I Made $5 Million as a Creator - This is What I Learned... | Justin Moore | MMP #036

I Made $5 Million as a Creator - Now It's Your Turn! | Justin Moore | MMP #036 Justin Moore: It's a really important thing to understand as a creator, as a business, if you're negotiating with the sponsor, that you have to ask them, what would a win look like for you? What does success look like if we were to collaborate? Because a lot of people think it's conversions every time and that's not true at all. Unknown Speaker: You're watching The Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Justin Moore: How are you? Kevin King: I'm good. How are you doing? Long time no see. Norm Farrar: Yeah, like less than 24 hours. Kevin King: Yeah, this episode is coming out, I guess it's probably January right now when you're listening to this, but Norm and I just returned from a couple of holiday parties in Miami. Norm Farrar: Yeah, the annual Fort Lauderdale boat parade and we went to a Titan event. Kevin King: Yeah, which was awesome. Yeah, both events were really good. We had a girl in a pool, in a bubble, floating in a pool, like doing all kinds of aerobatics and stuff inside this big bubble on top of the water of the pool. That was interesting. Norm Farrar: Yeah, you know what though, like I gave Colin about a hundred bucks. And he didn't get you to go in the bubble. Kevin King: It was supposed to be you. Norm Farrar: It wasn't supposed to be, you know, that 110-pound lady. Unknown Speaker: It would have been better marketing. Kevin King: Well, I think he figured out if he would have put me in the bubble, the damn thing would have sunk. She was about 100 pounds, and if he put me in there, all 982 pounds of me, that thing would have freaking sunk to the bottom and everybody would have been splashed, you know, with the water splashing out of the pool. So, I think he... Norm Farrar: I would have loved to see you in there with a cigar. Kevin King: There's a lot of people out there that are trying to pay for stuff now. We talked to someone at the event. Maybe it was at my table. I don't know if you were there or not, but we were talking to someone and talking about this whole thing. No, actually it was. You were there. We were talking about this whole influencer industry and trying to get sponsorships and people trying to get paid, whether that's you're a creator and you're trying to get someone to sponsor your channel or you're someone like us who has a podcast. We have a couple sponsors that you guys hear sometimes from time to time that actually pay us a little bit of money to actually sponsor this event. And then you get sponsors for your newsletter. I get sponsors for mine. I get sponsors for the BDSS. But getting people to pay you money for something that they have no idea if they're going to get an ROI on or not can be challenging, can't it? Norm Farrar: Yeah. You know what? Especially if it's a smaller community, you always hear people that, oh, I do, you know, 10 million. I have 10 million followers or something like that. But when you have a niche community, it even becomes tougher. Kevin King: It can be tougher, but actually from my point of view, that's actually better. I'd rather spend money on a community of a thousand engaged people than someone who's got an Instagram following of 20 million people. Norm Farrar: It's finding and explaining your community to the sponsor. And if they get it, they get it. And they're willing to pay a hell of a lot more. Kevin King: My newsletter, I don't know what you charge, but my newsletter, Billion Dollar Sellers, for the Amazon community, I leverage that because people sponsor to put ads. I have two ads pretty much in every single issue, every Monday and Thursday. And people are paying anywhere, depending on the placement, $350 to $1,000 for. I have affiliate commissions in there. So if you click sometimes if I feature a product, it might have an affiliate commission on it. And then I do what I call dedicated emails. And so twice a week, on the non-days that I'm sending out the newsletter, so on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I will send an email from me to my email, my list, dedicated to that sponsor. And they pay $3,000 for that. Right now and sometimes there's also an affiliate link on the back and they keep coming back for more and more than that. And that's because I have a highly engaged community and they actually get results. So if you and that's that's the key on sponsorships is that repeat business that you know, I have someone like a Tita. Who's sponsored every one of my BDSS events since 2019. Keeps coming back and back and back. A Quiet Light, another one that's sponsored almost everything. So that's the trick. Sometimes it's not hard to get someone to sponsor one time, but to keep them on board is challenging. Do you find that as well? Norm Farrar: It was a bit more challenging coming out of COVID. COVID was simple. For me, I could charge two, three, four times more. Then when it started to die down a bit, I found that I had to adjust my sponsorship rates. It'll be easy when we talk to our guests today about that. What I didn't realize when, because I only started my newsletter, it's been about a year-ish, I don't know the exact time frame, but I didn't realize the different Avenues, different streams of revenue that you can generate. Like you said, you've got the newsletter, but then you have the affiliate link and then you have a dedicated email and we both have podcasts. So with the Lunch with Norm podcast, you can bundle it together and you just find creative ways that you can give value. And all of a sudden, podcasts are expensive. You know, I don't know about like the person that's just turns on a camera and starts, you know, speaking at the camera and has a podcast. It's nothing. It's their time and energy. But when you have a production team, you have social media and you got all of this. It's a lot of money and people really don't realize how much it costs in time and money to run a podcast or a newsletter. So those sponsorship dollars really help us bring quality value to the community. Kevin King: I agree. Justin Moore is our guest today, and that's what he specializes in, is sponsorships, whether you're a company or you're a creator or you're a brand. How do you actually go out and get these people? What do you guys say to convince someone to give you $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, $100,000, whatever it may be for a sponsorship? What do you got to do to actually convince them that you're the right fit, that your audience is the right for them when they haven't tried you and how do you find them? How do you actually find the right person that can actually We're gonna make that decision. So I think this is gonna be, who knows, I think me and you might actually make a bunch of money off of this podcast today, too, because our guests will probably teach us a few things that we don't know. Norm Farrar: Well, I know, like, I already talked to Justin that this is gonna be a case study. So what I wanna do is Justin is going to talk to both of us and by the end of this podcast, I am gonna get Kevin King to sponsor my newsletter for $25,000 a month. Unknown Speaker: It's going to be easy. Norm Farrar: It's going to be easy. Kevin King: I don't know if it's an audience fit, though. I don't know. I don't know if it's an audience fit. Let's go ahead and bring out Justin. All right. Norm Farrar: Here's Justin. Justin Moore: What's going on? Kevin King: How's it going? Justin Moore: What's going on, Kevin? You know, I don't know if I can get that 25K newsletter sponsorship, but I could definitely get that inflatable bubble to maybe sponsor your newsletter. That company might be really into it, I think. It's like perfect alignment there. Kevin King: That could be it. That could be exactly it. How are you doing, man? Justin Moore: I'm good, man. Thank you guys for having me. I'm stoked for this. Kevin King: Thanks for coming on. You're known as the sponsorship guy, right? Justin Moore: I am. I call myself a sponsorship coach, actually, which is different than a manager or an agency or a broker. I've been in this industry for about 15 years. I've seen all different sides of it. I've had YouTube channels with my wife since 2009. And then I ran an influencer agency for about seven years as well, kind of on the other side of it. And kind of the whole management model where it's like, I'm a creator. I just want someone to like come and bring me business and I'll give them a percentage, 20%, 25% or whatever. I think there's a lot of insidious things that go on with that model. I think it's not aligned well with creators and businesses and things like that. And so my model is different. It's basically I teach you, I educate you and you keep 100% of it. So it's been a fun ride because, you know, apropos to the focus of your guy's show, I've pissed a lot of people off with this model because this is how they're eating, you know, taking a cut of people's business. And I'm saying that I'm not going to do that. So it's been interesting. Kevin King: So there's no agency fee, basically. Justin Moore: There's no agency fee. Basically, you hire me or my team to coach you, basically flat amount every month, or you go through my program, essentially, and that's a flat amount, and then you keep 100% of the upside, essentially. Norm Farrar: Okay, before we get started, because we do this every single guest, we gotta know a little bit about you first. Justin Moore: All right, all right. Norm Farrar: It'll be halfway through, and we'll go, oh, geez, we don't know anything about the guy. Justin Moore: All right. Well, I was in a Screamo metalcore band in high school. Is this the kind of thing that you guys want to know? Because that's an important part of my story. So I was in medical devices actually before this. I was in product management. I was not in influencer marketing, the creator economy at all. I mentioned my wife April started her first YouTube channel in 2009. So this was like way back in the day. This was right around when the partner program was starting, when you could make AdSense split, which was, not a lot of people remember