How to Find Instagram Sponsorship with a Small Account

Do you see people on Instagram showing off cool products and think Wow, I could never get a brand deal with my small account?

Well, the good news is you can. I've got some fresh new strategies for you based on personal experience when I was first starting out on Instagram. So if you're looking for tips on how to find sponsors and are willing to work with small influencers, stick around, my friend!

How to Find Instagram Sponsorship with a Small Account

I'm Michelle Osorio, a filmmaker, and singer, Youtuber-turned entrepreneur and I was able to grow two Instagram accounts quickly to 23,000 and 20,000 followers, in just a matter of months. In this post, I’ll walk you through the strategies that made me achieve that and show you how to do it.

I'm writing this while on an awesome steam train trip here in the United Kingdom. I thought this would be the perfect place to do some Instagram photos for a brand deal and teach you some tricks.

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Jumping right in, my top favorite tips to see results on Instagram are:

Don’t have a huge following? No Problem!

My first tip is if you're just starting out, you don't have to worry about having a following so much as just working on your engagement. If you don't have a lot of engagement, you need to start working on that now.

Engagement just means that when people see the pictures on your Instagram, they're going to like and they’re going to comment. They're going to spend lots of time looking at the picture and examining it. And so that's what it means that they're engaging with the content.

Therefore, don’t be intimidated if you don't have a big following. A lot of times these days, brands are actually looking for what are called micro-influencers, which means you may not have a big following, but you have a lot of engagement.

According to studies:

The numbers show that bigger influencers actually tend to have less engagement percentage-wise, which means if there's an influencer with 100,000 followers, they might only have  2% or 3% engagement. That's because people might not be commenting as much percentage-wise for the number of followers they have.

Whereas brands have started to notice that micro-influencers (people with very small followings), actually have a higher percentage of the people who are following them making comments and engaging. It's a kind of a smaller community. That's a good thing because if you're a micro-influencer, you still have a good chance of getting a brand deal. It happens all the time.

Don’t just post…Engage!

Like I said, if your engagement is not very good, start working on that right now. Don't just post something and then sit there and wait for the comments and the likes. You need to engage with the community just as much as you're expecting engagement back.

Go to the people you're following and go to the people that follow you and go leave them comments and replies. Go out there and be active and if anybody comments you need to reply back. In the beginning, if you're trying to get more engagement, instead of just saying, oh thank you… If they say ‘nice picture', why don't you follow up with a question? Ask them how they're doing today? Try to get a conversation going. Ask them what their favorite part of the photo or the video that you posted is.

The more comments you can get, the more engagement you're going to get. That actually is a metric that brands might want to look at.

Identify audience before potential Sponsors

Next, you want to identify potential sponsors. A lot of people would advise you to just pick brands you like. That's just half of the equation. It's actually really important that you also identify who your target audience is.

In fact, that's just as important in general for branding and for social media. You want to know who is your ideal customer or your target audience. What if most of the people who follow you on Instagram are 45-year-old moms who enjoy shopping and spending time with their kids? But you happen to love paintball so you go look for a paintball sponsorship. If you do something like that, there's a big mismatch… The audience doesn't care for the content.

If your audience doesn’t engage, the sponsor is unhappy. Everybody loses. Ultimately your job should be to serve your audience, to be there for them and to provide them with information that they'll find valuable.

So what you want to do is show them products that they would be interested in. Before you do anything, you have to sit back and try to identify your audience.

Get talking in your brand's community

The next thing you want to do is get talking in your brand's community. Get talking to other people who might have similar interests. Start using relevant #hashtags. For instance, let's just say you really like a certain clothing brand. Don't just use the hashtag of the brand, go look and see the kind of campaigns that they're doing. There could be seasonal campaigns or giveaways.  Use those hashtags. Start tagging them in posts and stories.

Really engage so that you start getting on their radar to prepare for when you're ready to start talking to these brands. This goes beyond just Instagram. Twitter is actually a really great place to engage with brands too. That's actually how I was able to start conversations with particular companies and have a two-way dialogue. Eventually, I was able to become a brand ambassador for a few companies just by engaging with them on Twitter. Twitter's a great place for one-on-one communication.

The idea is that you want to start warming brands up to you. You want to be talking to them. When you're ready… you can slide into their DMs and see if they're ready. You can do a soft pitch and just say,

Hey, love to work with you sometime. If you ever think that I'd be a good fit for one of your campaigns.

Then you can hit them up again. It's totally fine.

What's the worst that'll happen?

They'll say, no?

If you think you're ready, you can graduate to a formal pitch. This is where you put together a proposal or at least a well-thought-out letter. Not a copy/paste but something that is customized for the brand.

Do a Google search and try to find somebody from marketing or PR in the company, but a lot of times companies are actually using an outside PR firm or an outside PR agency. That’s a little bit hard to figure out and that's why it's good to start building those relationships with the brand first. That way they might keep you in mind and refer you to the PR agency later.

Too shy to reach out? There is a way out.

If you find direct pitching too difficult or maybe you're just a little shy and you're not ready to reach out to brands… Something you can do is create an account on websites like Aspire IQ or Influence.co or if you have enough followers you can join Famebit. All of those are basically a third party service, as a middleman that aggregates opportunities that the brands have brought to this  website and then you can just look for campaigns you're interested in and apply.

I have done those a few times. It's easier in the sense that I don't have to feel shy about approaching anybody. I can just submit a proposal, but I already know what kind of campaigns the brand is going for. They'll already have terms set (like of how many followers you need to have, how much engagement you need, etc.) on these websites.

What's cool about it is if you grant permission to a site like this, it will gather helpful information, analytics and insights that the brands can use. For instance, the brand might have a campaign that says,

Hey, we want to show off fall colors in our clothing collection, but you need to have these many followers and 5% engagement on your posts… and we're looking for these type of influencers in this country.

That's really helpful, right? Because then you know if you fit the criteria or not. I do this once in a while, and I would say that I get approved probably about half the time, which is pretty good… and I'd say that's probably because I've always had really good engagement even when I haven't had a lot of followers.  I try my best to engage with my community, replying to everybody as best I can, and then looking at my top engagers and going to visit them on their profiles and talking to them, commenting on their pictures, liking and more. You gotta pay it forward. That's super important if you're going for the engagement.

Get a Media Kit

The next level to this is to create a media kit. That's where you put together slides with helpful information about your audience demographics. You might show some of your portfolios. Now that could be an entire post in and of itself. So let me know in my YouTube comments if you want me to talk more about what it's like to make a media kit.

But just so you know, that could be an overkill. I've never created one and I was able to get lots of brand deals. That's actually something on my to-do list that I really need to work on. So it is and it isn't necessary. But, if you don't have followers, it doesn't hurt to have a media kit under your belt.

Let's say that you pitch a brand or you just DM them and say, Oh, I'd love to work with you. … and then they actually reply! [Gasp] It actually does happen a lot. So are you prepared for the next stage for negotiating? How to talk about terms?

I actually talk about that in my next post where I take you through the anatomy of a brand deal from beginning to end. So, make sure you check out that video or blog post. You can subscribe to my mailing list to keep in the loop.

Lastly remember, this is doable. You can do anything you set your mind to. Don't let anybody talk you out of your dreams.

Remember:

Never give up.

Always be a Dare to Dreamer.

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