$$ Brand Dealz – The Entire Brand Collaboration Process From Beginning To End

Learn how to deal with brands and what to expect when doing media collabs

When it comes to working with brands, figuring out how to pitch yourself, how to negotiate rates and how to turn your social media following into a business can feel a bit like wandering in the wilderness searching for answers. Luckily, Modern Millie put together a great tutorial outlining her entire process working with brands from start to finish as an influencer. Grab your notebooks, as this is a brilliant roadmap to get you started if you’re wondering how to work with brands as a photographer, videographer or creative!

There are a lot of steps to negotiating and preproduction with a brand before you start creating.

Remember: 1 ounce of planning & preparation is worth 100X more down the road in the time it saves you and trouble it can prevent!

When negotiating, you’ll want to discuss deliverables:

• Brand Expectations
• Content Topics & Ideas
• Posting Schedule
• Content Format – Stories? Posts?
• Where will it be posted?
• Who OWNS the content you create?
• Will it be exclusive, or can you work with other brands?

Then, you sign your contract.

Payment depends on the brands and the agreement you’ve come to.

The real key to the ENTIRE process is communication.

You want to be on top of communication at every step of the way, not only to establish a great working relationship and ensure they feel good about the project, but also to protect yourself and document that you fulfilled everything you agreed to, should any misunderstandings take place down the road.

Where can you find brand collabs in the first place?

While you can reach out to individual brands, there are also lots of agencies these days that will connect you with brands themselves – You pay a commission, but they handle much of the negotiation and leg work to get the contracts in place.

Campaign Briefs

Most of the time when a brand is running a campaign, they’ll send a summary of what they’re doing, what their goals are, and what their call to action is (what action they want the audience who sees your content to take)

Delivery of your media

Once all this stuff is in place, it’s pretty simple. You create the content (And ALWAYS make sure to create it well in advance so you have room to submit it to the brand for feedback and make any adjustments or edits necessary) Then you post and finish out the working agreement

HOT TIP – Always have revisions in your contract

Sometimes brands want updates or changes to your original agreement. Make sure to include a statement in your contract of your cost for revisions outside the scope of the original project.

This ensures you get paid and don’t get hit with a week’s worth of edits for no charge.

As you can see, the process isn’t as scary as it seems!

Remember to update the company with your results & analytics to show them the value you brought to them!

What do you think? Do you feel like this covers everything you need to know how to work with brands as an influencer or photographer?

Or do you have parts of your process with brands that we’ve missed? Leave them in the comments below!