Brand partnerships on LinkedIn sure are causing a buzz. Whether you are a LinkedIn creator or a brand looking to partner with them, this episode is for you.
Key moments in this episode:
00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
01:01 Understanding Brand Partnerships
04:56 Choosing the Right Brand Partner
07:27 Audience Insights and Brand Alignment
11:41 Pitching to Brands
16:09 Live Case Study: Dreamdata
22:35 Negotiation and Campaign Goals
28:29 Sponsor Magnet Book Launch
Buy Your Copy of Sponsor Magnet
Today's episode is sponsored by Metricool. Make sure to register for a FREE Metricool account today. Use Code MICHELLE30 to try any Premium Plan FREE for 30 days. https://i.mtr.cool/NEDXVZ
ABOUT MICHELLE J RAYMOND
Michelle J Raymond is an international LinkedIn™️ B2B Growth Coach. To continue the conversation, connect with Michelle on LinkedIn™️ and let her know you are part of the community of podcast listeners.
Connect with Michelle J Raymond on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellejraymond/
B2B Growth Co offers LinkedIn™️ Training for teams to build personal and business brands and a LinkedIn™️ Profile Recharge service for Founders/CEOs.
Book a free intro call to learn more - https://calendly.com/michelle-j-raymond/book-an-intro-call-15mins
Social Media for B2B Growth Podcast is a fully accessible podcast. Audio, Video, Transcript and guest details are available on our podcast website - https://socialmediaforb2bgrowthpodcast.com/
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@MichelleJRaymond
#LinkedIn #BrandPartnerships #UGC
00:00:17
Michelle J Raymond: G'day everyone.
00:00:17
And welcome back to the show.
00:00:18
I'm coach Michelle J Raymond, and I am joined by the one, the only Justin Moore.
00:00:23
Welcome to the show.
00:00:25
Justin Moore: What's up, Michelle?
00:00:26
Thrilled to be here.
00:00:27
Michelle J Raymond: Look, I have to confess to you straight up.
00:00:30
I know that you wanted to be on podcasts to promote a certain little
00:00:35
project that you're working on.
00:00:37
But I selfishly have a vested interest in this one because we're going to be
00:00:41
talking about brand partnerships and I really wanted to learn about it.
00:00:45
And I've heard you speak and gone through the stacks of your content that you've helped me with.
00:00:50
And so I figured.
00:00:51
Why not get you on the show?
00:00:53
I'm going to learn, my listeners are going to learn, and then we're going
00:00:56
to talk about your project at the end.
00:00:57
That's going to help us even more.
00:00:58
Is that a fair trade?
00:01:00
Justin Moore: Love it.
00:01:00
Let's go.
00:01:01
Michelle J Raymond: All right.
00:01:01
So there are probably lots of listeners on here right now.
00:01:05
If I look at LinkedIn, brand partnerships is something that just started to
00:01:10
pop up towards the end of this year.
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And I know it's huge on other platforms like Instagram, probably TikTok and things like that,
00:01:17
but can we do a quick brand partnerships 101 for those people that maybe aren't familiar?
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What are they?
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And why should we be paying attention as we go into 2025?
00:01:29
Justin Moore: All right.
00:01:30
Brand partnerships 101.
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I ran an influencer marketing agency for about seven years, I've done thousands of campaigns.
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And essentially what they are is, brand XYZ or company XYZ over here has some sort of
00:01:41
product or initiative or feature or something that they want to spread the word about.
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And instead of running Facebook ads or Instagram ads or YouTube ads or something like that
00:01:50
or, putting ads on a billboard or a bus bench or in the penny saver magazine or something.
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They're saying, Hey, we want to reach a very specific type of consumer.
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And we think that these influential people over here, usually on the internet,
00:02:02
they have this really large audience.
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What if instead we went and gave the marketing budget to them and they could talk about it and
00:02:08
give us kind of an endorsement or a testimonial talking about this campaign or this initiative
00:02:12
or things like that, and with the hopes that their following will take some sort of action.
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And so this is what's called influencer marketing is the parlance.
00:02:20
But this is, as you said, like it's a pretty common thing in B2C consumer marketing where,
00:02:25
you think of the TikToker or the YouTuber doing a sponsored post or something like that.
00:02:29
But Increasingly, as you mentioned, you're seeing more kind of B2B focused people
00:02:34
have built up audiences on platforms like LinkedIn do partnerships there as well.
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Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, absolutely.
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And even LinkedIn themselves released a feature where you can flag on your
00:02:43
post that it is a brand partnership.
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But just the conversations that are going on the platform now and the campaigns that I'm starting
00:02:51
to see where people are going you know what?
