Why Your Aesthetic Might Matter More Than Your Engagement

Years ago it was trendy to have a perfectly aesthetic, nicely balanced, color coordinated Instagram feed, but the last few years have brought in a love for under-edited “real” moments, and many creators have found that having an aesthetic feed has no impact on their engagement (or even decreases their engagement). People want to see the real, authentic, unedited moments.

And all of that is still true, to some degree, but there’s one other factor to consider beyond audience engagement and growth: brand deals.

If your goal is to make a living through your content, you’ll have to consider not just what your audience loves, but also what brands love. Your content (especially your Instagram) is like a portfolio when pitching to brands. They want to work with you for your platform, but also for your content. Brands are getting better (pickier) at working with influencers and it seems to be more important than ever to be able to give them high quality content that matches their style and can be used in their own marketing. While your audience and reach is certainly worth a large chunk of the price tag, you can start to charge a lot more and book more deals, even with a low engagement rate, if your photos and videos can not only bring views but also replace the brand’s need to hire a photographer and videographer for their own content.

Having beautiful photos and videos is, of course, a lot more work than shooting in the moment, but it may be just the thing to bring a much bigger return on investment than other parts of content creation you currently spend time on.

So here’s what I recommend:

Make a list of your dream brands, and then whenever you’re making content, try to create images and videos that you imagine that brand would post on their own feed. Mimic their aesthetic and production value as much as you can. Think about creating example content that you could use to pitch to that brand in the future, to show them that you are capable of delivering high production value that is perfectly on-brand for them. Whether or not your engagement and growth are impressive at that time, if a brand can see that your aesthetic and message is a perfect fit for them, they’re likely to want to find a way to work with you.

Basically, if your engagement and following are both insanely high, maybe don’t spend too much time on actual production value. But for the rest of us, having something else to offer a brand in addition to your audience is a great way to increase frequency of brand deals and be able to raise your prices.