Persuading advertisers

Your audience data is your most powerful weapon when talking to advertisers.

Nothing else will help you close as many deals as quickly.

Kurtis Hanni from SMB FinanceOS used audience data to sell $50,000+ in ads within just a few weeks.

CJ Gustafson from Mostly metrics used audience data to double sponsorship rates overnight.

CJ’s story

Before CJ Gustafson had good audience data, he struggled to sell ads.

His content was top-notch. He had 20k subscribers — many of them huge fans. Yet, selling ads was a struggle.

This changed when he got access to good audience data.

He doubled his sponsorship prices overnight. He landed sponsor after sponsor. Sales became easy.

He even had to create more content to fulfill the demand from advertisers. Nowadays, CJ sells out all ad slots for:

1. The Mostly metrics newsletter, which he sends 3x per week
2. Podcast episodes published 3x per week
3. A dinner series for CFOs

All at premium prices.

(CJ just started another newsletter to have even more ad inventory.)

How can data make such a big difference?

Advertisers pay to get in front of a certain audience.

That’s their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — the customers they want to acquire. All their money goes towards reaching that audience.

For Mostly metrics, advertisers usually want to reach finance people, especially CFOs. (Those are the decision makers.)

CJ could tell sponsors: “I write finance content, so I must have a finance audience.”

However, that’s not very convincing. There will always be irrelevant people in every audience. His mom, for example. Or a product manager who wants to get better at business. Or subscribers from India without purchasing power.

Advertisers know this. They know they might not see conversions. Thus, it is a risk for them to advertise with you.

They want to know: Will they see a positive ROI?

Addressing this doubt with data

CJ uses audience data to eliminate this uncertainty.

He has detailed job data on 50%+ of his audience.

He can tell advertisers something like the following: “Based on my data, my audience is 42% finance people. 4,500 subscribers are CFOs. 85% are US-based.

“I have who you are trying to reach.”

This completely changes the conversation. It builds trust. Advertisers know exactly who will see their messaging. There is no gamble. They can make informed decisions about whether Mostly metrics is right for them. (Often, it is.)

Sales is so much about eliminating uncertainty.

For CJ, it has been a night and day difference between not having audience data and having it. Sales took off. He created more content to fulfill sponsor demand. Nowadays, his media company is incredibly successful.

How can I use audience data to persuade sponsors?

There are two approaches. I recommend combining both:

1. General — a strong media kit
2. Tailored — custom audience insights

Let’s break them down one by one.

1) A strong media kit

Start from the data your advertisers are asking for. What do they usually want to know about your audience?

That’s the data you should put into your media kit.

In B2B, common attributes are job function, seniority, industry, company size, and country. You might also want to include industry-specific data points.

Analyze your audience data and create percentage breakdowns:

• Job function: For CJ, those could be:
  • 42% Finance
  • 19% Founders
  • 14% Marketing
  • 10% Product
• Seniority: Founder, C-Suite, VP, Director, Manager, Individual Contributor
• Industry: Tech, Consulting, E-commerce
• Company size: 1-20, 20-50, 50-200, 200-1,000, 1,000-10,000, 10,000+
• Country: US, UK, Canada

Industry-specific data points could be:

• Assets under management (AUM)
• Shopify store revenue (in an e-commerce newsletter)
• Aircraft type and brand (in a publication for pilots)

Create charts. Maybe pay a designer to create a good-looking media kit for you.

Here’s an example from Stacked Marketer:

Your media kit is important sales material. Hand it to every potential advertiser.

2) Custom audience insights

Every advertiser has a different ICP.

When CJ talks to a potential sponsor, he asks them about their ICP. Who do they want to reach?

Then he dives into his data. He segments his subscriber list. He identifies how many of his subscribers match the advertiser’s ICP.

Then he gets back to them: “You said you wanted to reach CFOs at tech companies between series A and C. I found 800 of them.”

That’s powerful!

To the advertiser, these 800 CFOs will be worth 5-7 figures each if they sign a contract. Thus, buying ads (or even 3 months of ads) becomes a no-brainer.

It also makes CJ stand out. This level of service is rare.

CJ has used custom audience insights to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads.

A little trick

Let’s say you have data on 50% of your audience. Let’s say that among those 50% you find 1,000 subscribers who match the advertiser’s ICP.

You’ll want to report to the advertiser how many subscribers match their ICP overall, not just among the 50% with data.

To get there, multiply those 1,000 subscribers by 2. You arrive at the estimate that your full list has 2,000 subscribers who match the ICP.

Combining both strategies

Combining both strategies is powerful:

1. Use your media kit to paint the overall picture of who your audience is.
2. Provide advertisers with custom insights about their ICPs.

It drives results

Doing this, CJ sells out all ad slots with ease. He now struggles to create more content to fulfill advertiser demand.

Kurtis Hanni from SMB FinanceOS also uses audience data for ad sales. After first getting access to good audience data, he sold $50k+ of ads in just a few weeks.

Ad: What if I don’t have any audience data yet?

This is what I’ve built Megahit for. It is a data tool for B2B media companies.

Both CJ and Kurtis have been using it for 2 years to obtain detailed audience insights for advertisers.

Megahit finds your subscribers’ names, job titles, employers, LinkedIn profiles, and more. All from their email addresses (even from Gmails).

It then gives you detailed audience statistics for job function, seniority, industry, company size, country, and more.

CJ, Kurtis, and many other media companies use Megahit to do sales on easy mode.

Check out Megahit! I’d love to give you a demo.