147: How to Set Up Brand Partnerships with Justin Moore

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You should not have standard pricing As a creator, as a business owner, every single deal that you do is going to be different and it's going to be based on the circumstances and success metrics of the organization.

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Hello, hello free timers. I am so ridiculously excited to be here today with Justin Moore. Justin is a sponsorship coach and founder of Creator Wizard, a school and community dedicated to teaching others how to find and negotiate dream brand deals. He has a unique perspective to how brands choose which influencers they partner with and those they will not. He's on a mission to enable creators to land 1 million paid brand partnerships by 2032. Justin, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. Jenny, I don't think you knew that I was going to be bringing my sound effects but here I am. This is the vibe I'm gonna be bringing today.

I love it. Yep, that's your soundboard in the background. I wish I was cool enough to have a soundboard and just applause for myself when I make bad jokes and stuff. I loved hearing you on Nathan Barry's show and then I did the Justin Moore Rabbit Hole. I listened to you on a bunch of other interviews. Then I joined your free community. Then I get your newsletters and the energy you bring to this space is just next level. So let me start by asking how do you have so much energy?

I just get so excited talking about brand partnerships. This feels like a really dorky thing to get excited about. But you know, this is something that I have done for many, many years. My wife and I have been full time creators for eight years. We started our first YouTube channel in 2009 so it's been a long time that we've been living on the interwebs and sharing our life. And, you know, working with brands has always been, number one, a very significant portion of our income as creators and business owners. But it's been the one area where I think there's a lot of myths, there's a lot of uncertainty, you know, when it comes to actually making partnerships with brands and companies. And so I have just decided that, like, you know, a couple of years ago, I wanted to start creating content to educate people around the process of working with brands, because in my experience, it has always been such a mutually beneficial thing. It's been so additive to our life and our business. It's been just this wonderful experience. All of the partnerships we've done over the years have just been awesome with, like, very, very few exceptions. So that's just the vibe I wanted to bring, because I didn't see that dialogue. I didn't see this conversation happening really, anywhere on social media.

I love how you've taken your knowledge and expertise in this, and then it is so empowering if you can help other creators actually earn a living from what they're doing. And one of the things that attracted me to you is that you were the first person that made it seem doable, even with an audience of a smaller size. So what do you say to the creator who, let's say they have a newsletter and, like me, might be tiptoeing around having paid sponsors for the newsletter? I know Convertkit shout out to Nathan Barry. Convertkit is starting to build that into their platform, which is genius. But a lot of business owners that have a newsletter probably have an underutilized asset in a certain sense, but they're counting themselves out saying, I'm too small to have anyone pay me or it's gonna be too much work. The juice isn't worth the squeeze of what they could earn given the size of their list. So what would you say to someone who's worried about that?

So there's a couple layers to the onion that I think we should peel back here. So the first one, let's talk about the mindset piece. When it comes to, oh, you know what? I'm either not big enough or no brands or companies would really want to partner with me or sponsor me because I don't have a large reach or distribution or subscribership or whatever, that's what stops people right out the gates most of the time. Right. And in my experience, the most important mindset shift that you need to have around this piece is not about how you can help brands, but it's actually how you can serve your audience and how you can serve your customers best. Because a lot of creators will think, you know, I don't even really know, like, what types of brands I could target. And that's because they're just trying to, like, pull things out of thin air or they're trying to look at, you know, the types of brands and companies that they really like. And that can be a good place to start. But the much more empowering way to do this is to literally ask your audience about their lives. Ask your audience about what is keeping them up at night. And this is what something that's called the psychographics of your audience of your customers. So people really get fixated on demographics. So it's like their ages, their genders, their geography and so on. And that obviously is important to a certain degree, but it's really about people's psychological characteristics and interest and behaviors and things that actually make them tick. Again, what's keeping them up at night? Where are they consuming your content? Are they in line at Starbucks and they're scrolling for one minute? Are they sitting down on, you know, they're casting YouTube to their TV and watching a one hour live stream that you're doing? Like, exactly. How are people interacting with your content and your business and asking them questions about, you know, what brands and products are you loving and using right now that's helping your business or helping your content creation strategy and so on. And so you get these really beautiful, colorful, qualitative responses when you literally can either send a, you know, a Google form survey to them, maybe you ask on your Instagram Stories or your YouTube Community tab, or send it to your newsletter, whatever you do. And you could start to understand, oh, I didn't realize I had such a large segment of my audience who has this very particular issue. I actually can think of a brand that I would love to expose my audience to this particular brand because I think it's going to solve a problem from them. And so this is the positioning that you utilize. Now you feel empowered to go reach out to that brand because it's not you now saying, oh, oh, I really love your brand. I would love to talk about it to my audience. It's no my audience. I have data here to back up the fact that they really need your product or your service. And so this is the missing piece. Is that what a lot of creators do when they try and pitch a brand is that they say, oh, I love your software tool, your SaaS platform. I've been using it for two years. I'm sorry. The brand doesn't care. Like people joke. They've given me this title of, like, their tough love mentor when it comes to this kind of thing. Because at the end of the day, the brand really doesn't care about you. They don't really care about your content or your business. What they care about is do you have prospective customers in your community? That's what they care about. And so your job as a creator or a business owner is to draw that line and illustrate to them that you are the conduit for them to accomplish that.

