Category: Blog

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!

Professional Associations in their search for Sponsorship Sterling 1st December, 2010

Sponsorship is growing rapidly in professional associations. No matter the prime objective of the particular trade body, whether they represent shipping companies or small digital businesses, they all share in common the predicament of shrinking revenue streams from membership fees.

Professional associations used to be key in growing and developing brands. However, with the ever present flow of information, documents, best practice guides, white papers, and social networks available for free, membership benefits are now less vital to business success. This puts professional associations in a very difficult situation. They have less revenue to provide membership value, and yet are faced with current members demanding more value from their membership. An almost impossible task.

In the past, events tended to be the second main source of revenue for professional associations, with delegate tickets far exceeding the supplementary sponsorship income. However, in a time where free events are occurring daily and webinars are streamed from around the globe directly into people’s homes, even this ‘secondary’ form of income is finding difficulty in meeting targets.

Furthermore, our current economic climate continues to add strain professional associations are already feeling. Budgets are being scruitinised and marketing directors are prioritising gauranteed and tangible ROI before writing any marketing expenses.

As a result, professional associations have had to start finding new ways of providing value to their members, which is the reason we are finding an increasing number of sponsorship proposals and opportunities available. Sponsorship has therefore become a key revenue stream for many professional associations, for it reaches both revenue and engagement objectives.

The changes have also greatly affected the Direct Marketing Association – Europe’s largest trade body in the marketing and communications sector. Chris Combemale, executive director, claims that sponsorship is now crucial to the mission of the DMA. He commented, “Through the additional revenue of sponsorship, we can expand the number of professional services we provide, as well as the number of insight and networking events we offer. These activities are integral to our purpose of promoting the business interests of our members and driving the growth of the direct marketing industry. Of course, through pairing our sponsor partners with suitably themed platforms we ensure maximum relevance and mutual benefit to their target market.”

Although these sponsorship proposals are on the rise with professional associations, there are nonetheless pros and cons to integrating the two successfully:

Pros

Value for the Professional Association: Sponsorship revenue amongst professional associations accounts for a large portion of total sponsorship revenue. Whilst perhaps not as newsworthy as larger sporting events such as the World Cup, it significantly increases funding for many not-for-profit organisations, enabling them to continue to grow in the future. Implementing a successful sponsorship department can thus help to create a sustainable organisation.
Value for Members: Sponsorship not only provides a new revenue stream, but it also provides values for your current members. A basic key benefit to membership is the networking opportunities and brand awareness professional associations can provide. Sponsorship goes beyond this basic benefit and provides engagement with the members through tangible touchpoints, enabled through sponsorship activation. Providing sponsorship opportunities provides value to your members by helping them to reach their current marketing objectives.
Value for the Audience: Sponsors add significant value to the events and programmes that they support. This is especially true with professional associations as they tend not to be as forward thinking as brand companies due to a lack of resource and funds. By having a sponsor involved, the professional association has the ability to utilise some of the sponsor’s resources and create a more exciting event for the attendees.

Cons

Lack of Resource: Sponsorship is not just a sales pitch. It requires strategic thinking in developing the programme as well as significant resource in account management. Successful sponsorship only occurs when there is a partnership built between both the sponsor and the rights owner. This can only be built through communication and a very solid understanding of the other’s objectives. Typically, professional associations are under resourced. This means that while sponsorship may be initiated, it is often unable for it to be sustained. This can then create bad blood between the professional association and its members, a result of which may be that the rights owner is pressured to refund the sponsorship money in order to maintain goodwill. In such a situation, it would appear the professional association would have been better off not partaking in the sponsorship deal in the first place.
Lack of Understanding by Members: For professionals outside the world of sponsorship, it can be very difficult to understand its benefits. Particularly in a world where Marketing Directors are under pressure to deliver leads and guaranteed ROI. Sponsorship can thus seem very intangible – in which case, even the best sponsorship proposal cannot compete against pay-per-click advertising.
Lack of Expertise: Sponsorship is complex, and needs to be strategically developed in order to work with all parties successfully. Professional associations rarely have this experience in-house, making it difficult to manage and develop. Fortunately, there are blogs, forums and websites dedicated to explaining sponsorship benefits, however none of these can surpass having sponsorship experience at hand.

Some key questions professional associations need to ask themselves before undertaking a significant sponsorship programme would be:

Find out if sponsorship is right for you. Do you have the resource and time to dedicate to developing this into your organisation?
Understand your members and what they want – will members be upset if they are financially unable to take up some of these new sponsorship opportunities?
Do you have an audience that is large or niche enough to build an asset from?
Do you have in-house sponsorship experience or do you know of a sponsorship agency that can help?

Sponsorship is a fantastic way to bring additional value to professional associations, particularly in this current economic climate. However, you need to be very careful in its implementation and development in order to create sponsorship that is sustainable, as well as successful.

Sports Integrity with iGaming Sponsorship 18th November, 2010

I was recently asked to sit on a panel at the Sport Business Group’s event: Sport & iGaming. Our panel topic was about how to maintain integrity in sport with the inclusion of iGaming sponsors.

