Anya Razina

Anya Razina on How Sponsorships and Brand Deals Work for Youtubers and Creators (#280)

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Our Guest Today: Anya Razina

Anya Razina is back for Part 2 of our discussion answering one of the most popular questions for creators:

In this episode we’ll discuss:

  • What is influencer marketing?
  • Anya’s role as an influence marketing manager, and what it means
  • How does influencer marketing work at Restream (Anya’s company)?
    • Where does Restream look for and choose influencers? What are some of the high-level criteria?
  • What’s the difference between working with YouTubers, vs Podcasters vs. Instagramers (and other platforms, if any)
  • What makes a good collaboration
  • Every brand is different – Restream being a livestreaming platform, where is Anya seeing the hyper growth for bringing brand awareness at the moment?

Watch Our Interview

Transcript

Livestream with Anya Razina (Part 2 of 2): Breaking Down How Sponsorship Works for YouTubers and … – powered by Happy Scribe

A couple of seconds in case there’s any delay. Hey, everyone, this is Fay from Fay’s World Media, and I went live yesterday and again today. And today is the second time with Onya Rosina from Stream. And our focus today is going to be how sponsorships and influencer programs actually work. And for two groups of people, if you are a YouTube content creator, definitely stay on. And if you’re a brand, you’re a tech company or any sort of company now looking to partner with YouTube and creators on YouTube, definitely stick around, because Onya has been this powerhouse to really push forward.

And it’s so much on her own, so much to share. And we’re using this room to go live. It’s super simple. One button push. You don’t have to worry about jobs or anything. And at the beginning I even hooked up with Zoome and to go directly from Zoome. There are a lot of options and there’s a link below. You can use a stream forever for free and when you do decide to upgrade, there’s a ten dollar credit.

So let us get started. All right. On your welcome. And as promised, I said that you are head over influencer marketing and research team and you look great. I would love for you to talk to us briefly about your setup, please.

Thank you so much. This is it’s always a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me today. And hello to all the community. Super excited. So, yeah, it’s I’ll start with a brief story whenever I show up to meetings, like, of course, I use the setup for for everything that goes externally, the external meetings, conversations, even something that doesn’t necessarily get stream, but just just just a call or chat.

And I know that my camera intimidates people a lot because, like, very often I get on the call as people and the first thing they say is like, I had to upgrade my camera and they know exactly where it’s coming from because they see my image and they’re like, whoa. So yeah. So, yeah, that’s that’s the magic of DSLAM camera. It’s a little bit of an investment. And I, I would definitely not recommend people to get super stuck on this idea that unless I have DSL or mirrorless camera, I don’t I’m not good enough to go live.

You can do a wonderful job with a good web camera and good lighting. And that’s something that I also cover briefly in terms of your set up, how light is more important than than the camera in a lot of ways, because the best camera in the world and dark space is not going to provide any good image. And the very moderate camera was perfect. Lighting is going to do a better job. But yeah, in general, I did start with a was it just a small Logitech BREO?

I think it was it was a Nebris first. It was just one of those Logitech Web cameras. And then slowly but surely, eventually I did upgrade to DLR. I do connected through ComLink and Godo Cam Link to kind of trick my computer into thinking that the DLR is a web camera. And that’s what kind of works for me. I integrate the studio very easily and once you connect the cam link and the camera, you just simply find it in the sources for your video inputs and then that’s the image that you get.

So on top of that, there are two key lights from El Gordo that kind of create this this this lighting for me here. You can pretty easily substitute them with the sun or any other lights. But just remember that more light on you better. The quality is going to look no matter the camera. A couple of more tricks about the camera that I like to share is definitely if you’re considering to use DSLAM, you can actually use older cameras as long as it has the video setting on it that that should work for you.

But just remember that the new versions of cameras don’t have any latency. They do really well with the latency. So when you watch me, you actually don’t see any delays between my audio and video. That’s because in your camera, it’s kind of like account for that while old or dazzlers, like if you take one from like five years ago, for example, which we did use a first, like one of our coworkers actually donated his his diesel camera for for just a little test drive for us.

And people saw a noticeable delay with the same cambalache, the same computer, the same setup. Just because older cameras do have that tendency to be a little bit more delay, it’s just something to keep in mind. And I guess another thing that you mentioned earlier about the batteries, like how do you how do you make sure that the battery doesn’t die in the middle of your stream? Which is my personal nightmare, because it did happen before. To me, of course, you learn you learn all the mistakes.

So there are two ways to overcome that option. One is some of those cameras, actually, Cam was a cable that you can connect directly to your USB dock, which connects to your charging and sometimes to your either net. And in that case, your camera basically is constantly charging. However, that trick specifically for our canon, it didn’t work really well. For whatever reason. We did have it connected. But at some point it started to like not not feel not see that source of energy.

