S1E3: Should Small Creators Do Brand Deals?
Will doing small brand deals affect your ability to grow a bigger audiecne and eventually get bigger brand deals? We break this viewer question down in episode 3.
All right, we got another good question for you. All right. All right. This is
a full-time marketer. They have a full-time role as an individual contributor
and they have a
relatively active following of about 6,000 people on LinkedIn.
So the question is I found some success recently growing my following around 4,
000 new subscribers in the last five to six months.
They've got 6k total. I've been approached by a few companies to do paid posts,
but have turned them down.
It would be a dream to eventually be a paid creator,
but I'm worried that if I do too many of these smaller deals with different
companies,
it may affect my growth and lead to less big brand deals in the future.
So the deals that they're getting are from relatively small brands.
Should I do the lesser brand deals to show bigger brands that I can do them or
hold out until I have more followers to
approach the bigger brands?
[Music]
That's a good one. This is a really good question.
I get this question a lot actually because most people who reach out to me are
just starting off as creators.
I'd say it's good to experiment
with one or two at the most and there's a few reasons behind this. One,
you'll see how promoted posts compare to your standard posts and you have some
frame of reference on engagement.
Two, you start getting a taste even with the smaller brands of what it's like
to engage with
paid situation. The back and forth, the revisions, the negotiations, all that
stuff,
the unsexy stuff that nobody tells you about besides getting paid. Then you
realize like,
was it worth a couple hundred bucks? Mostly smaller brands aren't paying like
thousands of thousand dollars.
You're probably getting paid like what four to six hundred bucks a month max.
So it's like, is it worth it even at the six thousand mark?
A couple things you should think about at this level is you have way less
negotiating power as a smaller creator.
With six thousand followers, you say, "Hey, I want this." Brands may not budge
on that.
So I would say try out one or two so you can get a frame of reference and then
as you scale,
make sure that you're keeping track of your metrics. The big brands do care
about past performance.
It's very difficult to land a big brand deal without having some baseline to go
up.
So it is good to go there.
I want to dive into some of the wording they used here and to see if this
changes any advice.
They say that they have a very active following of six thousand people.
So I know a lot of people on LinkedIn that are super active, they get a lot of
engagement on their posts,
but they don't have a huge following. So maybe they have six thousand followers
but they get any comments on every one of their posts or something.
Do you think that the engagement, there's a conversation that they can have
there with the brand
that they can say, "Hey, I know I only have six thousand followers, but those
six thousand followers
are really good followers. They're in your ICP and they engage with my content
."
Does that give them more negotiating power than just, "Hey, it's this random
person that has
not a ton of followers?" It depends on the category. So if we're talking about
Martak sales tech,
there's so many creators in those spaces that you can have strong engagement,
it's still 50 people.
It's still just 80 people. Because these folks are talking to a bunch of folks,
right? And they're most likely coming to you because they can't afford the
bigger,
the bigger hitters just yet as a brand. Again, your negotiating power isn't as
high,
depending on the category. Now, if you happen to have a hundred executive level
you're talking to above the power line type of content, those are worth a lot
more.
Now you can up the ante a bit or ask for what you need to. So it depends on the
category.
I get this question a lot. Like, what is a good engagement rate? I mean, the
benchmarks are all
over the place, but I've got some creators who are getting like two, three
percent engagement
rate, which is amazing. And then you have somewhere where like at the point two
to point five percent,
which is more average, what I'm seeing on LinkedIn right now. So if your
engagement rate,
which is all the likes, comments, shares divided by the number of followers,
all those things
are higher, then you can try to negotiate more. But just know that one percent
of six thousand
is very different than even point five percent of four hundred thousand. You
may not have as much
an engagement just yet. The only reason I'd encourage someone to try this out
is to get a baseline.
There are things I mentioned before. The experience is as worth it. And then
how can you scale from
here? Once you know what your promoted posts are actually worth. If the advice
is to test the
waters a little bit, get the experience, once you put out one promoted posts,
companies will
start to come out of the woodwork a little bit because it's like, oh, this
person does promoted
posts. How often should they do that? Because their question is, at what point
does this impact
my ability to actually grow and then use my following to do bigger brand deals?
So like,
how much of that do you think they should do? Yeah, from the numbers I've seen,
and this is
completely me, like anecdotal, there's no report at the six thousand mark, I
wouldn't do more than
two brand deals because you're a very smaller group. As you get bigger to the
50, 60, 70,000 mark
as you get bigger from that point. Most of my biggest creators, like I'm
talking hundreds of
thousands of followers, don't do more than four at a given time. They never
want to be seen as overly
promotional. I think audiences have some grace saying, okay, you're creating
content, you want
to get paid fine. As long as it's an authentic piece, then do it. Like even the
six thousand person
with the one or two brand deals are going to do, we need to make sure that
those brands are
slammed up. You can't just be like, you're a walking billboard now. You can
never compromise on that,
especially at six thousand. You cannot abuse that trust at six thousand
followers, 100%. So just
keep those ins the way. One of the things I see a lot of creators, more
specifically some of the
smaller creators, a lot of people will say only do brand deals with companies
that you use or like
a product that you're familiar with and you actually like and can endorse. What
are your thoughts on
that? I'm really big on that, especially earlier on, because you want to be as
authentic as possible.
Most of the times you hit that six thousand stride or a thousand followers a
month,
because you've caught on to some form of technical utility. So I'm linked in
the best way to grow
is to give technical utility advice. It's like, I took this framework and I
applied it like holy
smokes, whether you're sales, marketing rev-ops, whatever. If you're doing
mostly the mindset
motivational stuff that gets you there, but it's nowhere near. I mean, you've
seen it too. Yeah.
