Category: Top Sponsorship Tips

Charity Sponsorship: Top 5 Reasons Why Companies Get Involved 24th February, 2011

With the current economic downturn and the critical financial issues of the market, it is vital that companies find new ways to differentiate themselves against their competitors and increase brand awareness amongst their target audience. There are a number of ways to do this, but one of the best ways to increase brand awareness is through sponsorship – specifically sponsorship in relation to charitable work and activities.

Brands have been involved with charities as part of their corporate social responsibility positioning for decades. However, a recent occurrence that is increasing is linking brand support of charities through marketing campaigns and sponsorship activation. Associating charitable support through sponsorship rights is an effective way to create an emotive response alongside the goodwill already built through their sponsorship activation.

But what are the reasons that drive a company to sponsor a charity? Although there are many reasons, here are our top 5:

1. Increasing brand loyalty: sponsoring a charity is a business deal rather than a charitable donation. Companies choose to sponsor a charity in order to align their PR activity with a cause-related issue that enables them to build or increase their reputation amongst their target market.

2. Brand differentiation: sponsoring a charity has the potential to differentiate their brand against other competitors who don’t support charities.

3. Awareness and visibility: as charities typically rely on volunteers to run their business and have small marketing budgets, social media plays a vital role in their marketing strategy. Brands who are involved with charitable work can typically work with the charities to utilise these social networks in order to promote their association providing a greater reach into a different audience.

4. Highlighting corporate social responsibility: supporting a charity enhances a company’s credibility in a way that can spread a positive attitude amongst their audience and help them reach a new market.

5. Client entertainment: this can form a key part of a brands strategy, especially in regards to cultural or athletic events in which brands can activate their experiential marketing campaigns and/or meet with key individuals.

Need a Sponsorship Sales Consultant? Top 10 Things to Ask Yourself 21st February, 2011

The need for sponsorship sales consultants is apparent everywhere. On almost every LinkedIn Group, Twitter feed, and on numerous email requests I see people looking for someone who can sell their property rights. Considering money can be hard to come by, I understand the reasons why this is now one of the most sought after positions. However, there are things that you should consider and things you need to be aware of before you take someone on.

In this blog, I’ll explain the Top 10 Things You Should Ask Yourself before considering hiring a sponsorship sales agency or consultant. There are variations of sponsorship consultants – those that work on commission-only, those that work on tactical, those that work with sports personalities, and many more variations.

In this first blog of a series, we’ll start by looking at whether you even need one and if you do, can you support one?

Do you need a sponsorship sales consultant? If you have enough resource and staff with a good knowledge of both your property and an idea of what sponsorship can achieve, then you might not even need a sponsorship sales consultant. If you don’t have this, then…
Can you outsource sponsorship sales to another sales department? Sometimes this can be disastrous – most often when the media ad sales team tries to take this task on. However, sometimes all it needs is a bit of sponsorship sales training and the right sponsorship proposals for your media ad sales teams to hit the ground running.
Do you understand sponsorship strategy? If you are unsure about what sponsorship assets you own and how to package them, typically you will need more than just a sponsorship sales consultant, you will need a sponsorship agency to valuate rights, put together a strategy and do the research.
Do you know if your property rights can be sold? History is a great way to understand what rights you have and if there is a market for them. However, many rights owners are just starting to integrate these strategies and are unsure of whether it can be done. As such, you really should determine the evaluation of the rights first before you waste time and resource in outsourcing sales that haven’t been strategically developed in the first place. You should evaluate your sponsorship rights before even considering hiring a sponsorship sales consultant.
Is sponsorship an organisational goal? Sponsorship takes a lot of time and effort (even if sales are outsourced) within an organisation. If it is not an organisational goal, it will often get left behind and sales (whether done internally or externally) will not be successful. It takes a whole organisation to support this activity and the resource should not be underestimated. However saying that, sponsorship can help drive organisational change and innovation – we just suggest that everyone is behind the idea before you get started.
Are there politics within offering sponsorship? Sponsorship can sometimes be a tricky thing to integrate due to politics. Sponsorship sales consultants who are not involved with the strategy may not appreciate these constraints without having a more long-term approach to working with your rights.
Do you have senior staff and/or board members who will be against new sponsors coming on board? If this is the case, it will be difficult to get sponsors involved and those that do get involved with have difficulty activating their sponsorship and will not renew, making your sponsorship unsustainable.
Do you understand your objectives with integrating sponsorship? Sponsorship not only can become a new revenue stream, it can also reduce costs. This is a great avenue, especially for new property rights and needs to be considered when approaching brands. Understanding the objectives and all the benefits you can achieve through sponsorship is important before hiring consultants so you can measure performance against KPIs.
Do you have enough time? Sponsorship tends to be an afterthought when budgets haven’t been met. This creates a situation of distress sales and can often be detrimental to the rights owners. This needs to be communicated carefully and sales need to be strategically thought out.
Do you know who to go to? Putting out random messages on social networks is not the best way to find sponsorship sales consultants. You need recommendations from people who have worked with them or have done the research. As mentioned, it is quite easy to call yourself a sponsorship sales consultant because so many people are in need. However, you need to do due diligence to ensure your programme is not dependent on people who cannot do the job.

