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Tag: activation

  • Customer Engagement: Make Your Sponsorship Count

    Customer Engagement: Make Your Sponsorship Count

    There are many forms of sponsorship businesses can use to their advantage: from the check written to the local Little League baseball team to help offset the cost of uniforms (with your name on the back), to local sponsorship of a national charity event, to owning a major golf tournament or NASCAR race. Each has its own audience, it’s own impact, and it’s own way of engaging the audience. The trick with all of them is to create a positive, lasting and active emotional connection between your brand and the event.

     

    Brand activation for a sponsorship is one of the toughest marketing challenges most businesses face in their effort to raise awareness and drive recognition that can boost sales over time. The magic is in the matchup of the brand and the sponsored entity. The audience has to intuitively “get it” when they see the sponsor’s name in connection with the event, which means that there needs to be at least some rudimentary logic to the pairing of the two. There are some pairings that appear to be, well, natural in how they are executed, but I’m a firm believer in the tenet that there are no coincidences, and that most simple, natural occurrences are engineered by someone or something, although not necessarily for their own purposes. Auto racing promotions by oil companies, tire companies, engine builders and the like seem like natural extensions. Beer, cigarettes, soft drinks, and other consumer consumables, seem like a bigger stretch, until you consider that the audience for the race is the tightest demographic match to their product buyer possible, based on their own internal research. A huge chunk of race fans enjoy a Coke regularly, and in earlier times, the vast majority of race fans enjoyed a Winston or Marlboro on a very regular basis.

     

    Even those famous pairings required some time and effort to appear natural, and be linked in people’s minds permanently. Not only were there competitors in each category to wrench the spotlight from, but they had to find a way to activate the sponsorship so that all the dollars they spent paid off, by moving the product sales needle in some predictable way. Pennzoil, Valvoline, Quaker State, MobileONE, and a host of other petroleum brands vied for NASCAR sponsorships, but only one would eventually rise to the top of the recognition heap in that particular type of racing. The winning brand crafted a long-term series of ads, promotions and other outreach content that pinpointed and brought to light their involvement with high performance activities. You could put it in your Chevy, but you knew that it was developed for and was used in a race car, making your grocery-getter a little more like the race car you couldn’t have. Aspirational activation is a strong driver of success in sponsorships, and has been used to promote luxury brands and commodity consumables alike for many years with great success.

     

    Athletic endeavor has been fertile ground for this type of approach, because athletes have long been role models of persistence, hard work, grit and perseverance against the odds. Aspirational stories abound about athletes, and since they enjoy extensive media coverage, athletes and their stories are readily available to the public. If consumers aspire to be like the great athletes they watch and read about, then emulating them is a logical step toward making that aspiration a reality. If Tiger Woods wears a Tag Heuer watch, maybe if I buy one I’ll be a little more like him, run in the same company as he does. The athletes’ brand transfers to the product, and in some cases the reverse as well, creating that “natural” pairing. You’d expect the winner of a slew of majors in half that many years, with lifetime earnings in the multi-millions, to wear a pretty high-end watch. If Tiger had a Timex endorsement, it would have created a bit of a disconnect for the audience(s), and that natural feeling would not exist, diminishing the positive effect of both brands, diluting the aspiration, and reducing the effect on sales to the point of being nonexistent.

     

    On a smaller scale, middle market businesses can make sponsorships pay off quite well if they create or find a way to activate that sponsorship emotionally with the audience. The key is still to make it aspirational and activational. The aspiration can often come from the sponsor’s own position in the market. The largest commercial bank in the state sponsoring a business organization designed to build wealth and commercial connections makes perfect sense. Offering unique access or benefits to the members of that group makes it activated and effective. Market awareness, brand recognition don’t do all that much unless the target audience frequently finds itself in a quandary between two entities – the one with the higher recognition has been shown to win more frequently and more consistently, however irrational that choice may be for the consumer.

     

    Being in front of the right target audience for extended periods of time offers the recognition, but with no activation or aspiration, the sponsorship will be less than ideally effective. A male country music artist’s tour sponsored by Prius doesn’t have the same level of activation and almost no aspiration, when compared to Ford trucks. It’s a matter of cultural understanding, and matching the market leader to the aspirations of the audience. Country music fans clearly care about their environment as much as the next fan, but their concern takes a different form than saving gas or reducing pollution.

