Mistakes That You’re Making When Pitching To Brands and Magazines
It’s been a while since we chatted about pitching to brands and magazines isn’t it? Don’t think that I’ve forgotten about my favourite topic; after all, pitching remains my number one recommendation when it comes to marketing yourself as a fashion photographer!
Today I want us to chat about some of the mistakes that you might be making when pitching to brands and magazines, because you’re probably making a few of these (trust me, we’ve all done them) and they’re generally quite simple things that you can fix. So let’s jump in, shall we?
Not Addressing A Person
This one sounds really simple, but whenever I speak to people about their current pitching strategy, and they tell me that they just email the general “info@” emails of a brand and then open up their emails with “Dear {Insert Brand Name}” it makes me really sad. This is such a massive mistake, and one that is really messing up your chances of getting a response from a brand!
Inside my online course, Pitching With Confidence, I stress the importance of doing your research before you even send your first email to someone. You need to spend time finding the email address of the actual person at a brand that you want to speak to. If you forever just email the general email addresses, guess what? You’re generally speaking to someone who doesn’t really care or have time to forward your email on to the right person. Or you’re going to be seen as not really bothering to take the time to find the right person, and therefore you can’t be THAT interested in working with the brand, surely?
So the absolute best thing that you can do is take some extra time to do as much research as you can into finding the exact person you’d like to speak to and email, and then address them personally.
Only Emailing Once
I know how discouraging it can feel to send an email to a brand or magazine, feel really excited about how they might respond, and then never hear back. We’re so connected to our work personally, that someone ignoring us can feel like a personal attack. But I promise you that it’s not. There are a million reasons why someone may not reply to your first (or second or third) email, so please don’t automatically assume that it’s because you’re not good at what you do.
The mistake would be to only try once, and never try again. If you’re serious about wanting to shoot for that brand, and work with that magazine, then you need to keep trying. I promise, you can only benefit from emailing more than once.
Forgetting That It’s About Them, Not You
Whenever you pitch yourself to anyone, you must always remember that it’s about them, and not about you. Let me put it into context:
Do you get annoyed when you have a friend who only ever gets in touch when they need something? Yeah, me too. It’s the same with a brand. If you only ever email someone saying: “hey, please can you hire me” that can be really irritating.
Flip that on it’s head, and what if someone approaches you and offers to help you in some way. Doesn’t that sound much more appealing and friendly? I know that when I get emails from people asking me to do something for them (especially if I don’t know them), the question that comes into my head is “Why should I? What’s in it for me?”
So it’s incredibly important that whenever you send a pitch, you make it about them. Offer them something highly valuable that they simply can’t say no to!