00:02:54
No one really trusts brands and their ads anymore, but we trust those people in our audience
00:03:00
that have built up community, built up thought leadership, are known for particular topics.
00:03:05
We're going to go with them instead.
00:03:07
So it's, yeah, for me, it's fascinating as a creator, if I put on my creator shoes.
00:04:56
With any collaboration, choosing the right partner is gotta be crucial.
00:05:01
So given you've done so many of these partnerships in the past and still do them, as a creator,
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what should I look for in a potential brand partner so this thing doesn't come unstuck?
00:05:14
Justin Moore: I'm going to give you a twofer here.
00:05:15
Okay.
00:05:16
I'm going to dispel the myths that you talk about that you talked about earlier about
00:05:19
needing a huge following to collaborate with brands and talk about what you should
00:05:23
look for in a perfect brand partnership.
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So let me tell you a story about one of my, my coaching clients.
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Her name is Dr.
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Alex, and she has built up a, a fairly significant following on LinkedIn.
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Also has a podcast and her business is called digital pathology place.
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So she is a physician veterinarian.
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And she totally nerds out over this topic of digital pathology, right?
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And she has built up this audience.
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It's not hundreds of thousands.
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It's thousands or tens of thousands.
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But she has all these people, the ear of all of these people who are really
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interested in this very specific topic.
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And guess what?
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All of the medical device companies, the instrumentation companies who are out
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there, pharmaceutical companies who are out there trying to figure out how do we get
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in touch with these physicians or these, the operators, the techs at these clinics
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or these hospitals and things like that.
00:06:11
How do we market to them?
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It's a tall task actually.
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And so going out and partnering with someone like Dr.
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Alex, where, yeah, she may not be, dancing on TikTok, but she, you know, is being flown
00:06:23
out with these companies to the conferences and ask, Hey, can you tell all these
00:06:28
people about our webinar that we're doing?
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Or, Hey, can we, can can you come and do a tour of our facility or all these really
00:06:34
interesting sponsorships that she never thought were ever going to be part of her business?
00:06:39
Cause again she's practicing, right?
00:06:41
She has like a practice, right?
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And I just love sharing this example and I have countless examples like this where it's
00:06:46
people who have built up an audience, built up an expertise around a very hyper specific kind
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of niche or industry or content vertical where sponsorships has become really meaningful part
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of their revenue stream pretty surprisingly.
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And so for someone like Dr.
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Alex, to your question of like how do you think about these perfect, what's the, what's
00:07:02
a good criteria, I think a big mistake that people make is they just sit and think what are
00:07:07
the brands that I authentically love and use?
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And of course, that's fine, right?
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But to be honest, that's kind of table stakes, right?
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Because a lot of these brands, a lot of these companies, this is
00:07:15
what they're hearing all day long.
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They're inundated their inbox or their pressed email is like, Hey, I love your software.
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It's your sass.
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I've been using it for three years.
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Collaborate with me.
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This is what pretty much everyone's saying.
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And so a better approach is learning more about the psychographics of your audience, doing surveys
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and saying, Hey, what's keeping you up at night?
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What problems are you having?
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Like I would love to learn more about you.
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What are the challenges, right?
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What brands and tools and products are you using and loving right now?
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When you get that data back, that's a way different story because now you realise, wow,
00:07:51
I've, I just did this sample of my audience.
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And it seems 40 percent of them, these small business owners, they're having
00:07:57
issues with HR with employee issues, or they're having issues with bookkeeping,
00:08:02
or they're having issues with X, Y, Z.
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That may be somewhat unrelated to my current content vertical, but you know what?
00:08:07
I should probably go out there and pitch a bookkeeping software and,
00:08:11
and forge a partnership with them.
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And Hey, I can actually think of a pretty creative angle to do this partnership.
00:08:16
And so I think this is the number one thing I would recommend is learn more about your
00:08:20
audience because you have a richer texture that you can then come to the brand.
00:08:24
Instead of saying, Hey, I love you, please pay me.
00:08:26
You're saying, Hey, here's a bunch of people in my audience who want to hear about your brand.
00:08:29
Michelle J Raymond: I'm picturing these creators is please, sir, can I have some more?
00:08:35
And the brands are going, you want more?
00:08:38
Uh, Yeah that's what I'm picturing in my mind.
00:08:40
So what I'm hearing from that good news is we don't need to be able to dance like on TikTok.
00:08:46
So we can scrub that one off.
00:08:48
Phew.
00:08:48
Justin Moore: I'm a pretty good dancer.
00:08:49
Michelle J Raymond: All right.
00:08:50
Nice.
00:08:50
Nice.
00:08:50
My, my skill at this point in time is I eat chocolate biscuits, like or
00:08:55
cookies, as you would say in the U S.
