SHOW TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is automatically generated by Descript.  Any errors or omissions are unintentional.

[00:00:00] Justin Moore: Now that would have never a sponsor. You would have thought to pitch, but again, it’s not about you. It’s about serving your audience with this issue that they’re having. And so I think that this reveals so many surprising and interesting things of not just sponsors that you could pitch but content that you could create.

[00:00:15] Wow, I should probably make some videos about this because this is like an issue that my, my audience is having. So I think it’s just a game changer.

[00:00:23] Jeff Sieh: Hello folks. Welcome to social media news live. I’m Jeff See. And you’re not.

[00:00:27] Conor Brown: And I’m Connor Brown. And this is the show that keeps you up to date on what’s happening in the world of social media and more.

[00:00:33] Jeff Sieh: Have you ever wondered what it really takes to attract sponsors who see your value? Maybe you’re curious about how top creators turn brand deals into long term partnerships. Or maybe you’re ready to land sponsorships, but aren’t sure where to start. If so, you’re in the right place, because today we’re excited to welcome a guest who has mastered the art of sponsorships.

[00:00:53] Justin Moore has not only built a thriving business, but Working with brands, but has also helped countless creators secure profitable deals. He’ll be sharing his journey, insider knowledge, and his best strategies for landing and growing brand partnerships. So sit back, clear your schedule, clear your mind, and get ready for this week’s episode of Social Media News Live.

[00:01:12] Justin, how are you doing today, my friend?

[00:01:14] Justin Moore: Let’s go. I’m in the house. I’ve got my sound effects. We’re going to have a blast today, guys. We’re going to have fun. We’re going to make some money. let’s go. Happy Friday.

[00:01:23] Jeff Sieh: Awesome, man. I’m looking forward to it.

[00:01:25] Conor Brown: We’re so excited. This is going to be a fun one. But if you don’t know who Justin is, you should because Justin Moore is a sponsorship coach and the founder of Creator Wizard, a school and community that teaches you how to find and negotiate your dream brand partnerships so you can stop leaving thousands.

[00:01:43] Of dollars on the table. Justin brings a very unique perspective because not only has he been a creator in the trenches doing sponsorships for years, but he’s also run an agency. So he has insider knowledge of how big brands choose which influencers to partner with and why they pass on that knowledge.

[00:02:02]Others, Justin’s mission is to enable creators big and small to land 1 million paid brand partnerships by 2032. He’s well on his way to achieving that goal, but Justin, thanks again for being here with us today.

[00:02:17] Justin Moore: Heck yeah, let’s go.

[00:02:18] Conor Brown: just

[00:02:19] Jeff Sieh: want to do a shout out real quick to our sponsors of the show, the amazing folks over at Ecamm. You can find out more about them at ecamm. com forward slash Jeff. Use code Jeff15 to save 15 percent on your first purchase. one of the things, Justin, and I really, so the book, Is amazing. So we’re going to be talking about this all today, folks.

[00:02:36] This is the sponsor magnet book. this is like my third copy because I’ve got it like electronically, his assistant sent it to me electronically and I, and I got it for Kindle because I take notes with it, but this is an amazing book. So if you’re trying to do sponsorships, or want to learn how to monetize your creations, this is the book for you.

[00:02:54] I’m not blowing smoke. I really, really liked this really, really good book. but let’s dive in. Because one of the things, one of my favorite quotes in the book, Justin, is it says, you say, remember, don’t be a creator, influencer or entrepreneur, be a consultant. So how does that shift of thinking help land better brand deals?

[00:03:14] Justin Moore: It’s one of the most frequent questions I get from especially smaller creators who are people. Or people who are at the outset of their journey as they’re looking at the social media landscape and it feels so saturated, right? It’s like, how can I stand out in 2025? There’s all these other people out there on the internet.

[00:03:31] and especially if you are starting to engage and interact with brands, it feels like, well, who am I to try to negotiate or even ask for money at all? Because there’s, it seems like there’s this. Endless line of people behind me who are willing to accept the free thing or willing to do it for, for very cheap.

[00:03:49] and so if that is, if the only value proposition that you feel you have is your reach or your audience size, then yes, of course you’re gonna be. Commoditized, right? They’re going to look at you as another influencer, another creator who has, you know, however many thousand followers on the internet.

[00:04:05] and you’re kind of indistinguishable from any, anyone else that they’re, they’re talking with. And so one of the central themes of my book is how do you differentiate yourself? And it’s not just about the views or the kind of vanity metrics, the views, the engagement, the comments, the reads, the followers, the downloads, whatever platform you’re on.

[00:04:23] It’s not just about that. You know, it’s been my experience having done, you know, over 500, deals personally with my wife and making over 5 million doing it. It’s been one of our primary revenue stream. It’s been our experience that, brands value a lot of other types of things that have nothing to do with the, you know, high level social media metrics.

[00:04:41] really it comes down to at the end of the day, it’s your professionalism. It’s your timeliness. It’s how nice you are when they, you know, when they send you the talking points of like, Hey, here’s like kind of the sound bites that we need in this video. We hit them every time with the plum, when they come back to us with feedback and they’re like, Hey, can you make us some small edits here?

[00:04:58] We’re like, sure. We don’t go, how dare you violate my creative genius? You know, which is what a lot of. Creator Zoo, candidly, you know, I ran this agency and I have that experience. And so, really at the end of the day, I hope that this is like an exciting prospect for, for creators who might be on the up and up, realizing like, wow, there’s kind of these intangibles, that if I can get good at just being professional and, and frankly nice, that sponsorships might be for me as well.

[00:05:22] Jeff Sieh: Very cool.

[00:05:23] Conor Brown: Remember, Jeff, if you can learn to be professional,

[00:05:26] Jeff Sieh: Okay. I’ll try. I’ll try it, but I’ve, you know, I’ll try. We

[00:05:30] Conor Brown: working on it. So Justin, I think a huge thing that you talk about is, is leaving money on the table. And going back to what you, you just said, it’s easy for us to compare ourselves to huge, massive creators that are having these massive brand deals.

[00:05:46] And then we think, well, we’re not at that level because of, you know, XYZ vanity metric. So maybe you just give me 20 bucks, right? But in reality, the, the partners that we’re looking to, to partner with, they have much more money that they’re actually willing to offer. So in Sponsor Magnet, when you’re talking about authors leaving thousands on the table, what do you think is the most common way you’re seeing creators that are just undervaluating or underpricing themselves when it comes to this?

[00:06:16] Justin Moore: Well, let’s, let’s first talk about the mindset shift that needs to occur when you are interacting with these sponsors because, you know, the, shape of most pitches, what they take is, you reach out to a brand and you say, hi, my name’s Conor have this many followers on my YouTube channel or this many readers of my blog or this many downloads I get on average on my podcast.

[00:06:37] here’s my audience demographics. you know, I’ve been using your brand or your service for three years. Would love to collaborate. This is what most pitches sound like that brands, receive. And so again, the brand reads that. They don’t know who you are. There’s lots of people on the internet who have lots of followers, so that’s not unique.

[00:06:54] and you’re asking them, oh, we’d love to figure out a way to collaborate. The way that sounds to a brand is like, oh, more work for me, great. I don’t know how to partner with this person. And so they don’t respond, or they delete the email. And then you as a creator, Convince yourself that pitching doesn’t work because you think, Oh, I’m not, I’m constantly getting ghosted, rejected.

