How do I contact influencers for promotion? The best ways to reach influencers for brand deals (2023)

Engaging influencers to market your products is an incredibly cost efficient and effective way to spread the message about your product or service to a wide, engaged audience. Influencers speak directly to their audiences every day. Influencers are viewed as experts in their niche, and most followers are highly interested in their opinions and recommendations, with the most loyal cohort ready to act on suggestions and promotions. Influencer marketing entails finding the right influencers, structuring a campaign, building a group of influencers to fit your budget and ensuring the campaign runs as planned. At Word on the Block, we help brands along each of these steps. We’ve reached out to millions of influencers since our inception, and share below what we’ve definitively found to be the best way to do so. 

Where do influencers prefer to be reached?

One of the first steps of an influencer marketing campaign is finding the right brand advocates. But once you find them, how do you reach them? We have found that email is by far the preferred means of communication for influencers. That is good news because almost everyone has an email address, and many influencers make theirs public on their Instagram accounts. Those that do are interested in being contacted for brand deals, so you have a high likelihood of a reply! Likewise, influencers may have their email address listed in their TikTok description or in their YouTube “About -> Description” page. There are some influencers who prefer to be reached through other channels, the most common being Discord, especially for gaming and live streaming influencers.

Where do I find an influencer’s email address?

For those that don’t make it easy to find, we recommend finding their Instagram profile, looking through their social media reference landing page (LinkTree as an example) to find their other digital properties including website, blog, and other social channels. Oftentimes, their email address will be listed on one of these sites. If all else fails, you are able to uncover an influencer’s email address on YouTube in the “About -> Details” section, though YouTube limits you to only a few per day. Influencers will also often link their other digital properties here as well. 

What if I can’t find an influencer’s email address?

There are many influencer discovery platforms out there that allow brands to search for influencers to uncover their contact information. Most are a few thousand dollars per month and limit the number of influencer searches and contact information you can access. They are a good option for large brands with available budgets who have full-time internal influencer marketing teams that can spend the time to sift through influencers and reach out themselves. At Word on the Block, we handle the influencer discovery, communication, negotiation, contracting and campaign execution for brands. Brands simply approve creators we find and oversee campaign progress, without having to worry about reaching out to influencers and staying organized throughout the process. Influencer reachout is a numbers game, and is truly an arduous process. Most influencers will likely not respond, so we recommend reaching out to at least 5x the number of influencers you would like to ultimately engage with. But keeping that organized is not an easy task, so we aim to handle that process for brands. Check us out here for more details: https://www.wordontheblock.com