     

    Big brands should select their sponsorship opportunities carefully, to be sure that the target audience’s aspirations and activations align with their values and cultural norms. Done correctly, your sponsorship can be one of those “natural” pairings that lives in consumer’s minds for a lifetime.

  • Ten Ways To Make Sponsorship Build Credibility, Visibility For Your Brand

    Ten Ways To Make Sponsorship Build Credibility, Visibility For Your Brand

    Every business out there has probably been approached about a sponsorship, or included sponsorship in their marketing mix in one form or another, especially those with a consumer sales focus. But how do you make the selection of which one’s might be the most effective long-term?

    Careful selection of the events, products, and people you sponsor will allow you to activate that sponsorship to benefit fully from your association. In order to make a beneficial selection, you have to know your brand inside and out, and have a good handle on some of the more “outlying” characteristics that consumers have pinned to it – not just the ones you’re broadcasting about it. Some of those alternative characteristics can make for very solid sponsorships if you pick them carefully and engage fully with all the opportunities they offer.

    Many businesses don’t engage fully with the opportunities they do select, and get less-than-optimal returns as a result. This is one situation where you really do get out what you put in. Don’t stop at the logo on the sign, that’s just the beginning. Here’s ten ways to maximize the return on a sponsorship opportunity, planned or impromptu:

    For Event Sponsorships:

    10) Make sure to provide adequate materials to the event hosts so that all participants receive something from you at the event. Don’t short the count on the collateral, the promotional items or the literature, because that one person who gets left out will carry that impression longer and to more people than all the rest combined.

    9) Be sure your brand is represented adequately, accurately and repeatedly. You’ve purchased a certain level of exposure, and most event organizers will bend over backward to help you get it, but if you don’t speak up and remind them, you may not get everything you were promised. Check everything to be sure the brand is represented in the best possible light, and that it’s reproduced at an adequate size, color fidelity and resolution to do you some good – after all, you paid for it.

    8) Even if you don’t have something already created, make sure you take advantage of every portion of the sponsorship package. Most sponsorships are multi-faceted, and usually multi-media. If you don’t have elements in use already for each medium, be it flash video, print collateral, sales sheets, logo files in every possible format, bios, soundbites, banner ads, animated gifs, promotional blurbs and items, signage, banners, and other typical elements to take advantage of the whole package of opportunities, create whatever it is you’re missing. You might be the only one of the sponsors who does, in which case, guess who’s going to be the most memorable?

    7) Make sure the audience matches your efforts. Most brands have a broad range of demographic, psycho-graphic and geographic audiences it serves. Be sure the sponsorship you pick reaches at least a viable, sizable niche slice of your total target market. If not, it doesn’t make sense to participate.

    6) Make your selection based on LIFETIME CUSTOMER VALUE, and not just acquisition cost. It may cost you $25 to reach, influence and close a new customer to buy your product once. But if the event sponsorship is a valid one, you not only close one sale, but in most cases (if you’re doing your retention efforts correctly), you’ve gained a long-term customer who will enact or refer multiple sales over the next few years. Once you factor that in, the numbers on ROI work much better.

    5) Do your part of participate in the success of the event. Your name and your brand is now attached to this event. Do you part to promote it, get some mileage of your own out of your participation, fill the stands and pack the seats – it‘s to your benefit, it drives that many more people to view your participation, and bring you more customers.

    4) If the package doesn’t fit, ask for what you want. Most event organizers want the sponsorship to benefit you, so that you’ll repeat or extend your participation and become an evangelist for their event. They want to make you happy, and will negotiate in good faith if you have an alternative proposal to present. If you don’t ask, they won’t likely offer what you want. The tough part is accepting and using the valuations attached to each element. Most often it pays to just make the best overall deal you can, and work it to the fullest.

    3) Pick events that make interaction logical. A mountain bike company sponsoring a swimming event doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that same company sponsoring an off-road bike race makes perfect sense. That’s not to say that you can’t sponsor an event outside your industry, you just have to be selective so that the audience can easily make the connection between your brand and the activity they‘re engaged in at the moment.