And then sometimes I would just turn I would be dead. So what we ended up with is we decided to buy two, two sets of batteries, right. And as I speak right now, there is one battery constantly charging. And even if, let’s say I have a three hour stream and whatever, all I need to do is to quickly change the batteries in the middle. And I can ask one of my teammates to do that. And I’ll ask that case.

The host are going to maximize themselves while I do that, or I kind of constantly rotate the two cameras like the two batteries. And every time I leave the office, every time I’m done with this team, I make sure I swap them. It just became the nature for me. So, like, that’s kind of how I make sure that I’m always fully charged. So, yeah, that’s a long intro about my camera.

And which camera exactly are you using? I have a Sony sixty four hundred. Mirrorless, which one do you have.

This is Canon Awasthi Etai. So that’s one of the simple cameras, one of the simple cannons I believe it is about eight hundred dollars on Amazon pretax in the United States. And it is currently the one that I’m using is was the lens that came with. So you can always upgrade the lens if you want more and like daps I focus on you. Everything behind you is super blurred, like more kind of opportunity to play with it. But honestly, for my purposes of live streaming, kind of like a talking head interview type thing.

It does. It is absolutely amazing. And that’s the only other thing you need to worry about is good lighting. And then it’s going it’s going to look pretty, pretty epic.

I’m so glad we’re doing this because people can now see us side by side. The difference between onea on a four camera versus what I have. Most people have a Logitech tan ADP. And it’s really interesting that for me that I, I can’t believe I only start thinking about this recently, but I too worried about switching, going from a meeting, a meeting and switching between the cameras, having one not work. And the battery issue was top of mind.

So also, you mentioned on your quickly about lighting, do you currently have two lamps or what are some of the light sources you have? And do you have like a three point light forty five degrees in front of you and one behind you, something like that?

I do, actually, yes. So basically, it’s almost like a four point. If you look at the. So I do I do have two key lights which kind of. Yeah. This one is mainly lighting me up and the other one is taking care of the shades. And what I really love about the lights is and I’m going to do a little demo right here so I can control the temperature. Right. So now I am trying to be bigger.

Sure. Yeah. So here we go. And here comes my my fourth slide, which is that light saber right there. Right there. So, yeah. So the lights that you’re seeing right now, I can control the temperature like watch how I can get like very yellow was them and or I can get and I can also get a lot brighter or less like darker. Yeah. You see how that like constantly and that’s my key like like I can make it very bright and very yellow.

So like this kind of thing is something that you can play with with, with key lights, which I think is amazing because in the end of the day, every single stream is different for a lot of people. And a lot of times, like you kind of like you look at your your guest or your host, like in this case that only to yellow or to blue right next to them. So and that’s just the app on the phone.

Then you can adjust that as you go and the brightness can be adjusted, specially supercool for people who are partially using natural light, which is actually also happening to me because I have glass doors everywhere and the sun is coming through. So sometimes I get like overload because because the sun is here. And in that case, I like dim my lights a little bit. And sometimes it’s a dark or just rainy day. And then I get I get them full blown in my face.

So I like to be better. And I do have a couple of lights too, like light up my my tapestry, my yeah. Wonderwoman, Sunset or sunrise, whatever you want it to be. And that little guy on the side is just it’s just like a color changing led light that I a lot of people refer to as a light saber like oh that’s your light lightsaber. And I is that do you remember that is something that we bought on I think on Amazon.

It was it was just one of those things we saw really cool LED lights was that one where I just was using and we were like, oh gosh, we want this thing. And like, that was the closest thing we found. Yeah. And at first we were like, this is this is ridiculous. It’s just a stick, you know, like, what is it? But I kind of learned to like it a lot because a lot of people refer to it as a lightsaber because it does it looks through the reflection in light of my table, I could go through it.

So so it became a thing.

And the light. What’s the. The brand for your lights, I know those can go from 70 dollars all the way up to like thousands of dollars.

Yeah, yeah. Those are Holgado, the same as my chem blankets at Elgar’s. Gazzo, in my opinion, is one of the best brands out there that takes care of lighting. And they have those ring lives that are very affordable and there are a lot smaller, more portable and mobile. And this are the key. So that’s the top of their line. And I got to I believe one is two hundred fifty dollars. So like the two of them are about five hundred.

So again, that’s an investment and you can definitely start with one key light and definitely can do a lot with one ring life, which also has this really cool effect. If you’re using the ring light, it creates that kind of like shiny ring in your eye. So that’s what a lot of people really like to see when they’re streaming. They’re kind of like shiny, you know, brightness in their eyes. So that’s definitely I definitely recommend if you’re looking into lights and thinking about leveling up your quality with with proper lighting, look at the collection that al-Qaida is offering.

