Understanding who attends an event you sponsor and aligning your overall business strategy and goals with organizers is crucial to getting your message to attendees. Carefully selecting an event you participate in can provide great rewards for your business, including brand engagement and awareness, targeted marketing that connects you with a specific audience and it can also strengthen a company’s commitment to a cause.
Miguel A. Sedano, digital content editor at Smart Meetings (SmartMeetings.com) offers this checklist to review when sponsoring an event:
Understand your audience.
What overall message do you want attendees to come away with? A key component to reaching and engaging event guests is to understand them. Quantify the type of audience a specific event attracts by collecting objective measurements of demographics and other data that can help you decide whether this event is right for you. Having an idea of who you will be marketing at an event will assist you in crafting a campaign that can drive results.
Branding, branding, branding…
How will you stand out from other sponsors? A key to effective event sponsorship is to leverage any chance to individualize your message and making sure your offer is completely unique. Whether that is in the form of marketing collateral or product giveaways, partnering with event organizers can provide insight on their experience and help you understand what has worked in the past.
Digitally connect with attendees.
Building a social media strategy is essential to connecting with attendees at any event. Physically having them sign up for your email list on an iPad is a start. But today’s social platforms provide you with more than one avenue to encourage on-the-spot brand activation before and after events. This can be accomplished by having attendees tweet, post an Instagram photo or simply connect on Linkedin.
Negotiate and set your terms wisely.
Making sure that sponsorship organizers will work with you can eliminate offers and terms that don’t align with your strategy. Having the ability to negotiate terms that work for your business can leverage and help you obtain items that were not originally included in the event offer, and further customize your presence at a specific event.