Further to Question 10, we’ve had so many properties looking for consultants so we’ve put together an industry roster of sponsorship sales consultants. If you every need advice, please email [email protected] with your brief, property rights, and location and we will try and pair you up with a consultant that is most relevant to what you are looking to achieve.

For any sponsorship sales consultants who want to be on our roster, please check out this blog in order to qualify.

Email Newsletter Sponsorship: How to do it and Why 17th January, 2011

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels available, ensuring a wide reaching audience and proven results. E-Newsletters are particularly useful for organisations as a tool for communicating with customers, building engagement, driving traffic, and directing customers to key content. And, with a groundswell of readers behind it, an email newsletter can be used as a platform for sponsorship – providing a great revenue opportunity as well as a great marketing opportunity for potential brand partners to create new engagement opportunities with your audiences.

Sponsorship of e-Newsletters can be a powerful way to tap into a new customer segments and aligning your brand to relevant and complimentary topics or propositions. It helps increase exposure in a receptive environment (your customers’ inbox) and can subtly promote your brand whilst gaining goodwill through association.

For the converted, there are a variety of e-Newsletter sponsorship investment levels to consider, which vary according to type of audience (mass market B2C vs niche market B2B), frequency (daily vs monthly), and style of content (promotions vs editorial). From a cost perspective, most range between £1,000 and £3,500 a campaign (which may translate to a one off, mass market hit, or a monthly ‘takeover’ of display ads).

A great example of an e-Newsletter sponsorship opportunity is eConsultancy, who offer a prime position on their daily alerts for £2,250, which is sent out to a 10,000 to 12,000 opted-in subscriber list.

However, not all e-Newsletters are appropriate for the task. There are a few points that we always take into consideration when talking to clients about before considering this style of sponsorship. Here’s a quick overview:

1. Audience: an e-Newsletter can only be sponsored if it attracts an audience that is either sufficiently large or very niche. To state the obvious, B2C e-Newsletters require a large audience to be of interest, whilst B2B e-Newsletters can deliver value with smaller audiences with greater purchasing power. If you have an e-Newsletter that might be attractive to sponsors, but you don’t yet have a sponsorship sales strategy, you will need to demonstrate value in your audience through proof of size, quality and engagement of your audience. Most email marketing applications will provide you with basic analytics tools to generate this information.

2. Measurement: ROI is key to sponsorship and vital for brand sponsors when choosing who to spend their marketing budget with. Analytics tools will also provide publishers and sponsors with all of the necessary metrics to understand views, click throughs and open rates; and it is this data that will ensure that pricing and value for money are maintained at the right level.

3. Resource: sponsorship is not just about attaching someone else’s brand to yours. For this style of sponsorship to be successful there needs to be a dedicated team behind it that understands data, brand synergies, and the ability to unearth unseen co-branding opportunities. This is no small task, but this kind of attention to campaign management can turn e-Newsletter sponsorship opportunities into gold.

5 Sponsorship Predictions for 2011 5th January, 2011

We anticipate that 2011 is going to be a great year with a lot of changes in sponsorship. Not only for Slingshot Sponsorship, having recently signed some exciting clients including Haymarket and London Irish, but also for the sponsorship industry as a whole. With the Olympics around the corner, an interesting shift in marketing that has occurred as cause of the recession last year, as well as public funding cuts, we think sponsorship will take on a whole new meaning in 2011. We anticipate it will be a shift for current sponsors, rights holders, and brands alike looking to break into sponsorship. We can’t wait!