There’s a lot of different options for different budgets and for different kind of like level of sophistication that you can introduce into your setup for sure.

For sure. And I can’t help noticing that your mic sounds really good. I hope that I’m matching up volume wise. I was a podcast or first, but you’re I think the the mic that you’re using works really well. It is intimate without manipulating your voice so much and then just a whole package. You such an upgrade for Lifestream for sure.

Probably totally audio superimportant. We kind of cover that during the previous conversation that live streaming, as counterintuitive as it sounds a lot of times, is experienced by your audience as a podcast because they have the livestream as one of their taps and they’re doing something else and they’re just actually listening in. So the quality of your sound is much more essential and critical for your audience to stick around than the quality of your video. In general, with live streaming, people are more forgiving to slightly imperfect video, but they’re not forgiving to bad sound.

So if people cannot understand you, if there’s a lot of interference, kind of background noise or some kind of hum, that is really annoying. Sometimes people don’t even understand what is frustrating about the stream, but they would just go away because it’s not working with with them on some kind of subconscious level. So if you want to invest, invest in the mic.

First of wonderful. So microphones and then I would say like microphone lights and finally camera. You can use your Logitech for a while and I definitely will consider the upgrade with with a battery backup. So this is wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing this. And I would love to kind of get into the site is second segment. There are a lot of YouTube content creators. I do refer to them collectively because I think YouTube has it’s a really interesting space to work on YouTube as so I want to talk about this influencer program.

The first question that was sent to me was, OK, we specific to YouTube or even Instagram. It’s so easy to look at subscriber counts. But what are some of the other metrics, vanity or otherwise brands like you yourself are looking at when evaluating creators?

Yeah, that’s a good question and it’s a very creative process for us for sure. Many other brands would agree with me that there is no this is one place where there is no formula. So to say that you can follow, there are some frameworks and some templates that you can use as as a as a brand in order to kind of maximize your results. But most of the time, it is a creative process and it’s a lot of just someone’s opinion and, you know, and someone’s decision that this this is going to work or not.

But I’ll break down a couple of things that we definitely look into. And I do think that for those who are seeking for sponsorships, that would be very helpful because just to kind of like create that checklist and check yourself on on those things. So the follower count is important. But like you mentioned, not the most important metric. People do want to have some kind of audience. Right? Like it doesn’t make sense for brands to invest in someone who doesn’t have viewers.

So we definitely want to see some fall. And then the follower is just a very easy way to understand, like, OK, this is a big channel. This is a medium size channel. This is a micro influencer. So at the same time, we understand that the number of subscribers, especially on YouTube, is completely not representative of the actual engaged audience in viewership that you will get on every piece of content that you’re sponsoring. So the first thing that we look at after we saw that first number and kind of like filed it into big, medium or small, literally, like that’s the criteria, that there’s nothing nothing deeper than that.

We start looking at the average views on each video. And a lot of times you can see that the the numbers don’t necessarily match. You can have a channel with five thousand followers and average viewership will be five hundred, which means that out of those five thousand people. They’re very engaged, like 10 percent is always showing up, they’re very interested in the content and the creator is keeping them involved. And we have seen channels with, I want to say, hundreds of thousands of followers.

Right. Think you’re looking at one hundred two hundred three hundred thousand. And then you look at the viewership and you see similar numbers, you see two hundred sixty five hundred six thousand views. And then you think, OK, so obviously there’s a lot of subscribers there which we don’t know how they gain those subscribers. We don’t know how old is that subscriber count, how active those people are. But by the number of viewers on each new videos that they produce, we can tell how many people are actually engaging.

And the other thing that happens quite a bit is you can see that some traders would have a couple of videos that they can put as featured and those would have thousands or tens of thousands of views. And you think, oh, gosh, like, this is great. And then you scroll down and then you see that those are probably the ones that got promoted somehow that good search engine optimize. And then the rest of the videos are actually back to those hundred fifty, whatever views.

So that’s again, that that’s it’s not a disqualifier for the influencer because a lot of times what you want is that specific niche that they’re catering to. And it doesn’t matter. You don’t necessarily go for ten thousand views. You might go after those two hundred views, but the very specific and very precisely targeted ones. But that’s something that you would definitely need to understand whenever you pitch as as a influencer to the sponsor. What are your numbers and what they’re going to be seeing and looking at?

So those those are the numerical things. Of course, a lot of times we ask, what is your main channel? Right. So that’s that’s kind of like a YouTube stream question. Maybe because if you are a YouTube, then, of course, YouTube is your main channel. And then we we would be interested and curious to know how many followers have on Twitter or Facebook and on LinkedIn. But that’s the main channel. Right. So we kind of go over to to your main space while other people can say, yes, my YouTube channel is very small, but that’s what my main platform like for me personally, for example, my YouTube channel is is tiny.

