10 Benefits of Brand Partnerships for Influencers and Brands

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Consider you’ve been posting videos on YouTube for a while, and you’ve finally built a decent following. You’ve made it past the 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time thresholds, and now you’re ready to start making money from your channel. Like many creators, your first thought is to join the YouTube partner program and run ads. But what if I told you there’s a more lucrative way to make money on YouTube if you know how to get sponsored on YouTube? Brand partnerships—also known as sponsorships—can help you make more money than ads while opening doors to more opportunities to grow your channel.

In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits of brand partnerships and how to land them so you can get sponsored on YouTube. Getting a sponsorship can be a lot smoother than running ads. While with ads, the process can feel rather mechanical, like a cold transaction between you and a faceless corporation, landing a sponsorship can feel much more natural. A lot of excitement comes with a brand wanting to partner with you.

They'll contact you if you’ve done your job well after discovering your content and seeing how you might align. There’s no telling how much money you’ll make from a sponsorship deal, but it’s usually far more lucrative than running ads on your videos. And again, the more sponsorships you land, the more opportunities you have to grow your channel. Aha Creator can help you get sponsored on YouTube by connecting you with brands looking to partner with creators like you.

Benefits of Brand Partnerships for Brands

Benefits of Brand Partnerships

Influencer Marketing: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Influencer marketing is the process of collaborating with an individual who has the potential to influence audience opinions—typically due to a large personal following, an established brand, or perceived authority. Partnering with influencers can help businesses boost sales and boost their brand profiles. Here’s an overview of some of the main benefits of ecommerce brands.

Increased Brand Awareness

Influencers have large online and media followings, making them influencers. Examples include actor-turned-wellness-provocateur Gwyneth Paltrow and kaftan-obsessed food writer Helen Rosner. Partnering with one can give you access to the influencer’s audiences and raise awareness of your brand.

Increased Credibility

Influencers can endorse your brand implicitly (e.g., by tagging you in a social media post) or explicitly (e.g., by writing a positive review of a product or service). Both increase your brand’s credibility with their audiences.

Audience-Specific Market Traction

Brand partnerships can help businesses target particular audience segments. Suppose you want to target young women with ankle injuries (say, to sell anti-inflammatory collagen supplements or a line of stylish ankle braces). In that case, you might partner with a female-identified skateboarder or soccer player with a solid social media presence.

Strong Return on Investment

Studies show that the average return on investment (ROI) for influencer marketing campaigns is close to $6 for every dollar spent, and some companies report earning as much as $18 per dollar spent.

Increased Sales

Influencer endorsement can motivate a purchase—one recent survey found that 56% of millennials and 58% of Gen Z purchased a product based on a social media influencer’s or a content creator’s recommendation.

Benefits of Brand Partnerships for Influencers

Benefits of Brand Partnerships

1. Bigger Paychecks: How Brand Deals Boost Influencer Income

Deals with brands can offer significantly higher earnings compared to ad revenue alone. Influencers can negotiate compensation based on their reach, engagement, and the value they bring to the brand. This allows them to earn more for their content and efforts.

For example, Charli D’Amelio, a TikTok influencer, earns significantly through brand partnerships with companies like Dunkin’ Donuts and Hollister. These deals pay her far more than TikTok’s creator fund or ad revenue. Her collaboration with Dunkin’ included a custom menu item (The “Charli” cold brew), showing how her massive reach translated into higher negotiated earnings based on her impact.

2. Increased Stability: Brand Partnerships Diversify Income Sources

Relying solely on ad revenue ties your earnings to fluctuating ad rates and viewer behavior. Brand deals provide an opportunity for diversification, ensuring that income is not exclusively dependent on ad revenue and providing a more stable income source.

For example, Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), a tech YouTuber, doesn’t solely rely on YouTube ad revenue. He collaborates with brands like brands for skins and features products from companies like Tesla and Google in sponsored segments. These sponsorships allow him to maintain a steady income even when ad rates fluctuate due to seasonality or economic changes.

3. Greater Control: Brand Partnerships Give Influencers Creative Freedom

With brand deals, influencers have more control over the content they produce. They can integrate the brand message organically into their videos, maintaining creative freedom and authenticity. This leads to more engaging and genuine content for their audience.

For example, Emma Chamberlain often partners with brands like Louis Vuitton and Aritzia. She integrates sponsored content organically into her vlogs, allowing her to maintain her quirky and authentic personality while aligning with luxury brands. Unlike generic ads, she retains full creative control, blending the brand message smoothly into her existing content style.

4. More Relevant Content: Brand Partnerships Help Produce Personalized Material

Brand deals often involve products or services that align with the influencer’s niche and audience. As a result, the content feels more relevant and valuable to the viewers, leading to higher engagement and a more positive response. For example, MrBeast is known for his philanthropic and larger-than-life challenges.

