The Ultimate Playbook for Running YouTube Sponsorships
Use this step-by-step playbook as a guide for a highly effective YouTube sponsorship campaign for your brand.
With nearly a decade of expertise in YouTube sponsorships, we have facilitated thousands of successful partnerships, totaling over $50 million. Building on this wealth of experience, we have developed a comprehensive, multi-step process designed to help brands to work with the best YouTube channels to promote their products. This playbook is focused on pinpointing the ideal channels that align with your brand’s goals and mission, and forging successful partnerships with those creators.
Whether you partner with ThoughtLeaders or use this blueprint independently, this process ensures a thoughtful and data-driven approach to mastering YouTube sponsorships. Having developed these steps over almost a decade of running successful creator campaigns for brands, we can confidently say that this playbook is guaranteed to bring your brand better results from your YouTube partnerships.
Is this playbook right for your brand?
Before diving into YouTube sponsorships, it’s crucial to conduct a Brand Analysis to understand whether your brand is a good fit for this unique advertising space. Not all brands find success from working with YouTube creators, and taking the time to assess your fit can save you time and resources.
YouTube is a powerful fit for many brands
YouTube excels at reaching broad and highly engaged audiences. Brands offering digital services, tech gadgets, lifestyle products, or entertainment-focused offerings often find immense value in this platform. The diverse and expansive audience base ensures that brands with creative, engaging, and visually compelling messages can thrive.
Brands that may not find YouTube the best fit
While YouTube offers immense potential, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Certain businesses may face challenges achieving desired ROI due to the platform’s broad, interest-based targeting approach. Examples include:
Local Businesses: Brands with very specific geographical targets, such as restaurants, might find Google Ads more effective for reaching their audience.
Targeting Specific Professions: Brands aiming to reach incredibly niche roles like “Food Packaging Technologist” or “Drainage Engineer” may struggle since YouTube lacks detailed audience occupation data.
Income-Specific Targeting: YouTube sponsorships remain inside the content for longtail viewers, which means that companies that have a primary offer that relies on a particular season on the year may find a better return on their ad spend by focusing on advertising options that deliver impressions within a specific timeframe
These limitations highlight that while YouTube is a powerful tool for broad or interest-based targeting, it may not be ideal for businesses with highly specific audience criteria.
Assessing Your Brand’s Readiness To determine if YouTube sponsorships are right for your brand, start by defining your identity and positioning. YouTube sponsorships thrive on authenticity and alignment. When creators connect with brands that resonate naturally with their audiences, the results can amplify your reach, build trust, and drive conversions. Taking the time to analyze your fit is the foundation for a successful YouTube sponsorship strategy.
What tools are needed to implement this playbook?
To implement this playbook effectively, you’ll need access to a comprehensive YouTube data platform that provides historical data, sponsorship projections, and tools for vetting creators based on performance metrics. Look for features like advanced channel filtering to identify similar channels to your recommended profiles and ensure you’re targeting the right audience.
Additionally, you’ll need the capacity to conduct meaningful outreach to creators, recognizing that not all will respond, and a dedicated team—whether in-house or outsourced—to manage outreach, campaign execution, and performance monitoring.
The ThoughtLeaders platform provides all the data tools you need, and our team of experts can handle the outreach,execution, and creator payments, ensuring your campaigns are optimized for success.
The ThoughtLeaders 9-steps playbook
Step 1: Audience
When it comes to YouTube sponsorships, defining your audience goes beyond traditional demographic targeting—it’s about understanding their interests, behaviors, and viewing habits. This step isn’t just about knowing who your customers are; it’s about determining what captivates them.
Your audience’s interests may extend far beyond your niche. For example, if you’re selling cocktail kits, you don’t have to limit yourself to sponsoring alcohol-related channels. Your customers might also enjoy content about home decor, hosting tips, vintage style videos or even DIY projects. The key is to tap into the broader spectrum of channels that align with your audience’s interests, and look beyond the basic demographics.
This approach differs significantly from traditional PPC targeting, where you focus on specific demographic filters like age, gender, and location. YouTube sponsorships require a mindset shift: you’re targeting audiences based on what they watch, not just who they are. It’s about finding channels that resonate with your customers’ broader lifestyle and preferences, even if they don’t directly relate to your product category.
Actionable Steps
Analyze demographic data: To understand your audience's interests, behavior, and viewing habits, start with the basics: determining your audience demographics. This includes age, gender, location, and other key factors that help define who they are and what interests them.