It’s like I don’t really pay much attention to it. I don’t really work on that. My main platform is LinkedIn. That’s where I have thousands and thousands of followers. And that’s what if I were to sell it to a sponsor, that’s what I would pitch primarily. So that’s another thing to keep in mind. Like what’s the main channel? If you have many channels that are developed equally, then that’s your that’s your big sales point. Right?

Like you can say, I have a lot of channels that equally develop, that equally engage. So you’re tapping into all this audiences and those are different people, because I think it’s logical to assume that the content that you’re creating on YouTube will not be watched by the same person on YouTube, then on Twitter and then on Facebook. That just generally doesn’t happen. Those are usually different audiences and different people. Yeah. So that’s that’s just the major metrics when it comes to like initial conversation, like initial evaluation, like, OK, so what’s their full account, what’s their average view count.

How many platforms do they go to, which is their main channel and like what kind of engagement? We’re going to get out of that. And on other platforms that are not YouTube, we definitely look at things like comments, like shares, because that’s another huge thing for us. Views are counted differently by different platforms. For example, YouTube counts as have you, something that when the person’s going to stick around for over ten seconds, I believe Facebook accounts of you as anything that was scrolled through your feed and someone like stop for two or three seconds.

That’s already of you. So there is like a lot of different ways how people think about that. But of course, if someone commented and especially if the comment had some substance, not just like, hey, or I’m from Austin, but someone actually made an app that could be beefed up, commented that makes sense and contributes to the conversation. Like that’s the type of things we’re also looking at, like, OK, how we their audience is, how interactive they are.

Are they having a conversation around piece of content? Because in the end of the day, that’s what the brand wants.

This is the most thorough, like, most complete answer. And it’s so important because so many people just assume that somehow brands are only looking at their subscriber count. And I urge people that you’re creating and I know that it feels slightly embarrassing if you have fifty one hundred subscribers to begin with or that that goal post just keeps on changing. Your numbers again are the thousand ten thousand. But definitely do not go out there sub for sub, which means you’re encouraging people to subscribe to your channel only in exchange that you also subscribe to theirs or certainly buying subscribers.

None of those really works. And it’s really about it’s a it’s a long term process. And knowing that people like on stream are really paying attention holistically, not just those subaccount more reasons not to kind of cheat or trick the system. Nothing. A lot of people are doing that out there. But there was a period of time that we’re seeing that so. So I like I was wondering, is there any mechanism maybe this is a question for brains, we’re thinking about this as well.

We sometimes use social blade’s social blade or social blades. The numbers can be off for certain aspects like revenue and all that. But are there any systems out in the public that you trust and you might use to evaluate influencers or or vet them out yet?

So I’m sure there are a lot of good systems. And when we initially started this, this whole program for our own influencers, it was much more of one one, one girl show, one person thing. So we didn’t really we didn’t have the resources to utilize those those platforms. And most of the things kind of like when manually for us and to your point, like follow for follow type thing, like that was one of the biggest disqualifiers. And if you wanted to, people still do that.

And like a lot of people do that it was one of the biggest disqualifiers that we had for for most influencers. When someone would pitch to us and say, hey, I have a big Twitter account, like I’m going to like stream live on Twitter for you would go to their Twitter. And if they have two hundred thousand followers and they are following two hundred thousand people, that that would immediately mean for us that those people are not engaged. That was just an exchange.

It was purely transactional. And those people are not interested in what this person has to say. So definitely a lot of that there are a lot of systems that can kind of like scrape the Internet and tell you like, OK, so this are the profiles with your keywords that you can you can search by. And this is the full recount and this is the average viewer account and whatever. But a lot of times for us till this day, because we are focusing on quality of relationships and quality influencers versus quantity, our metrics and all about how many contracts we signed per day or per month or how many influencers were on board per week.

It’s about the conversions. It’s about which, of course, we’ll touch on very soon. It’s about the viewership, the exposure, the reach, the brand voice, the the presence of Ofri Stream, the number of quality content, like the units of content, like how many videos or masterclasses or workshops or interviews like this one were created by our partners. Like those are the metrics. We don’t care how many people we we basically contract or work with.

So in that sense, it does pay off for us to do that work that human chacko like. OK, so let’s look at this profile. Let’s make sure this is this is a good match for what we’re trying to do.

Wonderful. I think we kind of slowly stepping into the success were the metrics, as you know, after the fact, after you hire these influencers, how you look at their success. One thing I think immediately comes to mind is we have, for example, our affiliate links and referral links and the click through rate on that. And how many people end up signing up even better, upgrading their accounts to the pro account of stream or business account. Could you speak to that a little bit?

Is there anything else we’re looking at?

