How to approach a vegan influencer
Once someone gets to a certain level of followers it gets hard to get a message through to them. They will get thousands of direct messages (or DMs) through which ever platform they are most active on, and most stop reading them because they simply don’t have the time. In the early days YouTubers will try and respond to every comment on their videos; as their audience grows they won’t be able to keep up or they will employ an assistant to monitor these on their behalf. So to contact them you need to go off-platform. Go to their website and find their email address to contact them or look for the platform where they have least followers. Lisa is brilliant at doing this; for example, she has sparked relationships with vegan influencers or high-profile vegan business people by contacting them through LinkedIn, where they only have a thousand connections instead of hundreds of thousands elsewhere.
Already know what deal you want to strike up before you approach an influencer. Their time away from their audience is limited, and a vague “hey we should do something together!” may seem like the most friendly way to start a conversation but it’s also not likely to get much of a response – unless you are already a famous brand they aspire to work with!
Do you want them to review your product on their channel? Are you offering them a free supply of what you make in return for them being your brand ambassador? Are you looking to run an ongoing campaign where they produce a series of videos or posts in conjunction with your company? Do you want them to appear on your stand at an upcoming event? Be straight right from the start; if you are offering to pay for a single product endorsement post, don’t then hope (or ask) for a string of other favours on the back of it.
Your first message may also be the only time that you get their full attention, so get all the information across about your company, your product and your mission in a clear and concise way without needing a back and forth. Integrity is key to influencers building and keeping their loyal followers, so make sure they know that your product is a good fit for them and exactly why. If you know that an influencer only includes products that are palm-oil free and don’t have plastic packaging, make it clear that your product meets this criteria so they don’t have to come back and ask you. Make it clear that you are vegan, your product is vegan and that you run a vegan company. Once they build an audience they will get non-vegan companies approaching them also. If they are like any of the influencers that I’ve come to know, they will always be biased to working with other vegans over working with non-vegan companies. If they believe in the ethics of your company and believe in your mission they will give you a lot more in return.
And if you don’t hear back first time, don’t get disheartened. These can be busy people, and it may be that they saw your message and meant to respond but something else took their attention away. It might be that they have done something similar with another company recently or they feel like they have been promoting too many products recently and are saving up any approaches from companies for a month or two. So build a list of people to approach and work your way through them. When you’ve got to the end, go back to the top and resend your message a couple of weeks later to those that haven’t responded. Always be warm and personal, and understand that if they don’t respond it’s not because they are being rude – you just haven’t seen what their inbox is like!
