Influencer Collaboration with Brittany Montague

 

Brittany is a certified pediatric sleep consultant, mom of two, and former VP at a nonprofit. Brittany and her husband suffered a significant loss in April of 2023 after delivering her son, Gates, stillborn at 16 weeks. This was a pivotal moment in her life when she realized she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom with her 2 children. While Brittany was on leave from her job recovering, she found CPSM and enrolled.

Brittany’s background in nonprofit and strong desire for relationship building and sleep training drew her into this field. Brittany graduated from CPSM in June 2023, the same day she was laid off from her employer and became a stay-at-home mom. Brittany now works her business around her busy children and enjoys the rewarding work of changing lives for the better.

 

Links: 

Website: Counting Sheep

Instagram: @countingsheepbybrittany

 

If you would like to learn more about the Becoming a Sleep Consultant, please join our free Facebook Group or check out our CPSM Website.

Book a free discovery call to learn how you can become a Certified Sleep Consultant here.

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Transcript:

Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.

On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.

Brittany is a certified pediatric sleep consultant, mom of two, and former VP at a nonprofit. Brittany and her husband suffered a significant loss in April of 2023 after delivering her son, Gates, stillborn at 16 weeks. This was a pivotal moment in her life when she realized she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom with her two children. While Brittany was on leave from her job recovering, she found CPSM and enrolled. Brittany’s background in nonprofit and strong desire for relationship building and sleep training drew her into this field.

Brittany graduated from CPSM in June of 2023, the same day she was laid off from her employer and became a stay-at-home mom. Brittany now works her business around her busy children and enjoys the rewarding work of changing lives for the better everywhere.

Jayne Havens: Brittany, welcome back to the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. I’m so thrilled to have you back on the show.

Brittany Montague: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be back. I had a great time the first time we chatted. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Jayne Havens: Thank you. So, first of all, I really appreciate you being willing to have this conversation with me. I’ve done several episodes on how to use social media to grow your sleep consulting business, but I’ve never specifically addressed the topic of how influencers can play a part in all of this.

I’m wondering if the best way to kick it off is just for me to ask you about your experience in connecting with influencers. What does that look like in your business, so far?

Brittany Montague: Yes, so this has been a really great piece of my business. And I can say that having only worked so far with three and one in the pipeline. That just tells me that you can have one, two or three of these partnerships, and it can really set your business on fire. And that’s what I love about it. So I’ve worked with, coming up on four, I have done these partnerships. Each one has looked a little different, and I love that too. Each one has allowed me to be creative in different ways and to really think about the content that I’m putting out and timing in the partnerships with the influencers.

Jayne Havens: Can you share maybe like a bit of a case study? Maybe pick one, and tell us the story. Like, how did you connect with that person? What did the arrangement look like? How did you decide how it was going to be mutually beneficial for both of you? Did the process work? What was the outcome? Can you give us like a front-to-back rundown?

Brittany Montague: Yes, so interestingly enough, I’ll connect two influencers in this story. The first one, I know personally. And so I reached out to her. Because she does a holiday giveaway every year, and I thought I’m going to take a chance and see if this works for me. So she shared a campaign essentially, where she asked people to follow her and me. We both shared it on social media. She had, at the time, about 15,000 followers. And so I think that’s important to know what you’re looking at when you’re working with influencers. They don’t have to have 100,000. They don’t have to have a million. She did the giveaway. I gained a lot of followers from that.

During that time, I made sure that my content was going out timely as these people were following me and as we were talking about this. So I was on stories. I was talking about different things. If it was the topic of safe sleep, I went through that one time. So just mapping that out.

As luck would have it, the winner did land and was a influencer. That ironically happened, and then I’ve partnered with her. This was a few months ago. She is the influencer that I have worked with so far that has absolutely grown my business. We didn’t have any plans on her sharing. I obviously would — natural relationship comes up with an influencer. You want to have a plan in place. But this one was unique in that she won the package.

She shared every single detail along the way of what our partnership looked like. I provided her a discount code to her followers. And every time that she shared, I was gaining 10 to 20 followers. She created a highlight bubble, which was really impactful too because she would reference her highlight bubble on Instagram. People will go through and then read through it. Her discount code was in that highlight bubble, so people kind of had to go search for that and look for it. But I gained a lot of followers.

The interesting piece is that this has been now, I guess, four months that she has talked about me in various spurts. Because she continues to talk about how great her son’s sleep is, how wonderful. I think the important thing to know when working with influencers is, your clients aren’t showing up right away. They are building a relationship with you after they follow you. Because I truly believe that your relationships with these individuals who are following you means more than the influencer who is sharing.