Map out interests and viewing habits:: Look at your brand’s buyer persona and explore the interests and behaviors of your target audience. Identify the types of content they engage with on YouTube, including channels and topics that may not directly relate to your product but align with their broader lifestyle and preferences. Consider what other interests they share that complement your business offering.
Once you have those interests listed, use them to draw up a series of relevant keywords that relate to these topics. This will make it easier for you to identify the exact content that relates to the subject that your audience is most likely to be watching and engaging with on YouTube.
Why This Matters
By understanding your audience at this deeper level, you can identify the kinds of creators and channels that align with their passions and habits. This ensures your sponsorships feel authentic and reach people where they’re truly engaged, creating a connection that goes beyond simple ad placement.
Taking the time to brainstorm and map out your audience’s diverse interests will open up a world of opportunities for sponsorships that resonate and drive results.
Step 2: Your YouTube Footprint
Your YouTube footprint is the foundation for building a data-driven and impactful sponsorship strategy. Whether you already have previous experience with YouTube sponsorships or are just starting to explore this space, understanding your presence on the platform is crucial.
If you’ve done sponsorships before, analyzing your past campaigns can reveal what worked, what didn’t, and where you can improve. But don’t stop there—tracking organic mentions can uncover additional channels that naturally align with your product and audience. These mentions show that your product seamlessly fits into their content, making them excellent candidates for future sponsorships. Creators who already champion your product bring an unmatched authenticity to their promotions, and their audiences are likely to see the sponsorship as a natural extension of their ongoing support, amplifying its impact.
If you’re new to YouTube sponsorships, tracking organic mentions is your first step to discovering channels whose audiences already resonate with your brand, and your existing brand champions on YouTube.
This step isn’t just about revisiting the past—it’s about uncovering hidden opportunities and leveraging your YouTube presence to its fullest potential.
Track organic mentionsto identify additional channels where your product fits naturally. If a channel’s audience already engages with your product, it’s a strong indicator that a sponsorship could perform well.
Use the ThoughtLeaders sponsorship scoretogether with the ROI data from previous campaigns to rank channels and prioritize high-performing partners.
For brands without past sponsorships:
Identify and analyze organic mentions to uncover channels where your product is already gaining traction. These mentions indicate a natural alignment between the channel’s content and your offering.
Why This Matters
Analyzing your past sponsorships and tracking organic mentions allows you to uncover untapped opportunities and refine your sponsorship strategy. Organic mentions provide valuable proof that your product fits naturally into a creator’s content, making them strong candidates for future sponsorships. By combining past campaign data with insights from organic mentions, you can ensure that your current sponsorship campaign aligns with your goals, resonates with your audience, and delivers a strong ROI.
Step 3: Guide Brands
Guide brands can provide valuable inspiration for YouTube sponsorship success, and they aren’t limited to your direct competitors. A guide brand could be a company whose YouTube strategy you admire, one with a brand voice that aligns with yours, or a brand speaking to a similar audience—even if they offer a completely different product. By analyzing their previous experience with YouTube sponsorships, you can uncover winning tactics, target the right channels, and refine your approach.
This step is about leveraging insights from guide brands to shape your unique strategy. Their successes—and even their shortcomings—can inspire smarter, more effective sponsorship campaigns for your brand.
Actionable Steps
Identify your guide brands: List brands with similar products, audiences, or strategies you want to emulate. These can include competitors or brands with a resonant voice or complementary audience.
Research their past sponsorship on YouTube: Explore the channels they’ve sponsored and their YouTube sponsorship history, the content themes they’ve targeted, and the level of audience engagement they’ve achieved.
Analyze their offers: Look at the types of offers they’ve used in their campaigns, such as discounts (e.g., 20% off) or free trials (e.g., 30 days free), to identify what might resonate most with your audience, and how your offer can stand out.
Assess channel volume and budget: Review the volume of channels the guide brands have sponsored to gauge how much budget they invested in making an impact. Use this insight to estimate the scale and resources needed for your campaign.
Extract insights: Identify what worked for them, such as evergreen content, successful YouTube verticals, and note gaps or missed opportunities you can leverage.
Why This Matters
Your guide brands offer insights into what works on YouTube. By studying their strategies and building on top of the trial and error we see from their campaign, you can use their successes for your own advantage and create campaigns that avoid wasting money on the same mistakes these other brands might have made in the past. Learning from other brands in your space can actually help to set your brand apart on YouTube.
