3 Back to School Brand Deal Pitching Tips

Back to school is right around the corner.‍

If you're hoping to get back to school brand deals or sponsorships you have to start pitching right now.

So, chances are your dream brand partners are already locking in influencers to work with for their paid campaigns.

A lot of creators think that they can just reach out to brands a week or two before the school year starts and try to forge partnerships. But the truth is that it often requires a lot more

  • Preparation

  • Planning

  • Logistics

Especially since those brands are probably partnering with other creators as well.

3 Pitching Strategies

Here are my three back-to-school pitching strategies to help you land those dream brand deals.

WORK BACKWARDS

So number one is that you need to work backwards.

If you wanna secure let's say, three brand partnerships for back to school campaigns, let's assume that you're gonna have a 20% success rate.

By the way, I can get you closer to a 50% success rate if you take my course brand deal wizard.

But let's assume that we're being conservative at a 20% close rate. So, to snag three brand deals, that means you have to pitch 15 brands. In my experience, most creators send one or two DMS or mails to brands that they wanna work with, and that's it.

They don't have any sort of strategy behind what they're saying in their pitches and they don't follow up.

By the way, what are the three things that happen when you send that message?

  1. They ignore you, and you never know whether they even received the message.

  2. They can actually respond and say no.

  3. They actually respond and creators are left flat-footed.

So, what if they ignore you? And do you think most creators follow up? No, they don't.

Should you follow up anyway? Of course, they can actually respond and say no.

And then what do most creators do then? They say, okay, thanks anyway.

Is that what you should do? Of course not.

You don't take no for an answer!

But more on that later.

And the third thing that happens, is they actually respond and creators are left flat-footed. They weren't actually expecting the brand to say that they were interested and they don't have a concept that's ready to execute ASAP.

Remember back to school is right around the corner, you don't have time to hem and haw and go back and forth with the brand for weeks finalizing the idea.

It's your job as a creator to have that ready to go.

SURVEY YOUR AUDIENCE

So the second back-to-school pitching strategy is to survey your audience about what their kids' schools are doing for the fall.

Especially right now.

Brands are trying to figure out how to market to consumers since it varies in every part of the country. Some schools are doing distance learning, some are hybrid and some are in-person. You can use the results of that survey to approach brands for creative ways to help them advertise.

Not enough creators do this.

You can even incentivize your followers to respond with like a Starbucks or an Amazon gift card. Think about all the interesting things that you ask your audience. Like…

  • which brands do they like or

  • which products do they always buy every year for their kids

And you can use that as a list of brands to target by the way. You can ask them info about themselves like

  • their ages

  • their location

  • their kids' ages

  • you can even ask them household income

Don't you think it would be useful to know if let's say 75% of your audience makes under maybe $75,000 a year?

Or...

What if the majority of your audience makes over $150,000 a year?

Even if nothing comes of your pitches, you now have a ton of valuable information about your audience that could guide your content strategy.

Maybe your audience would prefer budget friendly content, or if they're more affluent, they wanna see videos with higher end product recommendations.

In general, don't be afraid to talk directly with your followers bcause it'll help you feel more plugged in.

DON’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER

And third back to school pitching strategy is that if they respond and they say no, don't just say “okay thanks anyway, please keep me in mind for future opportunities.”

You have just closed the door.

As a creator, you need to think of yourself as a sales person when it comes to this kind of thing. So find a solution for this problem. I recommend a useful solution called pivoting.

Here’s an example:

Oh, you're not interested in a back-to-school campaign. No worries, can you let me know what your holiday influencer marketing strategy looks like. I have these three other ideas that I think would be perfect, but it would be good to start planning them now so we have enough time to execute.

Again, persistence is the key here. You cannot give up.

A lot of creators here may get no response and it's a big blow to their egos. You cannot take things personally.

Any number of things could have happened to your email.

  • Maybe it got flagged as spam

  • The contact opened it and forgot to reply

Don't automatically assume the worst.

So whenever you get a response to a pitch that is different than you hoped, always have in your mind, how can I pivot this into something they would be interested in right now.

That’s the art of pivoting.

Watch this video to learn more on back to school pitching strategies.

By the way, do you want Intel on new brand deal campaigns?

Every week I send out sponsorship opportunities exclusively to creators on my email list.

So make sure to join here.

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Brand Deal Negotiation Tactics