10 Things You Need to Know When Dealing with Brands
Dealing with brands might be too overwhelming to start with. Impostor syndrome, self-doubt, and many other external factors might come in your way if you’re not well-prepared to deal with it.
In this blog, I will share my top 10 things you need to know when dealing with brands. But before that, let us know first why we need to do brand deals?
Establishes Credibility
Having successful brand engagements for your blog, channel, and/or other ventures attest to how good you are at handling projects and producing content. Content that delivers the need of a brand. A write-up or video that drives awareness, traffic, or sales for them. That’s what they want and if they’re loving working with you, your credibility increases, and more brands will know your name and contact you for future engagements.
Who doesn’t want FREE STUFF?
Dealing with brands will either get you more cash/revenue or free/sponsored stuff.
Your favorite gear might be knocking at your door and be able to test and try or even own it by doing brand deals. What will happen might be beyond your imagination but one thing is for sure, one or two brand engagements will add something to your shelf.
Speaking of Cash
Other brands preferred paying in cash for their engagements than giving away their products. Examples are high-value items such as computer equipment, video production gear, and cars.
Having some of these works for brands will surely get you more cash to spend for your blog or channel.
With those being said, let’s go now to the main course of this blog;
Know your channel
It is important to have a self-check first. Know your base. Know where you’re coming from and where are you in the chart. Having this being checked upfront will give you a better understanding of where’s your footing and where to begin.
What is your why?
Your purpose matters. Every company has its mission and vision that’s aligned with its goal or purpose. This purpose radiates when you’re dealing with other people — in our case, brands.
Telling your story with a purpose makes it more sense and will make you grounded in what you want to do. It’s the certainty and conviction that brands are looking for. Your purpose is your weapon.
Your niche
You will attract those brands that are related to your niche. This niche is usually the thing you’re passionate about and if you love what you’re doing, you’ll love the brand that you’ll attract as well. Since you love the brand that you’re working with, you will do your best.
Who’s your market?
Dealing with a brand is business. By means of business, money is involved. In order to deliver something to the brand, you must know who’s your market. What’s the market that your content is tapping? What market are you eyeing to win over?
If this is well defined during your conversation with a brand, the higher the chance that they will sign you because you know your place, you know your battlefield.
It’s all about data
I already mentioned that knowing where you are is important. Self-awareness avoids over or under-promising.
Digesting your content’s analytics will give you a much more targeted decision and well-constructed startegy. A more constructed strategy means calculated proposals to the brand.
The demographics of your market
Providing the demographics of your audience to a brand will increase their confidence level in you since they will strategically give the things that they want you to do with your market. Knowing the battlefield is always an advantage so give that to the brand you are dealing with.
The data analytics of your channel
Give them your mileage. Give them your top-ranking videos. Give them your click-through rate. Give them your average view duration. This information will help them identify which product or points should they give to you.
Brand deals are no-joke for big companies. They’re talking about effort, time, and money so hand them enough information about you for them to be able to construct a proper scope of work for you.
How you usually execute your brand engagements — your portfolio
Providing your previous works with other brands, again, establishes credibility. So while you’re at it talking with them, why not show some of your previous work, how well did they do, and how do you want to improve it further?
This will give them assurance that you will do your best working with them.
Brand Deal Kit/Deck
With all those things considered, you can already create a simple 2-pager brand kit or deck that summarizes all the things that we’ve talked about and have it sent to the brand that you’re talking with via email together with your initial engagement thread.
By doing this, you’re being proactive by providing them with all the information that they need and they will know if you’re fit for the things that they’re planning.
What did you achieve by this? You saved yourself and the brand from wasting time and effort from talking and exchanging emails not knowing you’re not fit with their target audience or vice versa.
Lastly,
Confidence in your rates
The reason why I listed first the “knowing your channel” is that, being self-aware is really powerful. If you know where you stand, your thing, your strengths, and your weaknesses, you will have this confidence about your worth.
You will have the confidence of saying how much your time working on something is. You will never be shy about saying those rates because you know how much effort and time you put into it.
Always remember, time is really valuable so it’s okay to give them the right price for it.
That’s all for this blog, if you’ve enjoyed reading this, you might want to check my YouTube channel where I upload content about editing, photography, videography, and content creation. I’ll be uploading a video version of this blog soon so see you there!