If you’re a physician searching for a side hustle, you may have considered pursuing the influencer route, as it can be highly lucrative.

We’ve covered how to become an influencer as a physician, which involves understanding your audience, creating a schedule, and posting only the content most relevant to your audience.

Most influencer verticals are indeed saturated, and healthcare is no exception. The number of influencers grows daily, and some of the most well-known physicians seem to have a monopoly on the niche, such as Dr. Mike, Brian Boxer Wachler, and Adam Goodcoff.

That doesn’t mean there’s no room for newcomers, though. In social media, you just have to find the right fit for you when partnering with consumer brands. 

Before you can find the right fit, you have to be noticed. How do you land a partnership as a physician influencer? Let’s take a look at a few ways.

4 ways to land brand deals as a physician influencer

Remember that just as influencers rely on brands, brands rely on influencers to help sway their customers. They know that consumers are more likely to follow an influencer than a brand, and that more than 3 in 5 trust their recommendations.

This is especially true in healthcare, where 2 in 5 have made an actionable decision regarding health and wellness based on the recommendation of an influencer. Over half would even decide where to receive care based on an influencer’s recommendation.

How do you leverage this to your advantage? The reality is that, when you’re just starting, you have to make your own opportunities.

Understand how brands find influencers

Before you can do that, it’s important to understand the three ways that influencers most often get found by brands:

Directly through a social media platform. Brands will often reach out via direct message to ask if an influencer is interested in promoting their product or collaborating on a larger project.

Creator agencies essentially act as the middleman for brands and influencers. These agencies are there to help  streamline the process of discovering, contacting, and selecting influencers.

Creator platforms allow brands to streamline their search but spearhead it themselves. Brands can search for influencers based on everything from category and niche to follower count and engagement.

Regardless of the way you get noticed by a brand, it’s beneficial to have a media kit on hand. These make it easier for brands to determine if you’re a good fit and give you more credibility. It should include a short biography, social media statistics (including follower count, engagement rate, and demographics), and past work.

Let’s dive into how to get noticed and land a deal.

Find your niche

You’ve heard it before: If you try to please everyone, you’ll please no one. So don’t try to!

Instead, focus on one or two things that you know well and can speak on. It should be a topic that you’re genuinely interested in and would be considered an expert in. This topic should be your main focus, but you can still share bits and pieces about yourself to infuse some personality into your content.

Several benefits come with choosing a niche instead of a generalized topic. For instance, Dr. Mike is focused on fighting medical misinformation.

When you choose one niche, you’ll gain a sense of clarity about what you want for your channels in the long term and a great understanding of your audience. Together, these will help you create better and more relevant content, which will grow your following.

This works to get you noticed by brands. At their core, brands have a niche – and when they’re looking for a new creator in that niche, you’ll be a standout almost immediately.

Post about the brands you want to work with

An influencer’s job is getting and staying seen, both by their audience and by brands they want to work with.

One of the best ways to get noticed is by making their ears burn, so to speak: talk about them in your content and tag them in your posts. When you do so, you show marketing teams not only that you’re interested in their brand, but also what you’re able to do for them.

This does involve work on your end and will likely entail some spending (you do have to understand the product to talk about it, after all), but when it works, the ROI can make it worth the initial investment. 

To give yourself the best chance, study the brand’s social media and the influencer marketing they’ve already done to get a feel for what they’re looking for. Get a leg up by choosing brands that you know and have used in the past yourself, as personal stories make influencers more appealing to both brands and customers. 

Sign up for influencer marketing programs

Networking has taken on an entirely different form in 2023, especially for influencers. It’s still important to tap into your own network and ask for referrals to expand your reach and increase the chances of partnership.

But there’s a new, easier way to get noticed – by signing up for influencer marketing programs, agencies, and platforms. These networks are dedicated to streamlining the scouting and signing of influencers for various brands’ marketing campaigns.

Signing up for this type of platform will give you a better chance of getting noticed. Some of the platforms designed specifically for health and wellness include Wellness Amplified, Refersion, TOP, and Healthcare Influencer Network.

Reach out to brands directly

Finally, we’ve reached the tried-and-true method of simply reaching out to brands you want to work with directly. 

Once you’ve exhausted all of your social media avenues, reach out to the PR team directly via email. Remember, PR teams are busy, so this email – which will double as your pitch – should be short and to the point.

It should include an introduction of who you are, what you do, and what your niche is before moving into the ask. Your ask needs to be direct and specific with a unique, deliverable idea that benefits the brand.

This will lead into a quick explanation of why working together makes sense before you close with a question that calls for an answer, such as, “Would you be interested in a collaboration?”

This is where the media kit we touched on earlier will come in handy. Attach it to your email so that professionals will get a better look at who you are and what you do in one fell swoop.

It seems like there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to landing a brand deal, and that’s true! For the first few deals, expect to put in some work while growing your following. But with dedication and persistence, you may find yourself as the next great physician influencer.

This material is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide financial, legal, tax, nor any other professional recommendations or advice.