I can confirm they do not care. I wrote to a couple brands. I was emboldened by listening to you, and then I'm sure I did it all wrong, and then I bungled it. But I wrote to three of my favorite software companies. I was so excited. It took me, like, probably years to get over the hump of emailing to ask. And then, sure enough, all three, it's like, wah, wah, wah. I know you have that sound effect somewhere, right?

Okay, I do, I do. Hold on, I've got that one. But okay, but hold on, hold on, Jenny, hold on.

That's exactly what happened to me.

Okay, but let me tell you, what we're going to do right now is we're going to turn the womp into a kaching. Okay? Because I really want to make this tactical. You don't have to say the name of the brands that you pitch, but walk me through what was the pitch that you made and tell me why you think you didn't get the response you were hoping for.

Well, I should pull one of these up. And I don't mind saying the brands, I don't want to throw the brands under the bus. Like, I genuinely love them. I probably shouldn't have started with my three biggest fangirl products, but I wrote to Zapier. I don't know if I did. Hello, Scout, Notion, and Kajabi, because these are the ones that I already evangelized on the podcast. And I don't know, I wrote to them. I did say I love your software. I said, I've already sung your praises on the podcast. My audience is small business owners who. So maybe I did connect it, that there was a target audience and, like, would benefit from the software. And then I even linked to them where I had mentioned them previously. But in all three cases, like, something must have been missing. And I'm so glad you're here to give me the Top love. Because I think I also didn't email the right person, which I know you talk about, because I didn't know how to find that person. And I did say, hey, I heard you're advertising on this other podcast that's related to mine. So I also tried to pick brands that I knew were running ad campaigns, but they all just gave me the generic, if any, reply at all. Just the generic. It wasn't even specific to my pitch. It was just like yellow by, as.

My Lebanese husband would say, got you. Okay. All right. So you cool if we workshop one of these right now?

Sure. Okay.

All right. So while you were making that description, I pulled up Zapier's Instagram page. Okay. And what I wanted to do while I was listening to you make this description of kind of how you pitch them was understand, how was zapier marketing in Q1 of last year or 2022, essentially. Okay. Because if you are going to be pitching Zapier right now, where you know, the date of recording, we're in mid October, basically, if you are going to want to forge a partnership with Zapier right now, you should not be pitching holiday campaigns. Because in all reality, we're already several weeks into Q4. If they're going to do be doing any Q4 or holiday campaigns, that planning and that budget allocation probably happened two months ago. Okay. And so that's one of the first key strategies, is ensuring that the timeline of something that you're pitching them is in alignment with, in all likelihood, with their marketing strategy. Okay. And so what I did is I. What I love doing is I love using Instagram as a research tool because you get a window into what these brands and companies like their strategies on a year over year basis. Because most people think that brands reinvent the wheel every single year when it comes to their marketing playbook. And that could not be further from the truth. They're going to be like, what were we doing last January? Let's go dust that off and run it again. Right. Maybe we'll do something slightly different this year. But generally they do the same thing every single year. And so what I did, Jenny, is I scrolled back and I found a post that they made on January 3rd, 2022, and it says, how to automate your work in 2022. So it's basically this initiative, you know, it's almost like New Year, new you, New Year's resolutions, like, stop doing rep stuff. You know, got to focus on your zone of genius. It's like kind of like a short form TikTok Instagram Reels type video that I'm looking at right now. And so knowing this, let's say that you were going to be pitching them for Q1, which you can still do, by the way, Q1 2023. You can say to them, the pitch becomes hey, Zapier. Or, you know, hey name. Right. I saw that you were running some campaigns and doing a content strategy all around how to automate your work in 2022, kind of for a New Year's resolution type thing. I was wondering if you were going to be doing that again this year. I would love to have your head of product or head of marketing on the podcast. I would love to do some newsletter blasts with you talking about how Xavier can help you enable your true genius and yada, yada, yada. I could do a webinar, a joint webinar with your team. You know, I could talk about my book, I could talk about how the tools and how I help people systematize and processize their businesses, et cetera, et cetera. You know, we can repl. Repurpose some of the content if you'd like, for paid advertising. Let me know if you're free on Thursday at 10am to talk about this.

Where's my soundboard? I love this.

There we go. That's the. That is. That is the pitch.

Oh, my goodness.