[00:07:10] Like this isn’t working. What’s the deal? and so, basically if you just kind of go outside your body for a second here, look at that pitch objectively. That is a me, me, me. Look at me. I’m awesome. You pay me money. This, is how that pitch feels to a brand. However, if you flip that on its head and realize like, The only thing the brand cares about is themselves.

[00:07:34] All they care about is accomplishing their own business objectives. That’s what they care about. They do not have random piles of money laying around to just like pay people that reach out to them. But what they do have big piles of money for is their own initiatives. It’s called budgets. So maybe, Ecamm or another, you know, product or service or whatever has this new fangled AI feature that they’re launching and they want everyone to know about.

[00:08:01] And they’re sitting here in their marketing meeting and say, okay, we want everyone to know about this. How can we do that? How can we market? Well, I guess we could go run Facebook ads. We could go pay Jeff and Connor. We could go sponsor someone’s event. We could do whatever. And so we’ve got 100K, 200K, whatever it is to spread the word about this new AI feature, because we think that’s going to drive results, drive new signups for Ecamm or whatever.

[00:08:21] Right. And so. You learning that, doing some research on the brand social media, on their blog posts that they’re posting on LinkedIn, you’re, you’re listening to the, you know, the founder of Ecamm talk on a podcast or whatever, and they’re talking about this thing, you ascertain, you infer, well, I guess it seems like this is important to them and this is what they’re focusing on right now.

[00:08:41] So that’s what you lead with when you reach out. You say, Hey, I see that this new feature that you’re coming out with sounds awesome. I can help you move the needle on that. In the following ways, I would love to do, you know, three podcasts, I’ll give you the rights to repurpose it for three months.

[00:08:56] I can turn around the first, you know, integrations on the podcast in 10 days, happy to share some results of how I’ve helped this other, you know, microphone company achieve results. Are you free on Thursday at 10 a. m. to talk about this? That is the pitch. And, and by the way, the subject line of that email is, EAM AI in 2025, question mark or something like that.

[00:09:15] It’s not, you know, a 10,000, you know, K or a 10 K YouTuber. Question mark, collaboration.

[00:09:21] Conor Brown: time.

[00:09:23] Justin Moore: They don’t know you.

[00:09:24] Conor Brown: bye.

[00:09:24] Jeff Sieh: is this what you’re calling in your book, the STP? This is part of that. When you do your surprising

[00:09:30] Ah,

[00:09:32] transformative promise. Can you, I know you just kind of give a little bit of it. So talk a little bit about that.

[00:09:36] Justin Moore: yeah, so what I just outlined was actually called, what I call in my book, The Rope Method. R O P E. So your pitch has to be relevant to a campaign that the brand is either currently running or has run in the past. So this AI feature I just made up. O stands for organic, meaning that you can tie your pitch back to organic work that, your, you have already published that illustrates that your audience has an affinity for their brand.

[00:09:56] P stands for proof. So you can, You know, show how you’ve helped other brands achieve results and E stands for easy to execute when the brand says, yeah, this is kind of interesting. What did you have in mind? and so this is the structure of, of, you know, pitches that I suggest everyone do, because it’s universal regardless of the brand that you’re trying to pitch, regardless of what the focus of your business is.

[00:10:15] Again, it’s all focused around pitch. The brand. the STP is also very important. It’s something I talk about in the, in the beginning section of the book. And it is, it’s called the Surprising Transformative Promise. But what this is more like, Jeff, it’s, it’s kind of like your one liner, like your elevator pitch.

[00:10:30] And it’s how you talk about yourself and your creator persona, your creator identity out there on the internet. Let me explain why this is important. So, one of the things that I had to do when I ran an influencer marketing agency and our, you know, our client, one of our clients, which is like a brand, a big brand comes to us and say, Hey, Justin, here’s a hundred K.

[00:10:49] We want to run an influencer campaign to spread the word about this campaign. And they say, go find us creators. Go find us 10 people, 15 people, whatever that are going to be a good fit for us. And so what we would do is we would go out there and just start searching for people. And we would kind of kick the tires on them.

[00:11:04] We would go look at their profiles. We’d look at their blog. We’d look at their podcast. We just kind of would do this holistic analysis of, you know, what’s going on with them. of people’s, platforms. And let me tell you, man, wow, it was so confusing sometimes when we would land on people’s platforms and we just really wouldn’t have a good sense of whether they would, they were a good fit.

[00:11:21] we would use software tools sometimes to try to find them. So we’d say, oh, we’re looking for a mommy blogger or a food creator, or a lifestyle influencer, or whatever the campaign was, and we.

[00:11:32] Jeff Sieh: 000 for that, weren’t you? It was

[00:11:33] Justin Moore: Yeah, I mean, some of these software tools were a lot of money to pay for to kind of like slice and dice and look for creators and things like that.

[00:11:39] And so what these software tools do is they go out there and they scrape all these people’s like social media platforms and put them into this giant database, basically. And so we would, on the surface, we would find someone’s profile and, oh, they kind of look like they’re a good fit. So we would click through, we would look at their profile, and then, We would just like look a little bit more detailed and it was just like, I don’t think this person is a good fit.

[00:11:59] Here’s, here’s a good example. I had a, a mom influence, like a parenting influencer come to me one time and she was like, why am I not getting any food sponsorships? Because like food is a really big category for kind of family focused, you know, creators to do partnerships. And I went and I looked at her profile and there was not a single post featuring And so you, you think about me as an agency or as a brand, they land on that person’s profile and they’re, yeah, they, they may check a few boxes.

[00:12:26] Oh, it’s the, you know, this person’s the right age range. They’ve got kids and kind of the category, you know, the age ranges that we want to target. But then they look at the profile and there’s not a single post featuring food. And so they, the brand thinks, well, I guess this person’s audience is not influenced by them when it comes to food. And so I’m not going to hire them, right? And so a big part of having a, kind of a harmony between alignment, between how your creator identity and the actual content that you post is illustrating to the brand that the reason that people are following you is because you may influence them to purchase Certain categories of products, whether it’s food, whether it’s, you know, travel and hospitality and, you know, they follow you for vacation ideas or whatever it is.

[00:13:09] And so this SCP process of kind of designing what is the, what is the reason that people are following you? Helps brands understand, okay, they’re gonna be a good fit to hire them.

[00:13:17] Jeff Sieh: Gotcha.

[00:13:19] Conor Brown: I think that ties in perfectly to this, this quote from our good friend Dustin from Magi, who says, as a sponsor, he himself being a sponsor, I get so annoyed when I get a pitch that is nothing but, I have X followers and X views, let’s do a deal. You know, from the sponsorship side of it, they’re looking for, as you’re saying Justin, the right Fit, right?

[00:13:40] A fruitful partnership and that kind of ties into this quote from your book that I loved when you said, my goal was never to make the most money possible on each deal, but rather to increase the number of times each client hired us. So it’s less about getting that white whale one time, you know, and really more about fostering a relationship with a sponsor, with a partner that can be very, very fruitful for a long, long time to go.

[00:14:07] So. that being said, how does that work? How can creators kind of structure these deals and these outreach that’s going to set them up for long term success with these sponsors?

[00:14:19] Justin Moore: I think it’s the, it’s the dream scenario to, get these ongoing recurring deals, right? Like, yeah, a lot of people say, Oh, brand deals and sponsorships are great when you can get them. But I could just never really rely on that income because every deal I do feels like a one off transaction. Right. And then the brand never wants to hire me again.

