How Sponsorship and Experiential Work Together

Sponsorship and Experiential Teams Must Work Together

Each component of a sponsorship marketing program must work together, from the start of negotiations until the final consumer interaction.

Because experiential marketing – sometimes called event marketing – requires some unique skills and mainly takes place in the field, we have seen cases where the experiential team is not fully integrated into the process.

At times, it can even seem like the experiential team is working at odds with the rest of the marketing program, simply assigned tasks which they fulfill as best they can, usually drawing on past experience with vastly different products or services.

Considering that the experiential field teams are the ones directly interacting with your consumers, this is counter-productive, to say the least.

You can head this off by making sure everyone fully understands the program’s strategic goals.

Not only does sharing the “big picture” prevent problems in execution, it allows every member of the team to draw on their experience and creativity to suggest ways to improve the program.

It’s well worth the cost of a comprehensive kickoff meeting to identify:

• -       What message we are communicating.
• -       Which consumers we want to reach.
• -       How we ideally would like them to respond.
• -       The nature of our relationship with these consumers going forward.

This allows the field teams to focus on quality, rather than quantity, for example.

One-hundred well-qualified responses will be worth many times as much as 1,000 unqualified interactions.

This will make your Return on Investment calculations both easier, and more accurate. With a proper understanding of the value of each consumer interaction, you can make better decisions about the types of events to stage, the best tactics and the most appropriate budget allocations.

Share your goals, not just your tasks, and you will reap the benefits.