Hold my laptop while I go transcribe this exact part of the podcast. Now we know my homework. I gotta send them basically this message and see what the uptake. Okay, the next inevitable question I have. And another thing that really holds me back is having no clue how to price something like what you just described. And I'm sure I'm skipping a million steps, but it's a big area of intimidation and uncertainty and especially pricing something again, where I feel like I'm coming at it with a smaller audience. Because let's be real, if I had a 10 times bigger audience, they'd be pitching me. You know what I mean? They're the ones knocking on my door. But when we're the smaller creators, it's a little different. And so just walk me through. How do you even price? I know we need to ask about their goals for the campaign and all that, but where do you even start with pricing?

All right. It's a really great question, Jenny, and I'm really glad you brought it up because this is, again, one of the things that prevents folks from reaching out and pitching these partnerships because they're scared of a positive reply and be like, oh, yeah, this sounds good. How much is it gonna be? And people are like, I don't know. Right. Let me give you a very simple framework here to understand how to approach these types of conversations. So when a brand wants to partner with a creator or a business owner for promotion, there's always 100% of the time, not 99% of the time, Jenny, 100% of the time. Brands have three goal types in mind with these collaborations. The first one is conversion focus. Right. So let's say Zapier came to you. You know, they said, we're interested in this partnership. And you asked a very simple question to them. You said, what would success look like to you? Okay. That's the question you ask as a creator who's pitching this. And let's say Zapier says, oh, well, you know what, our big goal for Q1 is just driving trial signups. Like, we have this new promotion we're running. It's going to be 14 day free trial or a certain amount of zaps per month or whatever, whatever. It's like, you know, above and beyond what you normally get. That's our big initiative right now because we're really trying to drive top level acquisition of customers. That's what they say to you. Okay, so what you propose to them is going to be very different than if they said, oh, you know what, Jenny? You know, let's say it's the VP of marketing. I listen to your free time book. I listen to pivot. Like, you are amazing. You're the exactly the type of brand ambassador we need to be, you know, aligning ourselves with as a company. We'd love to do a webinar with you. You know, we have our own Slack group where we have our top customers. Yad. Yeah, you know, our enterprise customers. We'd love to kind of do a newsletter, you know, guest post or something on the Zapier blog. Like that's what we're most excited about. And so your pricing has to be vastly, vastly different if they say those two things. So I kind of glazed over the middle goal type. Right. So the first one is conversion. The other one was brand awareness. And then in the middle you've got this tactic called content repurposing. So oftentimes brands will want to work with creators so that they can get amazing content. Or in your case, you know, you've got your podcast, maybe an audiogram that they could maybe repurpose on, you know, Zapier's Instagram handle or put on their embed on their website. Or maybe use it for paid advertising. Right? So that's very, very valuable to be able to get content like that, to be able to augment their content strategy. Right. And so in all of those different scenarios, your pricing has to be vastly different. In the scenario where it's conversion focused and they're saying, hey, we want to acquire customers, that is going to be the most difficult to negotiate because the brand is beholden to a set of internal, you know, what's called CPA or cost per acquisition metrics that it's going to be hard for you to be like, hey, you know, you got to pay me ten grand or whatever it is. And they're going to be like, well, you know what? Like we're assuming that let's say x thousand, you know, tens of thousands of people download this podcast episode or open the newsletter of that, we think, you know, 3% is going to sign up. And of the 3%, maybe 25% of those people are going to convert to a paying customer. So let's just say it's going to be 100 customers and the LTV or the lifetime value of those customers is going to be a hundred bucks over the course of that. So it's like the LTV times the number of customers that you've acquired during the trial, that is the max they're going to be willing to pay you. Jenny. Right, because that is the math that they have, that napkin math that they're working with on their end. And so contrast that with the brand awareness play where you're doing the webinars, you're doing the guest blog posts, and it's just more of a general alignment with a bestselling author and, you know, someone who they really believe aligns with the mission and values of their organization and their service like that is priceless. Okay? And so that, you know, VP of marketing or the partnership manager, whoever you're talking to at the brand, they are not going to have the same set of like conversion focused metrics, you know, success metrics that the general partnership, like high level alignment of just being connected and associated being able to say that you're one of their ambassadors, right? And so your ability to negotiate in those scenarios is just vastly, vastly improved. And so, you know, I do have a lot of frameworks and methodologies and calculators in my courses and all this stuff. But like, the most important thing to discuss here is that you should not have standard pricing. As a creator, as a business owner, every single deal that you do is going to be different and it's going to be based on the circumstances and success metrics of the organization.

We'll be right back just after this.

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You also say you shouldn't put prices in your media kit. Tell us why.

So let's just say, you know, I know you have a lot of business owners and folks on here too. Imagine like if you were on the receiving end of a media kit with pricing and packages and stuff like that where you reach out, you're really excited about working with someone, partnering with someone, and they reach out and be like, oh yeah, you know, sounds interesting. Here's my media kit. So number one, now it sounds as though you work with brands in a complete boilerplate fashion, complete cookie cutter way. You work with every band in the same way. You say, okay, here's the four packages of how you can work with me. Right? It's not this co creative process. Basically you're telling the brand, here's a tiny little box and I'm going to shove you in it. You have no choice. This is the only way you can work with me. And oftentimes what's going to happen is the brand or the company is going to look at that and be like, well, you know what, none of these four packages really fits what we were hoping to do. But Jenny's saying that's the only way we can work with her. So I guess we're not going to do this partnership, we're just going to tell her we can't move forward. Right? And the other like, most important thing here is that how do you know whether they would have been willing to pay you 10 times the amount of money, then you're listening in your media kit, right? Because of, again, talking about some of these goal types and the reasons that brands want to partner up with the creators and businesses in those ways. So again, like, if you have a pricing page in your media kit, if there's one action that you take away from listening to this, just drag that page in the trash immediately.