00:08:57
So every Friday I have a Tim Tam, which is a chocolate biscuit here.
00:09:01
And I do a Tim Tam tip related back to marketing.
00:09:03
So I'm working on these guys.
00:09:05
I think brand partnership is due I'm eating my body weight in these things to promote marketing.
00:09:10
So I think it's only fair, but I get concerned do you draw the line at you know, does the
00:09:17
brand have to align with your values or, you know, can we sell our souls for this?
00:09:23
Like What works best in this kind of environment?
00:09:27
Justin Moore: I'm never suggesting that you should sell your soul.
00:09:30
But, what I am suggesting is that it's not about you.
00:09:33
This is the expectation that I have always set with my audience was that
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I am an unbiased advocate for you.
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And so I'm going to go out there and I'm going to test a bunch of different tools and I'm
00:09:43
just going to tell you about them and different tools are going to serve different purposes.
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And my job is to serve you.
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I learned a lot actually from my wife.
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My wife started her first YouTube channel in 2009 actually.
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So way back in the day and her YouTube channel was all around beauty and skincare
00:09:57
and cosmetics and things like this.
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And the expectation she always set with her audience was like, look, I know you're not
00:10:01
going to go out there and buy these like 15 moisturisers but Like, I'm a product junkie, so
00:10:04
I'm going to do that and I'm going to tell you my honest opinion about all these different things.
00:10:08
And so for her to do partnerships with various different brands was always very
00:10:12
comfortable for her because that was the expectation she had set with her audience.
00:10:15
And so I think a similar approach could be had for anyone here who has built up kind of this intimate
00:10:20
connection with their audience is like this expectation that like, Hey, I'm going to tell you
00:10:23
about a bunch of different tools and here's why they're better for different, pockets of consumers
00:10:28
or based on your different use cases or whatever.
00:10:30
But of course you should never take money just because it's money, right?
00:10:33
You do have to feel comfortable associating with the values and the ethos of the brand.
00:10:38
Michelle J Raymond: I love that you use the words pretty much that I speak all the
00:10:41
time, which is in service of your audience.
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I don't think you can ever go wrong if you've built an audience that trusts you and you always
00:10:50
maintain that viewpoint that everything that I'm doing, whether it's creating content, having
00:10:54
these partnerships is in service of that audience.
00:10:57
So I really love that because I can see how people would cut off opportunities by going.
00:11:02
I don't know that, you know, or it's got to be a perfect alignment, or I
00:11:06
haven't used that product for 25 years.
00:11:08
And then we'd chop off the opportunities before I think we even got out of the gate,
00:11:12
which is something I think I've probably been guilty of in the past, which I, I see
00:11:17
this as a big opportunity in 2025, which is why I was so excited that our paths crossed.
00:11:22
Shout out to Jay and his wonderful podcast as well.
00:11:25
Justin Moore: Can we put a bookend real quickly on this point?
00:11:28
Because I think it's very important.
00:11:29
I think there's going to be a lot of people listening to this, who may have a podcast, may
00:11:33
have a YouTube channel, may have some social media presence, but the primary reason that they have
00:11:37
it is for lead generation for their own business.
00:11:40
And I hear you.
00:11:41
I see you and I and you may be skeptical still you're thinking I'm not going to do sponsorships
00:11:45
like why talk about a brand or another person's product when I could talk about my own coaching
00:11:49
or my own services my agency and this type of thing right and so I hear you I've had lots of
00:11:53
conversations with folks like you and I want to I want to pull you a little bit closer to my
00:11:58
edge of the universe here by saying something very simple which is going back to this
00:12:02
whole audience first customer, first mindset.
00:12:05
I think a lot of this comes from a scarcity mindset view where it's like, Hey, if I
00:12:08
talk about someone else's stuff, they're not going to have money to buy my thing.
00:12:11
Right.
00:12:12
So why would I do that?
00:12:13
When in reality, there are lots of products and even other people in the industry who
00:12:20
are selling things that you're never going to sell, but in reality, going back to this
00:12:25
psychographic research, your audience is complex.
00:12:28
Your customers are complex.
00:12:29
They have lots of different problems and lots of different needs, and you're not going to
00:12:31
be able to solve all those problems with your services, your products and things like that.
00:12:36
And so it is your job to go out there and fill those gaps with a, whether it's sponsors
00:12:41
products, whether it's other coaches, other people in the industry who have services that
00:12:47
could serve them well and introduce them.
00:12:49
Whether it's a sponsor, whether it's an alliance and what do you think is going to happen
00:12:53
when your customers life and business is made better by this other person's thing, this other
00:12:58
sponsor's thing, they're going to trust you and love you even more so that the next time
00:13:02
they're thinking, Hey, I need some support.
00:13:04
You know what?
