The Basics of Influencer Deals on YouTube

I recently had a client with ~1500 subscribers on YouTube ask about landing brand deals for the channel. My frank advice was to focus on 10xing the audience. 

Unless you are extremely niched (like commercial shipping or specialized equipment for semiconductor manufacturing) you’re not going to be able to land a meaningful-sized brand deal.

Below, I’ll provide a breakdown of the other lessons I’ve learned about YouTube influencer deals (from real deals I’ve landed with brands like Franzy).

1. All the good companies track data meticulously.

They create a custom URL and QR code for the campaign on your channel. They are tracking every click and conversion that you generate for them.

Here’s the one Franzy created: https://franzy.com/aaron-watson

If those numbers look good, they will ask to sponsor more videos. 

If you cannot convert your audience, they will know unambiguously.

The less sophisticated companies don’t track data as diligently. While you may think “awesome, that’s who I’ll work with”, the reality is that their budgets will be smaller and will be less likely to renew because they aren’t good at marketing.

2. The Larger You Are, the More Inbound Inquiries you’ll Get

Once my channel hit 100k, the number of inbound solicitations to sponsor videos went up dramatically. 

Most of the brands, and agencies they hire to manage influencer marketing, use tools to sift through the millions of creators to find the ones with actual audiences. They will proactively pitch you if you meet their criteria.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to get sponsors if you’re smaller than that. But, it does mean you will need to work harder at it.

3. It is harder to drive retention with a 60 second ad

Look at this retention graph from a recent video with a sponsor’s ad integrated. Can you guess where the ad starts?

Frustrating. Before the huge drop in retention during the ad, my retention was above trend!

A bunch of viewers took the ‘ad break’ as an opportunity to leave.

It’s already hard enough to make a video perform. Incorporating an ad ups the level of difficulty.

4. Deals are usually a set amount of money or a CPM deal

We have about a 50-50 split of deals where the sponsor pays a flat fee to be incorporated or a set $ per thousand views (CPM).

One way offers upside and downside, the other is a sure thing.

Brands tend to like the CPM model more.

Hope you found this helpful. If you have more questions about brand deals, reply to this email and I’ll answer them in a future newsletter.

P.S. - Also, we’re got a really good training dropping February 26th. If you’re focused on video marketing, it’s worth your time to sign up