Highlighting the benefits of event sponsorship can be an effective way to recruit promotional partners. You can increase attendance and outreach efforts your event by offering sponsors benefits such as:
- Access to event audiences for marketing
- Increased social media outreach
- Expanded email outreach
- Increased brand awareness
- Profitable return on investment
Event sponsorship can be a vital first step toward hosting a successful event. Here’s how these benefits can make a compelling case for sponsors to promote you.
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Access to Event Audiences for Marketing
One of the top benefits of event sponsorship which you can offer partners is access to your audience, which is likely a new audience for their brand, to promote their own products or services, assuming they are not a competing brand. Acquiring leads can be laborious, time-consuming, and expensive. You can provide your sponsors with a free source of leads by offering them the opportunity to promote themselves to your event attendees.
You can quantify this benefit for sponsors if you can provide supporting numbers, such as:
- Your estimated attendance
- The average cost of acquiring a lead in your market
- The average lifetime value of a customer a lead represents for your sponsor
Providing these types of numbers can help convince prospective partners of the potential benefits of event sponsorship.
Increased Social Media Outreach
Another benefit you can offer partners is increasing the range of their social media outreach by promoting them to your followers. Acquiring social media followers can require a significant investment in content creation, distribution, and management.
Once again, you can make this benefit more appealing if you can quantify it for sponsors. For example, you can mention:
- How many social followers you have
- How many shares your posts get
- How much traffic your posts generate for your website
Use this type of information to show sponsors how promoting your event can benefit their social media marketing strategy.
Expanded Email Outreach
A similar benefit you can offer partners is promoting them to your email list. Like social media marketing, email marketing requires a significant investment to attract subscribers and distribute content to them. You can save your sponsors time and labor by promoting them to your email list. If you’re able to help your sponsors gain new customers, it will increase their ROI.
As when offering to promote sponsors on social media, you can make an offer of email promotion more compelling to potential partners if you can quantify the benefits of your email list. Important numbers you can mention include:
- The size of your email list
- Your delivery rate
- Your open rate
- Your click-through rate
- Your conversion rate
Showcase these types of key performance indicators to show sponsors how it can pay to be promoted to your mailing list.
Increased Brand Awareness
One of the top goals for any marketing team is increasing brand awareness. By promoting your sponsors to your event audience, social media followers and email subscribers, you can help them achieve this goal. When you promote your sponsor to your followers, you also build their brand’s reputation, another major marketing goal.
You can make this benefit more appealing by quantifying it, using the types of numbers listed above. You can also emphasize the overlap between your audience and your sponsor’s target market. This lets sponsors know that you can help them build brand awareness with the type of customer who buys their products and services.
Profitable Return on Investment
One of the most compelling reasons you can offer sponsors for supporting your even is a profitable return on investment. If you can show them that promoting your event will earn them more money than it costs them, you can make an excellent business case why it makes sense for them to sponsor you.
You can use several strategies to demonstrate a profitable outlook for sponsors. If your event requires attendees to pay a registration fee, you can offer a commission to sponsors for registrations they generate. This provides them with a direct return on investment. To track registrations that qualify for a commission, you can use an event management solution that allows you to process registrations for your event online.
You can also offer an indirect return on investment by offering sponsors an opportunity to promote their products or services at your event. If your event is a trade show, you can offer them free booth space. Whether you’re promoting a face-to-face meeting or a virtual event, you can promote your sponsor’s products and services digitally. For example, you can link to your sponsor’s site from your webpage, social media posts, or emails.
To underscore the profit margin for promotional partners, you can emphasize to investors how little it costs them to sponsor your event. If sponsoring your event is free, this is easy to do. If there is a fee for sponsoring your event, or if it will cost sponsors marketing expenses to promote your event, you should strive to show that the potential profit from sponsoring your event outweighs potential costs.
You can reduce the potential cost of sponsoring your event by taking steps to minimize the labor sponsors need to expend to promote your event. One way to do this is to provide your sponsors with out-of-the-box tools to promote your event. For instance, you can provide a website link, social media posts, and emails they can share with their audiences. Your link can direct to a page on your website with event ticketing technology that automates the process of registration and sends out automated event reminders. This relieves your sponsors of any labor for promoting your event, making sponsorship a pure profit proposition.
Leverage the Benefits of Event Sponsorship to Boost Your Attendance
Showcasing the benefits of event sponsorship can help you attract partners and increase attendance. You can make it easier for sponsors to promote you if you leverage automation to make it easy for attendees to register. The Event Espresso WordPress event registration plugin allows you to take registrations directly through your website, making it simple for you to register attendees after sponsors direct them to you. Try a live demo now to see how Event Espresso can help you and your sponsors make your event a success.