Importance of Research During The Sponsorship Sales Process
As a sponsorship seller, researching your audience and your prospective sponsors is one of the most important things you need to do early in the sales process. Many properties have asked me over the years how to do this research and what are some of the best resources, so I wanted to pass along what I’ve learned.
How do I go about it and what resources are available?
As a sponsorship seller, researching your audience and your prospective sponsors is one of the most important things you need to do early in the sales process. Many properties have asked me over the years how to do this research and what are some of the best resources, so I wanted to pass along what I’ve learned.
The good news is that you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money to do research on your property and sponsors. There are many things you can do on your own and use a variety of free or low cost resources available.
The main type of research you’ll need to do falls in 2 main categories. Below, I’ve outlined some tips and best practices on how to find key information and intelligence on your audience and potential sponsors.
1. Research on Your Audience
One of the first questions you’ll be asked when you approach a prospective sponsor is: who is your audience and what are their demographics? If your audience doesn’t fit with the brand’s target audience, they are not going to consider sponsoring your event or organization. So you can look at this question as a screening technique—it will save you time by ruling out sponsors that are not a good fit because their target audience doesn’t overlap with yours.
The key information you need to obtain is basic demographics of your audience: gender, age and household income. Ideally, you can also obtain lifestyle and psychographic information, purchasing habits and the level of affinity they have towards your property.
Resources:
You can often get basic demographics on your social media followers and website visitors by using the tools/reports included with the platforms.
To obtain the most useful and thorough demographic and psychographic information on your audience, the best option is for you to survey your audience. It can be a short survey that you distribute before, during or after they attend your event or participate in whatever program you are trying to have sponsored.
If you have an email list, ticket buyer list, registration list, etc.—you can send out a survey yourself. Consider offering some sort of small incentive for completing the survey such as a ticket or merchandise discount or a chance to win a VIP experience at your event.
You can create the survey and administer it yourself using a free online tool such as Survey Monkey or Mailchimp
Or you can use a professional vendor that specializes in sponsorship research such as Navigate, Wakefield or Performance Research. These companies require a fee, but it could be worth the investment because they are experts at designing and administering the survey, helping you ask the right questions, providing comparisons to the general public and other benchmarks, and interpreting and presenting the results.
2. Research on The Prospective Sponsor
Before you approach a potential sponsor, it is critical that you’ve done some research on what are their sponsorship and business objectives, products/services, marketing priorities and current campaigns.
For sponsorships in particular, you need to be aware of what other properties they are sponsoring and how they’re activating other sponsorships. If you don’t do this type of research, brands will immediately sense that you don’t understand their business and what type of sponsorship benefits are important to them.
Resources:
Besides looking at the brand’s website to get information on their current brand positioning and products/services, you can also use free websites and databases such as Corporate Information, CNBC Dun&Bradstreet’s Business Directory.
To find information about what other properties brands are sponsoring, you can use SponsorPitch to search current deals. For example, I was recently working with a local theater on a valuation project and I wanted to find examples of other local theaters that have sold naming rights deals. SponsorPitch provided me with these examples and also insights on which brand categories were the most active in sponsoring theaters. It also has contact info for sponsorship personnel at many brands, which saves time in hunting for this information elsewhere.
If you put a little time in researching your audience and your prospective sponsors, you are bound to have a lot more success!