I want to discuss how many followers you need to get brand deals, how to visually brand yourself as a creator so potential sponsors know exactly what you do, and the 4 things that are more important to get a brand deal than the number of followers you have.
How Many Followers Do You Need for Brand Deals?
First and foremost, there really is no ideal number to be able to work with brands. I have done brand deals with creators and influencers with less than 1,000 followers because they fit exactly what the brand was looking for. Smart brands will always ask to see a creators audience demographics to ensure that it’s a good fit for them. The way you can leverage that as a creator is to analyze your own audience and think about what types of brands might want to market to those types of consumers.
Finding a Niche
The best way to get brand deals and sponsorships is to find a niche and double down on it. There are software tools that allow you to filter influencers by geographic location, and age, and the type of content and so on, but many brands still use the tried and true method of just going to YouTube to see what creators pop up.
Engagement Rate
As a benchmark, most brands are looking for 2% or higher now. In my experience, the best way to boost engagement is to actually engage with your followers. There's a ton of different ways to encourage engagement, like asking them questions, encouraging them to comment, doing a poll, and so on. And don't forget, you need to reply to them, that is the best way to build an intimate connection with your audience.
Consistency
This is actually a criteria that we use when we're trying to find a creator for a campaign at our agency. If you haven't published a post in a month, we're probably gonna pass. A good rule of thumb is, at a minimum, at least one post per week, depending on the platform, of course, but that tells us that you're serious and you're committed to creating great content.
Quality of Content
This is very important and whether it aligns with the brand's aesthetic. There's tons of talented creators out there who may not have tons of followers. So, for example, let's say you're a professional photographer or videographer. Maybe that's your nine-to-five is shooting weddings or something, chances are that you can create some really compelling content that a brand will be eager to reshare and repurpose on their pages because it looks so great.
Professionalism
Professionalism and communication is very important. Actually, those are absolutely critical. Most brand campaigns have a fixed timeline and dates that things need to be posted by, right? The quicker that you can reply, the more it tells the brand that you're gonna be a good partner.
As a quick tip, for example, at our agency, when we're reaching out to creators asking if they'd be interested in partnering with a particular brand, how long it takes them to get back to us is a very good indicator of how responsive they're gonna be throughout the duration of the campaign, right? Creators that get back to us in a few hours versus a few days, we're definitely gonna be prioritizing the former because it just makes our lives that much easier, right? When we don't have to chase influencers down for content or captions and things like that.