[00:14:35] and there’s a lot of different directions we could go down with this conversation, but, in particular, I think it’s realizing that, let’s just think about it from the brand’s perspective. Let maybe Dustin in the chat here, or big shout out. I, I linked my YouTube channel, by the way, and so we’re live streaming on my channel right now.

[00:14:48] So I got some of my peeps in here too. So I wanted to give a shout out to, to Anthony and, and, uh, some tech unraveled with some few folks from my community. but like, think about it from the brand’s perspective, right?they’ve been burned a lot. In the past, partnering with creators and influencers who are not professional, who turn out to be a huge pain in the butt, and so, they have a very low appetite to sign a 12 month engagement with someone when they’ve never even done a single partnership.

[00:15:14] So more often than not, they’re going to want to do some sort of initial engagement with them and just kind of see how it goes. And then decide whether they want to double down and ink a longer term, partnership. and I think that this is just like a, this is just reality. Again, you have to like put yourself in their shoes sometimes and, you know, resolve that like, okay, I’m just going to like blow their socks off.

[00:15:34] I’m going to blow their minds with this first thing I’m going to have, you know, I’m going to be super responsive. I’m going to deliver it, you know, ahead of the deadline. I’m going to be super easy and responsive to work with them. You know, one of the, one of the things actually is, is kind of funny about my book is that.

[00:15:47] You know, everyone always wants to talk about the super sexy steps, which is like pitch and negotiate, right? It’s like, I want to nail some more leads and get some bands on the hook and I want to negotiate more money and let’s go, you know, take a trip to the beach. but really it’s, it’s actually been my experience that it’s the later steps in my sponsorship wheel, which is like the concept, the production phase, the feedback.

[00:16:12] You know, phase. Those are the steps where the brand ultimately decides whether they’re going to hire you again or not, right? It’s like, is this person a huge pain in the butt? Even, even if the campaign kind of goes well and they make some sales, if you’re just like a nightmare to work with, they may just not want to renew because, you know, again, these are people.

[00:16:30] On the other side of these brands, they want to enjoy their day to day life. They don’t want to be stressed out all the time. And so if you can just be kind of like a nice person to work with, I mean, Jeff, you could probably appreciate this, right? You have had Ecamm as a sponsor of your show for years, right?

[00:16:45] And so there’s a reason that they want to work with you. It’s because of this rapport and relationship that you’ve established with them over many years. And that doesn’t happen by accident, right?

[00:16:53] Jeff Sieh: Right. And a lot of it, I think too, Justin is, is, you know, you mentioned being nice, but also being proactive. Like I’m in Ecamm Slack channel every week and going, how can I help? What do you got to promote? What do you got to do? I mean, so it’s not, you don’t just get a sponsorship deal and just sit back and like, you know, cash the checks.

[00:17:12] Justin Moore: You have, in my opinion, you have to be very proactive and, and continue to add value constantly. Or why continue the relationship? I mean, I mean, that’s kind of the way I think about it. So,I mean, think about it real quickly. Think about it again. Think about it. I do this a lot in the book. It’s like, okay, let’s put our hat on. Let’s, let’s imagine we’re the brand again. Okay. Imagine we’re the brand. If everyone else that they’re interacting with is like, how much are you going to pay me?

[00:17:35] You know, and then they just like, you know, they post it and then they ghost them and never, and then the creator never talks to them again. Versus you, you’re in the Slack channel, you’re proactively asking, how can I help? Who can I introduce you to? This type of thing. you, like, I hope you’re okay with me sharing this, but like right before we hit record on this, you’re like, hey, let me introduce you to the, to the folks over at Ecamm.

[00:17:52] They’re amazing. Like, they look at you as a connector, as a nexus in this industry. And that is, how do you put a, how do you put a dollar value on that? It’s very hard to put a dollar value on that, but if you are out there as just an ongoing advocate for their brand, that is worth a whole heck of a lot.

[00:18:08] Jeff Sieh: of I agree. And, and plus you find that, and Ecamm’s a unicorn because they’re a great company. I mean, they, They have a great community, great people. I enjoy them. I hung out with them at Disney, you know, a week ago. So, I mean, two weeks ago. So, it’s, I like the people. So, that makes it kind of easy too.

[00:18:24] I want to pull up some comments from some of our, friends who are in the chat. So much great stuff going on. Thank you for, having your, uh, channel connected. We got Playing The Mom Game saying, Good morning. 2025 is my sponsorship year. Order the book and I can’t wait to get it and read it and get going.

[00:18:38] Amazing book. You are on the right path playing with the mom game. So, and Carrie says Dollar Shave Cup will not sponsor this show. Probably not. Yeah. You’re very correct there.

[00:18:48] Justin Moore: on a second, hold on, because The Rock has a hair care brand and he’s bald.

[00:18:52] Jeff Sieh: That’s

[00:18:53] Justin Moore: So it’s called Papatooey, okay, so just never say never, that’s all, that’s all I’m gonna say.

[00:18:59] Jeff Sieh: And some more people plug in your book. Chris is saying, just having some example scripts from Justin’s history of communicating with brands was massively helpful for me in securing deals. The book is so money, massive value. Yes, very, very true. Uh, Chris, thank you.

[00:19:15] He connected me to Justin many moons ago. And Pat, our friend Pat Mills is saying, I’m just now getting into this for myself after working for companies with their affiliates. Yeah, get the book, Pat. I’m not, I’m telling you, it’s a great book. It’s a great read. And, and, and Justin, if you can’t tell, it’s kind of funny.

[00:19:29] It’s not just a dry, like, manual. There’s some funny things in there that are pretty good. I won’t spoil the dad jokes, but they’re pretty, they’re pretty awesome. and then we’ve got. we were talking about long term sponsorships. Simplified Gardening says, I had one sponsor for more than five years, a thousand pounds every single month.

[00:19:47] So that kind of stuff happens. It’s just not, you know, if you have those relationships and you go after them, it can happen for you. So very, very cool. before we go into this next section, Justin, I want to ask you this question, what do you think is a silent deal killer? That most creators don’t even realize is costing them sponsorships.

[00:20:06] Justin Moore: I mean, the silent deal killer, it’s, it’s a very, it’s a very simple one. It’s at the end of the campaign, after you’ve published whatever it is, you never talk to them again. And the reason that you never talk to them again after they’ve paid you is because they You’re terrified of asking them, Hey, how did it go? Because a lot of creators are terrified of that answer. They’re worried that the brand will say, wow, we generated no sales. We hate you now. You suck. Never talk to us again. This is what the, in their, in people’s minds, this is what they think is going to happen. And so they just don’t do it. And this is what contributes to this insidious mindset that sponsorships are.

[00:20:46] Just all, every time it’s a one off transaction. But if you can have the humility to realize that when I reach out to a brand and I ask that question, there’s this famous Nelson Mandela quote that I love. I never lose, I either win or learn. And I love this quote because it’s like, you know, regardless of the answer, you’re going to learn something from the brand.

[00:21:05] If they tell you, hey, it went great. Thanks so much. Great. Now it’s your turn to pitch them again on the next collaboration. Great. They love you now. However, if they say. Well, it just went okay. This is what most of the time if you ask that question and they are not like effusive about how it went, they’re going to say, Oh, this is okay.

[00:21:22] You know, we’ve made, we were hoping it would do a little bit better, maybe get a little bit more views or more sales, whatever. now it’s your turn to say, okay, thank you so much for telling me that information. I have a few ideas of why that might be the case of why it might’ve underperformed a bit. but do you have some suspicions of why, why you think that is?