I love that. I did do that. After I heard you chatting with Nathan, I was like, whoops, let me just.

Pull that right back out.

And then you open this conversation talking about mindset. I just can't help but ask you. You also had mentioned in that conversation, you said, stop negotiating against yourself. And maybe I saw this in one of your videos that you send out. But I do that a lot. I've had to have. My husband will remind me the same thing. He'll say, you're negotiating against yourself. Like, while I'm discussing with him, even if it's for a speaking gig, I'll start saying, well, but maybe that's too high and I should go back and I should tell them this and I'll cut myself down all on my own before I even get back to the company who's hiring me. Why do you think this happens? Why do we negotiate against ourselves? And can you share a practical way to remember to stop doing that?

A lot of it is rooted in a mindset of scarcity more generally for creators, for business owners. We feel as though we are in this cutthroat competition with our peers, you know, our competitors, right? And it's like, okay, if I don't give this brand who wants to partner with me or this company a great offer, they're just going to say, no, thanks, and they're going to move on to someone else, and I'm going to miss out on this opportunity. Maybe it's a dream brand or a dream opportunity, and I just don't want to miss out on this. But the most important thing to think about when it comes to, you know, negotiating your worth and not negotiating against yourself is this concept called your batna, which is your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. And this concept was developed by a Harvard professor named Deepak Malhotra. And it's really brilliant. So both parties in a negotiation have a batnot. Okay? What this means is that if you are not able to come to this agreement, what are your alternatives? Okay, so, for example, let's say that you're negotiating for a speaking gig, right? Let's say it's a very prominent productivity conference. I don't know, I'm just making this up here, okay? Like, if I was the conference organizer, they're going to think, okay, if Jenny turns us down and we really want to have something about the concepts that she discussed in her books or something about free time or systematizing, setting, delegation, setting up SOPs in your business, like, we really want to have a track on that here. And Jenny is the expert on this. And if you say no, they're screwed. They're going to be like, okay, well, yeah, we're going to have to go. We're going to find someone else. Maybe we can go find a notion productivity expert or we can go, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? There's, yes, there's other alternatives, but there's no one like you that you have cornered this market in this particular thing, right? And so the other analog is like, if you are just a creator and you create content in a very particular, specific niche, and one of the motivations of the brand actually partnering with you is that they want to generate content, right? They want to get compelling content that they can repurpose and run ads with and all this stuff, if you say no to them, they are now going to be faced with the situation of being like, okay, I guess we got to go like, hire a production company. You know, we got to go hire some actors, some actresses to star in this. You know, we've got to pay someone to edit this content. And then you know what, we got to go pay Facebook and Instagram or YouTube to run this app. Contrast that with, you know, having organic distribution, which is what creators do, right? You are the creative team, you are the production team, you are the editing team. You have a marketing channel, right, to serve this content to, right? And so I think a lot of times we forget the tremendous value proposition that we are offering to brands, to companies, to partners, and we just gloss over all of these things that are just second nature to us. But we all think that brands and companies have this stuff figured out, and believe me, they do not. And so the real tactic, like very simple tactic when it comes to negotiating this type of stuff, is to tell the brand or the company the investment to work with me is going to be X. And then you shut up, you lean into the silence, you don't say anything, and you just see what they say.

Sometimes it's intimidating to put these courageous numbers out at the edge of my stretch zone and then they ghost me, or they say no, or they say, that's way out of our budget and it stops the conversation cold. And therefore I had this chat with my friend Jaquette. I'll link to that episode in the show. Notes. It can be so perplexing to land on any numbers at all. We don't want to take one rejection or one person ghosting as a sign that our pricing is incorrect. We just might be out of their budget. But it's so hard to know that.