00:13:04
I'm going to hire Michelle because, she was the one who introduced me
00:13:07
to this other sponsor's product.
00:13:09
And now my business is humming.
00:13:10
So I just, I really need everyone to hear this piece of it because sponsorships
00:13:13
are not just about lining your pockets.
00:13:15
It's about serving your audience.
00:13:17
Michelle J Raymond: And if you think about it, most people running their business in service of
00:13:20
that audience are probably giving away this kind of stuff every day in conversations for free.
00:13:26
I'm going to ask you another question I'm asking for a friend, Justin, we'll
00:13:30
call this friend, Michelle, right?
00:13:32
And Michelle is a creator on LinkedIn and she has a reasonable following of,
00:13:38
20, just over 20 followers.
00:13:41
She's got a podcast, a couple of books, YouTube channel, all this kind of stuff.
00:13:45
But Michelle's thinking about doing brand partnerships in 2025.
00:13:49
And if you were to advise Michelle, what makes a creator attractive to
00:13:54
brands beyond just the follower count?
00:13:58
What else could Michelle do to make herself stand out in amongst the crowd?
00:14:03
Justin Moore: A couple of different directions that we can go with this.
00:14:06
And if you're game, I would love to do like a kind of real time case study to actually
00:14:10
think of, okay, what does this look like?
00:14:12
You actually, Michelle's business and we pitch one of your dream brands.
00:14:14
So I'm going to, I'm going to hold your feet to the fire and we're going to do this.
00:14:17
Michelle J Raymond: Okay.
00:14:17
Justin Moore: But the first thing is just like, how do you be more attractive?
00:14:20
And again, I ran this agency for many years and I've been on the receiving
00:14:23
end of a lot of interactions with partners and creators over the years.
00:14:27
And it's just the basics.
00:14:29
Honestly, it's the professionalism.
00:14:31
It's being responsive.
00:14:32
It's being a nice person.
00:14:34
It's not being a nightmare to work with.
00:14:36
If I come back as the agency and I say, Hey, got the feedback from the brand is it possible for
00:14:41
you to do a quick, five second voice over fix.
00:14:44
You mispronounce the name of the product instead of going.
00:14:46
No, you're violating my creative genius and freedom.
00:14:50
There's no way I'm doing that.
00:14:51
Or it's gonna be 5000 extra money.
00:14:53
You laugh.
00:14:54
But this is the experience that we would have constantly doing these partnerships
00:14:58
with creators who just didn't really see the longer term perspective.
00:15:01
They just looked at it as this kind of one off transaction and not Hey, maybe my goal here
00:15:05
shouldn't be maximising revenue in the short run.
00:15:07
It should be maximising the relationship and getting repeat business from this, this agent.
00:15:11
And so, yeah, so maybe it's not spelled out in the agreement.
00:15:14
Yeah, we got two rounds of feedback or revisions on the asset, but and they're
00:15:17
asking for a third, but it's gonna take me like literally 30 seconds to finish.
00:15:21
Yeah, I'll go ahead and do it right.
00:15:22
And so it's a lot.
00:15:23
It's this small game.
00:15:24
I call it right.
00:15:25
It's like this is what a lot of what I talk about my book Sponsor Magnet is like understanding
00:15:29
that it's this is a business transaction and there may be high stakes for the brand.
00:15:34
They may have never done brand partnerships before, and they went out on a limb for you,
00:15:38
and they're paying you a couple grand may not seem significant to you, but to them,
00:15:42
it's like a big initiative for them, right?
00:15:44
And so understanding the gravity oftentimes of what's going on internally.
00:15:48
The dynamics for the brand is a really important part of this.
00:15:51
And so there's just there's so many different things like related to this professionalism
00:15:55
thing that I just can't be overstated.
00:15:57
I would say B2B marketers have it a bit easier because maybe you do have a bit more experience
00:16:02
in a corporate setting, but a lot of, traditional creators, traditional influencers don't.
00:16:06
And so I think that's what a lot of people have going for them.
00:16:09
Okay.
00:16:09
So now how can we make Michelle more attractive?
00:16:12
Because That's what I really want to know.
00:16:14
Let's do a real time example here.
00:16:15
So if you had to think of a dream partner, someone who you would love to forge a collaboration
00:16:21
with Give me, rattle off a few that come to mind that would be like, yeah, boom, let's go.
00:16:25
Michelle J Raymond: Yeah.
00:16:26
So Dreamdata happens to be one of the companies that I would love to work with um, Because
00:16:31
they have a product that I think will help the marketing managers that I work with.
00:16:34
So that's one of them.
00:16:36
There's obviously a lot of tech companies that have products like that I use that my
00:16:42
clients would get benefit out of using as well.