this, but it was application only in the beginning. You couldn't just join if you hit a certain milestone of watch time or whatever. She actually got rejected three times before she got into it. It was definitely a badge of honor. Back in the day when she started, making money was not even in the picture of what a possibility was for creating content. And so really what happened is brands started reaching out, offering her free stuff. That was what it was in the beginning. It was like, hey, we'll give you this. She was in the skincare, beauty, makeup space. And so we were in our young 20s. She was like, free hair curler, free makeup palette. Awesome. Send it over. For years. That was the dynamic. And so around 2010-2011, I started going to business school part-time. And I started taking these classes around, you know, negotiating and advertising and marketing and the gears kind of started turning. I would see all these comments on her videos where it was like, oh, April, thank you so much. I just went out and bought it at the store. Oh, oh, I never heard of this brand. Thanks. I just went and purchased it on their website. And so I went to her and I said, honey, I really feel like we're getting the short end of the stick here. Like something, a free $30 hair curler, it doesn't really feel like a good trade-off here. I said, the next brand that reaches out to you, ask if they have a budget to collaborate with you. And they're like, there's no way anyone's gonna pay me money. I was like, just try it. So the next brand that reached out, she said, hey, do you have a budget to collaborate with me? And they said, oh yeah, sure. If you can include us in two videos a month, we will pay you $700 per month for six months. Unknown Speaker: And we were like. Justin Moore: Whoa, you know, cause like for us, you know, we had only ever been used to kind of W2 nine to five income. It's like the same every paycheck. Right. And here was this whole new world of like, wow, you can, there's like ways in which you can make money in this world that are uncapped, kind of no ceiling to it. And so basically fast forward a decade, my wife and I did 550 sponsorships personally made over $5 million working with brands. One of our primary revenue streams as creators, 2015 hits, I said, look, this can't continue forever. This is going really well, but we got to diversify here. People aren't going to watch our YouTube channels forever. There's no way. And so this is when I started an influencer marketing agency to essentially get deals for other creators. And so ran that for seven years, paid out millions of dollars to other creators. And so basically these are the two kind of perspectives that I bring to creator education as I've been a creator in the trenches for many years doing deals. But also I've kind of been in the boardrooms with a lot of these brands and advertisers where they're saying, hey, we don't want to just pay you, April and Justin, 5K. We want to spend a million dollars now across 200 creators. Like, what's the strategy? What platforms should we be on? So it's just like a very different conversation. And so honestly, I just started making YouTube videos around like, how do you negotiate? How do you behave on a phone call with a brand? How do you put proposals together? Kind of this one-on-one type stuff. And things really, really grew from there into this new business of sponsorship coaching. Kevin King: So what's the difference between sponsorship and affiliate? Justin Moore: I have my new book coming out called Sponsor Magnet and I talk about the three different pricing methods. It's basically affiliate only, which of course is like you get a percentage of sales and that's it. So it's performance based. Hybrid, which is a flat base fee Plus a kicker on the back end and then flat fee, which is like a flat compensation. There's no performance basis. So the way I look at sponsorship, see a lot of people think about sponsorship as like, oh, I'm getting this brand to sponsor my in-person event or something. But what they really mean is that they're just giving them a bunch of free product, free drinks, free food, something like that. But they're not actually getting compensated. So the way in which I look at sponsorship is that there is an actual Dollars being exchanged and usually, ideally, that there's actually a flat component there to compensate you for your time and effort to actually generate the content containing the promotion. Kevin King: Hey, what's up, everybody? Kevin and Norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors, 8Fig. Let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for Amazon sellers. That's right. It's called 8Fig. On average, sellers working with 8Fig grow up to 400% in less than a year. Norm Farrar: Apefig offers both funding and free tools for e-commerce growth and cash flow management. Justin Moore: And here's how it works. Kevin King: Apefig provides flexible data-driven funding tailored to your exact needs. You know, they could fund anywhere from up to $50,000 all the way up to $10 million. Norm Farrar: Apefig gives you free tools to forecast demand, manage inventory, and analyze cash flow. Kevin King: Visit 8fig.co, that's 8fig.co to learn more or check the link in the show notes below. Norm Farrar: Just mention marketing misfits and get 25% off your cost. Kevin King: That's 8fig.co, 8fig.co. See you on the other side. So Justin, you've been since the early days of influencing. I mean 2009 is like the embassy. That's when I was just kind of getting, wasn't really an industry like it is now where you have I think there's 25 million people just in China alone that are professional influencers, as recognized by the government. And the United States is quickly approaching a huge number. Every 12-year-old wants to grow up and be an influencer, not an astronaut or a doctor. And a lot of times, they don't need to wait to grow up. They can be an influencer when they're 12. So it's, but in the days, I remember the old days of like FameBit and all the old where you go on, you pay someone a flat fee and that was pretty much it. There wasn't this hybrid model really. And then you start seeing this hybrid model where they're like, yeah, give me 200 bucks and I want an X percentage. And then you went to this more from influencer. That was the influencer model to creator model. And it's all performance marketing now. So a lot of TikTok is like all commission-based. And there are some people that you pay a flat fee to, but a lot of them are just like, let's see who has the biggest GMV and go out there and try to hustle them to get them either working through an agency or directly to get them to promote your brand. It's kind of changed in a way and a lot of these old tools like FameBit have kind of gone to the side or not relevant really anymore. How have you seen it evolve and where do you think it's at right now and where do you think it's going? From a payment point of view. Justin Moore: Yeah, so I do agree. There's been a huge growth in terms of live commerce. I think for a long time we were looking at markets like China who were seeing huge traction with live commerce and things like Amazon Live tried to get into this and TikTok I think has definitely kind of cracked the nut here in terms of really incentivizing people or building the ecosystem to incentivize people to do this type of thing. However, I do think it's an important distinction though, which is that that is only one type of action that brands will care about when they want to hire a creator for a campaign. Which is a conversion action, right? And so there's three main goals that a brand would have when they want to collaborate with the creator. I call it my ARC framework, A-R-C. So the first is actually awareness. So if you think about the largest advertisers, when they're doing very large types of campaigns like billboards and bus benches, broadcast TV advertising, it's really difficult to attribute The success of campaigns like that and yet they're still very valuable and brands still spend a lot of money devoting to get people to get eyeballs on. Let's say it's, you know, they're bringing their business into a new territory. They were only available in the UK, now they're in the US. Or they've got some big new feature that they, you know, they've added AI into their product and they want people to know about it. And so that's one campaign type. The second is a repurposing campaign type. So the reason that they hire a creator is to actually take the content that they generate and repurpose it in other ways. So they don't care as much about the creator publishing it on their platforms, but The brand takes it, it puts it on their website, uses it for their social media, maybe runs paid advertising with it. And then the C in the ARC framework is, yeah, it's that conversion. It's the attributable thing. It's an app install. It's a download, a trial, something like this. It's a really important thing to understand as a creator, as a business, if you're negotiating with the sponsor, that you have to ask them, what would a win look like for you? What does success look like? If we were to collaborate, because a lot of people think it's conversions every time and that's not true at all. If I look at my own business and I am a, you know, as niche as you can kind of get, I'm a sponsorship coach and yet I do sponsorships because I have a newsletter of about 35,000 creators. I never thought like, oh, sponsorships is going to be like a, you know, play a role in my business, but I had these kind of creator economy focused companies who were coming to me saying, Justin, we are looking to market to creators. We have a SAS tool, we have whatever event. Can you talk about us? And I would say, hey, what does success look like? And they wouldn't say, like for an event, ticket sales. That's not what they're saying. Hey, we just want people to know that we're launching this event in eight months or whatever. So we want to do a series of promotions. So it's just, I want to hammer home this point because I know that there is, you know, the really, the cultural zeitgeist is really fixated on TikTok and affiliate stuff and commissions and things