[00:21:38] You know, I’ve done this quick story. I like, I’ve done this before and the brand said, oh gosh, you know what? Thanks for asking. We’re so sorry. We actually. Realize that we wanted you, we wanted really to share like a case study instead of just this kind of pure direct response thing that you did. And I, well, we forgot about that, that the case studies are way better.

[00:21:55] Let’s actually do that on the next integration. Because this is a brand who’s doing like 50, 100 partnerships every month. And it’s just like volume. And it just like slipped their mind. Like, oh, we should do a case study next time. That’s probably a better idea. So just like simply asking that question.

[00:22:08] allowed the brand to just like reveal more information to you. And another reason that and another thing that might reveal is that they were measuring the success of the campaign internally differently than they revealed to you at the beginning. So they may have told you like, Oh yeah, awareness.

[00:22:26] That’s really what we care about. This new AI feature is really important to us. And you’re like, okay, great. Awareness. If it’s awareness, like views, downloads, comments, engagement, that’s the key performance indicator that I’m going to optimize for as a creator, because that’s what they told me. Awareness.

[00:22:40] However, right at the end, you say, oh, you know, how’d it go? And they’d be like, well, we hope it was going to generate sales. And you’re like, hold on a second here. You never told me that conversions Was a goal that you were measuring here. Okay, great. There was a miscommunication here. Now that I know that, here’s what I would suggest instead.

[00:22:57] I would actually suggest that we do a newsletter. Blast for the next partnership let’s do a coupon code. Let’s put it straight to the newsletter. Do a couple integrations there. So I think just a big part of it is like realizing that you have to put together what I call a post campaign report at the end of a campaign that allows the brand to realize like, it’s not just the quantitative stuff that we need to measure here.

[00:23:16] It’s also the qualitative stuff. What happens a lot is like, especially if you’re a creator listening who say, yeah, I don’t really have like a social media presence per se. I have maybe like A podcast or a newsletter or maybe an in person event or something. A lot of times you might get feedback on the sponsorship that’s private.

[00:23:32] So maybe a creator is DMing you privately about it, or they’re replying to your email, you know, with the, with it, or, you know, they’re, it’s a podcast, you know, integration, so they’re messaging you privately or whatever. they may be asking you questions about the product or service or whatever. And the brand is not seeing that.

[00:23:47] If it’s not a public, you know, YouTube video or a public Instagram post or whatever, they’re not seeing those comments. And so it’s your job to circle all those, screenshot the heck out of those, and use that as fodder to pitch the next collaboration.

[00:23:59] Jeff Sieh: hmm. Yeah.

[00:24:00] Conor Brown: you talked a little bit about it already, Justin, but your sponsorship wheel and, and this concept of building this system that, you know, not only landing the brand deals, but hopefully you’re in this system where they’ll re sign. And you’ll do another activation with you. Chris Stone calls it out.

[00:24:18] Get them on the wheel. It’s an outstanding process. Talk a lot about it in the book, but can you just kind of give a broad overview of, of what the sponsorship wheel looks like and, and where do you think creators struggle the most in what stage of the sponsorship wheel and why they struggle there?

[00:24:35] Justin Moore: so just a quick overview of what the sponsorship wheel is. It’s my eight step process, to land consistent well paying sponsorships. And so step one is pitch. Step two is negotiate. Step three, contract. Step four, concept. Step five, produce. Step six, feedback. Step seven, publish. Step eight, analyze. So it’s this,process where you take a brand from start to finish essentially.

[00:24:56] and your question around. Where do creators struggle the most? I actually have data to back this up because every time that creators join my Brand Deal Wizard program, my, my course, I send them this ingestion survey basically saying, okay, let’s get a snapshot of where you’re at with your strengths.

[00:25:12] And then at the end of the program, they take it again and we can kind of measure how they’ve improved. and every single person always rates themselves the lowest on pitch and negotiate, which is step one and two, because those feel like the most intimidating. steps. However, the really interesting thing is that everyone always rates themselves the highest on the production phase, which is, you know, production, feedback, publication, because that’s what we’re used to doing all day long, right?

[00:25:38] That’s our wheelhouse. It’s like creating content, publishing it, and things like that. And what I’ve also found, though, is that people, tend to overrate Their ability in those areas, just because they think, Oh, I got this. I know how to publish a piece of content. Like, you know, no brainer. but that overconfidence also can lead to sloppiness I’ve found.

[00:25:55] Jeff Sieh: Gotcha. we have a great question here from my pal, Eric Fisher, and this is a great one because he says, if you’ve never done a brand deal before, how do you approach that first one? Do you approach many possible partners? Or, you know, do you narrow it down? And how do you start with having any prior examples of partnership?

[00:26:14] Justin Moore: this is a great question, Eric. I appreciate this one. okay, so let me tell you what to not do. It’s to sit alone in your room and meditate and think, who are the brands that I want to work with? Who are the brands that are really a great fit for me? Because I’ve used them for the last four years.

[00:26:30] so that’s the wrong approach. It’s, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve used them The brand or the product or not? Of course, yeah. You’ll want to have some experience with it, probably. But that is table stakes. Of course, you have to like love the product and be willing to, you know, talk about it. But again, if that’s all you’re leading with when you reach out, oh, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I used your product for four years.

[00:26:48] Again, that’s what every single person says, who reaches out to them. we’re missing a really critical step here, which is that we have to. Involve our audience in this process of discovery so that we can learn more about them so that we can select the right sponsors that will be a good fit for them.

[00:27:05] So I talk about this, process called doing a psychographic research survey where you’re actually asking them. about their lives. You’re saying, Hey, yeah, I can see the demographics, you know, on YouTube analytics or Instagram or whatever platform you’re on. I could see a little bit ages and, you know, your sex and where you live and all that.

[00:27:24] but I want to know more about you. I’m planning out my content strategy for 2025. And I want to know, I want to make sure that my content serves you. would you answer like the, you know, these six or seven questions would really help me out, right? you know, what type of jobs do you have? Are you married?

[00:27:35] Do you have kids? you know, how are you interacting with my content? Are you watching it in line at Starbucks for two minutes? Are you sitting down every Sunday and, you know, binging my last three podcast episodes or whatever? What brands and products and services are you using and loving right now?

[00:27:48] What is keeping you up at night? Right. Well, what problems do you have? Right. And so you’re asking these deeper questions to learn more, get this texture, behind who is in your audience, who are you reaching? And let, let’s say for example, Jeff, I’m just gonna make something up here. Let’s say that you, did this survey for your podcast audience or your live stream audience, whatever.

[00:28:06] you get the results of this survey and you realize that 35 percent or 40 percent of respondents have a brick and mortar store. You’re like, wow. I did not realize, I thought, here I was, Social Media News Live, I thought everyone was like, internet creators, internet businesses, right? I didn’t realize that I had such a huge segment of my audience that has a brick and mortar store, and the reason they’re following me is because they want to leverage social media to get more foot traffic.

[00:28:30] I don’t know, I just discovered that, I didn’t realize this, but you know what they’re saying, one of the problems that they’re saying that they’re having is, recruiting. They can’t keep enough qualified labor, or like that, that’s like a big challenge for them, so maybe I should go out there and hire a Recruiting firm, like go, go, go pitch them for a sponsorship and say, Hey, we’d love to do a webinar in partnership with your recruiting experts to help this segment of my audience with this challenge that they’re having.

