Come farsi sponsorizzare da un brand, senza avere 200k follower?

Summary

Camilla Mandarino explains how she secured a sponsor for a new YouTube format despite having a small channel—not a large audience of 200,000 or more followers.

The project grew out of her existing content about social media work. Its goal was to show how digital professionals do their jobs through on-the-ground interviews that are both inspirational and practically useful.

Rather than seeking a one-off ad or production-cost coverage, Camilla wanted a sponsor for the whole format. Register.it agreed to sponsor a launch video and four episodes, each featuring a different guest.

Sponsorship Pitch Playbook

• Build a distinctive format around an audience need. The episodes would follow professionals at work and share useful career or business lessons, such as how freelancers find clients or how to apply to an agency.
• Find a sponsor with a natural audience fit. Register.it serves freelancers and small marketing businesses, a broad audience Camilla also wanted to reach.
• Contact the right decision-maker. Camilla already knew Register.it’s marketing-strategy contact. For a cold approach, she recommends using LinkedIn to find someone in marketing, HR, or employer branding rather than emailing a generic inbox.
• Keep the pitch concise and sponsor-focused. She used Claude to help structure the pitch before creating a presentation. Her guiding principle was to explain the sponsor’s benefit, not just the creator’s idea.
• Explain the integration and distribution plan. The presentation covered the format, how the brand could appear across episodes, the episode count and release timing, the platforms involved, and plans to direct Instagram and TikTok followers to YouTube.
• Show why the sponsor should say yes:
  • Audience overlap between the creator and the brand.
  • Previous collaborations that demonstrated her content could generate results, despite her small YouTube audience.
  • Guest participation that could bring additional audiences to each episode through organic sharing. Camilla presented this as an expectation, not a proven outcome.
• Sell strategic value, not just product placement. The series could help Register.it reinforce its positioning as an all-in-one provider for online businesses, rather than promote a single tool in a one-off ad.

Business and Marketing Takeaways

• Prioritize brands that already know and trust your work. Existing relationships can make a small creator’s proposal more credible.
• When approaching a brand cold, include relevant content samples, previous partnerships, and performance data to support your claims.
• A multi-episode partnership can offer a stronger brand-positioning opportunity than isolated sponsored posts, especially when the content naturally fits the sponsor’s target audience.
• Keep the format valuable to viewers. Camilla wanted the series to offer practical takeaways, not just feature prominent creators talking about themselves.
• Her YouTube production challenge was operational as well as commercial: ideation, filming, and editing made consistent weekly publishing difficult. An earlier idea had stagnated after roughly two months.

Metrics, Commitments, and Limitations

• Camilla described herself as having about 1,000 YouTube subscribers. The subtitles also include a passing reference to 5,000, so the precise figure is unclear. Her central point was that she considered her channel small.
• The sponsorship commitment was one launch video plus four episodes, each with a different guest.
• She described cross-platform promotion from Instagram and TikTok to YouTube, but gave no conversion targets or results.
• No sponsorship fee, campaign budget, release dates, audience-growth target, or actual performance results were stated.

Presenters and Sources

• Presenter: Camilla Mandarino
• Sponsor discussed: Register.it
• Other source or tool mentioned: Claude, which helped structure the pitch; Gabriele, Register.it’s marketing-strategy contact.