Yeah, so that’s the big one. And that’s kind of like one of the myths that I unfortunately, whether I love it or not, have to break it to people all the time, which is kind of kind of surprising and at the same time, common sense. Right. So a lot of times I would have conversations with our influencers about the fact that if you did a video for a brand, if you created some kind of a post or content, if you shared if you mentioned the brand, it doesn’t mean that that that’s success for us.

Right. You doing the work like doing the right things. Creating content is not a metric for us. We are looking at two main things. And of course, number one things as any brand, we are trying to acquire more users. Right. The main goal of influencer marketing program for any brand is new user acquisition, closely followed by retention, reducing churn and making the average revenue per account higher through the education, through the demos, through the trust that they’ve already built with that community.

But the number one goal is new users. So if you created ten pieces of content that resulted in one subscription and we paid, let’s say, a thousand dollars per each piece of content, we wasted money because one subscription for us, forty nine dollars even was average LTV. That could fluctuate between six and 12 months. It is still it is still a loss for us and a big loss. So and if we created one video that resulted in fifty subscriptions and we paid or five thousand or ten thousand dollars for that, that’s kind of how we do the math.

So this is the formula that we are using internally that I like generously sharing with people as a good opportunity to kind of especially for those who are seeking for sponsorships and partnerships to consider. Think about the price that the rate that you’re offering per month per project, per video, per whatever piece of content that that brand is going to sponsor. Then look at their price per subscription, like the average average revenue, and then definitely ask, what is your average LTV?

If it’s a subscription business, like what is the lifetime value of that customer? How long do they typically stay subscribed? Because that one subscription, unless you are doing the influencer work for a one off thing, if people are selling shoes, then that’s just the one sale right there. LTV is just one sale. And if it’s a subscription business or if it’s an annual prepaid enterprise business type model, then so that unit that that that they count the contract.

Right. That subscription that they are after, that’s your number one thing. And for subscription is also multiplied by LTV. So the best thing for you to understand, if you’re bringing value to your brand, is to look at your rate per project or per month divided by their average revenue per account. And that number is what you are going to get. So, for example, to make it very simple, if you are charging one thousand dollars per month and people are selling something that costs 50 dollars and on average, they hope that that person will stay for 10 months.

Right. So five hundred dollars would be their total revenue from that. So that means that in order to be successful, in order to bring to make brand happy, you need to bring to paid users for those thousand dollars. And that’s what you charge. Fifty dollars is what they sell their their product for. They expect those people to stay for 10 months. So that becomes five hundred dollars per sale. So one thousand divided by five hundred that means two.

So that’s for them to break. Even if you’re making three or four paid users at that rate, you are bringing the brand profit and they’re very happy. So they will continue working on that. And the most logical thing for them to do is to kind of assess and say, well, do you think you have to get paid users in your community, in your circle? Right. And if you do, we will obviously double that amount. We’ll triple that amount because we want to continue that.

But then there is there’s a point when that ends, right? If you have a community of five thousand people, you’re not going to be bringing in ten thousand paid users because that’s just against the physics of planet Earth. That’s not how that works. So that’s another thing for you to assess, like what is the purchasing power of your community, how you are not going to overwhelm your community was constantly bitching and selling, but at the same time, how do you take your rate divide that by what the brand is trying to sell?

Ad op ed on was LTV and then that number is going to be something. And if you approach the conversation was brand with from this perspective, I guarantee you you’re going to like knock their socks off. They’ll be like, oh wow. Like this. People really think about what they’re trying to offer. They’re not just charging me because, you know, we’ll give you exposure that that’s that’s that means that you understand their business and you understand their metrics and their reporting.

And they will be that will be definitely ready to collaborate when you approach them from their point of view.

This is such a beefy and juicy content. I didn’t even expect us to get to this level details, which is great. I’m working on a YouTube for kids, which is a product I’m developing, launching in June. I want to give people precisely this level of insights because frankly, guys, it is a two way street in order to have a good collaboration and takes two people, the brand and the individual, to have like a very smooth process.

And I think especially the first engagement is the most time consuming. It is an investment of time and effort on both ends. So one thing on, if you don’t mind me, kind of probing a little bit, which is my dream as a software company. Like you said, the pro account, let’s say forty nine dollars a month, there is a forever free version. And how would you how would somebody go about assessing the average duration of a customer who chooses to stay?

I mean, I’ve stayed on for more than a year and I can see myself live streaming for years to come. But this isn’t quite the same as email marketing or we’re having a website, which is I’m not saying low level, but is a little more usual for people who have had a website for five, ten years. So how do people I can just ask a question straight up to assess that or ask that.

Yeah. So every brand knows their average LTV if they’re subscription business or kind of like their average value per account, if that’s a one off thing, because for four retail brands or someone who’s selling like one off thing, there’s also the refunds and some kind of churn. Of course, subscription business are more prone to churn. Right. Like you subscribe to stay for a couple of months. You tried something, didn’t work. You decided to cancel. So that’s what’s called churn.