    2) Make the sponsorship an integral part of your strategy, even if it isn’t. Plan your sponsorships to work with your product’s sales curve, either to boost the top or fill in the troughs, seasonally or geographically. If you’re expanding your service or delivery area, work events on the fringes of your current area to make the expansion more organic. If you sell primarily in the summer, work the earlier and earlier events, or later into the fall to extend your season and broaden your exposure.

    l) Don’t select more sponsorships or pick more events than you can fully support. The up-front cost is just the tip of the iceberg, and once you add manpower hours, staff training, brand monitoring time, collateral and participation costs, and follow-up and activation costs, it’s easy to get overextended, and not give a full effort to anything, a recipe for failure. Make an honest commitment to the right mix of events and participate fully for the greatest benefit.

    Making smart selections when choosing a sponsorship is a combination of art and science, and the basis is really knowing your market, knowing your brand intimately, and using some common sense with an audience perspective. Sponsorship can be a strong part of your marketing mix, if you make the right choices and work them to the fullest.

    If you found these tips helpful and would like to read more, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor . . .

    And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor . . .

    Are you really getting as much value from your sponsorship activity as you were lead to believe when you entered into the agreement? Have you ever tried to measure the gains, results, or revenue generated from a sponsorship opportunity?

    It’s tough, isn’t it? It’s difficult because there were no metrics or measurement tools built into the sponsorship, and likely no real activation point with which to leverage the value of that sponsorship into more sales opportunities. Sounds like gobbledegook, but there’s a fundamental truth buried in all that jargon: You can’t elicit or assess value if you don’t have a way to measure the return, and you can’t take advantage of visibility unless you find a way to make it turn into action by the viewer.

    Let’s take the activation portion first.

    Creating activation for a sponsorship, be it a meeting, a sporting event, a team, a radio program or other media opportunity is not easy, and it’s often not just a one-step process. Companies who’ve had success with sponsorship have found ways to really turn that awareness generated by this type of activity into action on the part of the viewer.

    Modern technology can help. The QR code is one way, the photo submission contest is another, with cell phone cameras being nearly ubiquitous in the US. The idea is to give event attendees or viewers a reason not only to interact with your brand, but to extend that interaction beyond the context within which it started to outside the venue, to incorporate it into their daily activities. Technology helps you give viewers a channel through which to interact with the brand that is new and fun and engaging, and if you do it correctly, they will become evangelists for your brand and pass their experience along to the others in their personal network, extending your reach even further.

    Now with modern technology, viewers have a method to engage, but you still have to provide a motive. They’ve got to WANT to interact with your brand, hopefully in a positive way. Motivating emotions for sponsorships tend to be the need for individuality (only people who attended in person get this shirt), aspiration to be an early adopter (be the first on your block to have one), greed (something for nothing), and the need for attention (winner gets his picture on our product box) these can take many forms in terms of the offer and the audience.

    Clearly, the brand/venue/activity/audience match-up is critical to making the most of your sponsorship, always has been, and technology hasn’t changed that much. Making smart selections based on your brand character, and your goals for the sponsorship are still critical exercises. But the need to engage, not just raise visibility for a short time, is higher than ever as message clutter has risen and attention spans have shortened.

    Now, on to measurement. Not coincidentally, engagement and measurement go hand in hand. The more actively engaged your audience is with your sponsorship activity, the more easily measured it is. Engagement involves action, and actions can be recorded, measured and assessed. If you put up a banner in a sporting arena as part of a sponsorship, that doesn’t inspire much engagement. But if you put that banner at eye-level in front of the entrance to a famous venue gate, and ask people to take a picture in front of the gate and send them in to your website for a prize, now you have engagement. The more photos you receive, and the wackier they are, the higher the engagement and the more value you get from the sponsorship.

    More sophisticated measurements can be taken if you have the need and the use for the data. There is tracking technology, built into ticket stubs, bracelets, and the like that can track attendee movement and dwell within a venue passively, over time. The readouts in aggregate can show you roughly how much exposure your physical representations got that day or that week, and give you a target number to benchmark against for future events in that venue. Connect the two methods, and you set up a sort of Where’s Waldo scenario that can lead to an avalanche of engagement, at least within the venue, for more bang for your buck.

    However you choose to do it, the basics are the same: Give them a reason and a way to interact with your brand in a positive way, and then measure the activity and benchmark it against the cost and the value of the sponsorship to assess ROI and renewal decisions. With a little extra effort, you can reap huge benefits from your sponsorship opportunity.