Still Wondering How to Partner With Major Brands?
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photo credit: The TomKat Studio
Are you wondering how to partner with today’s major brands? Want to know how to catch their eye?
Well, if you were at Create & Cultivate ATL you might remember the delicious Mediterranean-inspired dishes from lunch served up by Zoës Kitchen. Beyond filling our stomachs, they’re also filling our brains with useful info. We got the chance to pick the brains of the social media and marketing team behind the restaurant lifestyle brand.
They are sharing how they want to work with influencers and how influencers should approach them.
WHAT THEY’RE LOOKING FOR IN AN INFLUENCER
If you’re already a Zoës enthusiast, that’s great! They love seeing your passion for their brand. If you eat at the restaurant, let them know. If there is a dish you love, share it! The more often they see you interact with them online, the more confident they become in your authentic interest in the brand.
They’ll have ideas of their own, but are always interested in your take on how to deliver their message to your audience. You likely have a following that differs from theirs and you know how to best engage them. Share how you would engage your specific audience with a tailored pitch.
Getting your grid right is the first step to growing your audience. Elevated photography and feed aesthetic are key elements in selecting an influencer to represent your brand. Bonus points if you can offer photography that is so good that they would repurpose it in the future (crediting you, of course).
Don’t limit yourself to a certain category for collaboration. Brands like Zoës appreciate different types of influencers to break through the clutter. For example, if you’re a fashion blogger, sharing a food-related post will stand out from the rest of your feed and will captivate followers in a new way. Using food bloggers (or same-category influencers) has benefits of its own, but brands are always seeking refreshing and unexpected ways to be seen and share content.
"Don’t limit yourself to a certain category for collaboration."
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photo credit: The TomKat Studio
NEXT STEP: HOW TO GET THEIR ATTENTION
If you’re using a product or visiting a restaurant like Zoës, tag them in a photo or use their brand hashtag. That’s the first step to getting on a brand’s radar. The person monitoring their social media will be paying close attention to who is engaging with the brand.
If that doesn’t get a brand’s attention, the onus is on you to reach out via web or social. You can shoot them a DM or send a detailed, but succinct message of why and how you want to work with them.
Include examples of relevant brand partnerships. Numbers and analytics are a great way to show the brand the kind of impact you can make.
Remember, it’s all about the feeling. People don’t only come to Zoës Kitchen because the food tastes great. More often, the team says they hear that customers enjoy ZK because of how it makes them feel. They identify with the Mediterranean way of life – leading a balanced, active lifestyle, connecting with others, and fueling their body with food they can feel great about from the inside out. These are all points that you can work into your outreach to the brand.
MORE FROM OUR BLOG
The Blogging Business Key Nobody Is Talking About
And everybody should be thinking about.
Being a style publisher in 2016 is a multi-faceted job if there ever was one. Creating blog posts, photoshoots, running a website, liaising with brands, networking, researching, snapping, Instagramming, and more - all within a week’s work. If you categorize all these tasks, you’ll see they fall into three block pillars: Content, Business Management, and Tech.
This division is technically right, but it doesn’t identify the most crucial factor: that all three pillars overlap, and understanding the intrinsic relationship between them is the key towards the longevity of your blogging business.
So what is this mysterious intersection between the pillars of your business? And why is it important to understand and develop it?
WHAT IS THIS MYSTERIOUS INTERSECTION BETWEEN THE PILLARS OF YOUR BUSINESS?
Translating an overarching business vision through your digital presence is the one thing most publishers should consider when thinking of all the tasks their job entails. And it’s not even their fault. To put it simply, nobody in the industry is really acknowledging it. Well, almost nobody.
I launched my company, chloédigital, when it became clear to me that there was a gap between the fashion and tech worlds that was stopping great publishers from moving forward. Through our membership, my team and I now offer bloggers access to an all-rounded support system to strengthen their personal brands and power their online empires.
At chloédigital we look after some of the most successful blogs in the industry and the common factor that makes top-tier bloggers stand out from the competition is very clear: their business vision is holistic and cohesive.
Working closely with leading influencers around the world (a few of which will be panelists and mentors beside me at C+C DTLA!) has put me in a unique position to gain insights on the fashion industry whilst still having a foot in the tech world myself. I have seen first hand how working with a multidisciplinary tech and strategy team can be a pivotal point to grow a blogger’s online authority. But there is still much more to be done in terms of connecting all aspects of an influencer’s presence and decisions, on and offline. Working with a PR agency on one end and a tech team on the opposite end, with any content decisions torn in the middle, is just not an efficient way of approaching your business anymore.
The future of digital publishing lays within integrating every team and detail cohesively to reach new goals.
A very extended misconception about style publishers is that, as mainly creative professionals, content creation is the aspect of their business that drives most of their strategic decisions. But the reality in digital publishing is that, when there is a disconnect between the technical and creative side, it is actually the technical side that holds the veto power in key decisions. Let me give you a couple of examples of things that are commonly heard:
“I would love to add a new awesome functionality to my blog that I’m sure my community would love, but I’ve never seen anything like it so I doubt I can do that on my site,” or “I was very excited about the new style of blog post I published recently but it seems my readers didn’t respond very well to it; I’m not quite sure how to look deeper into these reasons, so I will just go back to standard content”.
Great ideas, content, and opportunities for innovation that get lost in translation as soon as a tech barrier is encountered. This is exactly why bridging the gap between fashion and technology is essential in order to keep digital publishing thriving. When there is seamless communication between content creators, agents, sponsors, designers, developers - that is when new things can be both conceptualized and well executed.
"Bridging the gap between fashion and tech is essential to keep digital publishing thriving."