So that’s more software companies or even subscription businesses, first of all. But even other businesses that can have that repetitive client coming back and paying for something, the are problem to churn. All of them are versus people who sell like physical goods. Of course, the only churn is someone refunds return. The product and gets a refund, but those all are still accounted, so every brand knows what’s your what’s their average revenue per account, which means if you sell something for ten dollars and then you have a fifty dollar and a one hundred dollar plan, you know, where you fall on average by know, by combining all the plans and dividing by the number of people who bought them.

Usually it’s one of those like sometimes this could be like thirty dollars only on average or eighty dollars on average, because all of those things combined. So every brand knows that number for them. And the LTV is the same thing. Every single Brandos knows that. No, they know exactly how much on average people stay on on their platform. And that accounts for people like you who tried regime and find the best value in it and continue using for years and accounts for people who signed up and were like, oh, I thought, this is a video editing platform.

Oh, it actually oh, it just goes live. They actually don’t need this. So like that accounts for all of those situations. Right. Because of course the of traffic is different. People find us through different different ways. And when when you are starting the conversation, I think it’s perfectly fine for for an influencer, for a creator to ask that question directly to to the brand. It will actually only show that you did the homework and different brands might have different policies on whether they share or not share that number, because for a lot of people, it does kind of tell you a little bit about the business like and how healthy this is, even though it’s, again, like it’s fluctuating.

A lot of times brands will throw some kind of, I think a very average, very arbitrary number and say, OK, well, let’s let’s let’s make it six months. So let’s make it 10 months for LTV. But that’s what they want to base the whole thing on. Right. And that’s what they will be then holding you accountable. And that’s what you can say. Well, you told me that on average, your your clients stay for a year.

That means that if I make the sell for ten dollars, that means I’m bringing you obviously one hundred twenty dollars right here. So that’s that’s what you told me, that the numbers are. So that’s that’s very important to us. And everyone has those numbers.

Oh this is so cool. I can already imagine creating different segments to kind of really break down. And so, so and you started already answering the question like how creators should really charge. But I want to make that kind of connection even more clear. The point of us having this those part of the conversation is that creators always ask the question, how much should I charge? And frankly, there are brands out there who do we expect, creators who work for free.

They totally give you a million reasons why you shredded this video for ten, twenty hours for free. Come on. And it’s really interesting to get into those conversations. And sometimes people say yes, because if Sony or some other brands give you revamp your entire workstation, fine. But I do think creators in general should charge, even if it’s little to start with. But what are some of the pitfalls or mistakes people made to kind of easily price them, price themselves outside of their competition?

Because in conversations with creators looking at their subscriber count, I’m thinking I want to say that either, oh, my God, you don’t want to share your value or charging too little or you’re charging way too much. I mean, that is just exactly like you explain you like no way brands will pay this much like is there anything else you want to add to that were like trivial things we get is this that is so funny because that’s literally my world, right?

Like this is what I do all the time. And more often than not, you get some kind of ridiculous number that people just throw on you and you ask, well, how did you come up with this? Like, why is it ten thousand dollars per video on your channel? Just like, why? I just wonder. And a lot of times and this is this is I’m sure it’s it’s common sense, but also not it’s mind blowing to hear that like.

Well that’s what my work worth. Like that’s that’s how much I need. This is how much time I’m going to put into this this video. And from Brand’s perspective, the first question I want to ask is, OK, what like why do you think that I as a client should pay something that just makes sense to you? Right. Like imagine you come to a store and someone is selling, I don’t know why or tomatoes or whatever, and you come in and say, OK, how much have tomatoes?

And the answer is like, well, it’s million dollars per Pernice little bag, because I think it’s worth it because that’s how much time it took me to grow those tomatoes. Like, what would you say to that? Like you’ll be like but the value of this tomatoes from me, I’m just trying to make a mozzarella tomato salad. Look, I’m not I’m not shopping for a variety here, so that’s kind of and maybe maybe those are tomatoes that give you superpowers and you become a hulk or you start flying like Superman, then those tomatoes all of a sudden might be worthy of an extra additional investment.

Right. So it kind of depends on on what what kind of value you’re bringing to people. And that’s when that formula comes back right away. And whenever I get a ridiculous proposal from. From influencers, which does happen, I immediately respond, was like, OK, so it sounds like ten thousand dollars is what you want for for collaboration. Cool. That means that divided by our average account, which is four dollars divide, multiply by our average LTV, which is that the X number you are looking at bringing, let’s say, ridiculously five hundred paid users per per month.

