Growth Wins And Gifting: My Instagram Update Plus A 5-Step Checklist to Gifting

It's just me this episode. I'm giving you an update on the last couple of weeks in my world, where Project 10K is really at, and a full five-step checklist for makeup artists trying to get gifting from brands.

What I cover:

• Why it's finally busy again in the Sydney makeup world after a slow, quiet stretch
• My last two weeks on the tools: five days of shoots, grooming Shep Rose from a US reality show, and grooming for the Logies
• My Project 10K update: I'm sitting at 5,500 followers, up around 500 in the last week alone
• The one reel that's driving most of my growth, and why I keep reposting it instead of chasing new content
• The five-step gifting checklist: write your wish list, optimise your page, find the contact, write your pitch, follow up
• Why knowing someone's name matters before you pitch them
• How to track your outreach, and why persistence is the whole game (I've had people respond after five follow-ups)
• "Shoot Your Shot Wednesday" and the 100 Rejections challenge
• A possible workshop on gifting, if you're interested, DM me

Grab the checklist: download my free 5-step gifting checklist here.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi and welcome to the Makeup Instagram. I'm your host, Annette Barney, Makeup Artist, Editor, Educator and All Around Buddha County.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

If you've ever got lost or learning in your makeup career, this podcast is for you. I'm here to interview makeup artists and other industry professionals to give guidance and be the mentor I needed early in my career. With a new episode every Tuesday, don't forget to hit subscribe so you don't miss a trick. And if you like what you hear, please rate and leave a comment. I hope you enjoy. You've just got me today, and I'll be doing a little inside edit episode, and I'm gonna just have a chat about the last couple of weeks for me. I'm gonna have a talk about my Instagram growth because I am on a trajectory to hit 10k the end of this year. That is my goal. And I also would love to talk about gifting because I've had a lot of artists reach out to me and ask how to get gifting. So I'm gonna give you a five-step checklist that you can download to help you get gifting, and I'm gonna take you through it step by step. If you've listened to some of my previous episodes or the last one of The Inside Edit, it's been slow, it's been quiet, and it's been hard. I'm not gonna lie, I can keep this job now, thankfully, because I don't know what else I would do. I don't think I'm fit enough to go back to be a hairdresser behind the chair. And yeah, I love being a makeup artist, I love doing makeup and hair, and there's nothing else that I want to do. So the last two weeks have been really busy actually for me. The week before last, I was I think I did five days of shoots. It was amazing. Gosh, I was dead afterwards though. But yeah, five days of shoots. This week has been a little bit different for me. I've done a lot of more do-and-goes and glams. I was looking after a man, Shep Rose, who is on a reality show in the US, and I looked after him a couple of days, and then today I did some grooming for a gentleman for the Logies. So there's been lots of grooming that's been happening for me this week, which has been really fun. All right, now on to my project to get to 10k. So I'm currently sitting at five and a half thousand followers, just a little bit over, and in the last week I've seen a growth of about 500 followers. If you subscribe to my newsletter, I do talk about my growth each week and what I've been doing. And yeah, this week has been quite a significant growth for me. I've been on a posting journey since about March early this year, and then since about June, things started to take off for me. I think I was around the 2000 mark and now I'm at 5,500. And the one thing that has helped me get there is one particular reel, and it is a reel with the fabulous Penny. She has a beautiful white hair and a French roll. I think I've posted her reel now a total of eight or nine times. Six times it has spiked my numbers significantly. The last time I posted it, which was I think last Tuesday, I posted it twice because the first time I posted it, I didn't put captions on it. So I was like, oof, I'll post it again. Posted again with captions, and the one without captions did far better. I think eating me between five and six hundred followers within one week, which is huge for me. Huge. If I can get you that every week, I'm set to hit my target of 10k by the end of the year. I don't think following is an indication of your success, but I sure as hell think that it helps. So I am on a mission to grow. My piece of advice to you if you want to grow and what has worked for me is find that one reel that has got the most traction on your page and repurpose it and keep repurposing it. I've seen other artists do this. One in particular that I can think of, I've seen her post the same model multiple times on her page and just