00:16:45
It's anyone that's related to their target audiences, marketing managers in a B2B space.
00:16:50
Why?
00:16:51
Because I'm having those conversations daily with the people I'm working with
00:16:56
already teaching them about LinkedIn.
00:16:57
But it's like, what are the peripheral things that go around in a marketing manager's life that
00:17:03
are beyond LinkedIn that I could help them with?
00:17:05
Justin Moore: Love it.
00:17:06
We're going to do some real time research here.
00:17:08
Excited for this.
00:17:09
Shout out Dreamdata who's going to be sponsoring Michelle very shortly.
00:17:12
So the couple of things that I want to do.
00:17:15
This is the exercise that I take people through in doing this research.
00:17:17
So I'm going to go to their website.
00:17:19
I opened up their LinkedIn.
00:17:20
I opened up their Facebook page.
00:17:21
I opened up their YouTube channel.
00:17:23
I just scrolled to the bottom to take a look at some of their socials.
00:17:25
So the first thing that I want to do is understand what is the most important thing
00:17:29
that it seems like they're promoting right now.
00:17:31
Okay.
00:17:31
So I'm going to scroll down.
00:17:32
This is the above the scroll or kind of on the main splash page of their site.
00:17:36
Okay.
00:17:37
So they've got case studies on here.
00:17:39
They've just got a bunch of solution stuff.
00:17:41
Not really a ton of stuff.
00:17:42
Okay.
00:17:43
They got a lead magnet here.
00:17:44
10 B2B benchmarking benchmarks you must know.
00:17:47
So this is their primary lead magnet that they're talking about above
00:17:50
the scroll So that's good to know.
00:17:52
I'm gonna go to their LinkedIn.
00:17:53
I want to see what they're posting about right now.
00:17:56
So they do a live show every Wednesday.
00:17:57
This is good data.
00:17:58
So we're just starting to check off all these, all this data.
00:18:01
Okay.
00:18:01
Michelle J Raymond: And for those people who aren't familiar with what Dreamdata do,
00:18:05
they are a marketing attribution software.
00:18:07
So when you're trying to figure out for all of your efforts going into sales and marketing, how
00:18:12
do you trace where to attribute that back to?
00:18:15
Dreamdata helps with that.
00:18:16
So it's about pulling data from all kinds of different sites, putting it in one place.
00:18:20
So you know where to double down on and where you need to maybe shift your money
00:18:25
away from, so is it sales or marketing that really, own the sale at the end of the day?
00:18:29
So that's some of the questions that they answer for people who may not be familiar with it.
00:18:34
Justin Moore: Okay.
00:18:34
I've got two pitches for you.
00:18:35
Ready?
00:18:37
Michelle J Raymond: Always for my friend, Michelle, of course.
00:18:39
Justin Moore: For your friend, Michelle.
00:18:40
Yes.
00:18:40
You could pass this information along to.
00:18:42
So first let me talk about the structure of the pitch that I share in the book.
00:18:45
It's called the R.O.P.E pitching method, R O P E.
00:18:48
So R means that your pitch has to be relevant to a campaign that they're either currently running
00:18:52
current campaign or initiative that they're either currently running or have run in the past.
00:18:56
O stands for organic, meaning that you can tie your pitch back to organic work that you've
00:19:01
already published that illustrates that your audience has an affinity for their product.
00:19:04
Okay.
00:19:05
P stands for proof.
00:19:07
So you can show how you've helped other brands achieve results.
00:19:10
And E stands for easy to execute when they say, Hey, yeah, this sounds interesting.
00:19:13
What did you have in mind?
00:19:14
And so the R in the rope method for Dreamdata is probably, Hey, I see that
00:19:20
you're doing this live show every Wednesday.
00:19:22
And you're talking about, X, Y, Z topic.
00:19:24
I was curious, do you need some assistance with anyone actually hosting that show for you?
00:19:30
There's some other topics you could actually increase the cadence of your
00:19:32
show from once a week to twice a week.
00:19:35
And I will be the host for that second episode every week.
00:19:37
And perhaps it's a series all around X, Y, Z.
00:19:41
So that's the relevance.
00:19:42
We don't, again, we're inferring that this might be something they're excited
00:19:46
about, but we've done the research.
00:19:47
We know that they do this show on LinkedIn and that's something that's important to you.
00:19:50
So that's pitch number one.
00:19:51
Pitch number two is I went to their YouTube channel and saw that they, all they're
00:19:56
doing on their channel is posting their full length podcast episodes, probably the
00:20:00
ones that are same ones that they're posting on LinkedIn and then short clips of those
00:20:05
podcasts but they basically have very few tutorials or demos of the software itself.
00:20:11
So you could say, Hey, here are the, I'm going to do the research.
