Love, Sponsorship Style

Become A ‘Matchmaker’ For Your Sponsors

We all need love – and that includes sponsors. You’ll feel the love in return – in the form of increased renewals and higher investments – if you take on the role of matchmaker.

Think about it – you have access to high-level executives at some of the greatest companies in the world. Who wouldn’t be excited to have any of them on their client roster?

And doesn’t it make sense to bring this A-list companies together, to everyone’s benefit?

Here’s how to launch Love, Sponsorship Style:

• -       Examine your sponsor roster for companies that do a lot of business-to-business (B2B) commerce. These companies land high-value contracts from major clients. They may most of their marketing money going after consumers (beverage companies are a good example), but they actually sell products to other businesses, sometimes as wholesalers, other times as direct suppliers.
• -       Once you’ve identified your B2B players, look for synergies. That real estate sponsor might be very interested in talking to a rapidly expanding retail chain. That waste management supplier would love to meet someone who manages multiple facilities. Your sponsor in the security business wants to get to know anyone with multiple locations. And so on.
• -       Arrange meetings, in a sponsorship context. This is very important. What do these sponsors have in common? You. So you must continue to serve as the fulcrum as they leverage these big commercial deals. This can involve using your venue or activity during the excitement of “game day,” or arranging a separate event just for sponsors. Emphasize the benefits of the environment you have created.
• -       If your list doesn’t include B2B sponsors … then here’s your chance to mine this wealth of potential new sponsorship dollars. Start from the perspective of arranging networking opportunities, make your plan crystal clear, and pitch it to your best prospects in this category. This can include those with local facilities, local headquarters or any thematic relationship. The low-hanging fruit is always the easiest to pluck.

By taking a proactive approach to matchmaking among your sponsors, and recruiting new sponsors with networking foremost in mind, you’ll cement relationships and bolster your unique selling proposition.

Celebs and Risky Biz

Risky Business: Celebs Can Drag Sponsors Down

At the risk of sounding overly cynical, I was reminded again this week of the risks involved in hitching your brand to a celebrity, such as an entertainer or athlete.

The widely reported massive security breach of Apple’s i-Cloud over the weekend left many celebrities over-exposed when their private picture-phone photos were posted on the Internet.

This immediately changes the public discourse about any of them from positive to problematic at best, and to prurient at worst.

This should only serve to reinforce the lessons from Tony Stewart’s tragic incident Aug. 9 in which fellow driver Kevin Ward Jr. was killed. Even if Stewart is cleared in the investigation, it has been a rough month for his sponsors.

In our celebrity-dominated, media-driven culture, there are massive potential rewards in associating your brand with a celebrity, but there can be massive risks as well.

Here are three ways to manage the risk:

1.     Sponsor a team rather than an individual. This concept extends to sponsoring a movie or show, rather than a single actor, for example. The beloved celebrity or athlete is still front-and-center, but the focus is widened, which reduces the potential for harm, should something happen. There is less reward, both in terms of total upside and duration, but massively lower risk. It’s a bit like investing in money markets, rather than individual stocks.

2.     Keep your crisis response plan up-to-date. You don’t want to be fumbling for answers if something happens. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. If you trust your relationship manager to make the appropriate response on a moment’s notice, you may find that they are too quick to support the celebrity, based on the personal rapport that has developed, at the risk of backing you into a corner. Some sponsors may even have been able to turn the recent privacy breach into a positive message for their brands.

3.     The least effective way to address risk is by incorporating a “morals clause” into the sponsorship contract. This at least has the benefit of allowing you to escape the relationship without spending more corporate sponsorship money. But it doesn’t exempt you from “guilt by association,” and it doesn’t make up for the opportunity cost. After all, you got into the relationship to advance your brand, and that’s not going to happen if you sever ties.

If this approach had been used in the Tony Stewart case, the Stewart team could have continued racing in NASCAR with another driver at the wheel, while Stewart sat out pending the results of an investigation. Sponsors would continue to benefit from exposure, while publicly doing the right thing by everyone involved.

Instead, the public continues to debate even now whether Stewart returned to racing too soon, in part because he “owed it to the sponsors.” That’s risky business, for sure.

The Ice Bucket Challenge

3 Critical Lessons for Sponsors From The Ice Bucket Challenge

If you have a Facebook account, by now you’ve seen dozens of friends, relatives and celebrities doused with ice water, in the Ice Bucket Challenge. Perhaps you’ve even been challenged – and accepted – yourself.

More than a fun event and a worthwhile fund-raiser, the Ice Bucket Challenge offers these lessons to marketers – and particularly sponsors – on how to engage consumers:

1.     Extreme sells. If this was the Lukewarm Water Challenge, everyone would yawn. But the Ice Bucket Challenge gets your attention because the very concept is a cold slap in the face (without actually being harmful, of course). This is the factor that makes extreme sports so worthy of consideration. In mainstream sports, “extreme” is winning a championship.

