Pitch perfect: how PRs can own influencer marketing

PR and marketing are waging a war over who owns influencer marketing. PRs still have an edge, but to keep it they need to understand the influencers they’re working with and be responsible for their organisation’s relationship with bloggers, vloggers, content creators and Instagrammers. Luckily, we can help.

Not only does Vuelio have an unmatched database of UK creators, the market-leading Vuelio Blog Awards and the world-famous rankings – we also regularly interview bloggers in exclusive spotlights.

These keep us, and our clients, up to date with the industry – we know what’s working and what’s not, what best practice looks like and, for PRs, what makes the perfect pitch.

And it’s the last point that we’re focusing on today, following our travel spotlight with Monica Stott, The Travel Hack. Along with telling us about the best street eats in the world, the joys of electric bikes and the fact she accepts press releases – Monica also gave us a template for working with bloggers, and influencers, on any project or collaboration.

So, what does the perfect email look like? For Monica, it’s this:

‘We’ve got a new product and we’d like you to feature it on your blog and Instagram feed. Attached is a description of the product and some photos.

‘We’d like two blog posts, one to be a dedicated review and one to be an editorial style post where the product is naturally featured. We’d like two Instagram photos which we’d like to re-share on our feed and we want them to be candid and natural photos similar to the style on the mood board attached. If you’re interested, please tell us your fee and your turnaround time for this content.’

There’s a couple of key points in this, which nearly every creator tells us when we ask about working with PRs:

1. Make it clear what type of content you want featured and the channel you want it to be featured on
2. Be upfront about budget, even if there isn’t any, because they need to know straight away to see if it fits with their business model
3. Be clear about the product, service or campaign you want them to cover
4. Include a brief – whether it’s a mood board like this example or a detailed description of your target market and positioning
5. Don’t restrict the creative – being too specific turns a lot of creators off, they’ve built a relationship with their audience based on their authentic content and your brand needs to fit into that. Only their creativity will work.

These five points can help build a strong and fruitful relationship.

And as it’s all based on good communication, PRs can fly ahead of marketing to manage and maintain influencer outreach, and ultimately win the influencer marketing war.