That is really what kind of set my business off. It’s because these followers have turned into clients over a period of four months. And so it kind of sets up a pipeline for you too. I think it would be difficult if everybody showed up on the first day and it’s like, “Hey, we want help right now.” It’s just not going to be like that unless you have someone who has a million followers and really trusted with their community. But it was a great partnership. She is one that we’ve actually stayed close. I can ask her at any point, “Hey, can you share,” or, “I have an idea.”

The other thing that I love too is making it a mutually beneficial relationship. So I have another influencer that I’m working with. She owns actually a consignment sale, and I chose to sponsor her consignment sale. She didn’t ask me to do that. I did it because I knew that she had supported me in my business, and this is another aspect that I can support her. But shopping their links, doing the simple things, just supporting their business, share about them, talk about them, and reshare what they’re sharing about you. You can really take these relationships and absolutely blow them out of the water.

Jayne Havens: I love that. I love how one influencer turned into a second. That sounds like a lucky horseshoe moment, as my mother would say. And also, I think it’s interesting. The influencer experience that you shared sounds — I don’t have a ton of experience working with influencers. I’ve only worked with two in my entire career.

One of my stories sounds very similar to yours. It was actually somebody who, at the time, had a following of about 50,000 on Instagram. I wanted to talk about like the audience size. Because you’re right. It doesn’t need to be 150,000 followers or half a million followers. These sort of like micro influencers, sometimes they have really engaged audiences, and they have really strong followings. And their audience, when they say jump, everyone’s like, “How high?” Right?

Brittany Montague: Yes.

Jayne Havens: Actually, the influencer that I worked with was somebody in the fitness space. My mom followed her on Instagram. I have actually never heard of her before. She was complaining about her son’s sleep, and my mom DM’d her. She’s like, “My daughter could help you. My daughter could help you.” This was pretty early on in my career. I’m like, oh, my gosh, mom. You’re so embarrassing. But thank you.

Brittany Montague: I love that.

Jayne Havens: And so she hooked us up, and we worked together. I offered to help her for free, which I want to talk to you about this. Because that experience went well. I offered to help her for free in exchange for her talking about me on social media. And it worked out. She actually spoke about me way more than what I was expecting her to do. I thought that she would maybe make one or two posts over the course of the two weeks.

But literally, she vlogged it. She, every single day, was talking about it once or twice a day. I mean, she was recapping naps. She was talking about bedtime. She really let everybody into her world. And every single time, she was tagging my Instagram. So I grew a ton of followers. I got a ton of clients out of it.

I would say also, it set my business on fire at the time. But she didn’t pay me. She was the type of person — I don’t know if it was because she’s in the fitness space, and they understand accountability. But I would think that sometimes when — I know that sometimes when people don’t pay you for support, they’re not as invested. And I’m wondering if you’ve ever had an experience yet working with an influencer where it didn’t go quite as well because it was just an exchange of services for free press, and if you are planning on outlining your relationships moving forward to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

Brittany Montague: I haven’t run across that. And I feel that way too. Anytime I’ve ever had a pro bono client, it’s just harder to work with in my opinion and in my experience because they aren’t financially invested. However, what I’ve learned about influencers is that they really want to have a trusted following. So they are going to put their effort into it and really have a great experience if it’s something they’re sharing about, because they want to be good at it. They want to do that. They want the trust with their followers. And that’s the only way to do it. So I really haven’t run into any issues there.

But I found that it kind of opens the door for them to just talk about it more. And really, it keeps me on my toes more. I probably overperform when I work with an influencer and make sure that they have everything they need. I even kind of go out of my way to where I’m sharing things too and creating on my Instagram. And I’m tagging them so that it’s an easy share. Also, I think that creates trust too with my followers — that I’m willing to tag when I’m talking about results and working with these influencers and showing that it is a trusted partnership. I really believe in them.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, let’s talk about finding the right influencers. You mentioned follower count. I agree. The follower count does not need to be huge. Follower account also sometimes doesn’t really mean what you think it means. You can actually buy followers on Instagram.

Brittany Montague: Yes, you can.

Jayne Havens: So somebody who has 15,000 followers might have really low engagement. Have you asked influencers to see their engagement statistics? On the business side of their Instagram account, they can track all of this. They can see how many people are actually liking their posts, engaging with their posts, sharing their posts. Are you asking for that data, or is it more on a trust basis? Then let’s also talk about who their audience is. Right? Because if their audience is not our ideal audience, then maybe that’s not the right fit.