He partners with brands like Honey or Feastables (his chocolate brand). These collaborations align with his content's core value of entertaining and giving back, resonating with his audience. For instance, a video might feature a Honey-sponsored giveaway that feels relevant to his community, ensuring high engagement.

5. Stronger Audience Connection: Brand Partnerships Enhance Trust and Credibility

Genuine brand partnerships can strengthen the relationship between the influencer and their audience. When the influencer promotes products they genuinely believe in, it enhances trust and credibility with their viewers. This trust can lead to higher viewer loyalty and a more engaged community. While ad revenue is still a valuable income source for YouTube content creators, influencer brand deals offer many benefits that can significantly enhance their earnings and overall content quality.

For example, a beauty influencer, Michelle Phan, partnered with brands that align with her values, like cruelty-free cosmetics. Her genuine passion for these products strengthened her bond with her audience. Eventually, this authenticity led her to launch her brand, EM Cosmetics, which her loyal followers eagerly supported, reinforcing trust and credibility.

Aha Creator: Brand Partnership Support For Influencers

Aha Creator streamlines brand partnerships for creators. We handle the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations, ensuring you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands, maximizing the potential for successful collaborations. Sign up for our waitlist today, and we'll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.

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Benefits of Brand Partnerships

1. Aha Creator: Your Go-To for Streamlined Brand Partnerships

Aha Creator helps creators streamline brand partnerships. We handle the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations so you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands to maximize the potential for successful collaborations. Sign up for our waitlist today, and we'll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.

Benefits of Brand Partnerships

2. Define Your Strategy, Goals, and KPIs

Before browsing influencer profiles and sending emails, you must define your strategy. Your influencer marketing strategy should help you know your goals and the actions required. In short, it’s your recipe for success, and without a clear strategy to guide your decisions, you’ll struggle to stay on track when you launch your campaign.

Decide Your Goals

Ask yourself what you want to achieve at the end of your influencer campaign. You may choose to focus on one goal or decide to have several. The more specific you can be about your goals, the better you can design your influencer campaign to deliver results. Your campaign goals may focus on brand awareness, engagement, conversions, or boosting loyalty.

Choose Your KPIs

Now that you’ve set your goals, choosing key performance indicators (KPIs) will help you know if you have achieved them. For each aim, assign a key performance indicator, i.e., a data point you can measure during and after the campaign to determine your success. KPIs for awareness might include impressions or views, whereas KPIs for conversions will include the number of sales, clicks, or subscriptions.

Plan Your Strategy

With your goals and KPIs in mind, you can decide how working with influencers will help you grow your brand. To build a framework for your campaign, you should determine your target audience, your chosen social media channels, and what type of influencers you should work with.

3. Choosing Your Campaign Type

The next decision to make is what type of campaign to run. You must consider content formats, social media channels, and influencer compensation. Your campaign type should be directly tied to helping you achieve your goals. For example, if you want to drive online sales of my limited edition hand cream, I could run a promo code campaign, offering influencers 10% of their profits.

Some of the most common types of campaigns include:

Sponsored influencer posts

Unboxing and product gifting

Giveaway competitions

Affiliate marketing

Product collaborations

Seasonal campaigns

Brand ambassador campaigns

4. Influencer Selection and Outreach

With your strategy set, now the action can begin! You can start identifying creators for your campaign by using your brand’s target audience demographics and analyzing creator performance metrics to choose the influencers best suited to your needs.

It’s helpful to use the right tools to run your influencer campaigns. You’ll save valuable time and resources by investing in the right software and integrations to get the most from your campaign. Find influencers at scale with Upfluence’s influencer search tool. Identify creators from a database using 20+ advanced search filters. Alternatively, you can identify influential people within your brand network by using Upfluence’s influencer matching tool to analyze the social reach of your customers, subscribers, or followers.

Once you have a shortlist of suitable influencers, outreach can begin! Introduce your brand and products, put forward a convincing value proposition, and share details of your compensation offer.

5. Briefs and Contracts

The next step in running an influencer marketing campaign is to onboard your chosen influencers by sharing your campaign brief, negotiating compensation, and signing a contract. You should create a brief for every new campaign that shares important details about content production and message tone, dos and don’ts, and a timeline. A successful brief is informative while getting the influencer excited to work with your business.

Negotiation is an essential part of any partnership. You should aim for mutually beneficial partnerships that balance the effort the influencer needs with the compensation they’ll receive. There’s no official rate for influencer content, so try to understand influencers’ costs when making your offer. Consider factors like location, industry, brand affinity, and campaign variables such as length and equipment required when deciding how much to pay.

The final stage of onboarding is creating an influencer contract. Nowadays, most influencers, like freelancers, expect a contract. So don’t be intimidated—a good contract will help establish terms, reduce risks, and set the foundation for a transparent, professional partnership. By setting and agreeing to expectations, you make sure both parties are on the same page.