But before the year starts, we thought we’d put some of our 2011 predications together and then see how they play out!

More Engaging Sponsorship Campaigns: following the trend seen in 2010, we anticipate that the industry will become more creative in regards to creating brand engagement campaigns through sponsorship. Especially with the 2012 Olympics around the corner, everyone will be vying for the title of activation champion and devising some thought provoking campaigns to catch the attention of brands.
Decrease in Brand Ambassadors: after the backlash of negative publicity surrounding Tiger Woods and Wayne Rooney, we expect that we’ll see a decrease in the sponsorship of individuals and signing of brand ambassadors. Especially considering that the economic climate is still difficult, marketing directors are finding more red tape in regards to negotiations with the leading sports and music stars.
Increase in Sponsored Events and Tournaments: as a result of the decrease in brand ambassadors, brands will be looking to for new sponsorship opportunities to align themselves through main sponsorship of the events and/or tournaments. This will provide brands the opportunity to align themselves to the sport while minimising the risk of negative individual publicity.
Increase in Digital Sponsorship: digital sponsorship activation is starting to really take shape and drive sponsorship opportunities. In 2010, we saw an increase in iGaming companies sponsoring sports – especially premier league football. The introduction of these sponsorship deals has helped develop the rights owner’s digital strategy with the sponsor, enabling them to create synergy of digital resource. Our favourite digital sponsorship campaign in 2010 was the Manchester United vs Manchester City online campaign with slogans that fans could submit online for the promotional campaign produced by Betfair. This showed a great leap in digital sponsorship activation led by a digital sector based sponsor.
Cluttered Market for Public Funding: due to public funding cuts in the United Kingdom, we anticipate that there will be an influx of adequately written sponsorship proposals for fantastic CRM programmes sent directly to brands. As such, this will make it harder for sponsorship proposals to really stand out from the crowd. This creates a great opportunity for sponsorship agencies to help educate the market and aid in creating credible and sustainable sponsorship programmes in 2011.

Whatever 2011 holds, we’ll be sure to keep you posted on our Slingshot Sponsorship Blog. To ensure you don’t miss anything, please sign up on the right hand side of this post.

Slingshot Sponsorship wishes you all the best for 2011!

The Challenges Facing Sponsorship Evaluation 8th December, 2010

So What’s Wrong With Sponsorship Evaluation? Right now sponsorship evaluation should be a hot topic. Sponsorship spend continues to rise year on year and with the current economic situation you would think being able to demonstrate ROI would be critical right? Despite this evaluation budgets are still seemingly being cut left right and centre. So what prevents the sponsorship industry from embracing evaluation?

Here are seven possible reasons…

1. Poor objectives result in poor evaluation: Effective evaluation relies on being able to evaluate whether sponsorship objectives have been met. So if no objectives have been set, or if they simply aren’t measurable any research you commission is ultimately going to be a waste of money. However, few research companies are going to turn down the opportunity to spend your money just because you give them un-measurable objectives. The result…the industry gets flooded with ineffective evaluation. At this point marketing directors cut budgets as the research tells them nothing they don’t already know.

The misconception that evaluation results in the termination of a sponsorship programme: In reality that is very unlikely. In the majority of cases the decision to sponsor, although not always based on sound consumer insight, is at least logical and follows good common sense. No one is going to question a beer brand that chooses to align themselves with a social occasion like a music festival. So once this basic fit has been confirmed the evaluation should be able to provide a steer to improve the effectiveness of future planned activations. e.g. Increase spend for on-site activations that deliver cut through and decrease spend on radio adverts which research shows are failing to cut through. If the evaluation can’t do this, the conclusion is your budgets probably could be better spent.

Connected to point two is point three…

3. Conflict of interests: The person most likely to commission sponsorship evaluation is the very same person that created the programme or brokered the deal. Why would you want tangible evidence to show you have wasted your employers’ money? Suddenly selling sponsorship evaluation has become a lot harder! However, let’s go back to point two. There needs to be a mindset change, sponsorship evaluation should be commissioned to help fine-tune the effectiveness of the campaign. Evaluation is a tool that can help the sponsorship look better not worse, if vanity is really so important.

