The Basic Fundamentals that are Needed to Understand Sponsorships
8 Outstanding Event Planning Tools and Software to Increase Productivity
8 minute read | November 2022
Sponsoring an event is the preferred marketing tool for many organizations, especially large enterprises. As a result, sponsorship budgets have remained at a healthy place and in some cases, increased in size. On one hand, this is great news for event organizers who are pitching their sponsorship proposals with the hope of landing big deals. On the other hand, it comes with increased layers of scrutiny, which makes it more challenging to win those sponsorships.
With this rigorous event sponsorship strategy, sponsors are demanding that new sponsorship opportunities align with their prescribed criteria before giving the go-ahead for investment.
Over the last several years, high-profile brands have moved from providing fixed investment packages to providing performance-based investment for the purpose of maximizing return on investment (ROI).
This sophisticated approach of providing performance-based investment has been used to evolve the efficiency of event sponsorship, especially during the initial assessment of a sponsor deck. Potential sponsors are asking new questions to help separate the more desirable sponsorships from their riskier counterparts.
For event organizers, sufficiently answering these questions in a sponsor deck will help with matching to the criteria prescribed by high-profile brands. As a result, the sponsor deck will appear more desirable, present a high ROI potential and subsequently enhance the likelihood of securing a partnership.
Here’s a look at the top five questions that high-profile sponsors are using as their criteria when reading your sponsor deck.
1. How will the sponsorship bring brand purpose to life?
Many high-profile brands will already have an established brand purpose. This helps them define the motive behind why the business does what it does. It’s crucial that the attendees of an event notice a sponsor’s brand purpose.
The most effective brand purpose activations will strengthen emotional connections with attendees and will bring the message to life in an engaging way. According to a survey, 76% of consumers are more likely to trust a company that leads with a brand purpose. 72% of consumers are more likely to be loyal to that same company.
For that reason, a sponsorship proposal must demonstrate how the property proposes to bring a sponsor’s brand purpose to life – A previous partnership between Spotify and Smirnoff is a good example of this. With Smirnoff’s brand purpose of inclusivity, Spotify helped Smirnoff address the underrepresentation of women as festival headliners and in music production. Their idea involved creating an industry-first application programming interface (API), dubbed the Smirnoff Equalizer. The application allowed listeners to find more female musicians based on the listeners listening data. This type of activation was able to help Smirnoff bring their brand purpose of inclusivity to life.
2. How will the sponsorship create commercial opportunities?
In sponsorship, commercial growth opportunities tied to an event’s platform or attendees is a win for both sponsor and rightsholder. However, sponsors often prefer to allocate budgets to activities that produce an immediate return. In this case, sponsorship organizers require some creativity to show prospective sponsors that a partnership will help drive sales over the short-term as well as the long-term.
The most powerful way to demonstrate this in a sponsorship proposal is to illustrate and unveil the biggest commercial opportunities. The event sponsorship proposal should show a clear connection to the brand’s market position and brand purpose. Here are some generic sponsorship opportunities as examples…
- Penetrate a new and unique market… if the sponsor is looking for increased market share
- Sell products or services on-site… if the sponsor is looking for immediate sales
- Provide hospitality packages… if the sponsor is looking to improve customer relationships
- Create new and innovative advertising spaces… if the sponsor is looking for brand awareness
- Align with popular influencers… if the sponsor is looking for credibility
relevant to a sponsor’s market position of targeting Gen-Zs
3. How will the sponsorship activate and showcase products and services?
Simple brand awareness and product placement are some of the go-to activations found in brand sponsorship proposals. These are quite ordinary with regards to big-budget corporate sponsorships. If rightsholders want to win the big deals, sponsor decks shouldn’t make the suggestion that simply adding a sponsor logo on a website is a valuable asset. For example, exposure in the form of static ad placements may result in some awareness but how effective will it be for increasing recall of a brand’s product or service? The fact is that high-profile brands receive these less-exciting and commonplace benefits as an expected add-on to a more powerful sponsorship package.
The effectiveness of showcasing products and services is in the creativity of activations. High-profile brands want original and effective activations that will increase attention, create an emotional response, and improve recall.
Subway’s activation at the Super Bowl LVI in Los Angeles embodied exactly this. The quick service restaurant brand partnered with the NFL to introduce their new signature sandwiches at the 2022 event in an intriguing way. The brand gave thousands of football fans a chance to enter the Subway Vault. This was a physical space, where fans could receive signature sandwiches that had been literally signed (in edible ink) by some of the biggest names in NFL. The activation resulted in Subway winning the Best Brand Experience at the 2022 Hashtag Sports Awards in Las Vegas.
