What is YouTube Sponsorship
Using YouTube sponsorships, you can generate very handsome revenue from YouTube.
It’s a partnership or collaboration between a brand or an agency and a YouTube creator.
It’s a win-win situation for both the YouTubers and the brands; YouTubers get paid for promoting and explaining the brand’s products or services to their viewers while the brands can get more visibility, exposure and trust-building in front of their potential buyers.
Types of Sponsorships
There are 3 types of sponsorships available for Youtubers:
- Product Sponsorships: Under this sponsorship, the brand will send you one of their product to use and then create a review video for it. In return, the brand will offer you that product for free. There’s a high chance that your first sponsorship experience will be of this type if you are a new Youtuber or have a small subscriber base.
- Affiliate Sponsorships (Affiliate Marketing): As part of this sponsorship, you will receive a unique affiliate link or a discount code. If a viewer buys that product using either your affiliate link or discount code, you will receive some commission for that purchase. More the sell more will be your revenue generation. These types of sponsorships are relatively easy to get even if you have a small channel.
- Paid YouTube Sponsorships: These are the sponsorships where the actual money lies, and that’s why it’s not so easy to attract or get them. Under this arrangement, you will have to talk and discuss the brand’s products or services in your video. Depending upon the paid sponsorship type, the amount of time you talk about their product differs. Let’s discuss them briefly –
- Sponsored Mentions: Doing a shoutout for their products or services.
- Partially Integrated Sponsorship: Talk about their product for a part of your full video (most effective & healthy ones for YouTubers).
- Fully Integrated Sponsorship: Under this arrangement, the brand pays you to talk about its product throughout your video. In other words, you will be creating a fully dedicated video talking about their product.
Reaching out to brands
If you are relatively new to YouTube content creation and have a small subscriber base, it’s you who have to reach out to brands and pitch a proposal to them for getting sponsorship.
Before you start reaching out to brands, make a list of all the relevant brands that sponsor creators in your niche.
Now filter that list based on how good the brands are and how much your audience will enjoy and benefit from listening about them.
Remember that it’s all about your viewers, misguiding and fooling them for the sake of money is the last thing you would like to do on this holy planet.
For that, promote only those brands and products which you believe in and personally would like to use.
Platforms that connect YouTubers and Brands
Reaching out to brands can be difficult if you don’t know any POC from their marketing team. But that shouldn’t create any blocker in getting your sponsors, you can use online platforms that connect YouTubers to brands and vice versa. A few of such platforms are –
- Google BrandConnect (previously FameBit)
- Looking For Sponsor
- Scalefluence
- Mysocial
Even if you are struggling with getting your channel monetized. You can buy a pre-monetized channel here.
Networking Events
You can leverage networking events and summits like VidCon, VidSummit, etc to interact with Influencer marketing agencies and other creators. This will help you to know more about getting potential sponsorship opportunities.
How to Attract Sponsors
Once you are an established YouTuber with a huge number of subscribers and viewers, you will start receiving inbound leads for paid sponsorship opportunities.
Make some free product reviews or shoutouts for a few of your favorite brands, this will act as proof of work for your potential sponsors who are looking out for new creators to promote their products.
Make sure you have mentioned your correct business email id and social media handles on the channel’s About page so that interested parties can reach out to you or your team without any friction.
Pricing and Negotiation
When it comes to charging for brands, especially for YouTubers getting sponsorship for the first time, it becomes difficult to decide an optimum rate at which you make the maximum possible profit and at the same time don’t end up losing the deal because of high rates.
For that, you can use online platforms like Socialbluebook which are helping creators to decide rates for sponsorship deals.
Based on the past and similar deals they suggest you the average rate, lowest rate and the max rate which you can charge.
Before deciding on the final price, keep in mind that you are not only offering your sponsor a promotion in front of your audience but also you will be investing your time, resources and energy to create video content around their product.
It’s you or your media team who will have to work on the idea, script, recordings, editing and other video production works.
So charge for this effort as well in addition to your brand value.
Review and Sign the Contract
Before you jump on content creation, make sure you sign a legal contract with the brand or the agency. This will help you to prevent business conflicts between you and your sponsor. Once a contract is proposed, make sure you personally go through all the mentioned points and have an open discussion without any hesitation in case you find any doubtful or unclear points.
Content creation, Approval and Delivery
Create the video by following all the guidelines and including all the points mentioned by the sponsor’s team. Once you have the final video ready, send them the unlisted link and get the revision done if there’s any.
Receiving the Payment
Decide with the sponsor or the agency on what will be the payment terms, whether it will be Net 15, Net 30, Net 45 or Net 60. Also, have the mode of transaction finalized before you even start content creation
