How Sponsorship Fits in Your Plan

Here’s How to Determine If Sponsorship Fits Into Your Marketing Plan

Sponsorship Marketing is a powerful tool, when properly used.

It offers a terrific way to cross borders, simplify language barriers and create tremendous emotional connections with consumers.

Here are factors to consider when adding sponsorship to your marketing mix.

Passion: This is the single most important word in sponsorship marketing, because it is the one advantage sponsorship has over other types of marketing. The consumer is passionate about the medium – whether a sports team, entertainer, event, etc.

In order to leverage the power of sponsorship, you must be able to connect and the consumer’s passion for the sponsored property with passion for your product or service.

Honestly assess the potential passion points of your company’s offering. Where could you generate passion? How could those passion points be linked to a sport or other activity?

Only then can you begin to build a strategic sponsorship marketing plan.

If you honestly cannot find a passion point, then sponsorship marketing still may offer the potential to generate visibility and awareness, but only if the price is right.

Budget: Understand that in sponsorship marketing, the “rights fee” represents only a fraction of the money you must spend in an effective program.

Think of the rights fee as equivalent to purchasing a door. Once that door is opened, it’s going to cost more to cross the threshold.

If you don’t have the budget to add in “activation,” you probably shouldn’t go down this road.

There are various “rule of thumb” formulas on how many dollars you should spend on activation compared with the rights fee, but really these decisions should be made based on specific goals and objectives.

Without a quantified strategic plan, spending can quickly spiral out of control. But without activation, a sponsorship alone is unlikely to achieve your goals.

Marketing mix: It’s rare that a company can use sponsorship as its only marketing vehicle. So how do you decide how much budget to devote to sponsorship marketing?

Again, we must return to goals and objectives.

Under a thoughtful Marketing By Objectives program, sponsorship can represent the “tip of the spear” by establishing a high-profile, potentially game-changing flagship element of your marketing program.

The more your company needs to break out of the doldrums, the more impactful sponsorship marketing can be.

Honestly assess your potential to generate passion points, and it’s very likely that you can find a complementary sponsorship around which to build.