like that. There's a whole other, there's a whole other ways in which you can serve brands that don't have to do with that. Norm Farrar: I really like that idea because when you're taking a look at all these brands, you have to manage their expectations. They think that you're just out there to convert, convert, convert. And exactly what you just talked about with ARC, like we're trying to bring brand awareness, you know, try to show them in different outlets. And not just for me, but for some clients that we work with. And a lot of people don't get it. And they just think that they're going after conversions. And that's in my books, it's just wrong. Kevin King: Yeah, it's a longer-term play. I mean, I think part of it's the instant gratification of the internet. People are like, if I'm going to spend 20 grand to sponsor something, I better get an ROI. I better get a A ROAS on that, you know, one point, a two, a three, a five. And a lot of people, that's what they pitch to. But I agree with you, the awareness is more of a long-term play. And a lot of, especially smaller entrepreneurs, either aren't willing or unknowledgeable or don't have the money to actually do the long-term play where it's just, can you just wear my baseball hat that has your logo on it? Can you wear my shirt and your thing? Or can you just use my product and don't even really try to sell it, just use it. And people will notice by default that that awareness top of funnel I think I agree with you. How does a smaller creator or a smaller brand actually shift their mindset into that when they really are robbing Peter to pay Paul to try to get something going? Justin Moore: So, you have to speak their language. Just like what you said, a smaller or medium-sized brand who is used to running Facebook ads or TikTok ads and that's what they understand. They put $1 into the black box and they get $2 out or $3 out. That's what's in their head. And so, if they start engaging with the creator and they say, hey, how much do you charge, you know, to do some content for us? And they say, okay, like how many sales can you generate from this or can you guarantee from this collaboration? The creator goes, You can't really guarantee it because that's not their specialty or they're scared of that. And so instead of that pitch, which oftentimes falls on deaf ears to those types of brands and companies, you could say, hey, I want to learn a bit more about your content strategy. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go and I'm going to look up their ad library on Facebook because if they're running ads on their Facebook page, anyone can see it. It's called ad transparency. We can all look at it, right? And so you can see what types of ads they're running. We can see the messaging they're running. And we can say, hey, guess what, brand? I think I could make you more compelling ads that will get you a more efficient ad spend. It's gonna be $5,000 to hire me to make these 5, 10 assets, but what do you say? That's their language. If that's what they care about, if return on ad spend is what they care about, then you have to pivot your pitch. This is the number one most important thing if you're negotiating with the sponsor is that you have to be nimble and agile when you're having these discovery calls with prospective partners to understand what is the thing that they're excited about, and then I can create a bespoke solution for them. Kevin King: How do I know what my worth is? How do I know should I be charging $5,000, $1,000, 500 bucks or Kim Kardashian level money? Justin Moore: Dude, your worth is different to every brand. I was chuckling a little bit when I was listening to you guys talk in the intro because you were saying, you know, it's really impressive what you've built, but who's to say that you couldn't be making five times that much? You don't know until you have a conversation with the sponsor. This is the biggest mistake that people make is they have a media kit or they have a place on their website with pricing. They say, click here, book it. Or here's the five packages, click one of these things, here's some packages, book it. I as a sponsor or I as a brand, a company, I come inbound to that. I look at those packages and I'm like, I don't want any of these things. And in fact, I had 50K and Kevin's newsletter is the exact The thing that I want to sponsor, in fact, I want to be the title sponsor for that newsletter for the entire year. I'm willing to spend $100,000, but he said the top package was $3,000. Maybe I'm not going to hire him anymore. I'm just saying, not for you, Kevin, but just in general, that people make this mistake where they have pricing, they leave the witness. The analogy that I give is, let's say you walk into the doctor's office, you have an ailment, you have a malady, you sit down and you open your mouth to start talking about what your issues are and the doctor says, shh. He writes on his little prescription pad, hands it to you, walks out. That's what you're doing. As a creator, you're not listening, you're not asking what's important to them, what do they care about. And so there's a very simple exercise that I suggest people do when it comes to figuring out your pricing. Pricing, first of all, is very much an art and a science. I talk in my book about the four different types of pricing models, which is You've got competitive, which is where you ask your friends, like, hey, how much do you charge? You've got a similar size to me. What are you charging? Which is how everyone starts out. Then it's cost plus, where you're like, hey, I feel like I calculated this and I made $2.50 an hour doing this deal. I'm not going to do that again. Let me figure out what I want to make per hour, add a premium to that. Then there's dynamic pricing, which is like you charge differently during different times of the year, maybe holidays when lots of brands want to advertise with you. And then merit-based, which is the last one, which is really what we wanna talk about here, which is like, okay, let's say you get on a discovery call with a brand. You ask a lot of these questions that we were talking about earlier, right? What are your biggest objectives for this year? What does the market look like? Are you having supply chain issues? Are you omni-channel? Are you just direct-to-consumer? What types of competitors? Is there an entrant that you're trying to fend off? You're asking all sorts of different types of questions, and then what happens at the end of those calls? The brand says, Okay, Kevin. Okay, Norm. So ballpark, like what do you charge usually for like a partnership or something like that? And then a lot of creators do is that they stammer, they feel backed into a corner and they just, they stammer and they spit out 1,000, 1,500, right? And they make this mistake and then they cry later in the shower or something, right? Which is, I'm not saying I did that. But it's like, you know, they feel like they don't know what to say in those situations. And I have a very simple script for anyone listening or watching. Next time that happens is you do something very simple. You say, hey, brand, this was a very great, there's a great conversation. Thank you so much for all this data. I would love to go back and give this some more thought. I'm going to put together a custom proposal for you. Usually what I do is I put together three to four packages of how I can bring this partnership to life. Do you have a sense of what I should set those three to four tiers at from a budget feasibility perspective? And then you shut up. This is very different than saying, what's your budget? Because if you say, what's your budget, they're going to, they're not, they don't want to tell you. They say, oh, we've never done this before. Because if you, if they say 10K, what's your proposal going to be? It's going to be 10K. If you give a range, if you give multiple different options, they feel as though they can back out. If something happens, their budget gets cut, they can then move forward with you at, let's say, package one. This is the game changer. When you ask that question, I've done this across hundreds of negotiations, 75% of the time when you ask about that range, they're going to tell you. It's wild. It's like, wow, that simple switch from asking that They will tell you and they'll say $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 or $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 or $100, $200, $300. Probably don't want to spend much time on that proposal, right? So they're going to tell you something and then 25% of the time, they're going to still stonewall. They're going to say, we don't know. We've never done this before. You tell us. And so in that scenario, which is the murkiest one, You have to pick, package one has to be what I call your hell yeah number. Meaning that when you give them all, but you still give them a bunch of packages, and package one is gonna be kind of the lowest amount. If they pick that, you say, hell yeah, let's go, I'm excited. Not, ugh, I gotta do this now. I didn't wanna do this. I wish they'd pick package three. So again, it's an art and a science for sure, but I think this framework will help. Norm Farrar: Do you put number one, your lowest framework, at the top? Or do you put it at the bottom or in between? Justin Moore: I mean, we could get into the nitty gritty of like, you know, price anchoring and having the largest package, you know, kind of be the highest one. My package strategy is quite a bit different than what most people do. So what most people do when they put a couple packages together is they just offer, the only variance between the packages is quantity. So they say, okay, package one, you get two newsletter integrations. Package three, you get four. Package three, you get six. And maybe the only incentive that a brand has to pick the top package is a price concession. So if you do more or you do a longer term partnership, you get 10% off or 20% off, which there's really no incentive. It's not a great incentive for brands to really want to pick that. They'll just come back and hire you again if they want to. They don't want to lock in that budget if they don't