Step 4: Winners
The winning channels that have performed best for your Guide Brands offer a shortcut to refining your YouTube sponsorship strategy. These are the creators delivering results for similar brands, and studying them can reveal new opportunities for your campaigns.
By analyzing their content and performance, you can uncover new ways to connect with your audience and align your message with creators who resonate.
Actionable Steps
Identify the YouTube creators consistently sponsored by competitors: Use granular data to see how frequently a competitor has worked with a particular creator, when the last sponsorship occurred, and the overall consistency of their collaborations.
Analyze sponsorship details: Review the style of sponsorships competitors used (e.g., product demos, unboxings, testimonials) and the messaging they employed. Examine how the content aligns with their brand goals and resonates with the audience.
Be aware of exclusivity: When analyzing creators who worked with direct competitors, consider the possibility of exclusivity agreements. If a competitor has exclusivity with a creator, you may need to wait a few months or target a similar creator in the same niche instead of pursuing the exact same channel.
Evaluate themes and topics: Break down the themes and topics of the most successful sponsored content to uncover patterns and insights that align with your campaign goals.
Leverage winning keywords: Extract top keywords from these high-performing channels and use our keyword search feature to discover similar creators on YouTube who use these keywords in their content. This approach helps expand your pool of potential channels with proven relevance to your niche.
Rank and evaluate potential: Use tools like the ThoughtLeaders Sponsorship Score to rank creators based on their performance, engagement metrics, and alignment with your target audience.
Why This Matters
Your competitors’ successes provide valuable clues. By learning from their winning channels, you can focus on creators with proven performance, maximize your ROI, and skip the trial-and-error phase.
Step 5: The Filters
Now that you’ve gathered a wealth of data from your previous experience with YouTube sponsorships, competitors, and audience analysis, it’s time to apply it strategically. This step is all about creating what we call “Your Filters”—a tailored set of criteria that will guide you in selecting the ideal YouTube channels for your sponsorships.
Think of these filters as the blueprint for your perfect channel partner. By defining the key traits and characteristics you’re looking for, you can streamline the decision-making process and ensure every sponsorship aligns with your goals. These filters are based on the data you’ve uncovered, allowing you to move forward with clarity and confidence.
Actionable Steps
Review data: Analyze your winning channels and those of your competitors to identify successful patterns in topics, keywords they use, themes, and demographics.
Define your filters:
Pinpoint key topics, keywords, themes, and demographics (age, gender, location) that align with your target audience.
Set ideal channel sizes, average views, and performance metrics based on your data.
Build your recommended channel profile: Summarize the key traits of ideal channels into a clear recommendation profile to guide your sponsorship decisions.
Why This Matters
Building Your Filters helps you translate raw data into actionable insights. Instead of wading through endless channel options, you now have a precise framework to identify the YouTube creators that align with your goals, and you can easily make a list of potential creators for your campaign. This step ensures you’re targeting the right creators—those with the audience, content, and engagement metrics that will drive meaningful results for your brand.
Step 6: Red Flags
After defining your filters, the next step is to vet the channels you’ve shortlisted to ensure they align with your brand values and objectives. This process helps you eliminate the channels that are less likely to deliver an effective sponsorship and focus on creators who are a perfect fit for your sponsorship goals. Spotting red flags early saves time, money, and potential reputational risks.
Actionable Steps
Check for Brand Safety- Review the channel’s content for inappropriate themes, controversial language, or values that misalign with your brand.. Additionally, you can check the channel's brand safety rating or create a list of keywords you want to avoid and verify if any of those terms appear in the creator’s content.
Do a Quick Google Search - If you’re on the fence about a channel, perform a quick Google search to see if their name appears in any news articles or controversies. This step can provide an extra layer of assurance about their reputation.
Analyze Audience Engagement - Assess the tone and quality of audience interactions. Look at how viewers engage with the channel through comments, likes, and views. Metrics like Average Views per Comment can provide valuable insights into audience activity and sentiment.
Verify Performance Metrics - Gain deeper insights into channel performance with our comprehensive analytics, featuring key metrics like fulfillment rate, renewal rate, average evergreen performance, subscriber growth rate, projected views, and more.These indicators help you estimate potential performance and determine an ideal price to achieve your desired ROI.
Look for Consistency - Prioritize channels with a consistent upload cadence. Regular uploads signal professionalism and a strong connection with their audience, ensuring reliable content delivery. Additionally, evaluate the channel’s view patterns to ensure stability. Avoid channels with significant volatility, such as getting 10,000 views on one video and only 200 on another, as this may indicate an inconsistent audience engagement or fluctuating content relevance.
