Sponsorship Strategies

Helping Brands Improve Their ROI Through Effective
Sponsorship Strategies

When you are organizing an event, creating sponsorship opportunities is just one of the things you have to worry about. You also have to put on the event and get people to attend. In terms of the sponsorship, you have to secure the sale. There is therefore a lot of pressure on your time, which often makes it difficult to improve your ROI from the sponsorship of the event. This is particularly evident when you have a small organizing team. One solution to improving ROI from the sponsorships you secure is to help the sponsors improve their ROI too. That is done through effective sponsorship strategies.

Doing this involves devoting more time and effort to the sponsor as well as being more creative and flexible, but the rewards can be measured both in the short term and the long term:

• You can enhance the experience of those attending your event.
• Securing a sponsorship from the same company in the future will be easier if you deliverabove expectations.
• Client testimonials and case studies demonstrating tangible real-world success can help you find new businesses to sponsor future events.

To achieve this, you have to do more than simply put on a fantastic event.

A Logo Is Not Sponsorship

One of the first steps is to appreciate that event sponsors want more than a brand-building exercise.

They want to connect with the audience in a real and meaningful targeted way, and they want tangible results. This could mean people taking a trial for a product, interacting on social media, signing up for a special offer, or even making a purchase. Sponsors want these results during or connected to your event. In other words, putting their logo on signage, press releases, and other marketing materials is no longer enough.

Instead, it means a new way of thinking. You should start moving beyond getting sponsors for your event to finding partners. This is a much better way to describe the relationship, as it shows that all parties involved can work together to increase what everyone gets from the event.

Forward-thinking sponsors consider these opportunities as customer activation strategies rather than simple brand building exercises. Increasing brand awareness is part of the overall plan, but it is not the goal itself. The actual goal is to move potential customers—the people attending your event—closer to a buying decision.

Strategies that sponsors can use to achieve this include creating a unique experience of their own at the event or organizing their own entertainment. They can run competitions, make available event-only special offers, give out samples, register people for free trials, and more but all these are experiential activations which sponsors today demand from their marketing budgets.

How You Can Help Sponsors Make Their Sponsorship Strategies Work

You can facilitate, encourage, and sell these opportunities by thinking about your event from the sponsor’s point of view. Here are some tips:

• Clearly define your demographic.
• Know your sponsors objective and create a strategy to achieve this for them.
• Look beyond the revenue to offering offsite events surrounding your event date(s).
• Think quality over quantity.
• Be creative.