6. Content Production

Once you’ve ironed out the final details of your campaign planning and contract, it’s time for your influencers to implement their creativity! For marketers running the campaign, you’ll need to make sure your influencers have everything they need to start creating content. This means shipping product samples, sharing campaign guidelines, and generating promo codes or affiliate links if required.

7. Content Amplification

Your campaign is live! You can maximize the success of your campaign by amplifying influencer-generated content during and after the campaign. You'll get the content in front of even more people by using your brand’s owned channels, such as social media, website, and newsletters, to reshare campaign content and promote your collaboration.

You may also promote your best influencer content through paid media campaigns. Buying additional media space should be a key consideration when planning your initial campaign budget. Repurposing content on paid channels is a great way to get extra value from the influencer content you have already paid for; just remember to include content ownership or whitelisting permissions in the contract!

8. Campaign Measuring and Reporting

At the end of your influencer marketing campaign, you’ll need to measure your KPIs (chosen at the start) to analyze your campaign’s performance. You should track the KPIs corresponding to your campaign goals and evaluate whether your campaign has successfully reached your goals.

However, campaign measurement shouldn’t happen only at the end of the campaign. Using a tool such as Upfluence to run your campaigns means you have access to real-time campaign analytics, so you can easily make adjustments if needed to keep the campaign on track.

Tracking results is essential to help you calculate return on investment and earned media value. This will show the direct results of your investment in influencer marketing and whether it’s worth repeating.

Analyzing individual influencers’ performance will help you decide which influencers to partner with again. You should nurture long-term partnerships with your best-performing influencers to ensure your ROI remains high across future influencer marketing campaigns.

If you’re running a revenue-share campaign, measuring the number and value of sales will help you accurately calculate and pay your influencers.

How to Find Influencers for Brand Partnerships

Benefits of Brand Partnerships

1. Use Aha Creator

Aha Creator makes it easy for content creators to find brand partnerships. When you sign up, we do all the heavy lifting of negotiating brand deals so you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system pairs creators with relevant brands to maximize the potential for successful collaborations. Join our waitlist today, and we will work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.

Benefits of Brand Partnerships

2. Hashtags

Stay on top of trends and boosted content. One of the best ways to do this is by searching for trending hashtags related to your brand. Look for influencers already using these hashtags and reach out to them. Before you do, research these influencers to see if their aesthetic aligns with your brand and if they share the same niche. Don’t forget to check their follower numbers and engagement rates, which you can do through an Instagram engagement calculator. There’s no use reaching out to someone with little to no engagement!

If you’re looking for hashtags, you’re already on social media, but it goes deeper than that. Look out for your brand mentions, and employ social media trackers or listening tools to find influencers already talking about your industry or niche.

4. Google

You can use Google to find influencers. Google Search Alerts is a tool that allows you to set alerts for keywords relating to your brand. This lets you find people talking about your brand, industry, niche, and everything.

5. Bloggers

Bloggers promote their social media content to have a substantial, engaged following. The manual approach would be searching keywords that relate to your brand or products along with “blog” and seeing the top blogs. In addition to reaching out to these bloggers, you can also go through their following to see if they have connections with any other influencers you can contact. There are many platforms available that can help you find influencers for your brand while taking out a large proportion of the heavy lifting. Some examples include Voila Norbert, Mailshake, and Respona.

6. Influencer Marketing Platforms

Tools like influencer marketing platforms have search features that allow you to explore the top influencers in particular niches. They can provide you with information such as their emails and social profiles, giving you multiple means to contact them. Proceed cautiously, as many companies offer outdated information, so research before committing!

7. YouTube

Depending on your niche, YouTube can also be useful for finding influencers. YouTube is a platform where influencers can do longer reviews of products like “Get Ready With Me” videos, which show off different products, ads, and more. It’s worth digging deeper into YouTube and using keywords in the search bar to find influencers who produce content surrounding your brand’s niche. Look for influencers with a decent number of subscribers but not so many that it would cost you to sell a kidney to fund the partnership. Most YouTubers also have successful social media pages, giving you a wider audience reach.

8. Your Website

Your website must be accessible to influencers and have resources available if they wish to contact you. Adding a link to an influencer landing page is worth showing how you would like to collaborate with potential influencers and leaving some contact information. This can save you the effort of reaching out to influencers and allowing them to come to you.

9. LinkedIn

This may seem like a long shot, but covering all bases is worthwhile. With tools that allow you to search by industry and position, finding relevant influencers seems more manageable. Try searching for keywords such as “blogger” or “content creator” and narrowing it down further by selecting the relevant industry. LinkedIn adds a sense of professionalism that Instagram may lack, instantly boosting your company profile. Don’t forget to make it easy to discover your brand from your LinkedIn page!

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Benefits of Brand Partnerships

Aha Creator streamline brand partnerships for creators. We handle the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations, ensuring you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands, maximizing the potential for successful collaborations. Sign up for our waitlist today, and we'll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.