00:20:14
Here are the top 10 long tail keywords that I think you should be ranking for on YouTube, which
00:20:20
is the second largest search engine in the world.
00:20:22
It's these, how to do revenue attribution on X, Y, Z, blah, blah, blah.
00:20:25
They're getting 300, 500 searches a month or whatever.
00:20:28
You should own those with content that lives on your YouTube channel.
00:20:31
And guess what?
00:20:31
I will make those videos for you.
00:20:33
Give me a demo account or I have an account.
00:20:35
Here's what I'm suggesting that we do.
00:20:37
So that's the R right?
00:20:38
The relevancy.
00:20:39
We, those are two ideas, right?
00:20:40
The O is you say, Hey, I also talk about revenue attribution a lot on my podcast.
00:20:45
And then you link them a specific episode.
00:20:48
And if you don't have a specific episode talking about revenue attribution,
00:20:51
You make one before you pitch them.
00:20:53
You do it strategically.
00:20:54
Okay.
00:20:55
Then the P in the proof and proof in the rope method is, Hey, here's how I've helped,
00:20:59
Streamyard achieve or whatever, some other brand that your current sponsor achieve results.
00:21:03
And then the E is this is exactly what I'm going to do for you.
00:21:07
I'm going to make you five long form YouTube videos.
00:21:10
I'll give you the rights to repurpose those on your YouTube channel.
00:21:12
I can turn the first one around within 10 days.
00:21:14
Are you free on Thursday at 10 a.
00:21:15
m.
00:21:16
to talk about this?
00:21:17
Michelle J Raymond: Nice.
00:21:18
Justin Moore: That's the pitch.
00:21:18
It's not.
00:21:19
Hi, I'm Michelle.
00:21:20
I have 20 LinkedIn followers.
00:21:21
I, here's my, my audience demographics.
00:21:23
I love your Dreamdata.
00:21:25
I've been using it for three years.
00:21:26
They don't care.
00:21:26
They just deleted your email.
00:21:28
Michelle J Raymond: And funny enough, I did start a conversation like this with
00:21:31
the guys at Dreamdata a little while back and they were keen to explore.
00:21:36
And then I went, Oh, I don't know.
00:21:38
They were like, you know, if it makes sense.
00:21:41
I've met them in Denmark.
00:21:42
There's a lot of relationship there.
00:21:43
They know who I am.
00:21:44
And then it got to the what are you thinking?
00:21:47
What do you want to do?
00:21:48
And then I went.
00:21:49
Oh, I don't know.
00:21:50
Sorry, Michelle, my friend did.
00:21:52
I kind of got half in there and then went.
00:21:55
Oh, hang on.
00:21:56
I'm going to take this advice back to my friend, Michelle, and let her know,
00:22:00
if you come to them with a solution and an offer, you make life easy for them.
00:22:04
That's what I'm missing out of my repertoire right now.
00:22:07
Look, there's so much in there and I want to talk about that for my friend, Michelle all day,
00:22:12
but I know we've got a couple of other things that I want to get to, so thank you for that.
00:22:16
And I will be sure to pass on that message to Michelle and make sure she listens to this podcast
00:22:21
and get some great advice about that system.
00:22:24
So let's say that there is someone called Michelle who gets past that, makes it easy.
00:22:31
And we're at that negotiating piece, that structuring piece.
00:22:35
And we're not going to go into it in big details here, but I often wonder, is this
00:22:41
just pay for number of impressions or can we get more creative with this as well?
00:22:45
Because I think, because I am completely new to this and you're an expert that's
00:22:49
at the other end, and this is why I'm loving this conversation so much.
00:22:53
My mind just goes straight to, if I can't do a post that gets a billion impressions,
00:22:57
they're not going to want to pay me.
00:22:58
It's going to be a flop.
00:22:59
And then my imposter syndrome, I think kicks in pretty hard at that point, which
00:23:05
is why I've cut a lot of these things off.
00:23:07
And so from that perspective, I want to kind of figure out.
00:23:11
Are there ways that we could creatively do this that don't involve, Hey, if I get this
00:23:17
many impressions, you pay me this much.
00:23:18
Cause that to me feels awful and probably why most people avoid it.
00:23:23
I would think.
00:23:24
Justin Moore: This is a big, another big myth, which is that the only thing brands
00:23:28
care about is either number of reach, following download numbers, impressions,
00:23:33
or on the other scale is sales, right?
00:23:35
Like how many sales are you going to generate?
00:23:36
How many leads did you generate from this partnership?
00:23:39
So the most important thing to understand is something that I call the arc framework, which
00:23:43
is the three campaign goals that pretty much every brand has when they want to run a campaign.
00:23:48
So the A stands for awareness.
