Understanding What Brands Want

Molly Tracy, CEO and founder of VRAI, sits down and helps explain exactly what influencer brands want. Molly’s job entails helping influencers navigate the business side of the industry, this includes growth strategies, brand deals, and admin management.

photo of Molly Tracy with title text reading Understanding What Brands Really Want

If you’ve ever wondered what it is that influencer brands are looking for, Molly Tracy lets us in on the key details in this episode. Molly requires everyone that she works with to have a presence in a non-borrowed space. You have to have a blog, podcast, newsletter, or a fitness app. It’s important to have content in a space that you own.

In this episode we learn that blogs are typically an influencer’s biggest revenue. Blogs also allow influencers to maintain a creative outlet. However, blogs don’t acquire a lot of brand deals.

Episode 086: Understanding What Brands Want

About Molly Tracy

As a former social media director turned influencer marketing strategist and talent manager, Molly opened her agency, VRAI, in April of 2019. VRAI classifies itself as a digital communication group for brands & babes with a point of view.

Website: VRAI Digital
Instagram: @VRAIDIGITAL

What Is The Goal?

Molly worked on the brand side for five or six years before she moved over to working in talent management.
Molly has a background in campaign strategy and casting.
She still works on the consulting side with some of the female influencers for VRAI.
The reason why Molly says to have content in a space that you own is because you never know when Instagram or TikTok is going to go down.
It’s important to have an understanding of what KPIs are for the brand.
Molly stresses the importance of knowing what the goal of the campaign is. Are they looking for conversion? Are they looking for brand awareness? This is so you know how the company measures success.

“KPI stands for key performance indicator.” – Molly Tracy

Social Media Strategies

Brands are moving away from in-feed content, it wasn’t getting as much of an organic lift as it used to.
Most of the campaigns that Molly works on are conversion focused. This means a lot of Instagram stories and reels are “king.”
VRAI does have a couple of women who are posting on TikTok with over half a million followers.
Brands aren’t quite sure how to incorporate TikTok yet because it’s a little bit of a bulkier sales process.
Brands don’t necessarily have marketing budgets where they can afford to not see a return on their investments.
Molly has not gotten any castings for Facebook reels yet, but she has had a couple of women from VRAI go viral on Facebook. Molly hasn’t seen a lot of brands spend money there.
Every now and then, Molly does get a casting for Facebook Groups because it is more of a targeted community.
Molly doesn’t have any women that are currently focused on Youtube, but she does think it’s a strong platform.
What Molly says you should know about Youtube: 1) it’s slow burn 2) expensive for brands that are looking to target some of the larger creators.

“Targeted pitching is more effective.” – Molly Tracy

Are You Pitchable?

If you want to secure more brand sponsorships start to speak about brands that you love organically on your channels.
Create content with the brands that you want to work with and tag them because it’s a great way to get on their radar.
Use affiliate links if you have them.
Some brands may be looking for brand awareness, others might be looking for conversion.
Make sure to engage with the brand on social media: follow, like, comment, and share what they’re posting.
Agency life tends to shift a lot.
A lot of agencies are working on campaign specific stuff, typically around a new product launch and they will have a budget for the month. A brand typically has a budget for the year and has a lot more flexibility on bringing in new creators.
When you pitch agencies, Molly recommends telling them who you spoke to prior to getting in touch with them. This gets your foot in the door, letting them know that you were already in touch with the brand.
When pitching an agency Molly will have a short bio of the creator (two sentences) – what she does, where she lives, the content she creates, and her social media handles. Part two may be a creative campaign concept specifically tailored to that influencer and brand.
You can incorporate daily reels, Youtube videos.
Molly will then end the pitch with some stats and analytics on the influencer for the brand to see.

“LTK report stands for like to know it.” – Molly Tracy

What’s Next

You can connect with Molly Tracy on VRAI DIGITAL or on Instagram.

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Links Mentioned in This Episode

VRAI DIGITAL