need to, especially if it's not a meaningful concession. And so the better approach is to tie each of your packages to the brand's objectives. Remember how we talked about earlier about the ARC framework, the awareness, repurposing, conversion. This happens a lot. When you have a conversation with the brand, they'll tell you lots of goals. They'll say awareness, more sales, content for us to put on our blog, our YouTube channel, whatever. They tell you lots of different things. And so this is a perfect opportunity for you to say, okay, guess what? Package one, that will help you accomplish goal one. Which was The Awareness. That's where it's gonna be The Marketing Misfits podcast brought to you by Brand X. And it's a little badge on the cover art that says Marketing Misfits powered by brand or something. That is an awareness campaign, right? However, package two, that is gonna be the repurposing goal type, where you're not gonna get the same things. You're gonna get, in that one, you're gonna get newsletter blasts or you're gonna get content that we're gonna recreate that we don't post anywhere. Then package three, yeah, maybe that's the newsletter blast and that's the, you sponsor our in-person events or whatever. And package four, five, six, when you get to the very top package, that's where the brand realizes that the only way for them to accomplish all their objectives is to pick the top package. Norm Farrar: So I want to talk to you a little bit about and this is going to be a how long is a piece of string question. But when you're I love silence. I love the silence strategy. But when is that follow up? Do you wait a day? 72 hours a week. When do you break the silence? Justin Moore: So the leaning into the silence, I hope, preferably it happens on a phone call. You can do it over email, but when you lean into the silence, the silence lasts as long as it takes until the brand responds. But I'm a big fan of when you are nurturing an opportunity and let's say you put a proposal in front of them, you're waiting for responses. A big mistake that people make is they just follow up and say, just want to bring this to back to the top of your inbox. I just want to follow up here. Do you have any thoughts? And it's annoying. It's irritating, especially if the contact has no new information for you. They didn't they didn't have a chance to talk to their boss or if it's an agency, they didn't have a chance to talk to their client. So they're not ghosting you because they hate you. This is what most people think. It's the long night of the soul. They're hearing the violins playing, you know, looking in the mirror. You suck. I know my podcast sucks, right? But instead, it's not about that at all. It's about managing expectations. It's about, hey, let me provide value every time I email them. I'm going to say, hey, here's an article I found in Adweek or Digiday about how other brands in your vertical or category are killing it with short-form content or podcasting or YouTube long-form videos or whatever. Next one, oh, I just wrapped this partnership. Here's a case study from what I did. It was a similar goal type to what you're looking to do, awareness, repurposing, sales, whatever. Here's the testimonial from what the brand said. So every time that you're reaching out, you're actually, and there's a cadence to it, of course, to how you're following up. I could just share a quick anecdote from a creator named Emma in my community. She had an anecdote that it took four follow-ups without hearing back from the brand. For her to finally nail a partnership. So she was negotiating. They kept ghosting her. She kept providing value. And then on the fourth email, the contact was like, I'm so sorry. It's been crazy. This is perfect timing, though. Yes, let's move forward with the deal. So could you set that as a milestone? Like, could you have the tenacity to follow up with someone four times without hearing back from them? Sometimes that's what it takes. Kevin King: And now a word from one of our sponsors, one of Norm and I's favorite tools, Stack Influence. Norm Farrar: Are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first page positioning? The influencer platform StackInfluence can help. StackInfluence pushes high-volume external traffic sales to Amazon listings using micro-influencers. And guess what? You only have to pay with your products. They've helped up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning, while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products. Right now is the best time to get started with Stack Influence to crush it during this holiday season. Kevin King: That's right, Norm. Sign up today at stackinfluence.com or click the link in the video below and mention Misfits, that's right, Misfits, M-I-S-F-I-T-S to get 10% off your first campaign. Head over to stackinfluence.com right now. Norm Farrar: This is crazy. You remember at the beginning of the podcast, just before you came on, I told you sometimes we go down some different rabbit holes. This is one of them, but it's on topic. I was sourcing a product. Kevin, I don't know if I ever told you this story, but we were sourcing a product and we were in the middle of negotiations, but I had to go away. I was away for three weeks. And we settled at this price. And then the guy just before I left said, or I went back to him and I said, hey, look, you got to give us a better price. Then I left. And there was a series, this is over three weeks, a series of emails that I didn't respond to because I didn't even know they existed. And it was, hey, we feel we can get down to this. Then it was, oh, hey, I'm talking to my manager and he feels it kept going. Unknown Speaker: I must have had about 10 emails. It was the lowest price way below, you know, the value of what I was willing to pay or sorry, the opposite. It was way better than what I was willing to pay and it turned out great. Norm Farrar: Now, I don't I always want to win-win. In this case, they must have had huge margins because they negotiated that without me saying a word. I love silence. Kevin King: And negotiate with themselves. Norm Farrar: Yeah, exactly. I didn't respond. Justin Moore: Dude. Kevin King: Go ahead. Justin Moore: No, I'm just going to say the same. I've been on the receiving end of thousands of negotiations again when I ran the agency with creators and they can negotiate against themselves all the time. It's like, well, I usually charge this, but I'm happy to do it for half that. And I'm like, I didn't even ask you to do that. Like, why did you do that? I probably would have paid you the normal amount, you know? Kevin King: I find that relationships are the number one factor for me. I mean, I have an event, an in-person event that I charge $15,000 or $30,000 to sponsor. And then there's also options, upgrades to that. So you want to be the exclusive, you want this, and they can do all kinds of add-ons. But some of what you just talked about, I'm going to change away a couple of things that I'm doing based on what you just outlined a few minutes ago. Justin Moore: Let's go. Let's go. Unknown Speaker: Let's go. Kevin King: As part of that, I find that it's the relationships. Sometimes I'll get the out of the blue person that emailed me, but it's usually because of another relationship with someone else that's had a good experience or has heard something. But a case in point on this awareness funnel is I never used to sponsor other events. I was the guy emailing or just working on relationships and making a phone call. Hey, do you want to sponsor the event? I only take 10 sponsors, so I limit it because in our space, we don't want the events to become All the attendees are sponsors and not actually sellers, so we try to balance it. I made the mistake one time of having way too many sponsors and it caused issues. But I just did an event in New York a couple months ago, about 600 Amazon sellers. And I spend about $25,000, $30,000 by the time you put in the hotel, the airfare, the cost of the booth. We did a video display and it was pushing four things. One of them was a couple of my in-person events. I sold zero tickets to the in-person event at that thing. I wasn't expecting to. It's just an awareness play. But what I did get out of it is seven sponsorships of people walking by and this is like, most of them I already knew. But it's that one thing, that extra presence, that extra push that's like, all right, sign us up. And so I'm doing it again in March at another event and spending a bunch of money. And so I have to look at it from that point of view. In the past, I would look at it as like, OK, I'm going to spend $25,000 to sponsor this show. I need to sell, if my tickets, let's just say they're $5,000 each, I need to sell five tickets to even remotely come close to breaking in, or more like seven tickets with my cost of actually producing the event. And if I don't do that, this is a failure. But it's not. And so I think that's a mindset shift that a lot of people have to look at from whether you're a company or a creator is sometimes it's the long term play and you got to you got to You got to spend a little bit of money to make some money down the road. Justin Moore: Man, I mean, you know, you go back to the 1930s and you look at what the movie studios, the research that they did, where, you know, they found that it took an average of seven times for a consumer to hear about an upcoming movie before they finally got their butts in the seats. It's called the marketing rule of seven. And I think that you see this repeat repeatedly over and over and over. And I think, you know, everyone thinks that people have such short attention spans and the age, the TikTokization of people and all this. But like, you know, marketing is marketing. And like, you know, seeing it, seeing a message across multiple different channels in lots of different ways. There's just, you know, there is something to be said about seeing your favorite creator, your favorite influencer talk about a product. That they authentically use and love multiple times. They're just going to be like, oh yeah, wasn't that, what was that brand that that one, you know, my friend like talks about a