- Brianna Seaberg is a travel creator with 680,000 followers on TikTok and around 18,000 on Instagram.
- She discussed her best strategies for pitching hotels for free stays as a creative.
- She also shared her latest media kit that she includes in her email pitches to hotels.
Brianna Seaberg has been on Instagram since the early days.
The 23-year-old creator joined the platform in 2012 when she was in middle school and has been determined to become a content creator ever since.
But her big break came with the rise of TikTok. By posting content about her college experience and tutorials on how to shoot popular trending videos, she has amassed over 680,000 followers, the majority of which in 2020.
But while that content was useful for building an audience, she decided her goal was to build a career based on travel content. For this, her main platform is Instagram, where she has about 18,000 followers. She believes the platform is better suited to her niche — Instagram users are looking to be aspirational and find “escapes from reality,” she told Insider.
Since then, she has been able to partner with major brands such as Amazon, Netflix and Dunkin’, as well as a number of boutique hotels in Italy, Greece and Florida.
She shared some of her top tips for getting started as a travel creator and offering hotels for free stays.
1. Really prepare your content
The first step to successfully marketing yourself as a hotel travel creator is to have content on your social media platforms that is aesthetically pleasing and reflects your niche.
Seaberg mostly does this on her Instagram feed. When she decided she was going to focus on creating travel content, she archived her old posts and began carefully curating her feed.
“I was no longer sharing photos with my friends or how I was doing random activities,” she said. “I made sure to curate my feed based on my travel experiences, whether those experiences were this year or a few years ago. Having this look to a whole collection of beautiful travel images is a great start, especially on Instagram.”
To build the legitimacy of her travel brand, she created a website where she publishes travel guides and hotel reviews and where she sells merchandise and digital products.
2. Clearly outline what you want and what you can deliver
Including specific details can be a good way to save time and keep up with the hotel you are offering.
Offering user-generated content that the hotel will have the right to repost to its accounts is the most successful way to secure free stays for Seaberg.
In its pitch emails, Seaberg includes how many images and videos the hotel will have rights to and on which platforms they will be published. She also offers a dedicated blog post, content on Instagram Stories, and reviews on Google and TripAdvisor.
This strategy is useful for getting responses – which can be difficult since hotel emails tend to be generic. Seaberg follows up by sending direct messages on Instagram or Facebook if her emails go unanswered, and she’ll even try to call hotels directly.
Having a strong, eye-catching subject line on your email also helps, she said. Seaberg highlights the size of her cross-platform audience with a subject line like: “730,000 followers Social Media Collaboration.”
3. Locate smaller, boutique hotels
Seaberg recommends offering smaller, boutique hotels that are in the mid-range—three- or four-star establishments. These hotels are the ones that may not have the resources to boost their social media presence. Giving them the option to get more content can be attractive to them.
On the other hand, larger chains typically have thousands of guests per week, which means they also have an almost endless stream of free UGC to funnel to their social media accounts.
4. Attach a media kit
A key element of Seaberg’s pitch strategy is her media kit, which includes information about herself, her past collaborations with the brand, and examples of her content.
She makes sure the media kit actually reflects the type of content she’s currently posting on social media, with her specific style and aesthetic to be recognizable.
Read the 4-page media kit Seaberg used to introduce hotels and brands for collaboration: