A marketing sponsorship is a unique way to help drive brand awareness and leads for just about any size business. It involves businesses sponsoring trade shows, events, charity causes, teams, or groups to increase their competitive advantage and reach certain business goals.

While marketing sponsorships may be an innovative way to increase brand awareness, they are not always ideal for every business. Read on to learn if sponsorships are right for your business and how to make the most of them, if they are.

1. Define What Sponsorship Success Looks Like

To determine which marketing sponsorships are right for your business, you need to scrutinize the offerings to decide which meet your goals most favorably. Work with the business offering the sponsorship to determine how they will be promoting your brand.

Ask to speak to past sponsors to get a sense of what you can expect when it comes to marketing ROI. The results will point toward the sponsorship that can help you achieve the most from it.

2. Define Your Target Audience

Ultimately, you only want to spend valuable marketing dollars on sponsorships that are going to put your brand in front of your target customers. Are you looking to attract new segments with your new service or product? Which events are your target audience most likely to attend? How can you best reach them?

Answering these questions will help you maximize your marketing sponsorship, and you will attract more people that are likely to interact with your product. Besides, people who attend events or meetings to interact or learn from professionals are more likely to be open to new products and services relating to the event.

3. Determine What You Want to Achieve

The exact Return on Investment (ROI) of a marketing sponsorship can be unclear. However, you can measure your Return on Objectives (ROO) to find out how many people you need to engage in order to see results. It is important to analyze your business's past marketing sponsorships to discover which sponsorships are worth an investment.

You can do this by analyzing target audience engagement for how many people were exposed to your product's message and their favorable impressions, the potential future audience, and the cost per acquired lead. Before the sponsorship, set up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure your success.

How many leads do you want to secure? What kind of increase to your website traffic and media coverage expectations resulting from the event do you want to see?

While ROI values are based on estimates, you need to evaluate its impact after a sponsorship.

To determine your ROI you should:

• Estimate the total value of consumer impacts. This is the number of times your target audience is exposed to your brand through brochures, give-a-ways, logos placement, or other materials. Then, estimate the number of times the event's audience will be exposed to your brand due to your sponsorship, and determine how much you would spend to achieve similar numbers using other marketing tactics.
• Calculate the total value of tangible benefits with a known value such as the number of event tickets sold.
• Find an estimate of media exposure your business receives from the sponsorship. For example, if your brand appears on TV, estimate the cost of the advert.
• Add the value of consumer impacts, media exposure, and tangible benefits to get the total value of your sponsorship.
• Subtract the total cost of the sponsorship from its value and the result will be the net gain from the sponsorship.
• Finally, divide the net gain by the total cost of the sponsorship. The result will be the ROI.

4. Prepare Beforehand and Analyze Afterward

Once you determine the best metrics for your marketing sponsorship, create a plan for maximizing them while at the event and evaluate your success afterward. You can generate the largest ROI from sponsorship by:

• Establishing clear expectations
• Negotiating your activities
• Training your staff to attract and engage with attendees effectively
• After the event, gather feedback, and review your strategy, especially if you intend to continue with the sponsorship.

5. Become an Official Sponsor

Borrowing brand equity is a great way to leverage sponsorship. However, most businesses do not think of using the sponsorship premises for marketing rights. As a business, you will need to understand that marketing rights can increase sales, highlight brand equity, increase credibility, and differentiate you from your competitors.

Your team can think of ways of incorporating the event you intend to sponsor throughout your business's marketing assets. You can do this by using product packaging, social media contests, and drive-to retail promotions, among others.

You can also try to create a unique opportunity for consumers through entertainment, experiences, or contribution to the social good. This all trickles down to working together with the event organizers who can help you achieve this.

6. Use Logos

Strategic logo placement is a great way to increase your brand's visibility. Your business logo will go a long way toward promoting your business since it showcases your brand. Moreover, human beings process images faster than words, so your target audience will most likely recognize your logo from a group of them. Make sure that it's visible and stands out since this will attract your target audience and help you be easy to spot amongst your competitors.

7. Plan for Activation

Activation is an effective way to engage with attendees on a personal level during an event. Ensure you screen the account for your resources, time, and costs when planning and budgeting for your brand activation. You do not want to spend your whole budget on investing in the sponsorship without a way to activate the sponsorship effectively.

Moreover, if you are considering a sponsorship, it is vital that you understand how the company you are partnering with plans on activating and what their success rate is with activation. Also, consider making your activation setup engaging, interactive, and unique.

8. Cost

Most businesses never know how much to spend on marketing sponsorships. You do not want to spend your entire marketing budget on one event. You should, therefore, carefully prepare a list of events you would like to sponsor.

Afterward, carefully evaluate your business objectives, sponsorship packages, and their respective costs to an

Final Thoughts

Analyze the benefits and risks for each of the opportunities. Remember to consider if you have enough resources for most of the events you have chosen. By choosing the right event to sponsor, your business can reach most of your target market at a lower cost when compared to traditional advertising channels.

Business owners should keep in mind that these sponsorships do not guarantee immediate ROI but can be good for giving back to the community and driving brand awareness…. Which usually leads to increased sales if done right.

For more information on finding or maximizing marketing sponsorships to drive ROI, contact us at info@rmimpr.com or 480-305-2017.