Bethany Lee Shares How to Succeed as a Multi Passionate Equestrian

Alli Addison Runs the Instagram Account Milton Menasco and is the queen of collaborations. She started the famous Instagram account because she wanted to showcase her love for horses, and it snowballed.

Alli has worked in marketing for luxury consumer goods for most of her career. Milton Menasco started as a test account so she could teach herself how to use Instagram. The platform was new at the time.

Today the brand produces its own products and also does collaborations with other brands. There are three different types of collaborations:

1. Short-term collaborations are where a few brands support each other with content and build relationships.
2. Marketing collaborations are paid. A brand pays you or gives you free products to wear their stuff and post about it.
3. Product collaborations are when you partner with another brand to produce something together.

    

Milton Menasco looks for long-term relationships with their collabs. This helps them get to know the brands they work with intimately and makes the content they put out powerful. They typically handpick people after getting a sense of who they are and their values from watching them online.

At the end of the day, when you collaborate with someone, you are going into business together, and you want to know someone well before you do this. You have to focus on quality if you want your collaboration to be successful. You have to meld both brands in a way that includes the crucial elements of each one while creating beautiful content.

There’s always a way that you can take two brands and mesh them beautifully. Work with professional photographers and communicate clearly what you want the images to portray.

If you want to start collaborating yourself:

1. Start small
2. Talk to other brands
3. Get to know them
4. Build those relationships
5. Make a shortlist of people you would LOVE to work with down the line and start engaging with those accounts on social media

    

You can’t simply press the follow button and expect something to happen. You have to take the first step. But don’t just jump straight into their messages. Comment on their posts, become a top fan of the stuff they’re putting out. Share their content. Reply to their stories. Instagram lets us engage with each other in so many different ways, so use them!

Spend 10 minutes doing this every single day, engaging with the brands on your list. Over time, you will become a vested follower, and when you do pitch the collab, they will recognize you.

Once you are ready to chat, have a plan in place. Think of it as a mini-marketing plan or a mini-business plan. Be prepared for this plan to change as your collab partner ads in their ideas, but you want to appear professional and having a plan in place going in does this for you.

Listen to the episode above to hear the rest of Collabs with Alli Addison.