[00:28:55] Now that would have never a sponsor. You would have thought to pitch, but again, it’s not about you. It’s about serving your audience with this issue that they’re having. And so I think that this reveals so many surprising and interesting things of not just sponsors that you could pitch but content that you could create.

[00:29:11] Wow, I should probably make some videos about this because this is like an issue that my, my audience is having. So I think it’s just a game changer.

[00:29:18] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. I think, you know, first of all, Eric, that was a great question, but the first thing you need to do, number one is buy the book right here. Sponsor Magnet. just going to do that really quick.

[00:29:27] Conor Brown: out to

[00:29:27] um Pat Mills and Bag Boy who just commented, I just bought the book.

[00:29:32] Jeff Sieh: Thanks, Pat. Thank you. Thanks. And by the way, this is also being live streamed on Amazon.

[00:29:37] So, if you’re watching on Amazon, right there at the bottom, there in the carousel, you can just click on a little button, buy the book. There’s three or four people who, um, have done it, and Pat says this is such a great tip or info to pass on to us. So, yeah. You know, I knew my, you mentioned this about the audience, I knew my audience was interested in sponsorships because a lot of creators watch the show, they’re kind of in that stage where they’re trying to figure it out, just like Eric was saying, so I think that’s a great, a great way.

[00:30:02] But yeah, buy the book, folks. It’s, it is, we’re not just, uh, blowing smoke. I don’t bring people on who I haven’t read the book and I read their, this book from, cover to cover and so I do highly recommend it. real quick, I want to talk about, you know, in the book, you say the closer you get to a brand, the closer you, you are to landing a sponsorship.

[00:30:17] and we kind of talked about this a little bit with, you know, kind of my journey with Ecamm, but what are some creative ways to build those relationships with those sponsors before the pitch? Like, you know, you don’t want to tag everybody and, and spam them, but what are some ways that you can, like, maybe come to the brand’s attention before you go in and pitch them the sponsorship opportunity?

[00:30:38] Justin Moore: Yeah, so, I’ll take a, I’ll take a slight issue with what you just said is yeah, of course you don’t want to spam them, uh, by tagging them all the time, but I do think, that there is a lot of value in starting to tag. you know, brands that you love in your authentic content that you’re posting, and starting to get on their radar.

[00:30:57] You know what, I get this, this question a lot from people, or this gripe. I get people in my DMs who are like, I’m so mad. this person over here just got sponsored by my dream brand. And how dare, I’ve never even. I didn’t even know that. That person has never talked about that brand, but I’ve been the one who’s been using it for three years.

[00:31:13] How come the brand didn’t work with me? Right. And so they get salty and they turn from like an Uber fan into an Uber hater. I’ve seen, I’ve seen this so many times, man. And, I, I simply ask them, okay, well, have you ever like, Tag the brand in anything? Have you ever talked about them publicly? And the creator’s like, well, no, because if I tag them for free, why would they pay me? And I said, look, a lot of brands, they do not have a lot of bandwidth. If they are not using social listening software, which is tools that allow them to monitor if people are talking about them on the internet, a lot of brands don’t use that tooling right now. And so if you’re not talking about them or tagging them, how are they going to even know you exist?

[00:31:52] like they don’t have oftentimes the ability to just keep tabs on everyone who’s like a potentially influential customer. They just don’t. And so the onus is on you to get on their radar, start tagging them, start engaging, you know, connect with them, you know, head of marketing or the, you know, influencer marketing manager on LinkedIn and start engaging with their posts on LinkedIn, follow them on Twitter, whatever, just like become kind of a known quantity in this person’s universe so that when you do ultimately reach out.

[00:32:17] Pitching a perspective collaboration, you’re not a nobody. They’ve seen your profile photo before, they see, they know who you are. it goes a long, long way. And just circling back real quickly to the point of like, well, if I tag them for free, why would they pay me? I think Dustin, who’s a business owner can probably, you know, give a testament to this that, you know, when a brand decides that they want to sponsor someone or hire a creator to talk about them, there’s usually very specific messaging.

[00:32:41] They want this person to say, whether it’s a seasonal promotion or some sort of very specific campaign where they need sound bites because they’re gonna take this content, cut it up into a, you know, cut it down into a 32nd video that they can run for paid advertising or something. And so when you’re doing just like a, a normal organic.

[00:32:57] Free shout out on social media. You’re not saying any of those talking points. You’re not saying the Justin 10 promo code for 10 percent off your first purchase. You’re not saying Ecamm, you know, com slash Jeff. You’re not saying those things. You’re just saying your organic affinity and your love for the brand.

[00:33:12] And so this is the reason that a brand is going to pay you and hire you is to, to check those boxes.

[00:33:18] Jeff Sieh: Hmm. Yeah, I think those are great tips you know, cause I, I tagged Waffle House one time and they like, they wouldn’t use my picture and stuff. And I was like, yeah, when I first started, like, I was just honored that Waffle House, cause there’s a beautiful sunset in Texas over Waffle House and they use my photo, so very cool.

[00:33:33] to fame and you gave them perpetual usage forever, Jeff. Come on.

[00:33:37] I just wish I would’ve got free waffles. That’s all I should’ve held out. I should’ve read your book. once again, more people are continuing to buy the book. Uh, Tony Alok is saying that he bought it. My friend, Rich Watts just bought it. So, Lou Bartunde just got the Kindle version.

[00:33:51] That’s what I do. So very, very cool. Connor, you had a question. I know. So go ahead.

[00:33:55] Conor Brown: I did, well, I’m first surprised that you even looked up for your pecan waffles at Waffle House to notice the sunset, so that’s shocking to me, for you

[00:34:04] Jeff Sieh: That’s right. You couldn’t see over the stack of waffles, so it didn’t matter anyway.

[00:34:07] Conor Brown: That makes more sense. That makes more sense. So Justin, you know, creators in this, the, the, sponsorship wheel, you know, so often we’re, we’re really focusing on those first two steps because we want to just reach out, right?

[00:34:20] And we just hope that we get a response, right? And we put all of our eggs in that basket and we’re waiting, waiting, waiting. And eventually when, when they do reach back out, now we’re at the point where we realize, oh my gosh, we have to negotiate. And so many of us just in the world are terrified of negotiating, right?

[00:34:37] We’re, we’re, we’re excited that they just reached out and they responded and then we kind of crumble and we’re like, Well, whatever you want to pay us, right? No big deal. What do you think the biggest pricing mistakes you’ve seen creators make are and how should they really work on reframing their rates so they’re not leaving money on the table once they finally get to that negotiating step?

[00:34:59] Justin Moore: So I just want to first empathize with everyone who might be listening or watching that this is a very normal thing because I was like this when I started out because I grow up. I didn’t go to school. to like take classes on becoming a cold hard negotiator, like when in undergraduate, you know, when I was graduating, you know, I was in medical devices before this, I was not a creator, right?

[00:35:21] And so I didn’t have formal training in this when we like first started doing this. to compound that, you know, a lot of us may have grown up in families or environments where money was tight. or it was taboo to discuss and you just didn’t talk about money right and so the prospect of like negotiating or advocating for yourself is a terrifying prospect and so i just want to like acknowledge here that a lot of people have head junk about this and that’s like a very normal thing and so just like let’s acknowledge that that’s like a baseline for a lot of people But the beautiful part about it is that this is something that you can learn and, get better at.