Brittany Montague: Yeah, absolutely. I think that your typical mommy bloggers and influencers out there are going to be the ones that you would want to have a partnership with. I don’t ask for those data points. I know how much time it takes me to put into a client, to put into creating a sleep plan. And for me, the trial of that is worth it. So I believe that because of what I put out, that they will then share.

I know that engagement matters. Follower count, in my opinion, and I agree, it doesn’t matter. It can be a trivial number. The influencer I talked about who lit my business on fire, she had 9,000 followers at the time. That’s the least amount of followers that I have worked with on an account. So I don’t really do the statistics. It might be something I’d consider in the future if this continues to be an avenue for me.

But as far as finding the right people, I think you have to look at the content that they are sharing. If they are, I will just say, a fitness instructor but they’re never talking about children, they’re never having that type of conversation, that’s probably not the person you want to go after. If they are talking about their children, if they’re sharing their real life, if they’re relating beyond fitness, then I would say that’s a great person to partner with.

Look at their feeds. Do they have pictures of their kids? Are they sharing? What are the types of items are they sharing if they are a person who is linking items? Are they baby items? Are they toddler? Are they the various types of things that you would use as a mom?

I think it’s important too to know that a lot of times through these partnerships, the people who are going to follow you are pregnant moms. I have found that through this because they are getting ready. And so that’s obviously not going to turn into a client right away. However, you have the opportunity to build the trust with those moms. And once they have those babies, they are coming to you.

It has happened to me already. That is truly, you just have to know who the appropriate audience is and where your moms are hanging out. Where are you hanging out if you’re a mom? And who are you looking at? Who are you engaging with? What type of stuff are they putting out? I mean, I really think it’s that. Because I love an influencer. I love shopping their links. I love looking at what they’re putting out, wonderful ideas. And truly, I build personal relationships on my personal Instagram with these influencers. Because then, one day, if I do and I make the ask, then we have a relationship. And they can see that in the history of our messages.

Jayne Havens: I love that you’re doing that. You’re laying all of this groundwork on the front end before you even make the ask. Right? You’re getting to know their account. You’re engaging with their account. You’re purchasing from them, maybe sending them DMs and asking them questions, starting conversations, building that relationship on the front end. Then I would imagine that makes the ask so much easier. Because it’s not a cold ask. You’re already a warm relationship for them, right?

Then I love also that you were prepared while this process is going on, while the influencer is sharing about your account. That you’re not just there thinking, like, what should I post, what should I do today? But you have a whole plan of how to show up so that when you have new followers coming in, they can see all of this really engaging and interesting content. Frankly, I’m really proud of you for doing that.

I don’t know a bit. I don’t know a bit. I’m not super strong on social media, so this is not my game. I’m learning from you. But that’s really brilliant. Maybe it’s obvious. But I definitely don’t know that I would have thought to play it that way. So I appreciate you sharing. You can’t just have all of these followers coming in and then not share anything with them and not teach them anything and not offer them any information, or support, or whatever that looks like. Because then, they’re just coming, and they’re following you and they forget about you.

Brittany Montague: Absolutely. I am not an Instagram expert by any means. The pretty reels, all these things, that is a struggle for me. But what I do know is that I’m good at relationships, and I can shine through that in my stories. And that’s where I choose to do it.

I was talking with an influencer this morning who we’re going to be partnering. We’ve already partnered. And she can be sharing soon, which is another aspect. You can partner with someone and share later too. I said, hey, let’s pick some dates because I want to be sure I have my content ready to go.

Something that I have picked up on — again, the non-expert of Instagram that I am — as soon as I follow someone, their highlight bubble or their story’s bubble pops up in the front for me. So if I know that on a personal aspect that that’s what’s happening on my Instagram every time I follow, then I know that I could be in the front of their highlights and stories, and they could be engaging with me very quickly. That’s a great way to build a relationship.

Jayne Havens: And are you sending all of your new followers a DM? Like when somebody new follows you, whether it’s because they came from an influencer or anywhere else, do you follow them back, send them a message, introduce yourself? What does that look like?

Brittany Montague: Yeah, I follow everybody back. I do that because there is an opportunity in DMs to do notes where you can just post a little bit. Like a couple of weeks ago, I posted and I said: some amazing results are in stories. It drove someone to look at my stories, and it created a new partnership for me with a doula. And so using that as a strategy, but you can only do that if you are following that person back.