4. Limited understanding of the benefits: Sponsorship evaluation should be your friend. Here is how it can help. i. If you have tangible evidence that proves sponsorship has driven bottom line value it is much easier for you to protect your future sponsorship budgets. ii. Evaluation can be used during re-negotiations to ensure rights fees are kept in-line with the likely returns for the business based on previous experience with that property. iii. Consistently planned evaluation can be used to compare the performance of sponsorship programmes within your portfolio, so you can easily see which ones are delivering the best returns and how best to allocate future budgets. iv. Evaluation helps you understand the effectiveness of all your communication touchpoints, so if radio is providing less consumer cut through you will know to switch your focus to an activity which is working more effectively.

5. It’s too expensive: It is true consumer research can be expensive, but anyone can begin to understand and benchmark their sponsorship activity without spending a penny. Ok this output data won’t tell you about the effects of sponsorship but it can help you understand the reach comparative to the other activities within your portfolio, and that’s a start. Output data can include: Unique website visitors, event attendee numbers, number of free samples distributed, competition entries, number of VIP guests that actually showed up. Suddenly you have a way of benchmarking your sponsorship portfolio.

6. Advertising equivalency values (AVEs) / media evaluation has damaged the credibility of evaluation: The sponsorship evaluation industry was founded on media evaluation with students using stopwatches to calculate the length of time a sponsors’ logo was exposed, this exposure time was then turned into a figure purporting to show what this coverage would be worth if it was bought as advertising. How on earth did this ever become the established form of evaluation?

Well going back to point 3 if you don’t want to risk your programme from being cut, this is perfect. You get a simple figure, which suggests to your bosses you are delivering real monetary value to the business and no one has the time or desire to rock the boat. There are tons of reasons why advertising equivalency value is pointless, but here is one. Advertising is evaluated on effectiveness, not the cost to buy the space. So why should sponsorship be different?

7. The poor definition of sponsorship: Every sponsorship agency has at some time tried to write their own definition of what sponsorship actually means. Most practitioners would agree it is a two-way or mutually beneficial transaction between the rights holder and the sponsor. The sponsor gains access to valuable rights and the rights holder benefits from sponsor money or expertise through a value in kind deal. However, incredibly very few definitions ever suggest that a sponsorship should be directly linked to the business bottom line and generate actual sales. What message does this send out? You can blow thousands if not millions on sponsorship activity and never have to worry about proving a return. Sounds like a cop-out.

History suggests that in times of recession creativity and business agility come to the fore. Could this be the time when sponsorship finally grows up and begins to prove its true worth? Let’s hope so.

Top 10 Sponsorship Sales Tips 6th December, 2010

Sponsorship sales cannot be done by ad sales teams!

Great sponsorship sales people are hard to come by. Successful sponsorship sales people typically have a unique combination of skills including marketing, planning, communication and of course sales to be able to stay in the industry. We try to help uncover the secrets of success by outlining Slingshot Sponsorship’s Top 10 Sponsorship Sales tips:

Sell the benefit: in sponsorship, benefits vary depending on the sponsor company and rights owner. Sponsorship sales people are able to articulate this by taking one benefit and adjusting it to meet the needs of the prospect. For example, a VIP table at an event may be perfect for dining clients as well as equally perfect for incentivising staff. This leads on to the second tip…
Do your research: in order to sell the benefit, you need to understand the prospect’s objectives and how your sponsorship can meet those needs.
Speak in their language: although everyone in the sponsorship industry understands what activation is, the CEO of a telecommunications company who has never sponsored anything previously will not know what this means. By speaking in the same language, you are not only understanding the prospect, but also making it very easy for them to say yes.
Create tangible benefits: brand association is a word thrown around a lot. Of course this is one of the benefits of sponsorship; however, is incredibly difficult to justify. Great sponsorship sales people talk about prestige of association, but rarely lead with this.
Measurement: sponsorship sales people understand ROI and how to attribute sponsorship to it. Measurement is key and is always brought up in sponsorship sales conversations.
Mimic body language: by mirroring their body language (not in an obvious way!) you help make them feel at ease.
Listen: without listening, you won’t understand the brief or their objectives.
Provide solutions: sponsorship is a cost-effective marketing technique with added value. Explaining sponsorship as a marketing tool and comparing this against their other marketing platforms within their marketing mix is key.
Talk about their business: by understanding their business, you will be well on your way to helping their business.
Smile: people like to work with people that they like. This of course doesn’t always happen, but it goes a long way in deciding who to build a long term relationship with!