So one tactic that I think could be very helpful for you in this. So first of all, let's back up with the mindset stuff here. Like a lot of times when brands ghost you, what creators do or what you know, in your situation, you instantly turn inward, right? You're like, okay, was it too much? Was it not enough? And they are not taking me seriously. Like, do they think I'm an idiot? My pitch sucks. You know, like a lot of times we look in the mirror because we think it has something to do with us. When in reality, look at it from the flip side from their situation. Perhaps the conference organizer or the brand or company, whoever you're talking to about partnering with, who knows, maybe they were super early in this process and they were really more coming at you from a tire kicking perspective and they're trying to understand, okay, we've got a budget for speakers of 100k or whatever and we're going to go around and we're going to see kind of get people's rates. Like, see, we got to Tetris this budget and figure out, you know, who we can kind of move here and substitute this person and you know, can we get this person availability, right? So a lot of it is this game from the brands or the conference organizers perspective where they're trying to make it all work and fit. It's not a personal thing. It's not that you suck. It's just that there's all these other dynamics at play because it's not just about you. And I think that that's a really important thing to remember. The other thing too is that likely there's lots of other internal stakeholders that are involved with these big decisions, right? If they're going to be paying someone five figures or four figures, even for a partnership, it's not just them. They have to go. They have to talk to their overall marketing. Maybe they spent a week gathering rates from 20 different types of people that they could partner with. And then the all hands marketing meeting where they're going to discuss all this stuff isn't for three weeks. Not to mention if the brand has an agency that's involved who's actually Running point on a lot of this stuff, right? Maybe your contacts out of office, they're sick, right? There's been a death in the family. Like, I cannot tell you, Jenny. I have done over a thousand sponsorships in my life between, you know, my wife and I and our creator platforms, but also through an agency that I ran for many years. So, like, I cannot tell you, like, this is the norm. It's actually this stuff that is the reason that you're getting ghosted and not getting a response or, you know, hearing back, no, we can't afford you, whatever. It's because there's just other dynamics at play that have nothing to do with you. Like, you cannot let that erode your pricing power in the market and erode your confidence in your value proposition as a creator, because, again, the vast majority of the time, it has nothing to do with you. So that's number one. Let's put a pin in the mindset stuff for a second here. But more tactically, let's talk about, like, how do you actually know? You know, you never know. Like, okay, I don't want to go in too high. I don't want to go in too low. So one tactic that I found to be very helpful over the years, when you're on a call or having a conversation with a partner, conference organizer, whatever is to say, hey, you know, you establish the rapport. You ask them questions about, you know, what are you trying to accomplish with this organization? Tell me about the attendee psychographics, demographics profile. Like, you know, is this C suite? Is this, you know, types of industries? Right? You're asking these questions because, number one, what does that illustrate to them? You illustrate that you care, right, about the outcome of, you know, attendees are getting to be really excited about your presentation, you care that this conference is going to be successful for them, and so on. But you can say things like, I want to make sure I'm really invested. I'm really excited about this potential opportunity, about partnering for this. Typically, what I like to do when I put together proposals and send over engagement proposals like this is I put together a couple different tiers of, you know, what is possible. And do you have a sense of what those three budgets would be? Because I want to make sure that we are in the same ballpark and you have an understanding of all the different things that we could do together. And so what this does is rather than being like, what's your budget? Because a lot of brands will be like, well, you give us a number, right? Or companies, right? And what this does, when you give them the ability to give you a range is that they now like feel more comfortable saying that range. Maybe it's 5, 10, 15K, maybe it's 1, 2, 3K. Like that is a very big difference because you also know how much effort probably to put into a proposal like that given the range that they give you. And the reason a range is helpful is that they don't feel as though you're going to hold them to it. Right. If they say 10k, of course you're going to give them a proposal for 10k, right. And so you give them a little bit of an out. And so this is kind of a little hack that I've found to be very helpful over the years.

This is awesome. Thank you so much. This, I was so happy to have you on because I just love all your tactics and frameworks and love the way your mind works.

You just wanted like a one on.

One consulting, personal coaching, you know, I did.

I think that's really what's happening.

Why else do I have a podcast? I mean, come on, I get to chat with you, have my therapy session about pricing and mindset. Also you have this interesting seat. Now what's so fascinating about the type of work that you do and being an intermediary many times, but also your personal experience with your wife and your platform is you have a thousand data points now. So it's really exciting when you look at the big data perspective of what you see, what works, tweaking it over time. So I love what you're sharing because you're able to get a really unique inside peek at the trends and what works where individual creators. It just feels like that parable of the blind man and the elephant. You know, we're just seeing little chunks at a time and you're really seeing the whole thing.

One thing that I'm. I haven't done it yet, Jenny, but this is like first look exclusive drop. I haven't really talked about this much.

But like there we need the I know sound effect.

What do I have? I have. Hooray. I have quiz music. Like maybe some quiz music. Oh my gosh, some sisters. Spence here. No, but so I have this sponsorship pricing calculator that I have worked like so much on. I've like spent so much time researching it and developing it. It's like super robust and to date it's something I developed for my advanced course program. But I'm now in my seventh cohort of the course and I previously thought I was like, man, this is like the special sauce of my course. Right. Because so many people have told me that they signed up for the course because they, oh, I wanted to get access to the calculator. Right. But more and more I've been thinking about the impact that I want to have more generally. And again, like going back to this service mindset of like you mentioned, I have this goal that I want to help creators land a million sponsorships by 2032. And so it's like I've thought about how can I actually do that in a much more profound way. And so I've decided that I'm going to be open sourcing the calculator.

That's so exciting.

