It’s very much planning season for a lot of companies out there, and that means some of you will be thinking about adding sports sponsorship to the marketing mix, possibly for the first time.
Sport can be an incredibly powerful platform, helping brands to achieve many different things from simple awareness through to deep engagement with key stakeholders.
It’s also easy to get it wrong, so if you’ve never done this before here are a few things to consider before you go leaping two-footed into a sponsorship with all the finesse of Vinny Jones in his prime.
1/ Get clear on the strategic objectives
Sponsorship can deliver many benefits but it really helps if everyone is aligned on the core problem that it needs to solve.
2/ Understand your audience
Sounds obvious, but make sure you have clarity on who you want to reach, and a real understanding of how they engage with sport as well as their general attitudes, values and behaviours.
3/ Brand foundations
Are you clear about what your brand stands for, how you want the audience to perceive it and how this might impact the type of property you would want to partner with? This, combined with the first two points, forms the basis for a sponsorship strategy.
4/ Create an internal sponsorship proposition
Having done the first few steps, this is a brief articulation of the job you want sponsorship to do within the business. I find this can be very helpful with keeping everyone focused and for sharing with internal stakeholders.
6/ Build a framework
Pull everything together into an actionable framework for how to make sponsorship work and how you might measure it. This is where you start to define the parameters for properties that could be a good fit for your objectives, audience and brand. Having a clear sense of budget (including activation) is very useful at this point.
From here, you can start to proactively scan the market to understand which sponsorship properties are out there, and start exploring them in more detail with the rights holders, including thinking about how you might activate.
Obviously this is a highly simplified approach, but if you follow something like this process in a strategic way – and avoid just reacting to one of the many proposals that are probably landing on your desk around now – you’re much more likely to end up with a sponsorship that delivers for your brand.