[00:35:57] It’s not like an innate thing that you’re, Oh, I’m never going to be able to be confident to be interacting with brands. And so I just want like, hear everyone here who’s, who might be feeling this way, that this is like a normal thing. this was me in the beginning. But what oftentimes happens, how this manifests when you’re negotiating with a brand, is that oftentimes you will negotiate against yourself a lot when the brand didn’t even ask you to.

[00:36:18] So for example, I could share this, like when I ran my influencer marketing agency, here’s an example of what would happen. So a brand would hire, you know, my agency to hire some creators. And so they said, yeah, let’s reach out to those five people. So we’d reach out to them. We’d say, Hey, This, our client, this brand wants to collaborate with you.

[00:36:33] Are you interested? Here’s kind of the campaign and the scope of work. How much would you charge for something like this? And then the creator would, they would spit back. They would say, 1, 000, right? And we’d say, okay, great. Like, we’ll go back and we’ll talk with the brand and the client. Like, we’ll see if they want to move forward.

[00:36:45] We just got to like finalize a few things. And so a couple of days would pass and, you know, we hadn’t like gotten any green light or final word from the client yet. And then the creator would email back and be like, Hey, I can actually do it for 500, you know, because. They really thought that the absence of an update meant that they’d scared us off.

[00:37:05] When in reality, we just, we just hadn’t got an update yet. We didn’t, we, we didn’t, we didn’t know. Right. And so like, that’s a big problem is people negotiating against themselves. The second, big mistake that I think people make, and we’re going to get a little tactical here. We’re going to get a little bit into the weeds here, but I think it’s going to help folks is that the most common negotiations tactic that people have is a brand reaches out and they say, how much for.

[00:37:26] You know, one integrated YouTube video or how much to like do some ad reads on your podcast or something. And, the creator goes, Oh, 1500. They just like stammer. They just like spit out a number. They spit out one number. And, and so the only negotiating leverage that they have from that point forward is price.

[00:37:46] The only thing they can negotiate is whether to kind of, actually, it’s only one direction. The only way they can negotiate is down, right? Because they said the number, right? And so in reality, spitting out one number like that is the quickest way to leave money on the table. Because in reality, what you should be doing is providing multiple packages to the brand, even if they did not ask for that. There’s a couple reasons why you want to provide packages to the brand. And the first is that they may have never known that you had presence or reach on other platforms. So they may YouTube video, but you coming back to them with a couple different packages. allows you to illustrate to them that like, Hey, I’ve actually got a newsletter with 3000 of my most engaged audience members on it.

[00:38:34] And we can actually amplify the campaign over there. And they may say, Oh, wow, we didn’t even realize that we didn’t do that deep dive of a research into you. And, and I didn’t even know you had that newsletter. That is huge. and so The packages not just allow you to illustrate your, holistic reach, but it also allows you to do something called price anchoring, which is real, helping the brand realize that the only way that they can accomplish all of their objectives is to essentially pick the top package.

[00:39:00] And we can go maybe into this a bit more detail if you’d like, but, this is the, the philosophy.

[00:39:05] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, so I that was one of the big takeaways and I think a lot of people have gotten through a book and by the way If you’ve read a book and I’ve seen some people already say in the comments That they just went over and left a review on amazon do that because that really does help out. booksellers

[00:39:17] Justin Moore: it hugely helps. Yes. Thank you so much. And if you want to get extra credit and I’ll love you forever. Attach a photo, or I’ll give you three gold stars. If you upload a video review, who’s going to be the first one to do it? Who’s going to be the first one to do it? And you’ll get a good affiliate commission probably too, right?

[00:39:34] Yeah.

[00:39:36] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, so go, go check that out. So, and by the way, once again, if you’re watching on Amazon, right there down at the bottom in the carousel. I think it’s the second spot. Um, one of the, I wanted to bring up this comment from my amazing daughter. She says, she’s watching over on LinkedIn says, Some people think that taking sponsorship makes a creator less, credible.

[00:39:53] Like they’re just saying what the brand wants. What’s your take on that, and how can creators work with sponsors while still keeping their audiences trust? Great,

[00:40:02] Justin Moore: Oh, I love this question. I love this question so much. And I, you know, if you’re just joining us or you missed that portion of the conversation, the way to prevent this is to involve your audience in the conversation. Like we talked about earlier, where you’re actually soliciting feedback from them.

[00:40:17] This example that I gave of like, you know, the 35, 40 percent of of business owners that are having this active issue with, you know, recruiting or whatever. When you come out with the sponsorship about recruiting, you’re not going to worry or wonder whether the, whether your audience is going to revolt because they’re going to be like, Oh my God, thank you so much.

[00:40:33] You listened to us. We were having this issue and you brought this solution to us that is going to help us. And by the way, it’s not just sponsors. You can help your audience with. I, I have this framework that I call audience first offers, and it’s your PSA, your products, your sponsors, and your alliances.

[00:40:51] So a lot of people listening might actually sell things directly to their audience, whether it’s courses, coaching, a book, whatever it is. And you think, you know what, I just wanna like. I don’t want to do sponsorships because I’m just like selling my own stuff and I’m going to make way more money on that than like working with a brand.

[00:41:05] So why would I do that? And so like, yes, of course you’re going to help your audience with, with those products. But when you do these surveys, you’re probably going to realize like my audience has actually has quite a few problems that I’m never going to make a course for. I’m never really going to write a book for that or do coaching for that.

[00:41:19] Cause that’s like, that just exceeds my specialty or I’m not going to do that. Right. And so, yeah, maybe I should go out there and find a sponsor. To actually fill this, like, gap or this void of this issue that they’re having. But this last bucket of alliances is another one that people are really scared about.

[00:41:33] Because what if you have a friend who’s a coach? Who that’s, they’re like a perfect fit to help your audience solve that problem. You better get your dang friend in front of your audience. To help them solve their problem because what’s going to happen when your, when your audience members business and life has been so massively improved by your friend, they’re going to, they’re going to trust you more, Jeff and Connor.

[00:41:55] They’re going to think, Oh my God, Jeff was the person who introduced me to this, you know, this person over here. And now I don’t have any recruiting issues anymore. Now I can focus on other things to grow the business. And so the next time that they want to invest in their business, they’re going to hire you to coach them, Jeff, or they’re going to buy your course or buy your book or whatever it is.

[00:42:11] Right. And so this, the, it’s, it’s a very, contradictory like idea, but it’s like, it’s a scarcity mindset that if like you introduce your audience to other people or other sponsors, that somehow you’re going to make less money. No, you’re actually going to make more money doing this because your audience, it’s not about you.

[00:42:26] It’s about serving your audience.

[00:42:28] Jeff Sieh: So, I want to ask, because I think this is kind of insider baseball stuff, but I would consider, when you talk about alliances, which is something I think most people do not talk about, and I really love that you talk about that in your book and in here as well, but would you say that what you have with Jay Klaus would be an alliance?

[00:42:43] Because I know he bought a thousand of your books and gave them away, and also a hundred, oh sorry, a hundred

[00:42:49] million dollars. Yeah.

[00:42:50] Justin Moore: a hundred is still a lot.

[00:42:51] Jeff Sieh: still a lot, but also, but also then you were, in his news, you know, in his newsletter, and so I know you guys are friends and you work together on this stuff too, but I can see that really kind of be in an alliance because both you provide something to his audience that he really doesn’t talk about, you know, sponsorships, and you were able to do this really cool thing together.