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If you’re a style publisher truly looking to create a sustainable business, stop thinking of tech and fashion as opposites. Connect your teams, think always big, and start creating a multidisciplinary space within your working process that allows you to push boundaries.
Branded Content 101: The Rise Of Brand Publications
The evolution of blogging and the rise of the influencer class has fundamentally changed the way consumers, specifically Millennials, consume media. Increasingly, we are able to curate our newsfeeds, news cycles, and the content that is delivered to us. Google, our go-to information hub, receives over 4 million search queries per minute from the 2.4 billion people that are online. That’s one big data party.
With this kind of volume, it’s only natural that digital communities are formed, which are then strengthened by social media and shifting cultural norms that glorify content sharing and curation. We use brands, and their online personas, to construct our own self image. The brands we buy, wear, and follow tell our peers who we are, and what we stand for. This is the springboard insight for all branded content.
Pineapple mag via Coffee Table Mags
by Dana Kelly
The evolution of blogging and the rise of the influencer class has fundamentally changed the way consumers, specifically Millennials, consume media. Increasingly, we are able to curate our newsfeeds, news cycles, and the content that is delivered to us. Google, our go-to information hub, receives over 4 million search queries per minute from the 2.4 billion people that are online. That’s one big data party. With this kind of volume, it’s only natural that digital communities are formed, which are then strengthened by social media and shifting cultural norms that glorify content sharing and curation. We use brands, and their online personas, to construct our own self image. The brands we buy, wear, and follow tell our peers who we are, and what we stand for. This is the springboard insight for all branded content.
As we grow more comfortable sharing our lives with our communities online and offline, we grow more passionate about endorsing the products, content, and brands that we buy into. The more shareable a brand’s narrative, the more eyeballs it can attract using its consumers as a vehicle.
Lifestyle brands have the most natural integration into branded content as so many Millennial eyeballs gravitate towards the aspirational, mobile-friendly visuals on Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. But we’ve moved beyond the days of a one-off sponsored brand post on any given blog. In order to be truly competitive in a sea of content, brands need to invest creative resources into capturing their audience’s attention and giving them a reason to share their brands’ stories.
The Journal by MR PORTER
Five O' Clock by Harry's
MR PORTER is a best-in-class example of a fashion brand that, paired with the rise of editorialized menswear and the advent of Men’s Fashion Week, has captured a hugely dapper demographic with its weekly online and print publication, The Journal. The weekly features aspirational fashion, arts and culture stories relevant to the menswear e-tailer’s sartorially inclined consumer base, or 2MM male web viewers per month. MR PORTER's sister site, Net-a-Porter also has a print publication, Porter, on newsstands all over.
In a similar vein, Dollar Shave Club is launching The Bathroom Minutes, an online blog with an expanded print magazine for the brand’s subscribers. The primary objective for this publication is to build a community of customers through lifestyle content, which features employee and subscriber submissions. Featuring user-generated content is another community-building tactic that brands like Dollar Shave Club use to engage their audience to share their own branded content. The grooming space is becoming especially saturated with heritage brands competing for the same debonnaire audience, as exemplified by Dollar Shave Club competitor Harry’s, which is spearheading its editorial efforts with the online magazine 5 O’Clock. The list goes on, and the content becomes more diversified with celebrity and influencer integration.
This explosive and experimental growth for lifestyle brands in the editorial space has paved the way for less-traditional brands. Airbnb’s print publication Pineapple explores the intersection of travel and anthropology, while King Arthur Flour boasts impressive blogger by-lines in its publication Sift. Even mattress brands are hopping on the quality content bandwagon. Mattress startup Casper is making it a brand priority to invest in its editorial vision. The brand hired former editor in chief of the New York Observer and founding editor of Gawker, Elizabeth Spiers, to lead the in-house publication Van Winkle. Brands that you might have never considered topical or aspirational are now becoming editorial tastemakers and household names.
Pineapple magazing by Airbnb
Let’s face it, if your go-to flour brand and mattress company each have their own publications, we’ve entered an age where it is expected that every consumer brand is producing their own content. We now demand this commitment to content from our favorite brands if they want a stronghold on our attention. According to an Edelman Consumer Marketing Study, nearly 90% of global online consumers want brands to share content online. If brands are able to supply enough content and address timely and functional matters, their content has the opportunity to be present and relevant in their consumer’s daily lives. But at what cost? Many brands have neither the time nor human resources to produce content in-house. Nearly 62% of companies today outsource their content marketing, many of them turning to media companies with cultural cache such as Vice or Refinery29 for custom content creation and distribution.
Given the current state of affairs, the following considerations can help align your brand with a branded content strategy:
- Consider your brand’s narrative.
- What publications does your brand currently pull inspiration from?
- What type of content is your target consumer engaging with online?
- Can your brand narrative authentically integrate into existing online series and trends?
- Do your consumers currently contribute user-generated content to your brand on social media?
- Do you have any consumer insights that could steer the creative? i.e. is your product used during a certain time of day, or does it alleviate any common stresses?
- Can your brand fill a calendar year of content on its own? Or does a seasonal media partnership feel more appropriate?
- Can your product or brand be art directed in an appealing way to consumers?
- How can you drive consumers closer to point of purchase through digital content?
- How can you play to different social platforms’ storytelling strengths for your brand?
Once you can see that a content strategy makes sense for your brand, be prepared to build a more engaged brand audience, and extend your consumer base to new people who can discover your brand based on content that resonates with them.
Dana Kelly is a content strategist by trade and subscribes to the notion that life, lifestyle, and the left coast are what matter most. The California native spends most of her days at Mistress, and has a deep love for words, wine, and great in-flight entertainment.