The million dollar question that I constantly receive as a blogger is “How do you book work???” Even my parents friends are so curious as to what a campaign may look like from beginning to end, how the work finds me, and how far out I shoot work VS when it is posted, so I wanted to take a second to break it down for you all, and open the curtain a bit! To show you a sneak peek at behind the scenes, I’ve included a SUPER old e-mail that applies to what an e-mail may look like for me upon booking a job.
Step 1: Initial Email- I receive an e-mail scouting my interest and/or inviting me to be a part of a campaign. It may look something like the below. I will generally receive the e-mail about a month before the job is supposed to be posted, but sometimes it’s as little as a week before, which is known as a “tight-turnaround” job.
Step 2: Review the ask. I review the brand, the creative ask, the theme or message behind the campaign and my content calendar, and decide if it’s something I would like to be a part of. Theres so many reasons why I may take or not take a job. Some reasons I turn down a job include: A poor brand fit, a pay rate that is too low for the scope of work, the timing doesn’t line up and I can’t make the shoot happen before the due date, the creative ask doesn’t align with my feed.
Step 3: Decide on Scope of work and rate, and sign the contract. If I decide I am interested, a rate and a scope of work is agreed upon between myself and the brand. Everything is put into a contract, based around a list of deliverables that I then owe the brand. This may look something like this:
Fee: XXX
Scope of Work:
My manager will then sign the contract, and I will calendar the shoot date, and the date the actual job has to be posted by.
… Are you still intrigued? There’s a lot more that goes in to it than what meets the eye!
Step 4: Shoot the Content. I receive the product for the campaign in the mail, and shoot my imagery. Sometimes the product shows up the next day after a contract is signed, and sometimes it may take weeks upon weeks, holding up a job. There’s many times when the tentative date the post will go live gets pushed back, because of a delay in receiving products, receiving a wrong size, etc. etc. Once a product arrives to me, I try to shoot it fairly quickly so that I am not ever late on a deadline. Shoots can take under an hour to many hours, depending on the location, the amount of photos required of me, and how involved my idea is!
Step 5: Send over content for approvals. After shooting the content, I sit down and edit the photos and write all of the copy ahead of time, including captions, blog posts and instgram story copy. I then send it all over for the brand to approve. Back in the early days of blogging, approvals never really happened, but now it’s almost guaranteed that the brand will want to see what you are posting before you post it. It can take anywhere from a few hours to weeks to hear back with a brands approval. Occasionally they will want a job to be reshot, but that only happens once in a blue moon. After I receive the approvals, I can set the official date for the post to go live!
Step 6: Post, and collect analytics! After the post is live, I am still not done with the job! The true end of the job comes after the brand receives analytics from instagram story views, and reach/ impressions! Having an instagram business account is critical in being able to send a brand proper analytics once a job is completed. After they receive the analytics, we send over an invoice!
The entire process, from beginning to end, generally takes a month, if not more. So when you see a post go up on my feed that is sponsored, it’s something I’ve been working on for weeks on end! I know, it’s wild, and I always forget that when I am scrolling through my feed, but it takes a lot of time and planning to make it all happen. I hope this was insightful, and please let me know any other behind the scenes topics you would be interested in seeing!
