How to Get (and Keep) Sponsors As an Independent Creator — 5 Lessons from Millions in Ad Sales
When it comes to sponsorships and partnerships, podcasters and creators are leaving money on the table.
The rise of the Creators' Economy and the recent changes by Apple's around privacy has created a massive gap in the market.
Brands are actively looking for podcasters, influencers and creators to collaborate and there's a multi-billion dollar ad market that's ripe for disruption.
This post will teach how to take advantage of this change, based on our experience helping creators generate millions in sponsorship revenue.
The best part, they've done this while keeping creative control and without feeling like they're selling out.
"PSA for podcasters: Learn everything you can from Sachit. His advice on seeking and getting sponsorships is spot on."
Kintan Brahmbhatt
General Manager, Podcasts at Amazon
Spotify
Apple
YouTube
In this excerpt from our full program, we cover the following topics:
- How to find the right partner for your audience
- Understanding ROI and what brands are looking for
- How to help brands improve their ROI to increase your earnings
- How many partnerships do you actually need? (you'll be surprised)
- Why you should say NO to brands that don't align with your audience
Whether you're running a blog, a podcast, a newsletter or an IG/YouTube page, this excerpt will help you sign partnerships with top brands. Enjoy!
Summary
Here are 12 simple steps to help you grow and make more from sponsors:
1. How many partners do you need to earn a sustainable living? You can do it with less than 10... here’s the math for you (image) Surprised? This is a big one that most creators get wrong. One example: a client made $500,000+ from 14 sponsors in one year (!!)
2. Protip: Be mindful of who you partner with and aim for long-term partnerships, since you don't need that many (from #1). That means saying no to companies that aren’t a good fit for your audience... even if they offer you gobs of cash.
3. Develop the "I am the prize" mindset. I've worked with 100s of creators. I've seen creators say yes to $50 sponsorships.
I've seen creators basically begging to brands. That’s not how you stand out.
Transcript
We're gonna start with three M marketing, which is really understand the three basics of how when you whenever you do a marketing campaign, which is who's it for? Who's the market messages, like, What are you saying to them? And medium is like, how do you reach them. And it's really important to, to like actually like understand where where sort of like this like idea of like sponsorship partnerships and influencer marketing is and more importantly, like where it's going. So influencer expand is expected to grow to $13 billion in 2021.
Podcast advertising is expected to [] percent of brands that runs run campaigns in house say that finding influencers is the most significant challenge for them. And I look at that this as a really big opportunity. I think another thing that's happening that people are sort of like not looking at is, Apple is making all of these changes in terms of like how like advertising works on the iPhone, right? Usually 30 to 40% of VC funding has gone to companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, for spend on advertising. And when adven sort of like the Apple, when Apple has sort of like broken Facebook ads in a way, companies are now not getting the same ROI they got on Facebook, in the past. And so they're increasingly looking at other ways to get distribution for their product. And a lot of companies are now turning to influencers, because influencers. And creators already have affinity with their audience. They already know what their audience wants, they have that relationship already. And I think for creators, podcasters influencers, this is a huge opportunity.
Want to learn more? In the full program, we cover the following topics around sponsorship:
Covered Above:
- How to find the right partner for your audience
- Understanding ROI and what brands are looking for
- How to help brands improve their ROI to increase your earnings
- How many partnerships do you actually need? (you'll be surprised)
- Why you should say NO to brands that don't align with your audience
Covered in the program:
- Why you should focus on sponsorships and partnerships
- Understanding your market
- How to find the right decision-makers
- How to price and what to offer sponsors
- How to reach sponsors
- Building your sponsor pipeline
- The Sales Call
- How to get partners results
- Closing the loop and following up
- How to manage renewals (this trick helped us start years with 60-80% of the year already committed)
- Finally... how to put this into action with tracking sheets, guided workbooks and examples of sponsor decks
Mixergy was missing out on sponsorship opportunities and the advertising side of the business wasn’t working well, ads weren’t producing much revenue to the point where they wanted to shut ads down altogether. Over 5 years, we helped Mixergy grow sponsorship revenue 10X while reducing workload and helping the team partner with amazing companies.
Sachit has deep domain knowledge of how Facebook fits into the picture of what you’re trying to accomplish, what to expect, and nuances to be mindful of. In our experience, he cares relentlessly. He never phoned it in. He cares about his craft, about doing a great job, about thinking flexibly, about what’s best for the client."
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