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.

Support a Vision

Make Sure Your Strategy Has a Long-Term Vision

There is a common perception that only short-term goals matter in these “what have you done for me lately” times.

Of course your CEO will be very focused on short-term results, particularly those that deliver to the bottom line. In fact, most of the goals you discern from your corporation’s public-facing documents are likely to focus on the short term, because they are written with investors as the key target audience.

That’s why your goals discernment must take into account insights the CEO and executive team share internally, perhaps through town-hall style employee meetings or other grassroots communications.

This will give you a more realistic picture of the long-term corporate vision.

This vision will help guide longer-term marketing commitments, including certain elements commonly associated with sports marketing, such as naming rights.

These will almost certainly involve multiyear contracts – sometimes decades-long.

Therefore, it’s critical to consider the long-term benefits they will confer on your corporation, such as generating sustainable growth, or preserving and increasing marketing share.

Here are some valid considerations when evaluating long-term impact of a marketing program:

-       Customer recruitment and retention

-       Cultivating the next-generation of customer

-       Protecting against inroads by competitors

-       Building sustainable relationships with high-value customers

-       Supporting new initiatives such as rebranding

-       Establishing awareness in a new geographic market, such as in the wake of a merger or acquisition

How much of your sports marketing budget is going toward short-term results? How much is building toward a strong market position in the future?

The proportions should reflect the importance of short-term vs. long-term corporate goals.

Balance your marketing portfolio accordingly, then communicate this vision to the executive team.

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.

Short- and Long-Term Vision

Target Both Short- and Long-Term Results

We have talked about how your marketing programs must be linked to goals in order to help you evaluate and eventually maximize their performance.

It’s important to understand that your goals should demonstrate both short-term and long-term vision.

Short-term results are obviously very important, particularly those that deliver results to the company’s bottom line.

But components of your marketing program very likely will be geared toward the longer term – especially if you have multi-year marketing agreements such as sponsorships or naming rights deals in place.

Think about desirable future results – such as preserving and increasing marketing share.

Beware of setting goals such as “brand awareness” or “share of voice.” These are too generalized to generate much enthusiasm among your team, or indeed from the executive suite.

Compare that to the goal of capturing marketing share in an under-served geographic or demographic area. In contrast with “share of voice,” this is a measurable result that can guide both day-to-day and long-term decision-making.

The process of defining and quantifying your short- and long-term goals and assigning budget to each can be termed “marketing mix modeling.”

How much of your marketing budget is going toward short-term results? How much is building toward a strong market position in the future? Are the proportions appropriate, given the company’s position in the marketplace? If not, work toward rebalancing the budget.

As an example of an appropriate marketing mix, one of our clients, a global manufacturer of office supplies, signed a long-term sponsorship with one of America’s best-known universities.

• Short-term, the deal delivered an immediate win in terms of access to the university’s significant office-supply needs.
• Longer term, the deal offered benefits well beyond the ivy-covered walls, as the corporate business-to-business sales force was able to leverage the sponsorship assets nationwide, and even globally, given the university’s renown in the sports world.

The resulting ROI on this sponsorship was very high in context with other deals of this magnitude.