get heaps of traction with it. So Penny works for me. I've got some other reels that work as well that I have repurposed in between. I just can't keep posting Penny every day. But yeah, I've tried trial reels as well, and I haven't had as much success with them. But Penny, oh my gosh, she she gets me the she gets me the views, it gets me the follows, gets me the likes. And I'll show you Penny here now. So it's that reel. I've changed the hooks. I've actually just kept the same hook as the one that was the best performer. And yeah, so give it a go. I've tried lots of other reels as well, and things just don't take off as well as what Penny does. So thanks, Penny. Okay, so gifting. I think gifting is something that is open to all makeup artists. I think that it's something you do maybe have to be persistent with and stick with and just have a bit of a mindset shift about if your mindset was anything how mine used to be. And my my mindset used to be that if I didn't hear from somebody or if somebody didn't get back to me, that it meant something about me. It meant that I don't know, maybe they didn't like me, they didn't think I was any good at my job, any good at makeup, they were never going to give to me, and I was all over. It's not the case. If someone doesn't respond to you, you may not have given them a good enough reason to respond. That's that's that is my the number one thing I live by now. If someone doesn't respond to me, oh I didn't give them a good enough reason to respond. So, what can I do to make it so they want to respond to me? That is my the thing I live by when it comes to pitching to brands, pitching to guests on the podcast, um, pitching to for gifting. So, yeah, if someone doesn't respond to you, you just haven't given them a good enough reason to respond. Another thing that really helped me get my head around the whole gifting thing is that it sounds quite miserable and sad in a way. I used to think so, but now I've changed my thoughts around it is that everything is transactional when it comes to your business. So if you want someone to gift to you, it's transactional. What are they gonna get from you for gifting? If you think about it like that with all of your work, like even if someone wants to collab with you, it's transactional. What are you gonna get out of it? How is it gonna benefit you? You have to come, you have to come a lot more self-focused, I feel, sometimes when it comes to maybe not so much for gifting, because in the beginning it might be what are you gonna give to them to get the gifting, but then maybe when you get a little bit bigger and you're maybe in demand or something, it's what's in it for me. So I guess you have to look at where you're sitting on the food chain. Yeah, there is a food chain, whether you like it or not. I'm not very far up the food chain, so you know I'm trying to work my way up. So that's the mindset thing. And also, I used to think that if I reached out to somebody that they should get back to me, because if they didn't, then that was rude. No one has to get back to you if they don't ever really. It's not anyone's responsibility to get back to you, and if they don't, they might just be busy. So that was a huge big mindset shift that I had. No one owes me anything, really. No one does. Make myself impossible to say no to. Another post that I did see recently was a makeup artist saying when a brand's gonna start gifting to makeup artists, when a brand's gonna start supporting makeup artists. Brands owe us nothing. Brands owe us nothing. That's the way I see it. We can choose to support brands that support artists. So if that was something that was really important to me, then I would be supporting brands that supported artists. Brands are gonna give to whoever they want to give to that they're gonna see maybe get a monetary value from. They're gifting to influencers that are who are doing get ready with me because that gets eyes on their products and that's what's gonna sell their products. So no one owes you anything. That is a huge thing that I had to learn. No one owes me anything. I've got to go out and get anything for myself. So I'm gonna go through, there's gonna be five steps to this. So I'm gonna go through the five of them first and then I'm gonna talk about them all. So step one is write your brand or product wish list. Step two, optimize your page. Step three, find the contact. Step four, write your pitch and send the email. And step five, follow up. So let's talk first of all about writing your wish list. There's no point reaching out to a brand that you don't align with or you don't use their products because really the whole point of gifting is that you're gonna post about it, you're gonna talk about it, you're essentially gonna be spreading the word about their products and helping people to make a decision to buy. Write a list of all the products or all the brands that you love, all the ones that you maybe use in a makeup, write a list of them all and write a list of which of the products you love and why you love them. Because this can