Top 5 Tips On Maximising Sponsorship At Your Next Event 8th April, 2016

Sponsorship is not only important for generating financial resources but also is crucial in creating credibility, brand experience, audience engagement and goodwill. Which begs the question, why don’t more events or platforms bring sponsors on-board? A recent survey in Admap magazine showed 86% of sport fans welcome brand interaction as they believe it will improve their experience.

One issue experienced within the event industry is that brands rarely maximise the ROI from the events they integrate with, as such they dismiss many opportunities whilst squandering their marketing budget on archaic forms of promotion such as logos badging instead of recognizing the real benefits that lay within sponsorship.

  1. Monetary Benefits

Sponsoring events that have your target audience provides brands the opportunity to:

  • reduce marketing budget spend through the efficient use of marketing budget and integration
  • increase direct sales
  • gain PR content through involvement and activation
  1. Brand Experience

Sponsorship of an event offers organisations a platform to access their target audience – creating meaningful brand experiences. This enables the brand to let the audience become part of the brand and product. The experience is always dependant on the product’s interaction capabilities, but a successful brand experience is always more engaging than a logo. Through this criteria the engagement becomes measureable and transparent for the brand as it allows real-time feedback from their consumers.

  1. Increasing the Halo effect

A company who integrates with a charity event as a sponsor to meet their CSR targets is able to improve their public relations and any other CSR goals set. Through integration they have the opportunity to create a positive impact on their social environment. Pro bono and charity work has long been part of company’s ethos and sponsorship also offers this to all brands. In addition, it allows employees to engage with the charity and align with brand values.

  1. Audience Engagement

Sponsorship offers brands a great opportunity to engage their target audience, offering meaningful and lasting investment resonance.  Brands need to uncover their own assets within the event’s rights and increase the overall event experience of attendees.

  1. Reputation Improvement

A corporate relationship with an event can provide an enhanced reputation of a brand and also secures a competitive advantage to rivals in business. An event which aligns to the image of a sponsor has the potential to further strengthen credibility.

When BP’s catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico occurred, sponsoring the Olympics was a quick and fairly easy way to manage their global reputation crisis – supporting their sustainability credentials.

With the vast and significant benefits that sponsorship of events offers brands – it would be fatal to not include it within the marketing mix.

The Age of Digital Sponsorship 26th June, 2012

Media platforms are becoming increasingly fragmented and consumers are able now more than ever to control how they get their information and how they engage with brands. This has led to digital media becoming the driving force in the implementation of many of the most successful sponsorship campaigns. Digital media provides a means for brands to reach out to the widest possible audience whilst engaging with them across new levels not previously available.

IBM brings digital to Wimbledon

IBM through their partnership with the Wimbledon Tennis Championships have created an augmented reality phone application. The app acts as an onsite guide and interactive map for Wimbledon, allowing users to simply point their phone to navigate around the Wimbledon site as well as allowing users to stream live feeds. The IBM Seer Aggregator enables fans to receive Wimbledon tweets to their phones from sources including players, commentators and a team of IBM scouts. Fans can also keep up-to-date with live feeds and information about matches played on any court transforming how fans can keep up with the action as it happens and enriching their experience of Wimbledon.

Johnnie Walker invites fans to ‘Step Inside the Circuit’

Johnnie Walker joined forces with McLaren in 2005 and have since created the innovative ‘Step Inside the Circuit’ campaign via Facebook. The campaign invites consumers to go behind the scenes and follow the progress of Lewis and Jenson on the track as well as their lives away from it. The campaign includes an online video ‘Drive of a Lifetime’ on the company’s Facebook page. The video puts users in the shoes of the drivers taking them from pre-race activities to stepping into the car before the start of the race. The Facebook connect function then personalises the film using photos and details from the user’s Facebook account, together with text-to-speech technology and video input from the user’s webcam transporting fans into the glamorous world of F1.

Digital media has become the most successful means with which to make sponsorship campaigns more interactive and to create a deeper relationship with consumers. With so many innovative digital campaigns already paving the way within sponsorship, it is inevitable that campaigns will continue to become more exciting and interactive as brands strive to stand apart from their competitors.

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.