3 Ways to Show Brands You Care

As a creator, it is important to show brands that you care by building strong relationships with the ones that support your channel. For one, the income brands offer can help you turn YouTube into a full-time career. Secondly, your fans want to see you promote brands you believe in. I always recommend creators find a handful of brands they truly love, build genuine relationships, and then come to mutually beneficial long-term partnership terms. Jumping from brand to brand causes distrust in your audience and in my experience, that distrust leads to poorer results for brands. It is a negative cycle you want to avoid at all costs. 

In my experience, the single best way to build great long-lasting relationships with brand partners is to simply show that you care. 

• Ask for a brand’s KPIs: The best way to show a brand that you care is to simply ask them what they are measuring in a campaign. What is their Key Performance Indicator (KPI)? Do they want a lot of views and impressions? Or are they looking for signups and new customers? If so, how many? From there, you can start to ask more informed questions to help the brand be as successful on your channel as possible. For example, what about your product’s value proposition will resonate the most with my audience. Why will my audience care? Is there a special offer for my audience that might help us get to the KPI you are looking for? How have you seen other creators be successful in hitting your KPI? With a few questions, like these, you’ll be able to craft your pitch to help educate your audience why they should care about this product and allow them to make an educated decision for themselves. That is all a brand can ever ask for. 

• Don’t Represent Competitors: If you work with a brand and their competitor reaches out to you, the right thing to do is reach out and ask the original brand if they’d like to match the offer. For example if Squarespace is consistently buying videos on your channel at $1,000 a video, but Wix reaches out to you and wants to buy a video at $1,500, do not accept the $1,500 right away. Instead reach back out to Squarespace and give them an opportunity to make you a new offer. The brand will appreciate your honesty and transparency and you won’t look opportunistic to the brands and your fans by representing two companies in the same industry. You might lose a little money in the short-term with this strategy, but you’ll win in the long-term. 

• Make your video content relevant to the sponsored integration: YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. People are often watching YouTube videos with the intent of solving a problem. For example, if you create a video about a healthy diet, individuals who are searching ways to live a healthier life are likely to find your video in search and suggested results. If you can pair a brand to a relevant video, it will significantly increase the performance of that video. Here is a great example of a time InfluenceLogic and a creator were successful with this technique. Last year, InfluenceLogic helped LetsGetChecked, an at-home health testing company, promote their home testosterone test in this video titled, “How to Increase Testosterone.” We featured LetsGetChecked as a “resource” or “solution” that helped viewers measure their testosterone levels. This educational video has now generated over 2M views, ranks third for the keyword “testosterone,” and has produced thousands of customers for our client.

The best way to build long-lasting mutually beneficial sponsorship relationships with brands is to simply show you care. On the other side of every brand are humans just like you. Treat the brands with respect. Build great human-to-human relationships, and you’ll find that a little bit of caring will result in a great source of revenue for your channel and a list of brands you are proud to endorse to your viewers.