosphere: is it okay to take free products in exchange for a post when you’re first starting out? Some bloggers are vehemently against taking freebies, arguing that it devalues your work as well as the work of other bloggers. They have a point, but I don’t quite agree. You gotta start somewhere.

I think it’s okay to take free product when you have less than 10,000 followers. Just don’t do it for ‘exposure.’ Here’s what I mean: some brands will claim that they’re paying you in exposure when they offer you free product. They’ll say they might feature your work on their Instagram feed, exposing you to hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. Then they require you to create 3 Instagram posts and 3 Instagram stories with their hashtags and your unique discount code for your readers. You see where I’m going here…The company grows its brand awareness and sales. You end up with a free product and more work than the ‘exposure’ is worth.

Why should you take a free product then? Do it to build up the portfolio you’ll need to land paid collaborations down the road. Let’s say you want to work with Nike, but you don’t yet have the following and engagement to do so. Working with a smaller competitor can help you stand out to Nike when you pitch them in, let’s say, 9 months.

Have a plan to stop taking free products

It’s important to have an exit plan from product-for-post collaborations. For me, I decided that once I hit 10,000 Instagram followers, I would stop accepting free products. When I reached that number, I rejected any free product offers (with the exception of a few companies.) Here are some things to keep in mind when deliberating whether or not to accept an unpaid collaboration…

1. What’s the brand’s reputation? Will working with this brand help me land my dream collaborations in the future?
2. What are the requirements of the collaboration? Are they reasonable?
3. Is the free work I’m providing this company commensurate with the benefits of working with it?

Now let’s go over the steps you need to take to land your first brand collaboration.

1. Learn from the best PR experts

When I got serious about monetizing my Instagram account, I knew I couldn’t afford to spend time scouring the internet for free information. There’s a staggering amount of misinformation online, too. I did a ton of research to find a credible source from whom I could learn about how to successfully pitch brand collaborations.

That’s how I came across Julie Solomon’s course Pitch It Perfect. Julie Solomon is a New York Times best-selling publicist who worked with bloggers, artists, and entrepreneurs for 10 years. What really impressed me about her was how she leveraged a relatively small following to land huge brand deals. With just 12,000 Instagram followers, Julie negotiated a 2-year, $200,000 collaboration with a children’s brand. Given her results and reviews from her students, I decided to invest in her course. Honestly, I was reluctant to do so because of the price tag ($499), but I’m so glad I made the investment!  

What makes Pitch It Perfect a great investment?

Julie’s course is worth it because she has insider PR knowledge from 10 years of working with the types of brands you’re trying to pitch. You just won’t find that information on the internet. Pitch It Perfect is a video-based course that goes into depth about the process of brainstorming, pitching, and landing paid Instagram brand deals.

It’s not enough to reach out to a brand and say ‘Hey, I want to work with you!’ You’re a content creator so you need to approach the brand with a campaign idea. How do you come up with campaign ideas? Julie expertly explains this through videos, real-life examples, and email templates. She takes away all the guesswork around pitching brands – this will save you time and energy as a beginner. By the end of the course, you’ll understand who, what, when, and how to pitch effectively. You’ll also know how much to charge and how to discuss payment with brands.

Click here to sign up for Julie Solomon’s free pitching masterclass

Beware of scammers

There are Instagram influencers with huge followings who have released courses about landing brand collaborations. I took one of them, and it contained a lot of basic information you can Google. Mega-famous influencers aren’t necessarily a reliable source, despite their success. Sometimes, they may take advantage of you. Case in point: an influencer scammed her own followers out of $500 each for a course she never actually delivered! Be careful when buying online courses. Put in the due diligence to research the course creator. Read the course reviews. Make sure you’re 100% confident about purchasing the course.

2. Create a professional media kit

A media kit is basically your blogger resume. It lists your brand story, personal story, blog stats, social media stats, types of collaborations your offer, and previous collaborations. There is one thing I see a lot of bloggers include in their media kit that’s an absolute no-no: your rates. Do not include your rates on your media kit! (This is one of the first things I learn in Pitch It Perfect, and it has helped me secure higher-paying collaborations.)

