Okay good evening guys! And welcome from New York City!
We're actually waiting for our train into New York City but we've just flown in here from Jakarta, Indonesia.
And we're here to work with a hotel that you will see in a few videos down the road.
But i want to take this opportunity to actually share with you some of the secrets and the tips i've been using
to work with brands and collaborating with hotels. So while traveling the world,
I've stayed at some pretty crazy accommodations; everything from five-star resorts, private islands,
to $100 hostels in Chernobyl. Now many of these I pay for myself.
There are times I will approach the hotel to see if i can stay for free.
So today, I'm going to use my social media following to get a hotel collaboration
and show you the entire process so you can do the same.
So tomorrow I'm heading out to New York City. And me being me, I haven't booked any accommodations yet.
And i've been looking through the prices right now for hotels and it is ridiculous for me
to stay two nights in New York right now. It's gonna cost me like $500, which is my month's rent here in indonesia.
Now I've made a list of 100 hotels here in New York City.
And i'm gonna start with the first one and see how many of them actually get back to me.
All right guys, it is 24 hours later. I have managed to get through all 100 hotels that I wanted to message,
and so far got some maybes, got some rejections, which i was expecting of course.
Most of them are having me actually email their director of marketing.
So i've gone ahead and actually emailed some of these hotels directly
to see if they're going to accept my collaboration or not. So let's head to the airport
and hope that along the way, one of these is going to accept my request because I have no place to stay tomorrow.
Good afternoon guys and welcome to the nation's capital as you can see behind me right there,
Washington DC! We just finished doing a hotel collaboration up there which you guys will see in a few videos down the road.
But what I want to do is take this opportunity to share with you guys,
what's worked for me in the past when I'm approaching brands and hotels to collaborate with.
Now you don't necessarily need to copy this completely, you can alter it in your own way
depending on who exactly you are approaching.
I've been traveling for the last year and I will be honest: in the very beginning, I did not get very many collaborations at all.
In fact I only got probably one or two in the very few months that I began.
There is one thing that I learned over the one year I've been traveling and collaborating with brands and hotels is this:
Find somebody that has something unique or special to sell or to market to your audience
if there's nothing special or unique about a hotel why are you going to be collaborating with them?
It's going to make your job very very difficult, trust me.
So I'll give you guys an example. When we were in Bali, we did a camper van video.
It was the very first camper van where you could actually rent one on the island of Bali.
It was super unique and I loved making that video because nobody had actually done that kind of video before in Bali.
Now there is one important step in this process and this is exactly where everyone makes this mistake.
It is a single reason why you don't get a brand deal or a collaboration.
As my friend Sam says: "you have to find the decision maker. Don't just DM 100 hotels
or 100 different brands asking for a free stay. That's just not gonna work anymore.
A: What do you think of dc so far? K: It's amazing, I like it! It's very historical
A: Better than New York? K: I like here better than New York. It's more chill here.
And so this brings me to my third point and you may be surprised to hear this but,
you don't need a hundred thousand subscribers or followers to get a brand deal or collaboration
A: How many followers do you have now? K: I have 12k
A: And how many on instagram? K: I have 3k
Yeah so she has 3,000 on instagram and 12,000 on youtube and she just got her first paid collaboration deal
for an undisclosed amount but it was a it was a good amount of money for her first brand deal.
So if you are doing a collaboration don't be afraid to ask for a paid promotion instead,
every single hotel and brand definitely has a marketing budget.
Now here's what brands do care about: what are you gonna do for them and why do they need you per se?
So don't let your first sentence be: "Hey I'm Alex, can I have a free stay?"
You're going to immediately get a rejection and probably no response at that rate.
Instead, what you can do is message them and say: "Hey I saw that your hotel doesn't post that many reels to your instagram.
This is a popular new feature that instagram is heavily promoting and what i can do for you is
create some amazing new video content for you to share.
You're going to get a much higher chance of scoring a response from them and a brand deal at that point.
Now first impressions are literally everything. You pretty much need to blow them away in order to land a deal.
And so i always have a media kit ready to go because 90% of the time their initial response is going to be:
"Send us your media kit we want to know your demographics, your analytics."
Pretty much they want to see if your content style and your audience fits what they're looking for.
So what I'm going to do for you guys is give you the media kit that i've been using for the past year.
I'm also going to include in that several scripts that I've used to negotiate with brands along the way.
And I partner up with Zyro once again to give you guys a huge discount on the brand new website.
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From now on Zyro is running a huge black Friday and cyber Monday deal,
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That's an extra bonus. They're giving you a free domain for one whole year.
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Now you guys may be wondering what is it exactly that I can offer of value to brands;
or where I can get a partnership or collaboration?
So here's a few things that brands have asked from me that i can recommend you offering:
First of which is obviously instagram posts.
Now more than ever they're actually looking for instagram reels instead because they're more valuable
and bring way more engagement. The second thing is most of the time they're asking for five stories from you.
So you gotta make sure you tag them on five different stories per day.
You can also do an integrated promotion on youtube so either 30 seconds to one minute.
And if you're thinking of offering paid promotions, you can even offer them a dedicated video,
where the entire video is just about the brand specifically. For those I wouldn't even do a collaboration.
Those are specifically paid requests. You've got to be getting paid for those, guys! Those take up a lot of time.
So no matter what country I'm in, these are the steps that I'm taking every single time to reach out to brands and hotels.
And remember guys, these brands and hotels receive requests like this every single day, every single week.
So one thing to remember is that don't be too demanding. Because if you set a good impression,
then these brands and hotels are going to come back to you with more requests and more collaborations.
Because most likely, more often than not they have multiple properties.
Now I hope this helped you and saves you some time because it took me a while to figure this out for myself.
And don't forget guys, I've included a free download to the media kit down below but most importantly:
go and get yourself a website. First impressions are everything.
See you guys next time! Peace!