MBA1844 The Easiest Way To Get Sponsors

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Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA show your drive thru business advice every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn the easiest way to get sponsors. Whether you're looking to get sponsorship for a podcast, for a YouTube channel, for your blog, for an event, there's the easy way and there's the hard way of getting sponsors. And I know both because I've done both. And in today's lesson I'm going to share with you what I've learned in the years of securing sponsorships for different things like events like podcasts, like projects, how to do it with the least amount of resistance from sponsors, how to make sure it's a heck yeah from them. That's what we get into in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Let's take a moment to ask the question, why do sponsors sponsor anything? Well, the bottom line is that they see value in getting in front of the audience, that you have a connection with that you have their attention. They believe that, hey, you have an audience we want to serve and if we can get in front of that audience, that would be good for our business. Whether it's to get more sales, to get more leads, to just get more attention, to get more awareness. This is why any sponsor sponsors anything or any. Just think of a professional athlete like Steph Curry. He's a professional basketball player and he has the opposite problem. He's probably got too many offers from different companies to sponsor him and his brand. Why is Under Armour paying him over a billion dollars to rock Under Armour shoes and Gear? Because they believe that if they get their brand in front of his audience, the people that follow him, love him, watch him, they'll love Under Armour too. They'll give them a try. Now, that might sound like an over simplistic example, but sometimes you have to go to an extreme to see things clearly. And that's the bottom line. A sponsor will sponsor your thing if they believe, hey, you have value and we want to get in front of that audience. So the easiest way for you to get sponsorship, and this is just the bottom line. What I learned through a lot of hardship, doing it the hard way for many years, is just be valuable, be a valuable person to the audience you serve. This is how you garner more attention and a larger audience. Before this podcast, I used to run a lot of events, I used to do a lot of projects and I used to reach out to sponsors to see if they would be willing to sponsor my thing. And it was very, very hard. It wasn't impossible, but it was like pulling teeth. And I had to negotiate rates and it was really hard. And I didn't know until the last moment if I was ever going to pull this off and if the sponsors would sign the deal. After learning that I don't want to do that anymore, I realize I just need to work on being more valuable to the marketplace, to my audience. If I get my value high enough, I don't have to chase sponsors. The sponsors will chase me. Now, I'm not saying this to beat on my chest or to sound like I figured it all out. No, I'm saying this because I made a mistake. I messed up. I thought you get the sponsors first, then you Grow the audience. No, the audience comes first. Work on then. That's why, when we launched this podcast, we didn't have any sponsors for over 300 episodes. We waited until the show was credible, until it actually added value to this marketplace, to our audience, to the people we serve. I really worked hard on just perfecting the show's content, and I still do. Till today. Every time I get on the mic, I think to myself, how can I make this episode better than the last? How can I add more value per second on the show so everybody who listens feels like this show is worth their while? If I create that kind of product, then sponsors will want to be a part of it. That's how it is.

It's that simple.

So if you just dedicate the time to be more valuable in whatever you do, it's gonna make it so much easier for you to get sponsors. So my advice is to focus at the start. Focus on one thing. Build something credible with an audience, whether it's a YouTube channel, podcast, a blog, whatever it is. It could be a monthly event or a yearly event, but if you focus on making that great every single time you work on it, it's gonna make your life a whole lot easier. It might mean waiting a bit before getting sponsors. And I've done this before. I've done this before, and I talked about how I did this with the podcast, but I've done this with events, too. Run an event without sponsors the first time around, make sure it's a viable business. And then the next time around, you use that data to be able to sell to sponsors how well the conference went, all the attendees and what they got out of it and all the attention and all the community that's around it all. Or you could do it the hard way. You can get sponsors by cold calling and emailing and begging and being lowballed and not getting your value. That is painful. And the problem is, is that the world is a small place, especially the business world, and worry gets around that, hey, this company, this product, you know, you can push them around. They're cheap, they're not as credible, they're not as respected. It's hard to get that reputation cleaned up once you've muddied the waters. So be valuable. And then you don't even have to look for sponsors. They'll come knocking at your door. The great thing about this strategy is that it carries over to other projects. So, for example, if I wanted to run a live event right now and I needed sponsors, I could just reach out to the same sponsors that sponsor our show regularly and say, hey, I'm running a live event. I'm going to be serving the same audience that you want to get in front of. My credibility, my reputation, and of course the audience comes with that offer. So it's very easy for me to say, hey, can you commit to these sponsorship spots? As easy for them to say, yes, that's because I've invested. You invest the time, the effort to build that value. And that's just the raw truth of the matter. Okay, that's just how it is. It may not be something that everyone wants to hear, but that's the easiest way to get sponsorship. It's not impossible for you to get sponsorship without building value and building that audience. But the title of the episode is not what's possible, it's what's easiest. What's the easiest way to get sponsors?

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To wrap up today's lesson, sponsors are a great way to for you to partner too, with great companies that share the same interest and the same goals as you because they want to serve the same audience. When you build that value, you can choose the people you work with. You can have that problem that Steph Curry has where he has to choose who he wants to work with. This is a great position to be in because this allows you to then engage in other partnerships with them, other collaborations, getting somebody from their company to come and speak at your event or come speak and do a guest webinar for your community, adding more value value to your business and to your community. It becomes a great relationship. And this is why you will see that often we'll have the same sponsor come back and sponsor the podcast year after year because we've built that relationship over time. They've got a return on investment. So did we. And we want to double down on that relationship, triple down on it. And as you know, business is all about relationships, but it starts with the relationship you build with your audience by building great value for them. First, thanks so much for listening to the Hunter LBA Show. If you love what you hear, subscribe and leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast app. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the other advantages of waiting until your thing is of value. You have served the audience you've built. An audience is you can work with serious sponsors, serious companies, people that really already sold on the idea of sponsorship. They have been in the game for a while and they know its value. When you're smaller and you don't command that kind of value, you're going to get a lot of people nickel and diming you. You'll get sponsors that all sponsor, you know, one spot or one episode and it's a lose lose because they don't get enough exposure for it to be worth their while. And you don't get much of a deal which has some sort of continuity. Our most successful sponsors are the ones that believe in sponsorship. Book a whole bunch of spots as a campaign and they get a great return on investment because our listeners, our audience, are more aware of them and the business achieves the awareness they're looking for. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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