Yeah. And so I have like, you know, it doesn't matter what platform you're on, YouTube, you know, newsletters, you know, live streams, like blogs, all sorts of different formulas and calculators and like, because I just got sick of seeing all these like really, really non scientific, like pricing advice and formulas. There are some calculators out there. But again, what I teach is that it's so dependent upon the brand's goals and all of the calculators that I've seen are dependent upon. You're literally looking at yourself in a vacuum. In my experience, again, going back to the thousand data points, like you're missing 50% of the equation when it comes to pricing. The other thing we haven't talked about real quickly, I'm sorry, I just go on all these tangents, but like, just.

Unfurl that big brain of yours, okay?

The thing that I think is a missing piece for a lot of people is that when they pitch a brand, they come to a company with their hands out and they're like, I love you, pay me. And the brand is over here thinking like, number one, I don't know who you are. Number two, we do not have a slush fund to pay random creators that reach out to us. Right? But what brands do have, going back to this sample pitch that we did for Zapier, they have marketing budgets that they've allocated for their own company objectives, right? So they probably have a Q1 marketing budget to go out and do some campaigns around resolutions, right? Getting people to systematize and delegate and all this stuff, that would seem like probably a pretty big initiative for Zapier in January, February timeframe, right? So by coming to them and saying, hey, I saw that your trying to do this, I saw that you have this objective based on my research, right? I read your press releases, I read your blog, I looked at your Instagram. I looked at your LinkedIn, you know, job board. It seems like you were trying to recruit for a content marketing manager and you're having these challenges. Right? I see that you're trying to do this thing. I can help you do that by sponsoring my podcast, sponsoring my newsletter, doing the xyz. Right? So it's much more of a problem identification and solution framework than it is, hey, here's a, you know, give me, give me money.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I love how you said they don't have a slush fund for creators who love their company.

Duh.

Why didn't we think of that? That is a great point and I just love hearing your phrasing and your framing. You mentioned something as well that really stuck out. You were talking about the effort and that the creator also needs to know that it's going to be worth the effort they're going to put in, given the budget or what they'll yield for the campaign. On the flip side, you talk about for the brand be really easy to work with, like, make things easy to execute. And I can say from already experimenting with podcast swaps, there's a zillion moving parts, even when it's unpaid, even when it's essentially a barter. So I'm really curious. Maybe you can let us in on certain process pieces that, like, what are the big mistakes that creators make when they're setting this up? Because it would be real easy to have this spiral into a hundred micro steps for one partnership. And then as soon as you land more than one, the whole thing falls apart and the owner's the bottleneck. So what about process and automation? How do we make it that we're so easy and wonderful to work with?