Find other brands that worked and renewed with the channel - Focus on channels that have worked with brands similar to yours at least three times. If a channel has no sponsorship history, or has only ever worked with brands for a single sponsorship with no renewal deals, you should be more wary about working with that channel.
Why This Matters
By identifying and addressing red flags, you ensure that your sponsorship investments are targeted toward creators who have a strong track record, engage their audiences authentically, and deliver measurable results. Using data to easily analyze the list of channels and remove any potential partnerships that are less likely to perform well is key for making sure your campaign stays on track, and avoid any obvious pitfalls.
Step 7: Close the Deal
Once you’ve vetted the channels and narrowed down your list, it’s time to initiate outreach, start the conversation with creators and book sponsorships. Outreach is more than just sending an email—it’s about building a compelling case for why creators should partner with your brand. Creators are very selective about the brands they work with, so never assume that a creator will be happy to champion your brand to their audience just for the paycheck. Just as you have vetted them, they will want to vet you and make sure that your brand is a good fit for their content.
Actionable Steps
1. Prepare Your Outreach
Gather contact details for your vetted channels and craft a concise and personalized message that does the following:
Explain your campaign goals and what you’re looking for from the creator.
Highlight something exciting about your brand and why your product is something they should promote to their audience.
Make it clear this is a paid integration.
Provide an example of a successful integration to guide the creator’s approach. This could be a previous sponsorship they’ve done for another brand or a standout partnership one of your other collaborators has created for your brand.
Confirm where your integration will be placed, ensuring it’s positioned early in the video or during high-engagement moments, rather than near the end when most viewers may have already dropped off.
Include questions about missing details you want to know - like pricing, audience demos or insights and any additional info needed.
Keep the message short and direct— remember that creators receive numerous pitches daily.
2. Follow Up
Don’t expect a reply right away. Creators are busy, so follow up if you don’t hear back within a few days.
3. Negotiate and Finalize
Clarify Expectations: Clearly define deliverables, timelines, and key messaging points to ensure alignment with your campaign goals.
Establish View Guarantees (When Necessary): Set a minimum view guarantee if the channel’s viewership is inconsistent. This helps protect your investment by ensuring a baseline level of performance for your sponsorship.
Include Non-Compete Clauses(When Relevant): Consider adding a non-compete clause if the channel is highly relevant to your niche and your competitors are strong players. This ensures exclusivity and prevents direct competitors from leveraging the same creator during your campaign period.
Consider Using a Trusted Partner
Companies like ThoughtLeaders can streamline outreach, improve reply rates, and handle negotiation details, ensuring smoother collaborations. With a trusted name in the space and strong existing relationships with thousands of creators, ThoughtLeaders brings both credibility and efficiency to the process.
Why This Matters
Successful outreach and negotiation set the tone for a productive partnership. Thoughtful, professional communication can differentiate your brand in a crowded inbox and ensure you secure top-tier creators who are genuinely excited to represent your brand.
Step 8: Execute
Executing a YouTube sponsorship is a highly nuanced process that requires careful coordination, constant oversight, and attention to detail. From setting up clear creator guidelines to monitoring results in real-time, this step is where strategy meets execution. Without the right expertise and careful coordination, even the best-planned campaigns can falter.
Successful execution demands aligning multiple moving parts, ensuring the creator delivers your message effectively, and optimizing for engagement and conversions.
Actionable Steps
1. Establish Clear Creator Guidelines:
Define and communicate guidelines for acceptable content, including tone, language, and themes, to protect your brand integrity.
Communicate with creators to ensure they understand and align with your messaging while maintaining their authentic style. One of the most important things brands can do is give creators as much creative bandwidth as possible. Don’t be overly restrictive—allow creators the freedom to maintain their unique style and tone, as being too prescriptive can lead to inorganic or overly scripted content that may alienate their audience. Strive to empower the creators you work with to craft ads and sponsorships that resonate with their audience and deliver the best results. Creators know their audience and how to present an ad that works, so brands need to trust in their ability to create impactful ads, rather than being overly prescriptive about how that messaging should be delivered.
Craft the perfect talking points - Provide creators with concise, impactful talking points that deliver your brand's core message within a 30 to 60 second window. Your talking points should not exceed 2 pages. It's crucial to ensure that the talking points in the draft clearly outline everything that must be included and what is not allowed. Since it's an industry standard to allow only one round of edits, leaving minimal room for mistakes is essential. Striking the right balance between providing strict guidelines and allowing creators the freedom to express their unique voice is key to a successful collaboration.
