Importance of Research During The Sponsorship Sales Process

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!

Best Practices for Sponsor Prospecting

Many sponsorship sellers don’t know where to start when they are trying to find brands that would be interested in sponsoring their property.  As a senior consultant with 25+ years of experience advising both rightsholders and brands, I’ve learned a few “tricks” and best practices I would like to pass along:

1. Talk To Other Properties  

   One of the best ways to get information on the most active sponsors in your market is to ask other properties in your market.  For example, let’s say your property is a music festival based in Cleveland. You can start by finding contacts at other music-related properties in Cleveland (the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame comes to mind, along with other music festivals, concert venues, etc.). You can also talk to sports properties, cultural attractions, nonprofit organizations and other types of properties outside of the music category. Ask them which companies and brand categories they’ve had the most success with. I’ve found that sponsorship sellers are usually willing to help each other out.

   In addition, you can talk to properties in your category in other markets. Carrying on with the Cleveland music festival example, the sponsorship salesperson can talk to sponsorship sellers at music festivals in other Midwestern markets and then extend that to similar-sized markets in other regions.  If you don’t already have contacts at these properties, you can find them by searching LinkedIn or the sponsorship section of each property’s website or use one of the third-party resources mentioned below.

2. Get The Most Out of Good Old Google Searches

   Another way to get good information about which types of companies are sponsoring properties that are similar to yours is to simply Google it.  For example, if your property is a marathon in Seattle, you can Google “Portland Marathon Sponsors” to see which companies are sponsoring marathons in nearby markets. I would recommend creating a spreadsheet of all the sponsors you find so you can start to identify which brand categories and which specific brands are the most active in sponsoring your property type (e.g., marathons).

3. Use Third-Party Resources

   There are several companies that specialize in creating resources for sponsorship sellers (and also buyers). One of my favorites is SponsorPitch (https://sponsorpitch.com ). It allows you to search thousands of sponsors, properties and sponsorship deals. There is also contact information for people involved with sponsorship at most properties and sponsors. I used SponsorPitch recently when I was doing some brand targeting research for one of my clients, a museum. I was able to search museums across the US (and even internationally) to find hundreds of examples of sponsors at other museums. I was quickly able to see which sponsorship categories and specific brands were the most active in sponsoring museums. SponsorPitch offers a free plan that allows basic searches and paid plans that provide a lot more features (e.g., custom filtered searches, the ability to add your own sales pitch and search others, sponsorship deal analytics). 

   Another good resource is SponsorUnited (https://www.sponsorunited.com/). The platform includes a lot of details on sponsorship deals including assets and deal structure, marketing/sponsorship activation campaigns, social media metrics, and best practices. A subscription to SponsorUnited is quite a bit more expensive than SponsorPitch, but could be worth it for organizations that have dedicated resources and experienced sponsorship salespeople.

If you implement these best practices, you’ll find lots of new sponsor prospects in no time!

Questions or comments?  You can reach me at mark@visionmarkconsulting.com