Sponsoring & Marketing Strategy

Event sponsoring is a very attractive way to get attention and awareness from a specific, targeted audience. Events are usually targeted towards a very specific group of people with similar interests, dislikes, and lifestyles. By managing your way into scoring a brand sponsorship of an event, you can get hundreds (if not thousands) of people to take a good look at your brand and give it a try.

However, this must be executed smartly. When it comes to event sponsorship, little things seem to go as wicked and wrong as when a brand forces its way into an (non-relevant) event of some sorts. Say a women’s underwear brand sponsoring a hard-rock concert tour, or Apple’s iPod sponsoring a “cowboy national conference” event. There are brands and groups of people that go hand-by-hand and some that just don’t. That is your first task, make sure your brand fits in (easily) with the event you will be sponsoring. Never rush into being a sponsor just for the kick of it, or for the amount of eye’s you’ll get.

Once you’re sure that your brand has qualities similar as that of the events assistants, and you get the negotiation deal done (I’m skipping that part..), it is now time to promote the sponsorship. Some ideas:

• Smart (non-clogging) advertising in the site of the event.
• Promo campaigns (together with the event) in local radio and tv; and through the internet.
• Get the event’s staff to use a branded t-shirt.
• Any other kind of promo material is OK if the deal allows for it (tee’s, cups, hats, balloons, etc.)
• (( Especially good if it’s a new brand’s launch )) : Give tryouts of your product if it suits for it. Sure you cannot give a car to every other participant but you can sure let them see the car firsthand.

Fast Forward… Let’s say the event is all done and over and it went great for the branding purpose. Now it’s time to evaluate the post-effects of the sponsorship deal. As we all might assume, the main objective of a sponsorship deal is to bring in new sales or incremental sales. (It might be disguised as “attention”, “brand awareness”, “branding”, etc., but at the end of the day only sales make you profitable). Go through a post-analysis to see if sales actually increased the way you thought they would and if they didn’t research why. There is no point on sobbing from a doomed event, rather learn from it and do it better next time.

If you have some cool ideas on how to sponsor an event, please let us know via comments. We’ll all appreciate it. See you.

Technorati : event marketing, marketing strategy, sponsor, sponsorship