The how to's the frameworks, the solve content. So it's very difficult to
continue that trajectory.
If you're talking about solving a problem, but something you've never used
before.
Yeah. So you're still in that earning attention stage of six thousand followers
. You want to get
to that fifty thousand mark minimum before you start maybe experimenting with
other things.
But I think from zero to fifty K, you should not be straying off anything.
I'll take it all. So I learned this the hard way back when we were doing
YouTube.
It took us a very long time to get to a point where we could actually monetize
our audience.
And the first time a brand came to us and they were like, hey, we'll pay you
like two thousand
dollars to do like a thirty second spot at the beginning of the video. It was
like, hell yeah.
Yeah, you're not on it. It's money. And again, like when we started doing that,
like more brands started coming out of the woodwork and it was like, this is
easy money.
We're creating this video anyway. We can do thirty seconds in the beginning.
But what we found,
and this is why I've turned down so many one-offs myself and like my personal
brand,
is that once you start doing them, there's this like visceral response with the
audience.
And I think this is definitely the case on YouTube. I think it will eventually
get to this point
on LinkedIn. But it was like, I loved this channel. They were like pure
education. Everything was
like for the audience. And now like, I'm not quite sure if I can trust what
they're saying.
Exactly. Exactly. You nailed it. So it's for the people, by the people. That's
why you're seeing
the thousand followers a month for this person. Because whatever they're doing
is like, it's not
corrupted. Yeah. Right. And that's the issue with sometimes with paid stuff,
like people will have
that perception that I don't know this person's for the cause anymore. So don't
lose all that at
six thousand followers. Because you're not worth anything big yet in terms of
monetary value to a
big brand. Yep. So if you do want to get paid eventually, build that audience,
build a trust,
let your audience know you're going to be experimenting with different things.
Like the
audience is okay with a conversation. That part's totally fine. Build other
things like your podcast
or newsletter. But that's where you should focus it. I learned this lesson from
KD, like my oldest
client. He's like an Asian, not all money is good money. Right. So just because
you think two G's
upfront 500 out from like, ma, I made it baby by the shoes baby by the shoes. I
got this. Those
only pair of shoes you're going to buy. Yeah. One time, because you're going to
lose so much out
front of the long run. So we are in this culture. Unfortunately, like Netflix,
Amazon, now, now,
now, now, patience is the worst. Take a look at my roster just for a second.
Right. I got 12
of the biggest hitters. I'm about to sign three more this week at inbound 12 of
the biggest folks,
John Barrows, KD, Morgan, Devin Reed, all these people. How long were they
building content before
they got paid? I'm saying I'm saying like seriously paid. Yeah. Morgan was
creating content for eight
years. Now, luckily, because these folks have paved the way, it doesn't take
that long. B2B
brands or even D2C brands are coming in to LinkedIn to spend money. So there's
an accelerant there.
But if you've only been doing this for a couple of months, about a long way to
go.
Yeah. Yeah. The way I see it. And this is based on my own doing YouTube and
then actually being a
YouTube like consumer of YouTube content. Right. There's this specifically when
when creators,
you kind of find them when they're in the early stages and you like them and
you follow them
throughout their journey. And then when they start doing brand deals, not only
do you dislike
the fact that they're doing brand deals because of that authenticity factor, it
's almost like you
have a resentment for the brand for like trying to like put their message into
the content. So,
I think there's definitely like this balance of like one, how you create that
content and the
message you put across, which we're going to talk about in another episode,
actually how you deliver
the message in an authentic way. But also like you have to be particular about
the brands that you
work with. Or you know, yeah, there's two thousand dollars isn't worth it. It's
not worth it. It's not
worth your own brand. Yeah. Right. And your personal brand. That's what
creators need to remember is
like, you are the business, the decision you make are the business. If people
find out that you're
doing stupid shit at a conference all week, that's going to hurt you. So
everything reputation
wise, what you put out in public, like that is the sphere you're in now. So you
have to be very
careful of who you partner with, why you partner with them, and just don't
think about the dollars
every time. You know, I told you before, like we brought in what 1.2 mil for
our creators in the
last year, year and a half. We've turned down double that. Yeah. Because we
quality controls
everything right now. So newer creators, like don't be impatient. Have people
in your inner circle
scrutinize the deals. Like you told me you have WhatsApp groups, like find
those folks who are
in the same journey, even be like guys, like I feel if you have remotely even 1
% of it, it's not
worth it. I feel like that's a huge part too, whether it's an agent or if you
're smaller and
you're not at that point yet. Like even in the content creation process, in all
of the stuff I
created early on, like me and Obed would go back and forth. I'd be like, dude,
does this suck?
Am I like, is this me or is this as really as bad as I think? And he'd be like,
no, dude,
you can't post that. No, no, it's not you. Because it's not you, right? So it's
very important to
remember the folks that are part of like, let's call it your rise moment
because they keep you
grounded. But even my own personal network, I've got my high school body. So
just be like, oh,
like don't get missed. You know, don't get too big now, Mr. Gary Maguire. Like,
because some of them saw
the post you did on me. They're like, Oh, here we go again. And you need to
stay humble. So it's a
mindset thing. It's a patience thing. So to the person, you know, 6000
followers, try as long as
authentic to your narrative. It's something that truly fits in 100% for you,
just so you can get a
taste for what it's like to do brand deals. So by the time you get to the
bigger level, you're ready to go.