lot. Like there, there, there absolutely is, is something to that. And I think we just, we can't lose sight of that. Um, even though maybe, you know, TikTok shop and all that is the, is the latest buzz, uh, buzz, buzzy trend. Kevin King: How much does FOMO matter in sponsorship marketing? Justin Moore: I'm not a fan of fake FOMO. FOMO works clearly in general in marketing and advertising, of course. My number one principle is just transparency. I'm just going to tell you how it is. I want this to be a win-win. I'm not going to try and We're gonna sell you fake scarcity. You gotta only have one more spot. We're gonna do this type of thing. That may work for some people, but again, as long as you're focusing on their objectives, it's not about you. It doesn't matter how many spots I have left in my event. It's a matter of is them being at my in-person event, which is happening next March, which is my first one I'm excited about, but it's like anything. Sponsoring any asset, right? My YouTube channel. I'm gonna get my book sponsored. As long as it's helping The brand accomplish their objectives, then it's a win. So I really don't get fixated up on like hacks and tricks and things like that. I don't think it matters because again, what do brands have budgets for? They have budgets for their own initiatives. They don't have random discretionary budgets, slush funds to pay random creators, random events that reach out. Hey, would you sponsor my event? Sometimes they do, but they have a lot less of those dollars than The million dollars that we have to spend to get people to know about our new AI feature, or the million dollars for people to know that we're now in North America. That's what they have money for. So your job as a creator, as a business, is to convince them that, hey, give me 50K of that. Give me 100K of that. I'm going to help you get closer to that objective. Norm Farrar: That's it. Justin Moore: That's all you have to do. Kevin King: Once you turn down sponsorships, I mean sometimes someone comes to you and they want to give you money. They want to give you the 100k out of the million and you just know this is not a right fit. This is just not right. Some people will take the money because they want the money. Yeah, and they don't care. Other people will be transparent like yeah, I You know what, maybe you don't want to do 100. Let's see if the audience, I don't know if it's a fit. Let's try a little $10,000 thing and just see what happens. What are your thoughts on that kind of honesty? Justin Moore: I have a nuanced take on this, which is of course, if it runs counter to your ethics and your values personally, then of course you should turn it down. However, my guiding principle is that sponsorships are not about you. Sponsorships are not about lining your pockets. It's about serving your audience slash customers. So this is a big hang up that I think a lot of people do is that the only lens that they use to decide like the criteria that they use of like whether they want to work with the sponsor is whether they personally use or love the product. And I actually think that that's table stakes. That's that's literally if you're reaching out to a brand and be like, I love your product. I've used it for five years. That's what everyone is saying, right? That's table stakes. It's actually the more meaningful dialogue that you need to have is actually involving your audience. In this conversation, I call it, it's a psychographic research study that you should be doing. So you're sending out a survey to your audience or if you're a YouTuber on your YouTube community tab or Instagram on your Instagram stories, you're asking questions, you're saying, hey, I want to learn more about you. Yeah, I can see the demographics, which is kind of helpful, but I want to know like, you know, what types of jobs do you have? Are you married? Do you have kids? What problems do you have? What's keeping you up at night? What brands and products and services are you using and loving right now? That last question is a game changer because let's say that you get, you know, 40% of respondents to that survey and you said, wow, I didn't realize that I had so many mid-level Companies subscribe to my newsletter. I thought it was all like small Amazon sellers or I thought it was all whatever, but you realize that you have some medium size and enterprise accounts or types of people that are actually on your list. That's interesting. What problems do they have is you learn about this and they're saying, Oh yeah, you were having HR issues. We have employees, tax issues or whatever, like a compliance issue, whatever is something you're going to learn stuff. And You might realize like, wow, normally this is my normal content lane, but I realized like there's all these people who are having this one issue. Maybe I should go out there and forge a partnership with a bookkeeping software. That's not normally a partnership I would do, but again, it's not about me. It's about serving them. And so I think at the end of the day, that's the lens that I consider sponsorships through is like maybe even if I don't use it personally, if I know that it would serve a segment of my customers, my audience, I'll seriously like consider it. Kevin King: I use something to that end. I mean, you have a newsletter of 35,000 people. What I'm prospecting with, I'm looking for people that might be interested in sponsoring. I have some sponsorships come out. Who can I hit up that I might know? I'm sure you have some tactics on this and I'd love to hear them. But one of the ones that I use to kind of along what you said is an app called Mega.App. And it ties into your newsletter list and automatically brings in all the LinkedIn of all your subscribers and a couple of some other data. And I can go in and I can see who are the business development or partnership managers at which companies. And then I can actually give me their email address or at least their LinkedIn contact and a lot of times their email address too. And then I can look and see how active or engaged they are in my newsletter. If they have a high open rate and a high click rate, I know these people know my brand left backwards and forwards. They should be a much easier sell and someone I should target. That's one way that I do it. What are some ways that you recommend people go out and actually find and actually be able to contact people that might be interested in sponsoring them? Justin Moore: Kevin, I'm so glad you brought up that tactic, because that's such a low-hanging fruit. A lot of people don't think of it. There's probably sponsors in your audience. A lot of people don't think about that. Maybe you should just ask them. Be like, hey, I'm looking for a sponsor for my event. Anyone interested? Fill out this, hit reply to this email. Very easy stuff that I think a lot of people are not doing. I'm so glad you brought that up. The second thing is, this is also in my mind kind of a no-brainer. Who is sponsoring all your friends? I call, you know, sometimes I've, your niche neighbors, my friend Shelly calls it, right? Where it's like, you know, go subscribe to all these other newsletters of other people who are kind of in your space, parallel, tangential, and start observing, like who are the types of brands that are sponsoring them? Because clearly that brand has illustrated that they value this industry, this niche, this content format potentially. And so that's like a pretty obvious one. Kevin King: That pisses me off sometimes when I get somebody else's newsletter and I see it's so, an ad in there, From someone I've contacted, I'm like, son of a mother effer, why the hell are you sponsoring these guys? You should be sponsoring me. I do the exact same thing. I monitor. Justin Moore: Hold on a second, Kevin. No, no, no. Don't get mad. Don't cross your arms. Kevin King: No, no. I see an opportunity. I see an opportunity. Justin Moore: Exactly. Kevin King: I'll go with this because I know the movement. Yeah, he's got this many people, but I know his open rate. I know his audience. And I've advertised in there and I've gotten shit results. So I'm going to go to them like, look, here's seven case studies of my people that keep coming back and back and back. I just had it happen this week. Someone ran an ad with me last week and they're like, please, please, I'm begging you. Let me run another one this week. It did so good. I was like, I'm out of space. Make a space. I'll pay you extra. And so I just did that. But that's what I want. So I look at those. I monitor trade shows of who advertises other in-person events. I monitor who advertises other newsletters, who advertises other online events. And I have a list of them and I go after them. Justin Moore: That's so great, man. And I mean, first of all, let me just acknowledge you for something, which is that most people are not proactive like you are. They are reactive when it comes to sponsorship. So they're just building their audience and they think, if I build it, they will come. They're sitting on their hands and they're waiting for their, you know, an opportunity to land in their inbox. And one of the things you guys probably know very well is that, you know, if you are just sitting on your hands waiting for business to come, you know, there's going to be, yeah, maybe it was great during COVID and you had lots of opportunities, inbound opportunities, and it was fine. But then those start to dry up. There starts becoming huge proliferation in the amount of creators, amounts of businesses, the supply. A lot of people that that brands can hire, when that massively explodes, what happens now? And so a big part of what I preach in the book, Sponsor Magnet, is you have to always be supplementing your inbound deal flow with outbound prospecting. And so to your question, Kevin, around what are other ways in which you can reach out to sponsors, a big part of it is just doing research, looking at their press releases, looking at the social media posts that they're making, looking at what they're posting on, their VP of marketing posted on LinkedIn yesterday. These are breadcrumbs that they're leaving, telling you what's important to them. They're