What’s the right way to sponsor a YouTube influencer?

Julian Shapiro Contributor

Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com.

More posts by this contributor

• How to get people to open your emails
• How to get your ads working, and whether PR is worth it

We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

This is how you’re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can’t get elsewhere.

Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VP’s of growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo, and Ritual.

You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curve’s marketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program. See past growth reports here, here and here.

Without further ado, onto the advice.

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How do you sponsor YouTube influencers cost-effectively?

Based on insights from Bjarke Felbo of Rune (LinkedIn). Lightly edited with permission.

• Influencers often expect compensation proportional to subscribers, but conversions happen proportional to views. So go after the influencers with high views and low subscribers. That’s the trick.
• We’ve had the best success with 30-60 second promo spots at the beginning of the influencer’s video.
• We’ve seen success depend on the video it’s attached to and what time of day/week it’s posted, so we’re strict about setting rules around that. Or, we give them a bonus based on the video’s view count to incentivize them to put our spot on a high-quality video.
• Be careful with repeat promotions with the same influencer. These haven’t yielded noteworthy returns for us — even after months. It’s likely that the audience becomes saturated.

For SEO, how much does link building really matter in 2019?

From Nat Eliason of Growth Machine. Lightly edited by Demand Curve with permission.

• Links are still important, but their importance is decreasing steadily. Google is getting better at evaluating content quality, and it’s focusing more on that.
• Consider this: Google doesn’t want to be gameable, and domain authority and link building are very gameable. But content quality is not. You can’t fake good content.
• Many major blogs outside of high authority spaces have grown rapidly using less link-building. Much of their energy is instead spent on choosing the right keywords (low competition, but still acceptable volume) and writing useful content that satisfies the searcher’s intent.
• However, link-building can still speed up the process quite a bit if you’re on a tight timeline, or if you’ve given content 3-4 months to rank and aren’t seeing the results you want.

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• Validating New Ideas w/ Hiten Shah (FYI, KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg)
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What’s the best way to take over a Twitter account from an inactive user?

Based on insights from Andrew Ettinger of Atoms. Lightly edited with permission.

Someone has your brand name as their Twitter handle and their account is inactive. How do you get access to it?

1. Create an ads account with an existing handle you want to swap for the one you’re trying to claim.
2. Go to twitter.com/en/help
3. Click on Account issues -> Claim an inactive username.
4. Submit a case.

You’ll then want your Twitter ads account manager to escalate your case (give them the case #).

This is not guaranteed. Your best chance of claiming that handle will be to have an existing Twitter employee escalate your case.

Demand Curve’s Asher King Abramson will lead a growth marketing session where he’ll tear down your landing pages and Facebook/Instagram ads in front of a live audience. He’ll deconstruct how effective they are at (1) conveying what you do (2) and doing so enticingly — so that people click.

If you’re attending Disrupt and want to participate, you can submit your assets to ec_editors@techcrunch.com for him to consider.