How to Work With Brands as a Creator: Our Pitching Process

If you have ever wondered how creators work with brands, how to get your first brand collaboration, or where creators actually find the right people to email, WELCOME!

We are sharing what we have learned from building The Sterlings and working with brands as a family lifestyle creator account.

And spoiler alert: You do NOT need a million followers to start working with brands.

You need good content, to put yourself out there, and eventually an engaged audience, depending on the type of brand deal you are working toward.

We are not experts who have everything figured out. We are creators who have learned by doing it, pitching brands, getting ignored, getting told no, getting gifted products, getting paid collaborations, and figuring out what works for us along the way.

So we’re sharing exactly how we approach brand collaborations.

How Do Creators Get Brand Collaborations?

There are a few different ways brands and creators find each other.

A brand can reach out to you — this is inbound.

You can also find opportunities through creator platforms and apps like Insense, Cohley, Statusphere, JoinBrands, and Billo.

Or, you can pitch to brands instead of waiting for them to come to you.

This one is important, but it can also be the most intimidating.

Sure, you could post daily for 30 days, tag brands, and make engaging content. That can work. But sometimes you have to make someone at the brand actually see why they should choose you.

For us, we look for brands that can naturally fit into our lives and our content.

While we do NOT believe in the “niche down” side of things, we do primarily post within a few categories. The good thing is that some of those categories are universal.

For example, take a “get ready with me.”

You could obviously be tagging hygiene, beauty, clothing, makeup, and jewelry brands. But you can change the story depending on what you want to talk about.

Maybe you use trending audio.

Maybe you tell a story about motherhood.

Maybe you talk about finding a skincare routine at your age.

Trending audio and fast edits can help get you seen, but can they connect with people? Sometimes a voiceover talking about something you’re actually going through can connect with someone more than a trending audio ever could.

We post about family, traveling, things to do in our city, DIY, our fertility journey, how we navigate motherhood, and what our toddler loves — from food to toys.

YOU are the niche.

How you present your life and experiences is what helps people decide to follow you.

As a two-mom family, posting about our relationship naturally pulls in people from our LGBTQ+ community. But when we post about fertility, we’re also connecting with women who are going through fertility treatments or thinking about starting a family.

The more you talk about a specific topic, the more you can connect with people who care about that topic.

And that matters when you’re working with brands because brands aren’t just looking at how many people follow you. They’re looking at who those people are and whether they actually care about what you’re sharing.

The best brand partnerships, in our experience, typically come from brands that have already seen you naturally using or talking about their products — or brands where they can immediately see how their product could fit into the content you’re already creating.

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You Do NOT Need 100,000 Followers to Work With Brands

One of the biggest misconceptions about brand collaborations is that you need a massive following.

You don’t.

Follower count is a piece of the puzzle, especially if you’re looking for paid campaigns where the brand wants to reach a large audience. But it isn’t the only thing brands can look at.

Engagement matters, too.

If your community is saving and sharing a video about what your toddler is eating and you’ve tagged the brands you used to make the recipe, you’ve just shown a brand something much more useful than a follower number.

You’ve shown them that people are actually paying attention to your content.

Quality Matters

Is your content crisp?

Is it edited nicely?

Does it keep someone’s attention?

Are you learning how to use text, sound effects, transitions, hooks, and other editing techniques?

You don’t need the most expensive camera or the fanciest setup. We started with what we had and improved as we went.

What matters is that your content continues to get better.

Consistency Matters

Consistency is a massive one, and it can be one of the hardest things to overcome.

But here’s the trick:

You don’t always have to create something completely new.

If you’re trying to post every day, think about how you can maximize one piece of content.

A reel can become screenshots for a carousel.

A day-in-the-life video can become a video about your favorite local restaurant.

A travel vlog can become a “3 things we would do again” video.

One experience can turn into multiple pieces of content without you having to live an entirely new day just to create another post.

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How We Decide Which Brands to Pitch

We don’t pitch every brand we see.

We start with the brands that already make sense for us.

Think about your own house for a second.

You are probably using hundreds of different products.

You have things in your kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, car, diaper bag, closet, and pantry.

You go to grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, attractions, and stores.

All of those experiences can potentially become content.

For example, if we’re filming a toddler morning routine, we might naturally have diapers, wipes, clothes, breakfast products, skincare, toys, and other products in the frame.

Those are brands we can potentially work with because we’re already using them.

We also ask ourselves one important question:

Can we create something for this brand that still feels like The Sterlings?

We don’t want to take a random product and force it into our content just because we want a collaboration.

The best partnerships are the ones where the brand fits naturally into our life and our audience can understand why we’re talking about it.

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How We Find Brands to Pitch

Once we have picked the brands we want to work with, the next step is finding the right person to contact.