telling you, hey, we're about to launch this thing in six months, or oh, one of my favorite tactics is literally scroll back on a brand's Instagram. To last year, so let's say we're sitting here in January, okay, and we're saying, oh, I would really love to partner with this brand. When you reach out, don't pitch a new year, new you campaign. They already planned that campaign six months ago. You have to be thinking April, May, you know, summertime, spring, summertime campaign. So scroll back on their Instagram, see what types of campaigns they were running last year. Chances are they're gonna be probably running a pretty similar campaign to that, right? And so when you reach out, that's what you say. Hey, I saw you were running this campaign last year. Are you gonna be running that again this year? I would love to help you support that. Pretty simple stuff, but again, it's you're leading with them. What's in it for them? It's not about you. Norm Farrar: Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Lavanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it. Kevin King: That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levanta, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right. It's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers, all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from. Norm Farrar: So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. Well, I'm kind of thinking the other way about the brands and what they're being taught right now, especially in Amazon. I've gone to a ton of events. Kevin, you've been there as well. And the people on stage are saying, reach out to the creators, pay them nothing. So it's a nothing play. So they're expecting that they're going to get the creator to go and just grab their product, you know, product shot. And that's it. And there's so many that are out there that they're expecting these creators to do it for nothing. Kevin King: So what just happened is, let's give it a we don't have to say the names, but let's give an example. Norm and I were just at a Christmas party. And there's a big brand that actually does, that wants this creator to actually do stuff for them. Norm Farrar: That's Naomi. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kevin King: No, don't worry. I won't say any names. So they want this creator who's a well-known creator to do some stuff. And this particular, I'm not going to say if it's a woman or a man, this particular creator actually Ausha is pushing back saying, no, you're not willing to make the commitment to what it takes. And they're like, well, tell me the price, and we'll do this. And we don't care if it works or doesn't work. And this person is like, no, you don't understand. That's not the point of this. It's not going to work. It's not going to work, period. You're not willing to make the proper commitment. And I just saw Neil Patel. He just put out a stat. I wish I had it here in front of me. Of the length of time it takes for different types of marketing to actually take effect. And I forget exactly, email was the quickest. It was like five, six weeks of a series of emails for it to really start to take effect. And I saw that with my newsletter. Norm has too. Sponsoring events is this. And social media is this. And it's pretty cool. It's going to be in my newsletter. It's a cool stat. And one of them was like nine months to actually where you start seeing the return. And most people just aren't willing to do that. And they don't understand the long-term play. And that's what Norm is saying is that This particular creator was pushing back and like, I don't know this. Why should I do this? There's either the way you're proposing this to me is on a commission basis and I'm not going to make any money because I know what it takes. And then the person trying to get them to do is like, well, I'll pay you some money and then we'll do a commission base. And this person was still like, I still not going to work. So how do you how do you handle that? Justin Moore: There's a couple different takes that I have on this. The first is writing this book was my act of service to try to educate people en masse. About this, educate creators about understanding their worth. Because this is the number one complaint that I hear from people is like, it's so difficult because there's a line of 100 people willing to take this product for free or willing to do it on commission only. It's just really hard for me to advocate for myself when there's these waves of people who are willing to do it for free. And so that's part of the reason why I wrote the book. The other thing that I'm gonna try and do is I'm gonna try and get this book in the hands of brands as well to help them understand the perspective. Of what it actually takes to run a successful campaign with creators. The book is focused for creators, of course, but I do think, like you said, there needs to be some education on the brand side to understand what's reasonable. And there's some not so great players encouraging some bad activity, I would say, in terms of not compensating people properly for their work. The other thing, though, that I would say is that brands oftentimes need to understand just simple economics when it comes to trying to convince a partner to collaborate with them. For example, if you try to, you know, a lot of creators worth their salt are pretty heavily diversified now. Yeah, they may be doing sponsorships, but they may have a course, they may have a book, they may be doing speaking, they may be doing coaching, they may be doing lots of things. And so they may have other revenue streams in their business where they're making a lot more money. Then, you know, this small pittance that the brand is offering on a commission-only thing. And so one advice that I give to brands who are really trying to entice creators to collaborate with them is that understand, are there other non-monetary assets that you can provide to the creator that would excite them about a collaboration? For example, if a creator economy company came to me and kind of looked, just literally took two second look at my social profile, they would understand The book, it's launching. That's what I care about. I'm talking about it every day. That's what I care about. And if they said, hey, Justin, as part of this collaboration, you talk about us on your platforms. We will also email our customer base of 50,000 people about your book. I would say, oh, OK, let's talk. I'm like way more interested in talking now. So it's like a lot of times brands need to understand what would get creators excited. And it's not always about money. Norm Farrar: That's so true. One of the things I want to go back to what you were talking about when you're talking about ARC. So you've got the awareness, you've got repurposing, you've got the conversion, but brands want to see results. That's all they want to see. If I give them, if they're doing an awareness campaign and I give them a report and it shows crappy click-through rates, you know, they're not going to be with me very long. So how do you get around it? What kind of information can you put on a report that's going to open their eyes and not drop you? Justin Moore: So, um, I'm going to push back a little bit on this, on that statement because, um, Yes, of course, in the Amazon world. So my wife and I did Amazon Live for three years. So I can speak pretty credibly to this. And we've been on Amazon. That was like one of the first ways we made money. So I've been doing the Amazon a really long time. And Amazon sellers are obsessed with conversion. That's what they care about. Like, like, like, end of story. Like I 100% acknowledge and understand that. However, when you look at Amazon, I don't believe that Amazon is a good representation of the larger industry as a whole, because if you're looking at other platforms, if you're looking at other types of brands who are selling in other retail channels, they don't look at it as myopically as Amazon sellers do. I think Amazon, especially, and TikTok Shop, That is a special case where yes, the majority of them are looking for conversions. But if you're thinking about an awareness campaign and you're trying to educate the brands about what the difference is between these things, the KPIs or the metrics that you're going to use to track those things are different. In an awareness campaign, It's impressions. It's engagement. It's comments. Those are the metrics for an awareness campaign. Those are the metrics that you should be reporting on. With a conversion campaign, of course, it's different. It's sales. It's click-through rate. It's those types of things. With repurposing, by the way, going back to the R, how many assets can you generate for us? Can you give us different cuts of the asset? One by one in a vertical, this type of thing. So again, A big part of this comes down to educating the brand and of course some of them it's going to be falling on deaf ears, but I actually fundamentally feel like it's a joy to get on a phone call with the brand, educate them. In fact, I could tell a quick story. We did a deal with a brand off a standard Instagram, YouTube type partnership and we had mentioned doing an Amazon Live partnership as part of the deal. They were interested. The brand ultimately said, no, I don't really want to do that, but thanks for telling us about this. That agency came back to us like three or four months later, but because we had proposed the Amazon Live thing, they said, can you tell us a little bit more about how Amazon Live works? Because we don't really understand it. And instead of just being annoyed, like, shouldn't they know? I literally fired up Loom. You know, I did a screen share and I was like, sure, here's a 10 minute video. Of how it works. Here's how we do it. Here's how I'd recommend we approach it. These type of thing. And they literally could not believe that I took the time to just send them a video, educate them on the process. And it doesn't matter whether it led to something or not. Now I have cemented in their mind that I'm an advocate. I'm a consultant for them. And so, you know, I understand it's frustrating. But if you can educate the