I do send a message. I just say, “Hey, thank you for the follow. I appreciate it. If you have any questions about sleep, let me know.” I kind of leave it at that. Because I don’t want moms to feel like I am just showing up in their DMs and just trying to reach out and see if they have problems. I’m just introducing myself.

Jayne Havens: I love it. I love it. When you work with an influencer and it goes well, are you asking that influencer if they have influencer friends that might also be interested in a partnership?

Brittany Montague: Funny you say that. I had that thought probably yesterday that that is something that I should be doing. It’s asking who else I know would want to work with me. But I truly believe — I mean, again, back to the relationships, you’re going to hear that from me every time you talk to me about relationships. But if that relationship continues to build and I know that I can ask these influencers for things, then I have no problem doing that.

Most of the time, depending on your relationship, they’re going to say yes. “Hey, yeah, I can make that introduction for you. Have no problem doing that.” Or, they’re going to reach out to me and say, “Hey, this influencer who I’m friends with, she’s having some sleep struggles. I told her about us working together. I’m going to send her your way.” So you might not even have to ask for that to come your way.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I’ve been doing that with podcasting. Like when I’m on a podcast that I feel like is really in my zone, like my target market is listening to that podcast, I often will ask them, like, “Hey, do you have any recommendations for other shows that I might apply to beyond?” Because there’s a gazillion of them out there, right?

Brittany Montague: Yes.

Jayne Havens: There’s no way for me to find all of them, just like there’s no way for you to find all of the great influencers, right? They’re a dime a dozen, which is a great thing. That means there’s so much opportunity. But we don’t know what we don’t know. So I’m personally not afraid to ask. I think most people are more than willing to share their connections and introduce people to others in their circle. And I’ve never been met with any any pushback when I’ve done that.

Brittany Montague: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I know that one thing that has gotten popular with influencers is that they have management companies. And their management companies make these deals.

Now, I did reach out to one who has a lot of very popular influencers. I’m talking a lot with a million followers. I asked. I said, hey, what does the partnership look like? The minimum, $5,000 for me to pay. That didn’t even guarantee me that they were going to share beyond like one small post, and that they would even do a find anyone. Because the upwards of what these partnerships are costing are $25,000 each.

To me — let’s just say I had the money and I did that — I don’t believe that would have been a real, authentic relationship. That would have been a paid relationship that I don’t feel like would have actually benefited me in the long run. Maybe it would have give me a lot of followers. But I think from a relationship standpoint and building relationships, I mean, she — well, not she. I mean, there’s multiple to choose from. But I don’t think they would have organically been sharing about me beyond that.

Jayne Havens: Right. I agree. I think that the most fruitful experiences come from genuine experiences from the heart, right?

Brittany Montague: Always.

Jayne Havens: Those influencers that you’ve recently worked with or that you’re working with currently, they are working with you, they’re getting to know you. They’re trusting you. And as you said, you’re forming a relationship with them. And that makes them want to share. I also think when people want to share something on social media, it comes across as so much more authentic than when somebody is being paid to share something. Right?

Brittany Montague: Yes.

Jayne Havens: And people online can tell the difference. Not always but usually. I think what you’re doing, building relationships with micro influencers who have very engaged audiences and have sort of mirrored audiences to your desired ideal client base, that’s the money shot right there. I think you’re doing everything right.

Moving into the future, what’s your game plan for this? Do you plan to just take it one at a time and work with somebody and hope it goes great and then move on to the next? I feel like you’re very organizational, so I feel like you have some sort of spreadsheet somewhere that I would like to see. What’s your back plan here?

Brittany Montague: For me, I mean, I think they’re going to happen organically for me. I mean, I continue to build relationships on my personal accounts because I like influencers. And that’s just what I do. So if I see an opportunity come up, I will do that. I am probably not going to go out and find and seek random influencers to say, “Hey, are you having sleep troubles? Can I help you?” It has to be something they’re already experiencing. And so I will probably just look at when they’re happening.

These influencers that I’ve built relationships with, I’ll continue to ask them to partner. They are going to continue to reach out to me. Because guess what? Yesterday, one of the influencers, her son woke up early. She’s like, “Hey, what is going on?” So I kind of recourse corrected with her. We have a new schedule in place, and things are moving forward. And she shares about it.