All right, well. Okay, we're getting deep here, Jenny. Okay. So I'll try and keep it, like, somewhat surface, but. Okay, so I have a framework that I've developed called the sponsorship wheel. It's an eight step framework that breaks down exactly how literally every single sponsorship that you're going to do will be executed. The first step is the pitching phase. So this is the stage where either the brand has reached out to you and they're saying, hey, we want to collaborate with you, or you are the one reaching out and pitching something, right? Because even if the brand is reaching out to you, you still have to pitch them. You still have to say, oh, this is exciting. Here is what I can do for that in exchange for money. Right? And so a lot of people don't really think about that as a pitch, but it is. Okay. The second step is the negotiation phase. So once you have agreed in principle to, hey, that this partnership sounds good, now you have to negotiate on the deal terms. You have to negotiate on, okay, what are the deliverables going to be? Is going to be a podcast, you know, how many newsletter blasts are you going to make social content? Are you going to do an appearance? Are you going to do a webinar? Exactly what have you agreed to do? Right? So you're negotiating on all those terms. Then it's going to be the contract phase, right? Where it's so, so important to actually memorialize and articulate exact what the expectations are on both sides of the fence for the company and for you, right? Then you're going to go into the concepting round, which is something that a lot of people don't think about, which is that even if the brand or the company is not asking you for this, you are professional, right? We're talking about professionalizing ourselves. And so you are going to say to them, hey, this is how I am going to bring this partnership to life. And what do you think about that? Please give me feedback on that. Because what a lot of people do is they sign the agreement and they just jump right into it. They record the podcast, they do the newsletter blast, they make the social content, whatever they do, right? They make the posts in their community. And then the company comes back and be like, well, this is not what we had in mind at all, right? And so like, you have to avoid doing all this busy work by being more organized and saying, hey, here's it doesn't have to be long, two, three sentences. Here's what I would like to do and allow them to provide some feedback on that, right? Then once you get that approval, then you can go into the production phase. And it's funny. So this production phase and then the next phase, which is the feedback round, these are the two phases in my experience, where the brand will ultimately make the decision of whether they want to partner with you again or not in the future. Because when push comes to shove, every partnership, you've probably experienced this, Jenny. Like, things come up, right? Things come up that aren't anticipated. And so you have to make the determination, okay, like, am I going to charge the brand more money for this? Am I going to just do it for them to be nice? Because I see a long term, you know, relationship possibility, right? So it's like understanding that, you know, the brand is going to be coming back with feedback and you're going to maybe have to revise it, right? How do you actually build language into the partnership to ensure that you're not doing a bunch, you know, there's expectations aligned about what is an acceptable form of feedback or revision requests and so on. And then after the feedback phase, after they've given you the feedback and say, hey, this sounds good, then you're going to go into the publication phase where you're actually going to publish, you know, the asset, you're going to send it out, you're going to post it on social media, whatever, and you have your own checklist where you're saying, okay, I'm making sure this is the approved version. Sometimes, you know, you'll get to V5, V6 of these things that you're creating and then you're making sure you're posting the right one. All the tracking, the links are properly placed to you as a creator. You may not, for example, like, I can't tell you how many times this has happened where, you know, through our agency, you know, we have gotten the contents created and then the person posts it and they either don't link the right tracking code, they don't make it clickable, right? Like let's say on a YouTube description box, right, where you can't actually click it out or they just become unresponsive after they publish it, right? And you know, like probably within the first 48, 72 hours for certain types of content, the performance window where you're going to see a lot of traction on the content. So if you can't get a hold of that person, if the link is Wrong. Like that can render the entire partnership moot, right? Because you can't track the performance of it. Right. So of course the brand's not going to want to partner with you again. And then the final phase of this, Jenny, is the analysis phase, which is this is where most people think like, oh, okay, the brand's just. Or the company is just going to ask me for like, you know, what kind of metrics opens clicks, you know, screenshot of YouTube analytics or downloads on a podcast, whatever. And so I'll just send them a screenshot of that and we'll be good, right? Some brands will say, okay, yeah, that sounds good. But because you're a professional creator, Jenny, you have to be putting together your own, what I call post campaign reports, right? Not only provide them quantitative data, but also qualitative insights into, oh, I got these DMs or I got these emails from my audience after I made that post and they said, oh, we wish you could have like talked about this other feature benefit of the product. Then guess what, you can use that feedback to then pitch them on the next idea. And that's really the whole essence of my framework is that, you know, this is not a horizontal timeline of you working with these brands, this is a wheel. Because the moment that you get to the last step, the analysis phase, you now have to pitch them on the next idea because that is how you transition these one off partnerships into recurring long term relationships.

So good. Love the sponsorship wheel. This is epic. Thank you. You're leaving me speechless. Like there's so much.

Jenny, you there?

Yeah, am I here? I'm here, I'm processing, I'm taking it all in. And well, like you said, then we see certain brands. I mean, maybe someone like athletic greens is a set it and forget it once they find a podcast they love, like Tim Ferriss. But that's such a fruitful relationship or a greenful relationship for both sides where Tim has had years of their brand partnership. And I don't know why it took me five years to order athletic greens, but I get it now thanks to hearing it on a podcast. And it took that long, long. So it still must be working for athletic greens to even have a partnership that long. But that seems like it really fits that ideal you described right at the beginning where it's just a win all the way around.

I loved you brought this up because like smart brands understand that there is a halo effect to this type of stuff, right? Because how often are you listening to a podcast or you're watching a video on YouTube or something and someone talks about a product or a service, this, you don't click their tracking link. Oftentimes you go and you open up a new tab in Google Chrome and you're like athletic greens or whatever, you're like googling it, right? And like researching it, looking at the company. So there's so much like research that actually happens behind the scenes or like kind of off of the creator's platform. And so it is actually your job to educate the brand about this type of thing, about the halo effect and about the fact that brand awareness and lending your name and likeness to a partnership, there's value in that beyond the actual concrete conversion that they're going to be monitoring on the tracking link. Not every brand is going to like understand this and that's fine. But your goal, if you do believe that your specialty is really kind of more of these high level brand awareness plays, then your goal is to find the brands that care about that as quickly as possible and stop talking to the brands that care about the conversions and only that, right? And so going back to the point about the beginning, about like, oh, I don't have a lot of numbers or followers or audience or whatever, that's fine. Don't go after the brands and advertisers that that's all they care about, numbers and all that stuff. Like go after the ones who, where you could actually provide real value to them with content or with expertise, you know, in your particular niche. Like there are again, brands do not have all this figured out. And so it's your job to actually educate them about how you can help them win.

That's always a great reminder. People ask me a lot of questions about licensing to companies. It's the same thing. It's like half the time the company's never heard of the word licensing. So I love that you're reminding us about the education going both ways and just continuing to find people opportunities where the goals are aligned. What would you say to the business owner like me, who's aware in the four levels of learning, I'm squarely at conscious incompetence? I just know how much I don't know. I'm staring up at Mount Everest of all this. Do you recommend that, let's say a business owner, someone who has a lot going on, should they partner with some kind of broker? And I know you have a community and you're offering opportunities at scale and that there are platforms that do this, but is that a thing like can someone hire you? Not you, Justin, because You're like on your way to a million partnerships that you're inspiring. But how do people get help in this arena if they don't want to do it all themselves?