2.     Viral is for real. I’m sure you’ve participated in meetings where you discussed the power of viral marketing as a concept. You may even have seen impressive numbers from campaigns. But forget the numbers, this is a tangible, in-your-face example of viral marketing at work, expressed in tens of thousands of homemade videos.

3.     It’s all about the idea. Marketing and advertising firms have known this for years. If you come up with the right idea, management will buy (fund) it. That’s why you need creative people on staff. 

       Hard work isn’t enough, you need a blockbuster idea.

Taken together, these points illustrate the potential for the right sponsorship marketing idea to take off.

You don’t need a high profile sponsorship to make it work, either. Who would have listed ALS as among the first three charities to come to mind, prior to the Ice Bucket Challenge? Even now, you see ALS described as “better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”

Take the sponsorship marketing program you have, and find the “ice water” element. It has to be clever, simple, scalable and inexpensive. Like the Ice Bucket Challenge, it needs a call to action that compels consumers to take the next step in engaging your brand.

And yes, it helps if your idea has a social responsibility element. But it’s more important that it be fun.

Sponsorship and Networking

Networking Is a Huge Component of Sponsorship

When we analyze the value of a Sponsorship Marketing program, one of the key components we examine is how well the sponsorship lends itself to networking.

This aspect represents a “value multiplier” to the sponsor, because it leads directly to new business. Typically, that new business involves big orders.

For that reason, it’s important that properties don’t treat networking as an afterthought, or worse, rely on the sponsor to do all the work.

Here are two components that properties should consistently offer their sponsors:

• 1.     Easy access to other sponsors, to facilitate networking internally.
• 2.     Assets that can readily be leveraged to network with the sponsor’s existing key customers and prospects.

Let’s look at those individually, in more depth.

Face it, in the battle for sponsorship dollars, you are competing against ALL sponsorship opportunities, not just other players in your niche. The sponsor has many possible pathways to marketing success.

So look to industry best practices for inspiration.

One great example lies in the world of professional sports. Top NASCAR teams like Penske and Hendrick Motor Sports stage annual get-togethers for their sponsors, with presentations on how to build business. They revel in bringing their sponsors together and making connections, in the context of their own racing business.

This brings value to the sponsors, and secures contract extensions and expansions for the racing teams.

You may not be able to play on that same scale, but you can emulate their tactics. Invite sponsors to your headquarters, if applicable, or a high-profile event, for dedicated networking time. Develop your own version of one-minute dating, or anchor the event around a keynote speaker, ideally drawn from one of your top sponsors.

Facilitate the connections, and importantly, share your successes with existing sponsors and prospects.

Likewise, sponsors want to leverage your relationship among their own leads in the context of your events and activities.

This emphasizes the connection between the sponsor and property provides unparalleled sales opportunities by creating a comfortable zone of interaction with their key prospects.

Your role is to make sure the experience fits the expectations. It needn’t be luxurious, but it does need to be hassle-free, with plenty of opportunity for interaction, so don’t overload the schedule.

Make networking a central component of your sponsorship offering, and help your sponsors take advantage. You’ll create stronger, more lasting bonds.

Getting Your Feet Wet in Sponsorship

How To Start A Sponsorship Marketing Program

Multi-million dollar sponsorships, such as naming or apparel rights, get the big headlines, and rightfully so.

But don’t let that give you the impression that sponsorship is only for the well-heeled.

In fact, sponsorship can be a very effective and efficient tool for local marketing, with a reasonable budget.

These local sponsorships offer many of the benefits of big-name deals, at a fraction of the price:

• -       A chance to tap into fan loyalty
• -       Prestige of joining a winning team
• -       Increased awareness among a plugged-in demographic
• -       Assurance of a proven marketing vehicle
• -       The chance to network with other local business
• -       And many more

The key is that the impact will be on a smaller scale. If your business operates within a limited geographic area, or has a very well-defined customer demographic, you can tailor a sponsorship program to deliver on your marketing needs.

Follow these five steps to sponsorship success:

1.  Begin with your customer. Define their lifestyles – what are their activities, their interests, their passions?

      2.     Match these against your own company’s offerings. How do your products or services intersect with these customer pursuits and passions?
3.     Identify possible sponsorship opportunities within this emotional intersection of your customers and your offerings.
4.     Rank the opportunities on a scale of 1-10 based on their ability to seamlessly represent your products and services.
5.     Evaluate the best opportunities in terms of your available marketing budget, and act accordingly.

You may find that it’s more effective and more economical to pursue a relatively narrow sponsorship-based marketing strategy than to use traditional media to drive your marketing goals.