The Hatch team recently hosted a debate with sponsorship experts from Hisense and The EFL to discuss how well-executed, strategic sports partnerships can match the growing expectations from above to drive ROI. [Available here should you want to watch the full webinar.]
With ever-increasing pressures on budgets and ROI, sponsorship can often be ignored. Sport sponsorship as a sector has a reputation for being expensive, and there is no denying that can sometimes be the case. However, it doesn’t have to be.
So, without giving away all our secrets, we’ve broken down our top five tips on how to make sponsorships sweat:
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Clear Objective
This is singular for a reason. Our advice to any brand – either already involved in a sponsorship, or looking to get involved in sponsorship – is have one very clear objective as to what you want to achieve from a partnership.
This could be anything from engaging a new audience, increasing sales, increasing web traffic, brand awareness etc. – but start with one. If you have too many, that will naturally increase budget requirements.
More objectives will follow as and when campaigns begin, but being laser focused is critical.
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Know your audience
Sport can offer the chance to communicate with various different audiences, but make sure you understand the audience that your rights holder can offer you. Request the insight, review the data, get under the skin – find out who they are, what they like, how engaged they are – understanding that detail early on in a partnership will save you a huge amount of budget in the long-term.
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Identify your channels
This could be multiple, but what channels do you want you want to explore with a partnership? Social? Email? Driving traffic to a physical destination? Either way, what channels are important to you and how can you leverage them? If you can be specific to 1/2 channels then are more likely to get better ROI.
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Robust Relationships
Massive in sponsorship – relationships. Make friends, build connections, develop a unique partner/rights holder relationship that allows you to call in the favours. You are likely to see extra value from having that open, honest but working partnership that allows you to contra work and push for extra rights.
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Asset maximisation
You will have a list of assets – could be overwhelming depending on the level of rights but either way organising these to use them all is crucial. Developing a season/year long plan of how you are going to utilize each and every right will help save budget in the long-run. Know how tickets are going to be used, get the most out of player appearances and ensure your digital rights and working effectively for that singular objective.
This is just scratching the surface, but either way, you don’t know need to blow the bank to make it work.
Should you want to get the other secrets, get in touch for a no-obligation conversation.