2. Provide clear guidelines for creators to link back to your landing page, making it clear to their audience what actions they should take to learn more about your product.
Here are some best practices for driving conversions:
Provide a QR code (linking to your landing page) for creators to display on screen during the ad. This is useful for encouraging conversions from viewers watching on their TV, rather than on desktop or mobile devices.
Provide creators with a personalized URL for them to include at the top of the video description, above the fold.
Ask creators to also include your link in a pinned comment once the video is live to maximize the impact of the ad.
Ensure that all these links include tracking, so you can clearly understand the impact and traffic driven by each of your YouTube sponsorships.
3. Review and Approve Content:
It's recommended to request a draft script from creators at least 5 days before the video goes live to review the ad's content. Following script approval, it is highly recommended to ask for a draft video at least 3 days prior to the ad's scheduled publication.
Carefully review draft videos to confirm they align with your messaging, tone, and campaign goals. This involves evaluating not only what is said but also how it’s delivered—visuals, pacing, and calls-to-action all matter.
If requesting edits, ensure they align closely with the approved talking points to maintain clarity and consistency while respecting the creator's unique style.
4. Monitor Real-Time Performance:
Track the video's performance as soon as it goes live. Metrics like view counts, audience engagement, and conversions need constant monitoring to identify any issues early. Keep an eye on the comments to make sure the conversation around your brand is positive
Ensure creators meet agreed-upon timelines and deliver on view guarantees. This process becomes much easier with tracking software that automatically monitors the video’s performance during the allotted view window. The software can alert you if the view guarantee is not met, allowing you to request that the creator honors your agreement by releasing an additional video.
Why This Matters
YouTube sponsorship execution is complex and involves much more than simply handing over talking points. Missteps—whether in messaging, creator alignment, or performance tracking—can result in wasted budgets and missed opportunities.
Step 9: Scale
Scaling your YouTube sponsorship strategy is not just about doing more—it’s about doing better. To truly grow, you need to dig deep into your campaign results, learn from the data, and refine your approach. Scaling is a strategic process that requires identifying what works, eliminating what doesn’t, and constantly optimizing your filters and strategy for greater success.
This step is where brands often realize the complexity of sponsorship campaigns. Analyzing performance, negotiating renewals, and refining strategies require not just time but expertise.
Actionable Steps
Analyze Campaign Performance:
Track performance metrics like views, clicks, and conversions to assess the effectiveness of each sponsorship.
Cross-reference your performance data with other channel metrics to work out insights about your best performers. Did your sponsorships perform best in longer or shorter videos, on channels with smaller or bigger audiences, with higher or lower posting frequency or with particular audience demographics?
Learn from Your Best and Worst Performers:
Identify your five best-performing creators and negotiate long-term deals with them to build consistency and trust with their audiences.
Review your five worst-performing channels to uncover what went wrong—were they the wrong fit? Was the messaging unclear? Learn from these missteps to improve future campaigns.
Refine Your Filters - Go back to the "Your Filters" step and update your criteria based on the insights from your latest campaign. This iterative approach ensures you’re constantly improving your targeting and strategy.
Evaluate Audience Feedback - Dive into the comments section of sponsored videos to understand audience sentiment. Did they resonate with the messaging? Were there any criticisms or suggestions? Use this feedback to enhance future campaigns.
Run the Process Again - Use the updated filters and findings to revisit earlier steps. Scaling is an ongoing process of learning and iterating, not a one-time adjustment.
Why This Matters
Scaling requires a systematic approach to ensure growth is both effective and sustainable. Without careful evaluation and refinement, campaigns risk plateauing or even declining in performance. By identifying your top creators, addressing weaknesses, and optimizing your filters, you can drive higher ROI and maintain momentum.
Conclusion
Mastering YouTube sponsorships requires a thoughtful, data-driven approach that prioritizes authenticity, alignment, and performance. By following this playbook, you’ll gain a strategic framework for building successful partnerships with creators, optimizing your campaigns, and driving measurable results for your brand.
Whether you’re a seasoned expert in influencer marketing or just starting to explore YouTube sponsorships, this guide empowers you to make informed decisions that maximize ROI and deepen connections with your target audience. Remember, the key to success lies in continual analysis, adaptation, and scaling as you learn from your results.
Ready to take your YouTube sponsorship strategy to the next level?
Partner with ThoughtLeaders for expert data and seamless campaign execution.
Visit ThoughtLeaders.io to learn how our platform and team can help you.