[00:43:08] Can you talk about that just a little bit?

[00:43:10] Justin Moore: Yeah. So, I mean, Jay is absolutely one of my best friends. And so I, I would say, It definitely supersedes an alliance because he’s like one of my best friends. but a hundred percent, this, this idea where it’s just like, I would send people his way regardless whether I had an affiliate link or not. Like, I’m just gonna, you know, I’m not the person, I am not an expert in community building.

[00:43:29] He is, I’m not. And so anytime anyone says like, Oh, I want to have like a private membership or a community or something like that. And I don’t really know what I’m doing. I would love to like, you know, it seems like you know what you’re doing, like, cause you have a community. And I’m like, I do have that, but that’s not my specialty.

[00:43:43] Like I looked at Jay when I launched mine, I joined, I joined his when he first launched it, because I wanted to see the master at work. I want to see like, how do you, how does something like the person who’s the best in the business do this? And so I just. I send everyone his way because this is not my, my expertise.

[00:43:58] And so I know, I just know, I don’t know if everyone listening or watching believes in this, but I believe in karma. And it’s just like, if I send someone out of my universe and they come inbound and they’re like, I’m not doing sponsorship, but help me with this. I’m just like, I can’t help you, but go talk to my friend, Jay.

[00:44:11] I just know that at some point, if it’s meant to be, they’re going to come back to me. And, or, or even if they never come back to me, They’re going to think of me as a good guy. And if they have a friend who has an issue with sponsorships, they’re going to be like, Hey, I’ve never worked with Justin, but he seems like the guy for sponsorships.

[00:44:28] And so you should probably talk to him. And so it’s not even just about like them becoming a customer. It’s just like establishing goodwill in the world and the universe. And it all comes back around. I really believe that.

[00:44:39] Jeff Sieh: Be nice folks. It works.

[00:44:40] Justin Moore: Yeah. Just be nice. Just be nice.

[00:44:43] Conor Brown: Be nice. Be nice. Don’t be, don’t be a jerk. Um, so we talked about, you know, things that were not experts in, right? We, we talked a little bit about negotiating, how it’s, it’s very normal for people to not be experts in that. And us as creators, we’re putting our expertise in creating and talking on the topics that we’re experts at negotiating.

[00:45:04] Even though it’s something we have to do, we learn to get better at it. Another side of that is is also contracts, right? We’re not all legal experts here, but we also know the importance of contracts when it comes to signing with sponsors and coming up with deals and partnerships. They’re super intimidating, but Justin, can you talk a little bit about kind of where to start with contracts and what do you think is one sponsorship contract clause that everyone needs to fight for and why it’s so important, if you have one in

[00:45:36] Justin Moore: All right, yeah, okay, I’ve got, I’ve got an easy one, uh, just open up the contract and do control F or whatever, whether you’re on a Mac or a PC and just search for the word perpetuity or

[00:45:46] Conor Brown: Yeah.

[00:45:47] Justin Moore: which basically means that somewhere in this document, the brand is asked.to get the rights to do something forever until the end of the universe, until the end of time.

[00:45:56] And so you should basically never agree to letting the brand do anything, for forever. so that’s just like an easy little funny hack. but, you know, I have a kind of a, a nuanced take on, on contracts. first and foremost, I think, you know, AI is a huge resource that has basically burst onto the scene.

[00:46:15] that, can be very useful, not necessarily as like final legal advice that you would want to, you know, run home and take to the bank, but as something that can absolutely help you translate legalese into basic deal points or bullet points that you can comprehend in English. Basically, you could say, here’s my understanding of what this deal is that I saw, that I’m agreeing to.

[00:46:41] It’s, I’m doing this many videos. I’ve agreed to this. I’ve agreed to this. and just here’s the, here’s the contract. Is it, is this roughly like an alignment with what we discussed over the phone or, or over email or whatever? And AI is very good at distilling that and basically being like either yes or no, or here’s like a few clauses that you may want to consider or ask about.

[00:47:00] I do still think there’s a lot of value in having a lawyer who, Is, you know, someone who, may not be, you know, a big shot, hot shot lawyer that’s charging 1, 000 an hour, but is someone who can just give you this kind of comfort that, hey, here’s roughly what I think, like, can you just do a quick blessing of this to make sure it looks good?

[00:47:20] that is a worthwhile expense. A lot of creators tell me that they don’t want to go down the road of hiring lawyers or legal expertise or things like that because Maybe the deal size is not very large. And if I hire a lawyer for, you know, two hours or whatever, oh, there’s all my profit. It’s gone. I just had to spend 500, 600 bucks with this person.

[00:47:37] And so the advice that I give in those scenarios is like, imagine you’re launching any business. You’re launching a, I don’t know, a shoe store, right? There’s a lot of costs. That would be required to actually, before you can sell a single shoe, right? You gotta lease a space, you gotta hire employees, you gotta get inventory, you gotta get insurance, you gotta get all this stuff, right?

[00:47:55] what are your costs as a creator? A phone, a computer, an internet connection? And maybe, Hiring a lawyer for an hour or two and saying, Hey, can you create a boilerplate contract template for me? Where the first six or seven pages are just standard. I’m never going to touch that. But the last page is the appendix or the statement of work.

[00:48:13] That’s the one where all, you know, it’s highlighted in yellow and just, I’m going to fill out every, you know, those are the things that I edit each time. That’s a worthwhile investment for you. Even if you don’t have a deal in hand as a creator to justify that expense.

[00:48:24] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. I think that’s super important. In fact, what I do, I use it almost, it’s like insurance. Like I have, I use a service called Legal Shield, which gives me like a blanket thing, and then if I have those questions, I can send them off and I’m not hit with those like 300 an hour lawyer things. So that’s what I use.

[00:48:39] And it’s been, what’s worked for me so far, but I’m with you, like. If you have any question, have them kind of put a template together, then you can go and adjust it that way. I think that’s great advice. We’ve got some more great comments from our amazing audience. this is a great question from Pat Mills.

[00:48:55] She goes, are people not using media kits anymore? I always ask for one before talking with the person. So what are your thoughts on media kit? Is that part of your arsenal Justin for sponsorships? what do you think about that?

[00:49:07] Justin Moore: So I’m assuming Pat is on the, on the brand or the business side, which is why, why she’s asking for media kits. So I’m just going to share my own experience and my own advice that I give to creators, which is that of the last a hundred deals that my wife and I have done, only about two or three brands have actually asked for media kits.

[00:49:22] you know, the conventional wisdom in years past was like, okay, you got to make a media kit, have it be pixel perfect and have it be beautiful. And you have a bunch of brand logos in it of people you’ve worked with and all that stuff too. and I actually don’t think that that’s. Very useful. I would, I would, be interested in your perspective on this, Pat, as someone who works on a, on a brand or a business, but like, you know, what probably would be a more useful thing, for a brand is case studies.

[00:49:43] That, that are relevant to your, objectives for the campaign that you want to run. So, I talk about this, in, one of the first chapters of my book, and it’s called the ARC framework. So A R C, meaning that what are the goals? It’s either awareness. Repurposing or conversion. And so if I’m talking with the creator where I want to hire them to spread the word about this campaign, I want to know, have they ever done a deal with another brand where they’ve driven awareness or where they’ve driven a lot of sales?