also help you when you go to write your pitch. But really important so you're really clear on why you're reaching out to that brand and why they should work with you. Step two, optimize your page. So make it really clear on your Instagram page who you are and what you do and where you're based. I think where you're based is really important as well. The next thing to do with optimizing your page, make sure you're tagging and listing the products that you use from that particular brand so that when you reach out to a brand, they can see that you are they use the product and they know how to do the tagging, that you they can see that you know what you have to do to help them spread the word about their brand. You could also do something in the highlights, maybe like products I'm loving at the moment, and feature the products that you're loving so that people can look at the highlights. So that way brands then know that, oh great, if I send something out, Vanessa's gonna post about it. Step three. Now, this one can be a little bit tricky because this comes to getting a little bit creative sometimes and finding the contacts of who you need to reach out to. I always think it's really important that when you reach out to somebody, you know their name. I think a pitch can fall very flat when you don't have someone's name. Admittedly, you might need to start out by just emailing the general email of the PR brand without somebody's name, that might be okay, or you might be reaching out in DMs and that might be okay as well. But if you're reaching out to someone directly, I think it's really important that you know their name. Okay, but then getting on to finding the contact. So finding out who like which PR companies represents which brands. You can do this maybe by seeing when you see other makeup artists posts, you might see who the PR company is. You can go to their page, screenshot it. Then you can also go on to if they haven't got like a direct email address there, you can go onto LinkedIn and you can look up the PR company and have a look to see if you can find who looks after which brand or find the emails there. There's lots of tutorials on YouTube where you can that that can help you find the email addresses on LinkedIn. So yeah, finding the emails probably is the trickiest and the part you'd have to be the most persistent with. The other way you can find out who the PR is or who the email is, you can ask somebody. I wouldn't recommend reaching out to people that you don't have a relationship with and asking for email addresses, but if you've got people that you know and you can ask, I would 100% recommend asking your colleagues if they can help you out. That one's a little bit of investigative investigative work, but once you get started and get persistent with it, you get better at it. I know I've spent a lot of time looking for particular emails. Step four is write and create your pitch as to how you're going to ask the brand to gift you products. The one thing that I would suggest when you are pitching to people, when you want something from it, come from the angle of what you can do for them, not what they can do for you. There's a lot of things actually I've seen on TikTok which talk about pitching. So do some research on the best way to pitch and start pitching and send those emails. But just remember when you're pitching, if you don't people don't get back to you, that's okay. And the final one, which I think is the most important, is the follow-up. So I would suggest following up with anyone you pitch to, whether it be in a week's time, two weeks' time, two months' time, three months' time. I think always follow up. I know I've followed up with people at least five times before I've gotten a response. So be persistent and don't get in your head about it because I know I've been there. And so the other thing I would suggest to you to do is record who you're contacting, keep a spreadsheet of everyone you're reaching out to. So you know you've got the contact details, you know who you've reached out to, and you know when you can follow up. Maybe set one day aside a week to do it. I think there's something out there that's called Shoot Your Shot Wednesday. I know I went through a phase where I was doing a rejection challenge, so I was trying to get a hundred rejections. It takes a lot of time to do a pitch and to make it personalized and send it out. I'm going to create a checklist for you, so I'll pop that in the show notes that you can download and you can start shooting your shot with brands. And I'm also considering running a workshop where I show you exactly how I do it. If that is something that you're interested in, please reach out and let me know. And good luck. Get pitching and let me know how you go. Bye for now, and thank you so much for listening. Your support actually means the world to me.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Thanks for joining me today on the Makeup Insider. I hope you've enjoyed the show. Please don't forget to rate and subscribe, and I'll see you soon. Bye for now.