The lesson here is to focus less on factual, non-narrative ad ideas and go after activations that will create storytelling opportunities.
If event organizers can propose ideas of how to integrate a brand’s product or service into the fabric or experience of an event, they’ll check a major box.
4. How will the sponsorship deepen customer and client relationships
Customer acquisition and client retention is an important area of focus in event sponsorship strategy. However, during slow periods like economic downturns, the business climate is unfriendly to strategies concerning new customer acquisition. Consequently, brands usually prefer to double down on what is already working by focusing on strategies that drive client retention rates and sales. This means that brands will value opportunities that allow them to solidify business relationships.
The fact of the matter is that whatever the economic climate, solidifying business relationships to increase retention and brand loyalty will always be top of mind for high-profile brands. Therefore, rightsholders can use the unique opportunities within their events to offer creative solutions to help drive customer lifetime value (CLV) for sponsors.
At the most foundational level, many rightsholders will leverage the opportunity to offer their sponsors some element of hospitality; such as meet & greets, luxury suites, backstage tours, celebrity chefs and more. However, to be memorable and distinctive when you write your sponsorship proposal, you need to communicate ideas that go above and beyond typical hospitality vehicles. For example, some of the best unparalleled hospitality programs have involved treating VIPs and C-suite decision-makers to not only entertainment experiences but also educational experiences.
In a partnership with Infosys, ATP leveraged their tennis tournament platform as the backdrop to help Infosys nurture relationships. Infosys invited prospective clients to enjoy tennis tournaments along with attending a session on topics such as ‘Navigating the Digital Disruption’ and providing technology walkthroughs where Infosys demonstrated how they were impacting the game of tennis. With this, Infosys were able to provide storytelling and more technical product understanding. The resulting change in attitudes and eventual sales meant that this was a very valuable benefit for Infosys.
5. How will the sponsorship make a positive impact on society?
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the activity used to manage a brand’s impact on society. Within the context of corporate sponsorships, it’s a component that the majority of high-profile brands expect to include in their event sponsorship strategy because of its influence on the overall financial business performance. The activity has evolved over several decades from businesses taking part in good causes such as ‘food drives for the poor’ to businesses now taking a stand on sensitive social matters like diversity, equity, and inclusion.
For the Turkish appliance brand, Beko, their sponsorship of FC Barcelona included a CSR component that promoted healthy eating and combated childhood obesity. The program taught kids how they could eat nutritious diets like their sports star heroes and subsequently raised millions of dollars for children charity, Unicef.
When considering sponsorships, brands want to see ideas of how they can demonstrate the sincerity of their involvement in a sponsorship.
Sincerity leads to positive consumer perceptions about the sponsor’s motives, which in turn contributes to successful outcomes for the sponsorship. The process of demonstrating sincerity surprisingly begins with the sponsor deck. A story needs to be told to a potential sponsor of why there is a close fit between property, fans, and the brand. Using this fit is a valuable way for your sponsors to show fans that they’re there to give back and not just to advertise their products.
Conclusion
Sponsorship as a marketing tool mostly provides valuable emotive outcomes, as opposed to measurable results data that can be scrutinized by brands. It’s not quite the same as running measurable digital ads for example. However, this hasn’t stopped the desire for brands to add a performance-based assessment to their selection process.
A property or rightsholder’s best chance of securing a sponsorship is to write their sponsorship proposal in a way that illustrates creative solutions that speak to the brand’s brand purpose. This requires extensive research into the brand’s product & services, followed by how it can be integrated into the fabric of an event.
Further, it’s crucial for event organizers to align their assets and ideas to a business case that speaks to the sponsor’s business objectives. Sales, brand engagement, and recall are usually common end goals for high-profile brands. Ultimately, answering the five questions discussed in this article when writing a sponsorship proposal will address all this along with helping potential sponsors decrease the perceived risk of a sponsorship opportunity.
To write a perfect sponsorship proposal is by no means an easy task, that’s why we provide a proposal writing and designing service. Our proposals help bring professionalism, best practice, and structure to your presentation for maximum impact and influence. As s a result, your pitch wont ramble or stumble, it will look amazing and sound great. Get in touch with us to explore possibilities that will boost your sponsorship success.