00:23:50
They were available in the UK.
00:23:51
Now they're available in the U S and they want to spread the word about there.
00:23:54
They got this big feature benefit.
00:23:55
They want people to know about or seasonal campaign.
00:23:58
R stands for repurposing similar to that example that we were just sharing with Dreamdata,
00:24:02
where the primary thrust of the campaign is for you to generate content that they can use
00:24:06
in other ways on their YouTube channel, on their website for paid advertising and so on.
00:24:11
And the C and the arc framework is Conversion.
00:24:14
Yeah, this is where they want something like sales or something attributable
00:24:17
and measurable and things like that.
00:24:19
And so the reason it's so important that you are asking the brand what is your objective
00:24:24
is because your pricing should change the amount of money that you should be asking for.
00:24:29
Let me explain by a quick example.
00:24:31
So let's talk about, we were just talking about revenue attribution.
00:24:35
So this is a perfect example.
00:24:36
So let's assume that Dreamdata, you approach them and they say, hey, let's collaborate.
00:24:40
And they say, Hey, Conversions leads that's what we care about.
00:24:43
In their mind, you're the growth head of growth or the partnerships manager, whatever
00:24:47
there is probably thinking somewhere along the lines of, okay, we hire Michelle for this.
00:24:51
Her podcast get an average of 10 downloads per episode.
00:24:54
I don't know what it is.
00:24:55
I'm just making it up for easy math.
00:24:56
10, 10 downloads.
00:24:58
Okay.
00:24:58
We're assuming based on other partnerships that we've done before, about 10 percent
00:25:01
of the people who listen to this are going to click the link in the show notes.
00:25:04
That's a thousand people.
00:25:05
Of that, those a thousand people, we're assuming that 250 people will
00:25:08
sign up for a free trial of Dreamdata.
00:25:10
Of the 250 people, 50 of those people, let's say 20% are gonna sign
00:25:14
up for a paid engagement, right?
00:25:15
And we know that our our software costs $10 a month and the average lifetime
00:25:20
value of each customer is 10 months.
00:25:22
So our, that's an LTV a lifetime value of a hundred dollars.
00:25:26
So that's 50 times $100.
00:25:28
That's $5.
00:25:29
That's a max that we're gonna pay Michelle.
00:25:31
But in reality, that's the breakeven point.
00:25:33
They don't want to just break even.
00:25:34
That's the whole reason they're doing influencer marketing.
00:25:36
And so they want to, in reality, pay a fraction of that half, third, fourth.
00:25:40
I don't know.
00:25:40
It depends on the risk tolerance.
00:25:41
And so this is why for brands that have a conversion focused goal, it's so
00:25:46
difficult to negotiate with them sometimes.
00:25:48
Contrast that with an awareness focused campaign, your friends at Dreamdata come to you and say,
00:25:52
Michelle we don't really care about the leads.
00:25:54
We don't care about the sales.
00:25:55
What we really care about is this big AI feature that we're launching in Q1 or Q2.
00:25:59
We just want to spread the word about that.
00:26:01
You're negotiating leverage skyrockets in scenarios like that.
00:26:04
So the number one piece of advice is ask them, what does success look like to you?
00:26:10
Michelle J Raymond: And again, we're just back to that in service of your audience.
00:26:14
And in this case, in service of the brand partnership, like what can you
00:26:18
offer that progresses them, and again, it's flipping it around, not just how
00:26:23
can I get them to pay me more money?
00:26:25
Like that's, which again, feels awful and it's not something that I'll ever be driven to do,
00:26:31
but there is, You know, I think when you've got that equal value, you've got something
00:26:36
they want that you can shortcut however long it would take them to build their own
00:26:40
audiences or, you know, I've got a completely different audience to what they've built and
00:26:46
coming at it from a different perspective.
00:26:48
I'm just looking at it, just going, if I shift my mindset around to what can I do
00:26:55
that would help them achieve their goal.
00:26:58
And of course they're going to want to throw money at me because I've got them
00:27:02
closer when they couldn't do it themselves with their own internal resources.
00:27:06
So of course it becomes so much easier and I make it again, back to your framework.
00:27:10
I'm going to make it easy for them.
00:27:12
They don't have to think because I've already done my research.
00:27:15
And so I'm just like blown away.
00:27:17
Just going, of course, we're going to work with Michelle, let's do more of that.
00:27:20
There's probably a lot of listeners going duh, Michelle, this is, all obvious.
00:27:25
I'll give you the handy tip.
00:27:26
Try and do it yourself.
00:27:27
Try and put yourself out there and figure out what things go on in your
00:27:31
mind that cut these opportunities off.