And this is where things get a little less fun.

If you’ve ever tried to find a brand’s influencer marketing email, you know it can be an adventure.

We start with the brand’s website, social media, and LinkedIn. Sometimes we also use tools like ChatGPT and Claude to help us figure out where to look.

But you don’t have to spend all of your time doing that.

We’ve combined a list of different emails we’ve found, tried, collaborated with, and reached out to.

This list is like gold if you know what to do with it.

👉 GET THE BRAND CONTACT LIST HERE

We are continually adding to the list, so bookmark this post and come back to visit.

And remember: having the right email doesn’t secure the win.

It’s what you do with the opportunity that matters.

What’s Inside Our Brand Contact List?

Our free brand contact list includes marketing, influencer, PR, and collaboration contacts we’ve found through our own research and outreach.

We continue adding contacts as we discover new ones and build new relationships.

We can’t guarantee that every email will always be active or that contacting someone will result in a collaboration. People change roles, companies change agencies, and brands change their marketing strategies.

But having a starting point can save you a LOT of time when you’re trying to figure out who to contact.

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How To Pitch to a Brand

Once you’ve picked the brands you want to work with, you need to craft an email or DM.

For us, Instagram has been more useful than TikTok for starting brand conversations through DMs.

A good brand collaboration email doesn’t need to be difficult, and it doesn’t need to be extremely long.

You want to get to the point while giving the brand enough information to understand who you are, why you’re contacting them, and what you can offer.

The Elements of a Good Brand Pitch

Who are you?

Why are you reaching out to this specific brand?

What can you create for them?

Why does the partnership make sense?

And most importantly:

Add some personality.

Here’s an example of a pitch we’ve sent:

Hi Kleenex!

We are a two mom family to a toddler that started daycare and the amount of sneezes we saw at orientation was too many to count. We love having Kleenex on hand (in our bag, in our son’s room, on the nightstand, and in the car) and as a nurse and content creator, I would love to bring to life content that showcases how families need your products.

We create high-converting content in the form of UGC and show-stopping paid ads that can catch viewers’ attention faster than you can catch a sneeze. With the holidays and flu season among us, it is the perfect time to get your product showcased even more.

Check out our portfolio where other brands have trusted us here and don’t make us wait too long or we may be using our Kleenex to cry in.

Why We Wrote the Kleenex Pitch This Way

We didn’t just tell Kleenex that we were creators and ask if they wanted to work with us.

We gave them a reason to care.

We connected the product to something happening in our actual life — having a toddler in daycare and the inevitable germs that come with it.

Then we told them what we could create, showed them our portfolio, and added some personality so the email didn’t feel like a copy-and-paste template.

That’s what we try to do with our pitches.

Give the brand a reason to picture you creating content for them.

If you don’t have a portfolio yet, don’t stress.

You can use a simple portfolio like this Canva template and pick up a few items around your house to create some practice videos.

You don’t have to wait for a brand to give you an opportunity before you start creating.

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I Sent the Email. What Now?

Don’t panic.

Brands get a lot of emails, and the person you emailed might not be the person responsible for influencer or creator partnerships.

This is where following up becomes important.

Our general approach is to follow up a few days after the initial email and then follow up again if we haven’t heard anything.

We usually don’t continue following up indefinitely. If we’ve reached out multiple times and aren’t getting a response, we move on and keep pitching.

In our experience, emails have performed better when we’ve sent them Tuesday or Wednesday morning, so that’s when we usually send many of our pitches. We’ve also had success sending emails on Monday mornings around 8 a.m. Central.

This isn’t a hard rule. It’s simply what has worked for us.

A “no” or “not right now” can still be useful.

You now know who the contact is.

Save that information.

If a brand tells you they’re not currently looking for creators, you can check back later when their next quarter or campaign planning period approaches.

Sometimes you’ll land gifted products in the beginning.

I’m not going to tell you to automatically turn those opportunities down. If you’re new to brand collaborations, gifted work can be a great way to get experience creating content for brands and building examples for your portfolio.

But don’t stop there.

After you create the content, ask for feedback.

Find out what the brand liked.

Then, when the opportunity is right, ask about being considered for their paid creator roster.

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You Can Do This

Getting your first brand collaboration can feel intimidating.

You might send 10 emails and hear nothing.

You might send 20.

You might get a “not right now.”

You might get a gifted opportunity before you ever get a paid one.

That’s normal.

The important thing is that you’re learning every time you pitch.

Figure out which brands make sense for your audience. Improve your content. Make your pitches more personal. Keep track of your contacts. Follow up. And don’t be afraid to put yourself out there.

You don’t need a million followers. You need to start.

Feel free to message us with any questions you have.

And don’t forget to bookmark this page and come back to check what brands have been added to our CONTACT LIST.