[00:50:11] I don’t really want to see case studies or examples where, there’s misalignment between the goal of what I’m trying to do, because it’s not that useful for me to know that, Oh yeah, they got a bunch of views on this video, but I’m trying to sell stuff here. And if you can’t show me like, Some examples of how you drove sales.

[00:50:25] it’s gonna be a bad investment because, you know, there’s just misalignment there. and so this is usually the advice that I give to creators is like media kits. can be useful to help you clarify your own creator identity. Kind of going back to that STP thing that we talked about at the beginning of like, what is my creator identity?

[00:50:40] How am I marketing myself? That’s useful. but really I’m much more of a fan of, getting on discovery calls with brands, if possible, getting a bunch of information from them and then putting together basically a customized proposal that has a lot of the same information that you’d put in a media kit, except it’s more customized.

[00:50:57] It’s, it’s tailored to what the brand told you on the phone call, What they’re trying to accomplish. In fact, page one of this proposal is what I heard on the call, right, from you. It’s kind of a regurgitation of that. and then, yeah, you could still have information about your following and your platforms and all that stuff in this proposal, but it feels much more customized and tailored to the brand than just a boilerplate media kit.

[00:51:19] Jeff Sieh: So one of the questions I know, like when you contacted me about The podcast are coming on the show here. You sent me a video like, and it sounds from other people I’ve talked to, that’s kind of your modus operandi. You’d like to send those video introductions where it’s very personalized. It’s a video of you talking to me.

[00:51:35] Very, very cool. Do you do that same sort of thing when you are approaching brands?

[00:51:41] Justin Moore: Oh yeah, heck yeah, baby. That’s my secret. That’s my secret weapon. Um, yeah, in fact, actually, I recently sent out to my newsletter. I showed, I actually pitched a brand for my, my upcoming in person event, Sponsor Games. and, I used a video and I actually sent the video to my, my newsletter. I was like, Hey, I haven’t locked this brand in yet, but hey, you want to see what I’m doing to like try to get sponsors for my event?

[00:52:02] And people loved it. Really, really loved seeing that because, it just stands out. You know, it’s like I’m saying, Hey, Stacey, or like I’m saying, calling the person by name, and I’m saying, Hey, I saw that you’re, I still do the rope pitch that we talked about earlier, right? The relevancy, organic, proof, you know, easy to execute.

[00:52:17] I still do that, but it’s in a, it’s in a video form. I’m saying, Hey, I saw that you’re trying to spread the word about, X, Y, Z. I also, you know, have an audience of about 35, 000 creators and I talk about this type of thing a lot and I link, I kind of share my screen and I show it. I say, you know, I taught, here’s an episode where I talked about this or here’s a video where I talk about this.

[00:52:34] In fact, Hey, look what this person said in the comment section. Awesome. Right. and then I say, you know, here’s what I’d love to do for you. Happy to share some results, blah, blah, blah. And I send that video and said, and man, I just, I have results. Doing videos like that. And dude, it takes like three minutes.

[00:52:49] Jeff Sieh: But it’s

[00:52:49] Justin Moore: It does. I mean, I

[00:52:50] Jeff Sieh: is so personal. Yeah.

[00:52:51] Justin Moore: yeah. So to clarify, it does take a more, a bit more time to like do the research before I turn the video on, obviously, of like, I want to know what I’m going to say. but like all in, this is like a 15, 20 minute process and the, the success rates in terms of responses is just so much higher than the kind of copy and paste spray and pray approach.

[00:53:09] Jeff Sieh: So that secret sauce, I mean, I’m telling you, wait till the end. That’s where we, we, we, we give the great advice. Uh, Justin, I have so many more questions, but, and you’re so gracious with your time. Thank you so much. For today, we’ll have to have you back on because there’s so much more I want to dive into and I think you really helped my audience today, but before we go, I want to make sure you have time to talk about your book, and, you know, sponsor games, which is coming up, really, really quickly.

[00:53:34] So, go ahead, my friend. The floor is yours,

[00:53:37] Justin Moore: Well, I appreciate you both so much. This was such a blast. I, you could probably tell, like, I, I could talk about sponsorship strategy, like 24 hours a day from now until I die. And that’s probably what I’m going to do. This is, this is going to be my life’s work. And, um, yeah, so if you know, anything that we’ve talked about today is just scratched the surface on really what I cover in my book, Sponsor Magnet.

[00:53:56] And really the kind of way I describe it is I have literally distilled everything that I know about brand partnerships, having done it for, you know, 15 years along with my wife, as well as running this influencer marketing agency for seven years. I’ve distilled all of that into the book. And so I didn’t hold back anything.

[00:54:10] This is not a giant sales pitch for something else. It’s like I’ve open sourced everything that I know. And so You literally can get it for very inexpensively, whether it’s at sponsormagnet. com is usually kind of the best place, to do it. And so, even if you’re someone who’s sponsorship curious, or maybe even a sponsorship skeptic, I do think that it’ll be, it’ll be worth your time.

[00:54:28] and then, yeah, my in person event, you know, I have been going to creator focused events for a decade plus. And you know, there’s always been like maybe one, two, maybe three talks about sponsorships. And I was like sitting here thinking like, sponsorships is the number one revenue stream for me and basically everyone I know.

[00:54:47] Why is there no, why is there not more talks just about this thing? And why is there no event devoted to this topic? That never made sense to me. And so I was like, you know what? After enough time, I was like. I guess it’s me. I’m the guy. I got, I’m the guy who’s got to pick this event. And so, yeah, it’s, I, I’m launching my very first in person event called Sponsor Games, March 16th to 19th in San Antonio, Texas.

[00:55:10] and it’s like kind of like an anti conference. There’s no keynotes. There’s no panels. There’s no workshops. I’m turning my. 8 step sponsorship wheel that we talked about today into eight games that you will play alongside other creators to learn and master these concepts. And I think it’s just going to be a game changer to just practice this stuff.

[00:55:25] Role play, pitching, negotiating, and get kind of real time feedback from me and my coaches on my team. And so, and the best part, Jeff and Connor, is that there, there’s going to be eight finalists that advance to the sponsor tank. And one lucky person, you’re going to be pitching, there’s going to be a panel of real partnership marketing managers on this judges panel, and one lucky person is going to walk away with 5, 000 in cash. So, dude, it’s going to be fun.

[00:55:52] It’s going to be

[00:55:53] fun.

[00:55:53] Jeff Sieh: Wow, I can’t wait this and I gotta figure out a way to get to San Antonio not very far from the the Longview So we’ll have to do this. So Connor Brown, where can people find out more about you and everything from the unsinkable Connor Brown?

[00:56:05] Conor Brown: You can head over to vacationkingdoms. com. You can follow Vacation Kingdoms across the social media. you’re someplace cold. You want to plan a vacation someplace warm, reach out to me. I can help with that. Justin, this has been awesome. What an incredible conversation. Thank you so much again.

[00:56:21] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, thank you to our sponsor. We talked about sponsorships, but here’s the one of the best Ecamm. com forward slash Jeff. You can find out more about Ecamm which helps produce the show. You can make videos like Justin was talking about that you can send to brands that you’re pitching with Ecamm. Ecamm.

[00:56:34] com forward slash Jeff. Use code Jeff15 to save 15 percent Thank you for everybody who is here today. all the great questions. Thank you for just your time. Gary, thank you for being here. Simplified Gardening, Pat, everybody who showed up and asked your questions. We wouldn’t be able to do the show without you.

[00:56:49] Thanks again. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you next time. Bye, everybody.