Okay, so I have a very simple framework that I think is really important. I'm glad you brought this up.

I know you do. Of course there's a framework for that.

I am a frameworks guy.

That's my favorite.

So I don't have an acronym for this one. I do have a lot of acronyms, but that's not this. If you believe that partnerships or influencer marketing is a very, very important or will be a very, very important marketing tactic for your business, you need to have this core competency in house. That is my opinion. Because yeah, if you are a giant conglomerate like P and G or Unilever or whoever, they have these agencies on retainer who are handling all these partnerships with them because they don't want to touch that they out of home. They're doing billboards and bus benches and print and broadcast TV and all this stuff. And yeah, you know our TrueView ads on YouTube that you know, and then they're working with creators. That's like a very small sliver of what they're doing. But if you are marketing to Gen Z, that is your core demographic, then you better have, as you're growing your marketing organization, you better have a partnerships or an influencer marketing manager on your roadmap in terms of personnel hiring because you know, you do not want that core competency to live in the heads of an external partner. Partner, yes. Maybe an intermediary step is to have, you know, someone come on and yeah, you're going to pay them either on retainer, there's a broker or whatever to actually handle these partnerships for you, that's fine. But the long term plan, given your customer focus, if that's important to them, then you need to be having this competency in house.

Bam. Go ahead and drop that mic over there. It wasn't on a mic stand.

I wish I had like a mic drop, but how about a joke drum? I didn't tell a joke.

I like it.

I didn't get to use that yet. I need to tell a joke.

You can make your own mic drop sound effect. Just drop your mic.

I know, right?

Yeah. Your homework will be thinking of. I know you'll find that acronym for this core competency.

I know, I know.

Or a good metaphor.

I feel really bad that I use so many sound effects. I wasn't planning on that, but I love them.

This is the most exciting episode of free time to date. So thank you.

All right.

Love to hear both your knowledge, your energy, and then the soundboard. I mean, icing on the cake, I'm telling you. You left me speechless. Like, this is very rare that I just straight I up, don't even know.

Where to start to respond.

Like, tongue tied. This is really so fun. I could just chat all day. Thank you so much for sharing as generously as you do with me on other podcasts that you're on. It's really incredible. The last question that I always ask is if you could give business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I have a graph or a chart that I'm looking at right now pasted on the wall of my office. And the title of the chart is who Americans spend their time with by age. And it is a bell curve, if you can imagine. And the very peak of the bell curve is between 30 and 40. Basically 35 to 40 is the top, top right. And the chart is time spent with children. I have an 8 year old and I have a 5 year old. And I have been someone who's been very, very driven throughout my life, always focused on what is next. And when I saw this chart, I was so struck by it because it made me realize that I've been so focused in my life on the next step. Where do I want to get my business, where do I want to get my life, finances or hiring people or all this stuff. And it was a really stark reminder for me that the prime of our working life, for most of us, probably most of us listening to this podcast, is right now, probably right, or in this window, right? And the people in your life, you know, who are most important to you, whether your kids or your friends or other family members or whatever, that chapter will be over before you know it. The permission that I want people listening to this to have is that it's okay to literally just take a breath and think about the present moment. And when you're on the floor playing with your kids or playing with your dog or like, you know, out and. And spending time with friends or whatever, you don't need to think about all the things that you need to do next because you'll get that done. Like you're gonna get it done, right? We're all professionals. We all have businesses. Like, we all handle it right? And so you don't need to always be thinking about it. It's okay to just be present for this moment.

What a beautiful reminder thank you so much Justin. Where can people find you? Tell us all the places, all your gems, all your frameworks. Where do they live?

Live, of course. So as you mentioned, probably the best way to keep updated on everything I'm doing is my newsletter. It's creator wizard.com join and it's a twice weekly newsletter. Mondays is all about Mindset Mondays where I talk all about this confidence and you know, all, all related on the topic of like brand partnership, sponsorships and things like that. But then Thursdays, this is my favorite digest, which is I literally send you paid sponsorship opportunities into your inbox. I say, hey, these brands are looking to partner with people. Click on this link to apply. Right. So this is a free newsletter. So yeah, I'd love to. And then obviously I share my new YouTube videos and all the stuff I talk about. Yeah, that's probably the best way to keep in touch with me. CreatorWizard.com join and then I'm just reatorwizard pretty much everywhere on social media.

Amazing. And if you join his free community, you'll see me in there. I'm more of a lurker. I'm around kind of pop in and out. But after this, I got homework.

Jenny, I literally did not even know you were in the community. I did not even know that. Now I know.

That's because I'm a lurker. Pro lurker.

I guess so. That's awesome. I love it.

It's so lurky. You didn't even know.

Yeah, I guess.

Justin, you're amazing. Thank you so, so much. This was such a treat.

Thanks again for having me, Jenny. It was a blast.

Likewise. Thanks everybody for listening.

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