I know this goes against what you’ve heard, but including your rates in your media kit pigeonholes you into a fixed price. You never know what a company is actually willing to pay you until you negotiate with the PR/social media person. Some companies have giant influencer marketing budgets and would be willing to pay you more than what you think they can or should.

Case in point, I worked with a Fragrance brand in early 2018, thinking I should charge them $250 for two posts. Because I didn’t list my rates on my media kit, I ended up negotiating a $400 payday. There’s an art to doing this, though, but it would take a whole course to explain it all.

3. Research the brands you want to work with

You want to make an exhaustive list of all the brands you’d like to promote to your audience. Don’t worry yet about whether the brand has an influencer marketing program. Just write down as many names as you can. Then, research the brands to see which ones sponsor bloggers and content creators. A good place to start is to look at their Instagram account to see if they reshare submitted by their brand ambassadors. Then you could do a simple Google search for ‘brand name’ + ‘influencer program.’

I’m a travel blogger so I first wrote down the travel-related products I couldn’t live without – luggage, beauty products, electronics, phone apps, and everything in between. Then I wrote down the travel and non-travel brands that interested me on a spreadsheet.

4. Stay up to date with your dream clients

To increase your chances of landing brand deals, stay in the know about ongoing campaigns, projects, and initiatives. Some easy ways to do that are to follow all of the brand’s social media pages. On Instagram, you can also follow the brand’s hashtag. From Instance, if you follow #danielwellington, your feed will show all the posts from the company’s brand ambassadors. That lets you know what they’re focusing at the moment and the types of content they like to promote.

By staying in the know, you can more convincingly pitch the brand because you can site recent developments and campaigns authentically. You’ve been following it after all, so when it’s time to pitch, talking about why you and the brand are a good match will be effortless.    

5. Find the right people in the company to contact

If you want your proposal to be read, it’s crucial to send it to the right person at the right time. You should always send your proposal to someone in the marketing or public relations department. One easy way to find the PR/Marketing person is to search for the company’s press releases. Search ‘Company name’ + ‘For immediate release’ and press releases should come up if they’re available online. Skim to the bottom of the press release, which is where the PR contact will normally be listed.

LinkedIn is another powerful tool to find contacts! You can do an advanced search to find people with any marketing/PR-related titles within that specific company. Here’s how to do it:

1. Log into your LinkedIn account and head over to the search bar at the top left. 

2. Put your cursor in the search bar to see search options. Choose ‘People’ from the drop down.

3. Select ‘All Filters’ under the People page

4. Once directed to the page below, narrow down your search by choosing the company, job title, location, industry, etc. If you choose to check the Connections boxes, LinkedIn will show connections you can be introduced to through your network. If you don’t choose it, LinkedIn will show you the employees of the company who fit the criteria you’ve designated.

In order to find the right marketing contact, these are some terms to search for:

• Influencer Relations
• Influencer Marketing
• Social Media Strategy
• Global Public Relations
• Public Relations & Communications
• Public Relations Director
• Marketing Director

Never send an email to the HR contact, an intern, or the president of the company! These people have absolutely nothing to do with influencer marketing.

6. Pitch brands consistently

Let me be upfront with you: you WILL get rejected. If you don’t have the stomach for rejection, then you might want to consider another way to make money online. Brands are picky about who they work with, and there are thousands of bloggers just like you vying for a few spots. You may also be ignored. That’s happened to me more times than I can count.

Create a routine for pitching brands. Maybe you can pitch two brands per week every Tuesday and Thursday morning. If you don’t hear back from them within a week, you can send a polite follow up. If you still don’t hear back, I’d move on. It’s not worth the trouble. Just keep researching brands to pitch. Be persistent. It may take time to land your first brand deal, but the fulfillment you’ll experience will be so worth it! And once you land that first one, the rest seem to come more easily!

What’s your #1 question about landing collaborations? Comment below and I’ll answer ASAP.

One more thing: if you liked this post, please share it!

Somto Ugwueze

Hi! I'm Somto. Two years ago, I stopped making excuses, ditched my indecisive friends, and started booking flights. Today, I'm a full-time solo traveler on a mission to inspire young women to seek new adventures.