brands about the difference between these three gold types, oftentimes that can lead to a much more significant partnership. Norm Farrar: So that goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, just managing expectations and educating. Justin Moore: Yep, yep, 100%. Again, the way in which you would tactically execute a conversion campaign is different for an awareness campaign. If it's an awareness campaign, this is The Marketing Misfits podcast brought to you by Amazon brand XYZ. And you may not even talk about them again. There may not even be a link in the show notes. That's not the play. It's an awareness play, so that every time someone sees it in their play or a new episode, they see the brand's logo. If it's a conversion-focused campaign, hey, click the link in the show notes, Marketing Misfits 10, for 10% off your first purchase. That is a direct response conversion tactic. So you have to be able to say this to a brand and help them understand the difference. Norm Farrar: I got to jump in because this has to do with what Kevin was talking about with this influencer. And I was listening to the brand and I was listening to the influencer going back and forth, back and forth. The brand couldn't let it die because they said, just produce a viral video. The person was saying, I can't guarantee that you're going to have a viral video. And the brand's expectations were, yes, you can. You're a big influencer. Create me a viral video. And it was driving me crazy. Kevin King: So speaking of that, I mean, one of the tactics you talk about in your book is getting ahead of the curve. So not waiting for them to come and say, hey, I want to advertise our new product that we're launching and I can help you get the word out. It's actually looking for trends and saying, hey, I see this trend. I see this is about to happen. I'm starting to notice on TikTok, A lot of people are talking about this. Your brand should get on the front end of this. You should actually be, and I can help you, because I'm seeing what other people are doing, and here's X, Y, and Z why you should do this. So you talk about that tactic, which is kind of cool and innovative, and a lot of people aren't willing to do that upfront homework, but when you almost act like an extension of the brand, and you're doing some of their work for them, and you put it on a silver platter, I mean, how effective, how cool is that? Justin Moore: Dude, imagine if this was your pitch to the brand. You say, Hey brand, I will be your extremely online consultant. I'm on these platforms all day long. I see what's blowing up. I see the trends that are coming and I'm going to create a slack room for you where the moment I see something trending, I'm going to drop in the link and I'm going to say, hey, here's the spin that I think you could do for your Brand is trending sound. Here's what you could do. And guess what? For an added fee, I'll create the freaking content for you on autopilot. I'll do this for you. A lot of a lot of creators thinks that brands have this all figured out. A lot of them don't have the bandwidth. They may only have one or two people on their marketing team. They don't have someone who's able to spend, you know, eight hours a day on TikTok and understand because with trends, sometimes they're gone in 72 hours. But you think that brand would love to insert themselves into the conversation? With that trend where these videos are getting millions of views, yeah, they probably would. It's gonna be $5,000 a month for me to be this extremely online consultant for you, what do you think? There's so many things that you can pitch to a brand when you can remove, when you understand you're not just a creator with a platform, you can serve as a consultant to these brands. Norm Farrar: What's a rabbit hole, because we are getting close to the top of the hour, what's a rabbit hole we haven't talked about? Justin Moore: The rabbit hole we haven't talked about is the importance of the eighth step in my sponsorship wheel framework, which is analyze. Most people don't do this as creators. Maybe the brand asked them for screenshots of their Amazon Associates dashboard or their YouTube insights or Instagram insights or whatever, and that's it. They said, okay, yeah, thanks. That's what we needed. When in reality, you have to be doing your own reporting, not just quantitative stats, but qualitative stats of how you think the campaign went. Here's some awesome comments we got about it. Here's actually some DMs, some emails that I got that you didn't see, because those are not public facing. And I'm not going to just sugarcoat this. I'm not just going to say, hey, I'm awesome. Look how great this was. I'm going to actually tell you, here's actually some negative comments I got, some neutral comments I got. Here's a bunch of objections about people say, oh, I tried that product six months ago. It sucked. Or, oh, it's too expensive. I'm never going to use that. And then you say, Let's actually address those in the next iteration of our partnership. Here's like three things that I would want to talk about in another newsletter blast or another YouTube podcast episode, whatever, about this thing. You know how much more credible you appear when you are actually leaning into that? You know, this is just an absolute game changer. And so if you look at my sponsorship wheel, it's like step eight, It leads right back into step one, which is pitch. And so a big reason that people think sponsorships is not predictable income is because they literally never talk to the brand again. They do the deal and then they literally never talk to them again. And you want to know why? It's because they're scared of asking the brand, hey, how'd it go? Norm Farrar: It almost sounds like at the end that you become a consultant as well. Justin Moore: A hundred percent. Quick story here. I was on a podcast with Nathan Berry, who's the CEO of Kit, you know, the formerly ConvertKit, the email marketing software. And we were talking about this very subject and he said, you know, if we hired a creator to talk about ConvertKit and they didn't drive the number of like signups for the, for, you know, new accounts that we hoped they would. But they came back to us with this report where they said, hey, I had a bunch of people in my audience saying, oh, I'm on, yeah, kit looks better, but I'm on MailChimp and I've got all these sequences and automations and tags and that's just such a pain in the ass to do all that. I don't want to deal with that. That, if you are able to circle that feedback back to the brand, that allows the brand to say, oh, well, we actually have a concierge migration team that is free. Let's talk about that in the next iteration of the content. So this is straight from the mouth of someone running a $40 million a year company, right? And so again, like because no one is doing this. No one is providing this type of data or this type of reporting to the brand. It's a game changer. Kevin King: Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm? Norm Farrar: Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast? Kevin King: Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not gonna know what I say. Norm Farrar: I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Unknown Speaker: Yikes! Norm Farrar: But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits. Kevin King: Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. What happens from a creator's side when you get involved with a brand and something goes awry? Maybe it's like you said earlier, sometimes you're passionate about the brand and you use the product, but sometimes you don't use the product. I've had this happen where someone buys an ad or pays me money and by me sending out this, let's say, this dedicated email, I'm indirectly sponsoring them even though I'm not necessarily endorsing them. Kevin says this is awesome, but it's an indirect endorsement. And then there's a bunch of negativity that happens on their webinar on something down the road. And how do you address that type of situation? How do you advise traders? Because you just don't know what's going to happen. Sometimes it's just, you know, you don't know when you're going to get hit by a bus walking across the street either. So how do you handle those kinds of things? Justin Moore: So a big part of it is research before you actually agree to the partnership. So if it's a physical product or something trying to actually go out there and look for reviews, testimonials, people who have posted, you know, Reddit, you know, Amazon reviews, Saying like, you know, does this product look legitimate? Do people have legitimate grievances about this product? That's something that you probably should be doing. Or something that we've done before is actually just purchasing the product, testing it out ourself before we actually agree to it. Say, $20 product, sure. I'll ship it to my house. I'll test it out. Like, cost of doing business, I gotta test it out. Or maybe send it over to me first. Maybe that's part of your criteria. Is like, I'm not gonna talk about something unless you send it to me and I can test it out. That's totally fine for you to like, you know, mandate something like that. Kevin King: What if it's someone's holding a conference in February and I know this person and they're like really good and I'm like, this is a smart person. They hold this conference and like, Kevin, will you help us get the word out? And I help them get the word out. People go to the conference, and it's a total shit show. It's like the worst organized thing, and half the speakers are boring as hell, and it's a waste, and at the end of it, they just did an upsell, and everybody's like, oh, this is just a freaking infomercial. How do you counter something like that? How do you distance yourself from something like that? Justin Moore: So I think it's twofold. So there's two things, like making amends to your audience is one, and then figuring out whether you want to Have an existing or a relationship, an ongoing relationship with the sponsor is important. Understanding like, you know, those two things are different, right? And so if it's egregious enough that you