So it’s just, I’m going to continue to build the relationships that I have. And those will lead to other places. I mean, they know people, like we’ve talked about. And they’ll be willing to connect. So I will probably ask like, “Hey, who else do you know that I can be introduced to?” I will just continue to form organic relationships, without the intent of making the ask for them to partner with me. Because if I’ve created the relationship, I don’t even have to make the ask. They offer.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, they’re coming to you. I love that. Before we wrap up, where can people follow you? I feel like, most certainly, you should be sharing your Instagram. Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Brittany Montague: Yes.

Jayne Havens: Let’s get you some new followers.

Brittany Montague: @countingsheepbybrittany on Instagram. I’m really more active there than I am on Facebook. But I’m also on Facebook at Counting Sheep by Brittany Montague. I love this work and leaning into these partnerships, and really just diving in and seeing how I can help other people too. I had someone in CPSM reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m working with an influencer. Can you help me prepare for the meeting? I said sure, and she landed the influencer after the meeting.

Jayne Havens: I saw that. That was on our winning Wednesday thread, right?

Brittany Montague: It was.

Jayne Havens: I saw that. That made me so happy. I didn’t know that the two of you were connected. That’s just another thing I love about our community. Right? We are 100 strong, almost 800 strong at the time of recording this podcast episode. But it really does feel like a small community. When I see little side conversations, like, I didn’t know that you and Alyssa were connected, that just made me really happy to see that today.

I love that you’re learning and figuring out how to do this and showing up with an abundant mindset and being willing to help other CPSM-ers who are looking to implement this in their own businesses, and then also share this on the podcast for anybody to listen — whether it’s somebody inside the CPSM community, or somebody who’s taken another course, or even somebody who’s just interested in becoming a sleep consultant and maybe feeling like, how would I ever find clients? Oh, okay. Maybe I’d partner with some influencers. Now I get it.

Brittany Montague: Right.

Jayne Havens: I really appreciate you being willing to share your wisdom. Congrats on all of your success. I think I’ve said to you before. I knew you were a star. When I first met you, I knew you’re going to get this figured out super quick. I’m glad that you’re rocking and rolling. And I can’t wait to — we’ll have another conversation maybe four to six months down the road, and see what else awesome you’re up to.

Brittany Montague: Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to share with you now a couple of things that I shared with Alyssa.

Jayne Havens: Oh, yeah, please do.

Brittany Montague: Yes, some tips when working with influencers and things to offer them. One of the partnerships that I love to do with influencers, offer to go live with them on a topic. I did one on daylight savings, and that was really well received. I think it’s important to be prepared for influencers to use their own language when describing sleep training. They may use some word verbiage that you don’t think that that is exactly what they’re talking about. I think that that is just something to be prepared for.

Then be prepared for them to share the good, the bad and the ugly. I mean, they are going to share every detail, which is great. Because you know you can overcome the low moments that they have in sleep training, if they do have them, and that they can overcome it. They’re going to come back on and they’re going to talk about that. But those are just a couple of things that I shared with Alyssa on here’s how you should be prepared to work with an influencer.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I think that that’s really valuable advice. If I think back to my most successful influencer partnership that I had, she did share the low moments. My heart sank. I was like, uh, this is hard, you know. But you know what? I think that that’s how they build trust, and that’s how they come across as truly authentic to their audiences.

You know what? I do that. I was thinking, like, I do that in my business, too, right? I get on to the podcast, and I’ve shared like when your clients don’t have success and what that looks like and how to handle those moments. I always say even the finest restaurant serves a bad meal every now and then, right? Or you get bad service. You can’t bat a thousand 100% of the time.

Luckily, when we work with families for two weeks, there are some high highs. There are some low lows. But it’s our job to get them to the finish line. And if they’re committed to the process, we are going to position them to make drastic improvements to the way that their children sleep. The beautiful thing is, with these influencers, I guess their audience is following along very closely. It’s like binging a Netflix series, right?

Brittany Montague: Absolutely.

Jayne Havens: They’re seeing all of it. So they’re seeing the high highs. They’re seeing the low lows. Then they get to see the results at the finish line. I think that that moment at the end makes it all worthwhile. And I’m just so happy that it’s working out for you. It makes me almost want to get back onto Instagram and let it with my business.

Brittany Montague: Right? Absolutely.

Jayne Havens: Probably not. Well, thank you so much, Brittany, for taking the time to share. We’ll do it again soon.

Brittany Montague: Awesome. Sounds good. Thank you.

Jayne Havens: Thanks, Brittany.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.

If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.