Running campaigns

Outreach

Outreach is the first contact a brand makes with a creator about working together, and the follow-up that turns interest into an agreed deal.

Also called creator outreach, influencer outreach.

Response rates rise sharply with specificity. A message that names something the creator actually made, states the deliverables, and gives a budget or a range outperforms a generic template by a wide margin, because it demonstrates the brand did the work and is not fishing for free content.

Most deals are lost to silence rather than rejection. One or two polite follow-ups, spaced out, recover a meaningful share of conversations that would otherwise die, which is why tracking who is owed a reply matters more than the volume of messages sent.

Common questions

Should a brand include the budget in the first outreach message?: Including a budget or a range usually improves both response rate and speed, because it lets the creator decide immediately whether the conversation is worth having. Withholding it tends to produce a round of messages that ends in a mismatch anyway.

Related terms

Creator discovery: Creator discovery is the process of finding creators who fit a brand: searching by niche, audience, location, and performance, then shortlisting the ones worth approaching.
Campaign brief: A campaign brief is the document a brand gives a creator setting out the goal, the deliverables, the key messages, the dos and don'ts, the timeline, and the disclosure requirements.
Creator roster: A creator roster is the maintained list of creators a brand works with or wants to work with, holding their contact details, audience data, rates, past performance, and current status.
Talent manager: A talent manager represents a creator commercially, negotiating brand deals and handling contracts and invoicing on the creator's behalf, usually for a percentage of the fee.

Distinct is the workspace where brands and creators run the work behind these terms. For brands, for creators, or back to the full glossary.