think it would warrant actually sending out some sort of apology to your audience, then maybe that's warranted. If it's crazy enough. Generally, though, I think as long as you're forthcoming about where your heart is at, that you were saying like, you know, I genuinely thought that this event was going to be worthwhile. I don't think that people will fault you too much. I mean, it's tough because, I mean, this happens. Like, look at the FTX scandal, right, where you had a bunch of finance YouTubers who, you know, outside looking in, it's got all these celebrity, you know, investors, you know, A-list VCs who had invested in it, and it turned out to be a scheme, and then these finance YouTubers get a lot of blowback. It's tough. I understand that it happens, but trying to implement as robust of a vetting criteria as possible before you agree to an endorsement is important, I think. Kevin King: So the book is out in January. How do people actually get a copy of your book? What's the name of it and how they get a copy of it? Justin Moore: Yes, the book is called Sponsor Magnet. You can go to sponsormagnet.com and it's literally a complete distillation of everything I know about brand partnerships. If this conversation tingled your brain, I have, it's chock full with more stuff about this. And I do, I have a massive amount of bonuses that go along with the book. I have this sponsorship tracker template that I've created. That actually allows you to track a lot of these relationships that you're forging with brands, pitching and things like that in Notion. I've never offered this. This has only been something that's been in my course before. I'm offering this for free as a bonus for the book. I have a bunch of scripts. I'm like, hey, the brand says this. What do you say in response to that? The brand says, hey, become an affiliate for us. Don't say, I'm only focusing on paid partnerships right now, which is what most people do. You say, no. Hey, yes, of course, I would love to go check out your affiliate program. Out of curiosity, do your affiliates also grant you the rights to repurpose their content for paid ads? Because that's something that I specialize in. Let me know if you'd like me to send over a few investment options for what that might look like. That's what you say. You pivot the conversation. So there's 15 of scripts like that. Yeah, so Sponsormagnet.com. Kevin King: Tell me about the event you're doing in March. What's that going to be about? Justin Moore: Yeah, so it's called Sponsor Games. It's kind of like an anti-conference. So I thought of all the things that I hate about most conferences, most creator-focused conferences at least. So there's no keynotes, there's no workshops, and there's no panels. I'm taking my eight-step sponsorship wheel framework and I'm turning them into eight games that you can play to master the concepts. So the pitch game and the negotiate game. Well, you actually do some kind of real hands-on learning in terms of putting pitches together and negotiating, role-playing, all sorts of stuff. And the culminating event is what we're calling the sponsor tank. We're the eight finalists of the event. We're going to actually pitch real influencer marketing managers on brands like a panel of judges and someone's going to win a cash prize. So it's going to be a lot of fun. Kevin King: What's the name of that? Justin Moore: It's called Sponsor Games. Sponsorgames.com. It's from March 16th to the 19th in San Antonio. Kevin King: Awesome. Norm Farrar: All right. I think that's it for the podcast today. We always like to ask our misfits if they know a misfit. Justin Moore: Oh, yeah. I absolutely know a misfit and it's my good buddy Jay Klaus over at Creator Science. Jay is one of the most thoughtful people that I know. When you have all these people out there teaching like, oh, this is how you get your video to go viral or this is how you get more views and hack the algorithm and all this, Jay's business is built around actually deconstructing and analyzing it, kind of using the scientific method of understanding how businesses actually work and grow. I'm in his membership community as well, one of my best friends, and he's the embodiment of a marketing misfit in my mind. Norm Farrar: Fantastic. Can't wait to reach out. Justin, it was fantastic having you on. Justin Moore: Guys, this is so great. I really appreciate the opportunity. Norm Farrar: Now, you do know that Kevin now is going to be charging me more for sponsorship in his newsletter. Kevin King: You know what? Here's what pisses me off is that just literally an hour before this call, I sent out 140 media kits. And then you're on here like, do not do that. Do not do that. And I'm like, I just I effin' did that. Now I'm like, okay, now I need to take this other technology that Norm and I know about that does some AI stuff that's pretty badass. I can go out there and do all this scraping, like you said, of Instagram and their previous posts and everything, and mix that in and do a whole customized approach. My mind is spinning right now. I've got a notepad here. You couldn't see me because I'm below the table, but I have a notepad full of notes. Hopefully everybody else got as much benefit from this as I did. Thank you so much, Justin. Justin Moore: Dude, last comment on this. Don't feel bad. None of us learned this stuff. We didn't go to school for this, at least I didn't. I did a few classes on this, but negotiating, talking with brands, this is all stuff we're learning on the fly. Don't feel too bad. As long as you can invest in learning this stuff, it can have a profound impact. Kevin King: Well, I appreciate it, man. I appreciate everything. Justin Moore: Yep. Norm Farrar: All right. We're going to remove you, but we'll be talking to you in a second. Unknown Speaker: Look at that. Norm Farrar: My one job. I did it. I did it. Kevin King: You can hit the button. You can still do that. Norm Farrar: You know, on Lunch with Norm, Kelsey's the producer of it, right? I didn't know how hard of a job he had. Kevin King: You don't know how hard of a job you have, what do you mean? Norm Farrar: No, hitting that button. Kevin King: Oh, that is pretty, I mean, you've been paying big bucks to do that. Norm Farrar: Big bucks to, yeah. Kevin King: You can just let the AI robots do that now. You can just say to Kelsey, sorry man, we're phasing you out. Norm Farrar: You know, this was So much information. Like you said, you had a notepad. I just have a really good memory. But what you could implement and how much did you leave on the table? But you know, Justin said, it's a learning process, right? Kevin King: He said it exactly. I mean, it's how much will someone pay? Like the guy that came back to me today that says, we want another one right away. I should have charged him more because obviously it says here's the same price. And I was charging for those dedicated emails four months ago, $2,000. And now I raised it to $2,500 and then I raised it to $3,000 and I'm probably still undercharging because people keep coming back. And like I want to do another one. I want to do a whole year. I want to pay for the whole year. Give me a discount. I'll give them a discount. You know, they up front pay, not pay monthly, but up front pay for an entire year. I'll give them a discount, but I'm probably undervaluing it. It's exactly like what he just says. Look at a finance company who won lead for a hundred thousand, a million dollar loan to an Amazon seller is worth an interest. I don't know, 30, 40 grand to them or whatever. I'm just making up numbers here, 30 or 40 grand and tailoring exactly to what he said. Instead of me charging them, okay, it's $3,000 for the email. They get one lead. Of course, they're freaking shitting their pants and they're like so happy. They get 10 leads. They're like, this was the best deal ever. We'll do this all day long. I should be charging them more customized. Maybe it's a software company where I got a spot available and the software company is charging $100 a month. And they get 31 leads. And they know their average lifetime value is three months. That means that $3,000 is going to bring back nine grand to them. And that's a reasonable amount. So tailoring it and asking them, what are you trying to achieve? What are you trying to do? Is really, really smart. And then adjusting the price based on that. So you can, I mean, I've already got 2025 locked up as far as my BDSS pricing. I can't really adjust that at this point, but you can damn be sure to be straight that start 2026 when I start advertising, there is no rate card. It's going to be based on every single person. Someone may pay me 50 or 100 grand that's been paying 15 grand right now. Norm Farrar: But if I wanted to sponsor it, you would give me a real good deal, right? Kevin King: If you want to sponsor, it depends if a reach around is included or not. Unknown Speaker: Just kidding. Kevin King: I'm just kidding, everybody. I'm just kidding. Norm Farrar: You know it's included. All right. So that's it. Kevin King: How do they follow us, Norm? How do they reach out? How do they follow this channel? If you like this episode, what are they supposed to do? All right. Norm Farrar: Become part of the community. You can go over to our YouTube channel, Marketing Misfits, or you can I hope by the time this airs, we have a newsletter or just go to your favorite podcast platform and we'll be there. Marketing Misfits podcast. And by the way, Our logo is two guys smoking a cigar, so you can't miss us. Kevin King: That's right. MarketingMisfits.co.co, not .com, .co. And if you like this episode with Mr. Moore, just be sure to actually forward it to someone. If you know someone in the career space, like, man, they got to hear this, don't just subscribe, actually forward the link to them so they can check it out as well with a little note that says, hey, you got to check this out. This was freaking awesome. You got to check out his book and everything. Other than that, I guess that's it for this episode. We'll see you again next week, next Tuesday, brand new episode coming up. Thanks again, everybody, for joining us on The Marketing Misfits. Norm Farrar: See you later.