Is that something that you want to commit and all of a sudden the conversation that the conversation really turns? Yeah. And then all of a sudden the person says, oh, well, there’s no way I can commit to five hundred page users per per month. Well, then we can commit to ten thousand dollars per month for a video. So then because that’s that’s what we’re trying to buy. Right. Like we’re trying to tap into your audience, give you give you the resources and tools, provide you with all the media assets and gets everything you need.

But then in the end of the day, you’ve got to bring that audience back to us as researchers, as members of our creative family, as free users or paid users. So that’s that’s what we’re trying to get. And if the result of that interaction is nothing, then of course, you are overpriced. We have lower Y than we basically wrap up the partnership. That’s that’s what’s going to happen. So that’s when when you’re pricing yourself, remember that.

Assess, what do you think you can bring in in terms of conversions, and I think another common mistake is to think if I if I price myself too low, I will not be able to ask for more ever. That’s a very common misconception. And I’m going to just just trash it now because because for me, if someone says, hey, I’m going to give it a try, I don’t know exactly how many people start signing up for extreme.

Let’s do a thousand thousand dollars per month and see what happens. And then all of a sudden I see that that person is bringing us one hundred paid users. So like, I’m making all that money back and I’m seeing the airline a little dashboard that like they’re like hitting one hundred percent. Four hundred and five hundred percent return on investment. The conversation that is going to happen next, because you also know that as an influencer, you see the dashboard like it’s very transparent, like you see exactly how many people you refer to.

The conversation that happens next is like, OK, so we try and obviously have a lot of traction with your product and within my community. Would you like to renegotiate and reassess what we are doing here? And if the brand is not represented by a complete idiot? Hmm. There’s no one in their right mind will tell a person who is bringing hundreds of paid users that you were not going to elevate the budget for. You are going to lose those people that you continue bringing.

We’re going to stop this partnership and not get those paid users and not utilize the potential of your community just because we don’t want to like that’s just that’s just complete nonsense. But what will happen is if you charge too much and then the area is low and is below 20 percent, which is like like that that mark for us at least, that, you know, if you’re if you’re not bringing in at least 20 percent of what you’re getting in sponsorship, that that’s not a good investment for us at.

Doesn’t look good on our reports. That’s when we’ll come back and say, you know what, we’re going to wrap this up. And and that’s and that sense is going to be very difficult for you to come back, because then you have to come up with some really creative idea of how to convince us that we need to continue testing this because have some kind of a breakthrough that is going to change that math around.

Yeah, well, this is this is great. I mean, if any brands or individuals are watching this, I would say that, yes, makes a super simple because literally within the same the same interface, I get to see everything. I get to see who sign up for the the free version. I get to see who upgraded. And there’s additional payout if you refer someone who becomes a pain member. So it does accumulate, I think as a creative content creator, it just ease of use, ease of tracking.

By the way, this is not a given from every brand. I’ve worked with several brands in the past. At the very least, I usually have to log into another system. Sometimes a system is down. I don’t get to see it. So it’s a little clunky. Like for me it’s another to do on a weekly basis to go and look. And there’s a third type, which is as brands are starting out, you have no insights into as a creator, you have no insights into how well you’re doing, which can be frustrating because I want to know what’s working.

Ideally, I want to be able to see sort of a new new subscribed new users as a result of this video, because for us, it’s possible that I have a video like the Zoom webinar has now sixty seven seventy thousand views. I assume that’s driving all the subscribers. But maybe one of these videos over here with hundreds of videos that are actually driving because it’s more focused. It’s super helpful. So I respect your time. I know we can talk about this forever, but but I want to definitely and I see more viewers on LinkedIn, which brings me super happy today.

I don’t think being tracked here necessarily. But anybody have any questions now? We’re after the show. Please drop a comment. I really, really love to talk about those. You can ask me. I don’t have to bother on you any further, but their company has recently reached out to me to say, I want to start this program, this influencer program. Let’s start with you, YouTube. We have a lot of fear. We have a lot of doubts.

And I immediately thought of you. So if I can make the final couple of questions be about lessons learned for you and man, you didn’t have much support when you first started. You have to figure a lot of the stuff out and restroom’s verve. I feel like it’s a very hip young company, but there are also other companies, a little bit more bureaucracy. How how do you kind of manage all that?

Yeah, if you’re just starting an influencer program in your brand and your digital brand like us, of course, that’s the only thing that can kind of speak about intelligently. I would say, like I was I did have a lot of resources in terms of I didn’t have a big team when I started. I didn’t have, like, ridiculous budgets. I did have a budget. So that’s the first thing that I recommend you think about, because when you’re working with influencers, you’ve got to have a budget.

You are not going to get good stuff for free. And you kind of touched on that. They earlier that some. Some. Influencers and creators are willing to do things for free, just just for the brand recognition, just for the fact that they can put that on their resume. I work with Sony. I work with with someone else. But in the end of the day, you’ve got to get what you pay for. And the level of commitment is going to be very low.