After a lively debate, I realised I completely forgot to add some of the key points I wanted to say so thought I’d blog them down instead.

Benefits of iGaming Sponsorship into Sport

iGaming has helped fill a revenue gap in the market for sport rights holders. With the decline in sport sponsorship funding, iGaming has not only helped fill this, but have drastically added to the sport itself. Many of the iGaming companies have utilised the concept of partnership and have introduced many sport related offers, games, and betting options for their customers. Betfair even goes as far as providing any 5-a-side and 11-a-side football kit if they play at Betfair.
iGaming sponsor companies illustrate how the right sponsorship ‘fit’ can create synergies. One of the most important decisions on whether or not to sponsor is the audience fit. As sport typically attracts a demographic of males aged 30-50 and this is the iGaming target market, this has allowed iGaming sponsors to really build brand awareness cost-effectively by tapping into their target market in a way that is meaningful to them.
iGaming companies lead digital marketing resource and expertise to sponsorship activations. In my opinion, I believe that the sponsorship industry lacks the innovation that is seen in some other marketing brand campaigns. This is due to the traditional sponsorship rights and being able to contract only what is available. However, with the introduction of the most state of the art platforms, forums, and e-commerce within iGaming sites, this has provided a much needed surge for sponsorship activation to this outside the box.

For more information on sport and iGaming, be sure to check out the video of the event here.

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.

My Notepad from Think!Sponsorship 2010 8th November, 2010

I have attended Think!Sponsorship for the past three years and always enjoy the insight. This year’s theme was digitalisation in the sponsorship industry, which is always a favourite discussion of mine, so I thought I would share my notepad in case you missed out!

Digital Statistics in the UK

38.5 milion people are online and are spending 22hrs/month
video games outsell cinema and videos viewing hours combined
on average individuals receive 3-5,000 marketing messages a day
online content needs to be interesting in the first 15sec otherwise people won’t view it
26 million users on Yahoo/month
the key benefit of digitalisation in sponsorship is measurement – you can easily track how many people are engaged

Online Brand Communication in Sponsorship

needs to be current and brands need to listen to what people are saying about them and respond accordingly
people want to create interaction, so interactive comments and discussions are how brands should be engaging with their customers

How to Make Sponsorship Content Successful Online

turn content into a game with rewards
use lists and rankings to encourage sharing
use a controversial title for guides and best practice documents
be personable and individual
content that is genuinely funny is usually shared

Sponsorship & Digital Tips

agencies don’t create virals, audiences do
traditional sponsorship rights are outdated
digital is about challenging perceptions about the brand
digital sponsorship activation influences long term purchase and emotional behaviour
sponsorship is not about immediate sales, it is about changing brand perceptions, which in turn changes purchasing behaviour

Hope my notepad has provided some insight into what was discussed. Be sure to keep following the Slingshot Sponsorship Blog as we discuss some of these topics in greater detail!

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.

Sponsorship Prevails under Economic Downturn 11th October, 2010

One only has to look at the success rates of the sponsorships of the 2010 Fifa World Cup to see that sponsorship can still prevail in a time of economic downturn. The official sponsors of this year’s sporting event, Budweiser, Coca-Cola and McDonalds, have lauded their sponsorships of the Fifa World Cup a resounding success, stimulating sales and increasing brand awareness on a global level. The fact remains that in spite of a necessity of cutbacks for all companies, the only way to stimulate growth in these difficult times is to increase sales. Brand awareness and mass exposure to your direct market remain the most effective ways to achieve exactly this.

During the World Cup, Budweiser beer sales were up 18.6 per cent in the UK over the comparable period in 2009, while Coca-Cola observed a 7 per cent increase in sales in Latin America. Despite already being globally recognised brands, this positive association allowed the companies to grow in spite of a spending-conscious public. By selectively sponsoring an event with great public appeal, companies such as these can increase their own appeal through association, without having to advertise why their product is better than it’s competitors. The public’s association of it with the biggest sporting even of the year will see to that.

For a company such as Red Bull, sponsoring extreme sports allows it to remain ingrained in public consciousness as an exciting, fast-living brand. Whether it be BMX biking or the Formula 1 Grand Prix, the message remains the same: Red Bull are the brand to go for if you aspire to live a high octane, stimulating lifestyle. Alternatively, by sponsoring the hugely popular Reading and Leeds festivals, Vodaphone can ensure it is in good stead with a music-loving youth generation, allowing it to be seen as a brand that has it’s feet placed firmly on the most hippest of grounds.

It would be a misconception to believe that a world still recovering from a brutal recession is one without need for a ‘luxury’ such as sponsorship. It is in actual fact one of the most cost-effective ways of generating growth, boosting sales and increasing brand awareness. By directly exposing one’s brand to its target audience, and thus allowing for brand engagement, companies can generate the positive upswing that will help lift us out of this recession, and not flailing in it’s midst. In an uncertain time, a strong public image is the greatest asset a company can possess, and a great affiliation through selective sponsorship can provide just this.

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