Millennium Magazine_14th Ed_Michelle Robell

208 Millennium - A Marquis Who’s Who Magazine CREATING SPONSORSHIP STRATEGIES THAT DELIVER RETURN ON INVESTMENT Event sponsoring in the past, before the age of social media and experiential marketing, was passive. It involved getting your logo on signage, marketing, and promotional material alongside mentions in pre and post-press activity. Sometimes it also involved giving away branded gifts or goods to make the impact of the sponsorship last longer. Sponsorship strategies have moved on significantly from this. It is no longer enough to consider sponsoring an event as the end goal. Instead, this should be one element in your plan, with the sponsorship facilitating and enhancing other marketing strategies you put in place. After all, marketing is increasingly about activating brands, not simply building them. The Harvard Business Review describes this as moving from projecting what a brand is to optimizing what it does. This is more personal, and it moves people closer to your brand and to completing transactions. Your sponsorship strategy should therefore be as much (if not more) about activating customers and potential customers as it is about raising brand awareness and increasing your profile. Activating customers can take many forms, including encouraging purchases, clicks, likes, sign-ups, trials, optins or registrations. Sponsorship Strategies To Help You Activate Customers To put an effective strategy in place, you first have to work out your specific objectives. You should then match this with the type of event you are marketing. Here are some effective strategies that you can employ at events you sponsor to help activate the event’s attendees and move them closer to becoming customers: Make it an experience: This strategy can be used for any type of event, as people attend events expecting to have an experience. That experience does not have to be limited to the event organizer’s plan, though. Working with the event organizer, you can create supplementary and complementary experiences that deliver on your marketing objectives. Run a competition: Running a competition with a prize that is relevant to the target audience and the event is a great way to further engage customers. Do something entertaining: Creating something entertaining that stands alone (i.e. it doesn’t involve a sales pitch) is another way to engage the event’s audience. For example, you could create entertainment outside the main event. This will capture people as they arrive, wait in the queue or leave. Connect the sponsorship with charities or community groups you support: A strong soft marketing technique is to implement initiatives around charities or community groups you support. This can also increase coverage of your sponsorship in the media. Furthermore, it helps the charity or group. Offer something unique: Create an event-only offer that adds real value. Give away samples: Instead of gifts that people may or may not use, give away product samples that have real value and relevance. Offer a trial: Registering people for a trial is another effective lead generation strategy. You can select combinations of these strategies, depending on your industry, message and objectives. They require resources to make them successful, but you will improve the ROI you get from the sponsorship.

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