How to find the right person to pitch at a brand

The most common beginner mistake in cold pitching is sending your email to contact@brand.com, info@brand.com or support@brand.com. Someone reads those inboxes, but it's customer service, and their job is refunds and lost parcels, not forwarding pitches to marketing.

To get a deal, the pitch has to reach whoever controls the creator or marketing budget. Bento's brand search finds that person in four steps: set your niche, filter by region, pick the right job title for the company's size, and check the contact before you save it. It takes a few minutes per brand once you know the filters, and it works on the free plan. The one thing to watch is stale contacts, because marketing staff change jobs often.

Step 1: set your niche and industry

Open the brand search in your Bento dashboard. Don't browse whatever brands appear first; start with your actual content niche, because the filter is only as useful as the category you give it.

• Consumer goods: skincare, wellness, drinks, apparel, pet products.
• Tech and software: productivity apps, consumer hardware, mobile games.
• Home and lifestyle: cookware, decor, bedding.

If your content spans two niches, wellness and home goods for example, run the search twice with each category rather than one broad tag. A narrower search returns a shorter but far more relevant list, which matters when you're reading through fifty results one by one. Fill in your own profile properly at this stage too; Bento uses it to recommend brands and to draft pitches, and a vague profile produces vague matches.

Step 2: filter by region

If you're based in the UK or Canada and pitch a US-only brand that doesn't ship internationally, the email was wasted before you sent it. Use the country or region filter to stick to brands that reach the people who watch your content, and double-check smaller or newer brands, since plenty are still regional even when their Instagram looks national.

This matters most for physical products; for software and digital services geography rarely matters. If you make content for one city rather than a country, Bento's local search maps businesses near you, which our guide to pitching local businesses covers.

Step 3: target the right title

Who controls the budget depends on company size, and pitching the wrong level wastes the contact even when the brand is a good fit. As a rough guide:

• Small brands, a handful of staff: the founder, head of marketing or growth manager usually approves partnerships personally, often within a day or two.
• Mid-size brands with a marketing team: the influencer marketing manager, partnerships manager or paid social lead, whose job is to field pitches like yours.
• Large brands: a brand partnerships director, or an outside agency that runs their creator programme. Expect a slower, more formal process, and a first reply from someone a step removed from the decision.

Match the title to the deal too. A sponsored post on your own channel is a brand-awareness buy, usually owned by influencer or PR roles. UGC for ads is a performance buy, owned by paid social or growth, which our UGC guide explains.

Step 4: verify and save the contact

Before sending anything, check whether the contact is marked as verified, which means the address was confirmed recently. Unverified contacts aren't necessarily wrong, but give them a quick check: look the person up on LinkedIn and confirm they still work there and in that role. Then add the contact to your pipeline, which is what lets Bento's follow-ups and tracking pick up the conversation. From there, write the pitch yourself; a generic template wastes all the targeting you just did.

Building a list of 30 brands in an hour

Once the filters are familiar, batch the work rather than finding one brand at a time. Run your niche search, then go down the results with three quick questions for each: does the brand sell where your audience lives, has it worked with creators before (Instagram prospecting or a look at its tagged posts will tell you), and is there a named contact with the right title? Add the ones that pass to your pipeline and skip the rest without deliberating. An hour of this usually produces a list of 20 to 30 well-matched brands, enough for a month on Bento's free plan of 20 pitches, with spares for the contacts that bounce.

Tag each saved brand with why you picked it ("new product line," "runs paid TikTok," "competitor of a past client"). When you write the pitch a week later, that note is your first line.

When the search doesn't give you what you need

• Too few results. Widen one filter at a time: a neighbouring category, a second country, or a broader title. Bento's database leans toward consumer brands that already work with creators, so B2B and very local niches come back thinner; in those, use Bento for the brands it has and LinkedIn for the rest.
• Only generic addresses. If a brand shows nothing but a hello@ inbox, check its team page and LinkedIn for a marketing title, or move on. A pitch to a shared inbox is a long shot.
• A pitch bounces. The person has probably left. Search the brand again for their replacement, and remove the old contact from your pipeline so the follow-up doesn't keep firing.
• The right person doesn't reply. Let the follow-up sequence finish before trying anyone else at the company; switching contacts after one email reads as scattergun.

Two mistakes that waste a good search

• Pitching the founder of a company past the size where founders read their own inbox. At a five-person skincare brand the founder probably still opens everything. At a company with its own influencer manager listed in Bento, founder emails usually go through an assistant first, so the more specific title is the better bet, even if it feels less flattering.
• Sending the same pitch to several people at one company "just in case." Bento's database may show the influencer manager, the PR director and the growth lead at one brand, but pitching all three looks uncoordinated the moment they compare notes. Pick the one title that fits your kind of deal and send once.