Sponsorship Measurement on Customer Behaviour is Key 13th November, 2010

For the majority of all sponsorship pitches, measurement is typically the last thing the sponsorship agency talks about when discussing sponsorship activation and rights purchase. It is of course within the pitch, but it is normally the last slide of the presentation and tends to include some very basic charts and graphs about how measurement will take place. Although sponsorship pitches used to work to perfection with beautiful images of the sponsors logo ‘zoomed’ in with great PowerPoint accuracy, this tends to only work when money and client spending is in excess, which no longer applies in our current economic climate. Results and ROI are now priority and many sponsorship agencies are struggling.

This is not to say that sponsorship does not bring fantastic results and ROI; however, is more a comment on the fact that sponsorship historically is built around building brand awareness, which can be difficult to measure. Results have also not always been the key reasons brands have sponsored in the past, typically looking for an affinity between the product and audience. This no longer is the case. In an era of increased accountability, rights owners and sponsorship agencies need to work together to create a consistent approach to measurement and ROI.

With the sponsorship industry priding itself on understanding audience and fans, it seems ironic that it is slow to recognise and respond to their sponsors’ needs for return on investment.

A measure on customer behaviour is key. For example, will the sponsorship bring in new customers and/or retain existing customers? If you can demonstrate a positive result for this, then you have achieved success.

– Mike Thompson, former Global Head of Sponsorship for E.ON

Some key tips for sponsorship measurement include:

Understand the brand objectives at the outset
Measure a baseline at the beginning
Identify focus groups that fit your sponsorship campaign profile
Measure sponsorship campaign and cost against a similar sole brand marketing campaign to prove the benefits synergy and engagement

Sponsorship is and can be hugely successful as a marketing platform, especially when it is attributed to return on investment. However, the sponsorship industry needs to work together in order to overcome the prejudice of corporate excess and prove results.

How to Integrate Sponsorship & Deliver ROI 3rd November, 2010

Sponsorship and brand partnerships are on the rise and almost mentioned as much as the terms social media and integrated marketing. However, not everyone seems to understand how to go about finding sponsorship funding or how to deliver a return on investment. Perhaps not as sexy as integration or social media, sponsorship and brand partnerships are actually much more interesting as they work within these medium as well incorporated above and below the line channels. The flexibility of sponsorship in the marketing environment opens up a world of possibilities, but with so many options, it can be difficult to understand the benefits.

Three top tips when considering sponsorship opportunities for your brand:

Is sponsorship right for me? Even before you decide on your goals, you must first make sure that sponsorship is the best way to communicate with your audience. Sponsorship is a great addition to your marketing mix, but only if it achieves your objectives and is planned out in a strategic way. A starting point for deciding whether sponsorship is the right fit would be understanding the audience and making sure that the audience is your target market. If they are not, any sponsorship messages, no matter how amazing they might be, will be lost.

Know your goals – In the planning stages, it is important to know your objectives for sponsorship at the outset. Sponsorship chosen to help get your brand some ‘face time’ will have different measurables than sponsorship chosen to give back to the community. Typically it will be a mixture of a variety of key benefits: showcasing expertise, aligning with another brand, sharing costs of marketing, supporting a good cause, and corporate entertainment. As mentioned, regardless of the key benefits you are looking for as a sponsor, in order for sponsorship to be effective, you must certain that you are reaching your target audience. The rights owner should have a proven track record of engaging with your target audience.

Set objectives for your sponsorship campaign – Make sure that you are measuring both brand engagement as well as sales increases. These should be measureable and have targets set. Throughout the term of the sponsorship, these targets will assess which elements of your sponsorship are most successful and will allow you to focus more on the activation of that element. By continually measuring and assessing your sponsorship campaign against targets you will be more cost-effective as well as flexible to take up new opportunities to further leverage your original rights package.

Sponsorship is not just about attaching your logo on the next promotional bulletin or making sure your brand has ‘face time’ at the next event, it is strategic and should engage your audience to be effective. Thought needs to go into developing these sponsorship relationships so that they reach their full potential. When they do – they can be incredibly successful and your audience will be begging for more!

