So you’re a new brand with some fabulous products that you can’t wait to promote. You know that a feature on a prominent beauty blog will give you excellent exposure and is an essential marketing tool. But how do you get your brand featured?

Hayley Carr, aka London Beauty Queen, shared some of her essential dos and don’t for contacting a beauty blogger, and building an audience that supports your brand, at MyBeautyMatches’ Digital Beauty dinner last week (check out the full post here). No doubt, you’ll be on a beauty blog in no time!

The Do’s

• Build a community. Make sure you’re having conversations or saying thank you. Answer questions and respond to tweets.
• Create ‘passion points’. Be it cleansers, lipsticks or Back to the Future, get passionate!
• Drip-feed information, so that you’re creating a bigger picture.
• Target different audiences with different messages. Don’t put the same content on each channel. People inevitably follow you on different platforms. For example, Instagram is more behind-the-scenes and inspirational. Different networks have different purposes.
• Engage in conversation.

The Don’ts

• It’s not all about you – nobody likes a show-off. Social media is about conversations, and engaging with your customers. Limit self-promotion and use your social media platforms to share worthwhile content with your followers and garner their interest through interacting with them first-hand.
• Don’t assume! Don’t assume that just because you’ve got something to offer, they’ll be pleased to help.
• Don’t shout. Understand that there’s a time and a place.
• Don’t only schedule content. You should be responding to content. It’s important to say thank you when people retweet. Be reciprocal.
• Don’t only rely on giveaways as you’ll end up with a follower-base who just want freebies. Be careful about how much you rely on competitions and giveaways.

If you’re looking for more tips on how to promote your brand and even get into the glossy’s take a look at Sarah Jossel’s top tips here.