If you’re asking people for barter, like, hey, here’s here’s our product in exchange for a thing and we do, those things would do them was like really small craters till today to kind of like help lift them up, because, of course, they just they don’t have the numbers. They can bring conversions as of right now, but they want to practice. They want to train. And we say, OK, get the free account, try to do things.

And if you see traction, if you start growing that we will start sponsoring you. So but in the end of the day, you have to have a budget like especially if you want to work with people that are really going to bring value to you. So make sure you check that box first. It might be a massive, gigantic budget, but it has to be there. It has to be available and you have to be accountable for it.

You have to be the decision maker on it. If you’re asking permission to spend every five hundred dollars to to sponsor a YouTube video or a blog, you’re not going to be successful because bureaucracy is not your friend in this kind of things. You get it right really fast. The key for building a good influencer program is to test different things, test. How would it work if you show up as a guest on the influencer channel to ask what happens if they create a video on demand test?

What happens if they run the live show and then they say this show is powered by Sony or Canon or whatever, like your brand test? What happens if they’re right? If they post, if they tag you on social media, if they do it a swap of videos on demand, like you put something on their channel, they put something on yours. So like do a lot of testing and measure, measure like crazy, see what works, see what brings you value and know exactly what those value criteria are.

For us. It’s definitely conversions. Number one, recent exposure. So viewership engagement number two. So if that’s those are the things that you’re measuring, just see the top performers and then see what are the top performing activations or activities. Right. And then just continue laser focusing on those. And don’t be, I guess, the last third third advice. Don’t be afraid to cut off certain activities. And I know it hurts. It’s so painful to admit that we thought that sponsoring live shows is a great idea or doing a monthly exclusive partnerships.

When you only talk about our brand and no other brands is a great idea, but it just doesn’t work. Don’t be afraid to admit that that that experiment failed. It doesn’t work. We’re going to do something else and move on because that’s that’s when you will. Finally, the trick. The trick is to find what works fastest faster than your competitors. At least it lays there and then and then invest and nurture and grow that.

Yeah, I know we’re coming up time, but I do want to just give a shout out to restring for not only now, nurturing and building a really rather large influencer community, but we are actually connected as opposed to blocking the influencers is like they don’t talk to Mark, Mark, don’t talk to Faye. We’re going to be in this community and we’re growing together. We have these bi weekly meetings where we get to learn from one another trick so we can share things.

I feel like I’m naturally comes up on social media. I’ll share there. There’s a link in the description below because you’re watching the way we’re using restroom and also mentioned on my website under what I call like kind of the capsule software. If I have five software I choose to use for my business is one of them. And why and another trick I think on in conversations with you, instead of pivoting from my original Zune videos to not ever talk, I’ll zoom again.

I realize Zoom can be connected to Stream, which has become really popular videos, but also I talk about content repurposing all the time. But where do the original content come from? Why create them easily using restrooms? So people love making connections as opposed to shouting, only giving shout outs to your brands. So yeah, so community aspects. And think about where you can integrate, not just for the YouTube videos, where else you can mention I have a community on Facebook group.

I want to tell people if it’s appropriate. I’m not going to just be down every door to sell the product. So it’s been so wonderful, organized or anything else. Before I let you go, anything else you like to say?

Yeah, I think just just to add on to the last thing that you mentioned about educating your influencers. It is also one of those kind of like dilemmas that influencer marketers, marketers face. On one hand, you want to work with people who you don’t need to teach them how to market products. Right. That’s going to be a premise. If I need to teach you how to promote how to build the community, how to promote my product, you need to pay me right, because I’m the teacher.

So on one hand, you have this idea that, OK, those people are professional marketers, they’re community builders, they’re creators. They know how to promote stuff. But on the other hand, if you don’t supply them with with everything that they need, with talking points, with value propositions, with graphics, with materials, with those webinars that we do for influencers where we share what something works for one party. And what is a good call, good call to action, what’s a good way to pitch people from signing up for free to upgrading for paid good ideas, good examples, good case study, stuff like, OK, so John here did this and it worked great for him on E!

And he did that. So those kind of things are going to be a central part of your work. So don’t think that you’ll will ever be able to drop that, because if you want a powerful, powerful community of ambassadors and influencers, you get to give a lot to them. So it’s not an easy job, but it’s wonderful. It’s fun because you have to have the opportunity to work with creative people and you have the opportunity to learn about yourself, your product, your community, your user, like in no other field or area.

So, yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for being here because I’m learning from you. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. This sort of pleasant conversation and all the videos are going to stay on wherever you’re watching this. And I’m going to take us offline now. Bye, guys. Bye.

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