How to Find the Right Sponsorship Agency 26th April, 2018

Finding the right sponsorship agency can be tricky. Each agency pitching for your business will be doing their utmost to convince you that they are the best people to help with all your sponsorship needs. But how do you make a decision that boosts your business, rather than one you live to regret?

To help you find a sponsorship agency that can deliver everything you need, here’s a list of eight questions you should ask any prospective agency. It’s important to ask these questions and get the answers at the outset, rather than a few months down the line when you’re wondering if you’ve picked the wrong sponsorship agency.

1. Where do you think we need help?

You probably have a fair idea of what you want from a sponsorship agency, but it’s a good idea to ask this question before you tell them exactly what you need for two reasons. Firstly, any prospective account manager can repeat your list of requirements to you, so putting the onus on them will give you a better idea of how well they understand your business and how much they’ve done their homework. Secondly, they may actually suggest some things you hadn’t thought of that should be added to your list of requirements. The sponsorship agency may offer a range of services beyond what you thought you needed, enabling you to get greater return from them than you had imagined.

2. Why do you think we’ve been unsuccessful in the past with getting or activating sponsorship?

This will tell you whether the sponsorship agency have gone to the trouble of looking at your past work and coming up with ideas on how they could improve it. If it becomes apparent that they’re just reeling off a list of standard services not tailored to your business, that’s a good indication that they haven’t put much effort into pitching for your business.

A good answer will give you confidence that the agency understand your business and how they can help it. It may even generate the first few tasks that you and the sponsorship agency need to tackle, assuming you start working together.

3. Do you have any clients with similar property rights to ours and how successful were you in helping them achieve their goals?

Whether you operate in the fields of sport, fashion, entertainment or B2B, you need to be confident that the sponsorship agency understands your sector and has a good contacts network. Ask for specific examples of success backed up by quantifiable results. “We did some really great work with such-and-such client,” is not good enough.

4. How many people work at your sponsorship agency and how many of you will be working on my campaign?

It doesn’t take a team of hundreds to manage a sponsorship relationship, but you need to ensure that your sponsorship agency has the resources necessary to manage your campaign effectively.

Find out whether you will have one dedicated account manager and point of contact. The last thing you want is to find yourself being passed around the sponsorship agency’s switchboard in your hour of need!

5. Who will be our account manager at the sponsorship agency?

Find out if the person you’re already dealing with will be your account manager going forward. If the agency person you initially meet won’t be your main contact, then insist that the account manager who will be gets involved with your discussions early on. You don’t want to commit to a relationship with someone you’ve never met!

You’ll need a strong working relationships with the person or people you’re trusting to manage your sponsorship programme. You don’t want to agree the deal with someone you have full faith in only to never see them again and find yourself dealing with someone you feel isn’t up to the task.

6. What measures will you put in place to track the success of our sponsorship campaign?

Agreeing the measurable KPIs at the outset is vital. It will help the sponsorship agency know exactly what you expect, and give you a fair idea of what they think they can achieve. It may require some back-and-forth or negotiation, but it will save a lot of trouble down the line.

There’s nothing worse than finding yourself arguing with your sponsorship agency that they haven’t hit their targets when they’re insistent that they have. Good targets equals good results.

7. Do you have existing contacts that would help secure sponsorship deals?

Ideally, the sponsorship agency will have plenty of existing relationships with companies that would be interesting in sponsorship opportunities around your business. Don’t expect them to list every name and number in their little black book, but you should at least have faith that they can open doors you can’t.

If they don’t have existing contacts in your sector, make sure you find out how they will build relationships and source prospective sponsors.

8. What are your sponsorship agency fees?

Don’t be afraid to talk about money from the start. If the sponsorship agency are way beyond your budget, they’ll appreciate discovering this early on, rather than investing hours’ of work only to be told you can’t afford them.

The agency fees will obviously have an impact on your budget, but don’t necessarily opt for the cheapest offer on the table. Try to pick your sponsorship agency based on the potential ROI, rather than just the upfront cost. Work out what each prospective agency can deliver for you compared to how much they will charge and make your decision based on that.

Obviously you won’t want to spend more on agency fees than you can help to get back in increased business. This article on ‘How much revenue could my project earn through sponsorship?’ will help you make that judgment.

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