00:27:33
Because I can speak from my own personal experience that I know that as much as I
00:27:40
think I'm good at certain things, when you start something new, Your brain goes into no,
00:27:45
no, no, we've got to protect you, Michelle.
00:27:47
We don't want you to put yourself out there because what if they say no, you know, which
00:27:51
the chances are you will get rejected and, or, what you propose will get rejected.
00:27:56
It's not personal.
00:27:57
And so for me, just listening to all of this, I appreciate I've got so much more to
00:28:02
learn, but at the same time, I think a lot of it is about how I approach this and having
00:28:08
that right mindset to then progress it.
00:28:11
And then of course go they would love to be working with me.
00:28:16
Of course they would, it's really, for me opened up this whole Michelle back
00:28:20
yourself and be in service of other people is the message that I've got through this.
00:28:25
I've said so many times throughout this that I could talk about this all day and.
00:28:29
I think I could, because I'm genuinely excited by the possibilities, but I also recognise
00:28:35
that we've just scratched the surface here.
00:28:37
So you have been working hard on a project that is going to help people like me, who
00:28:44
want to dig into this, get into the details and really help me take those next steps.
00:28:51
Tell us about your new book that's being launched, Sponsor Magnet.
00:28:55
Justin Moore: It's very kind of you to say, and I'm, and if, if that was the result of
00:28:58
this conversation for you, it's just this, this feeling, this mindset shift around like,
00:29:02
no, this is actually something that I can do.
00:29:05
That makes me so happy and fulfilled.
00:29:07
You want to know the other funny thing about that is that this is what brands have budgets for.
00:29:10
They have budgets for their own initiatives.
00:29:12
So for my book Sponsor Magnet, honestly, it was This is going to sound cheesy, but I'm in
00:29:17
this kind of like existential phase of my life where I'm looking at kind of the next chapter
00:29:22
of what I want to do what is the duty that I feel to educate the next generation of creators?
00:29:27
And I just felt so pulled to this idea of writing a book and basically distilling
00:29:34
everything that I know about brand partnerships into this tidy little format right here.
00:29:38
I'm absolutely thrilled that, I go through my eight step sponsorship
00:29:41
wheel framework in this book.
00:29:43
And so if that sounds like something that is exciting, intriguing to you,
00:29:47
you want to go down this this world of brand partnerships for your own business.
00:29:50
You can just go to sponsormagnet.com.
00:29:52
Michelle J Raymond: Just as we wrap up the show, because I think that what
00:29:56
you do genuinely is amazing and will help people shift where they're at.
00:30:02
We've been down the practical, but I think it's genuinely for me seeing that this is possible.
00:30:08
And it's possible when you've got the right expert in your corner who has
00:30:11
that experience and will get us through.
00:30:13
So yeah, congrats on Sponsor Magnet, thanks for coming on the show so I
00:30:17
can learn all of this and be excited.
00:30:19
You can hear it in my voice.
00:30:21
Justin Moore: I honestly, seriously really do feel, I look at someone like you and,
00:30:26
or you, sorry, your friend, Michelle.
00:30:27
And I look at that business and there's so much opportunity because again, going back to
00:30:31
this whole thing that like brands, they don't have an infinite amount of places to market.
00:30:35
Especially in B2B.
00:30:38
And all you need to know is that I have now, I could count three specifically
00:30:43
LinkedIn influencer marketing agencies that have started in the last year.
00:30:48
this is a growing thing.
00:30:50
Feel like the sky's the limit for someone like your friend.
00:30:53
And uh, yeah, I just, I'm excited to like, you know, touch base with you
00:30:56
in six months and see where you're at.
00:30:57
Because I think this could add a significant revenue stream to your bottom line.
00:31:01
Easy.
00:31:02
Michelle J Raymond: That's what I think.
00:31:02
And when you think about it, you've done the hard work to build the trust of the audience,
00:31:06
to build that community and all the research that I do in the background to figure out
00:31:12
what's working, what's not, what is a good add on, what things are not worth your time.
00:31:18
Like I have spent the last best part of five years figuring that out for
00:31:21
my own business and with my clients.
00:31:23
So there's a lot of work there, but Justin, like I truly am inspired by this conversation about what
00:31:30
is possible for my friend, Michelle's business.
00:31:33
And I'll let you know how that goes with her.
00:31:34
Cause I'll be certainly keeping in touch with you, but I wish you all
00:31:38
the very best for your book launch.
00:31:40
You have just been given a whole big dose of inspiration on how brand partnerships can
00:31:45
work not only as creators but for the brand.
00:31:48
So if you're a marketing manager that's out there, is this something
00:31:51
that you are thinking about in 2025?
00:31:53
I would love to know.
00:31:54
So drop it in the comments.
00:31:55
So until next week, listeners, cheers.
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