Sponsorship is by no means new, but it’s getting bigger and it’s been predicted that brand partnerships could be the difference between building a sustainable business or failing completely.

Here are our five top reasons why sponsorship should be included in your marketing strategy.

1)    Building brand awareness

Sponsorship helps to create positive publicity, raise your profile and therefore increases the visibility of your brand to your target audience. Essentially, it gives valuable eyeballs on ‘you’ as an organisation. Large national organisations will look to sponsor on a national scale, however, this doesn’t rule out smaller companies. There are still lots of opportunities to build awareness within your target market, whether this be locally or regionally. 

2)    Enhance public perception/shape consumer attitudes

Coca-Cola is consistently present at events and in other media outlets as a means to generate positive influence. As such they regularly support events that they believe can influence consumer opinions.

3)    Humanise your brand

Sponsorships (when done right) are a great way to engage with your audience. However, gone are the days where you can put your logo on something and be done with it. In the new era of sponsorship, it’s about the activation strategy around this, which goes beyond “in partnership with”. For example Santander, they use their the sponsorship of the TFL’s bike scheme, to engage with customers, with a dedicated app allowing customers to unlock a bike in a selected location (Santander customers also receive cash back on every journey).  

4)    It’s a great return on investment

There aren’t many ways to get such a large reach for a relatively small initial investment. Although difficult to quantify (note we said difficult - not impossible!) There a multitude of ways to build analytics around the awareness and outcomes from sponsorship, as you would do on any other platform. Activities such as event specific codes, subscription lists and web traffic comparisons are great ways to help measure your ROI.

 5)    Generates sales/leads /data capture

Particularly at events, consumers are willing to give their details if the right incentives are there. Similar to activation, tactics such as free subscription for 30 days etc. are great ways to capture data, generate leads and eventually a sale. In larger scale events, organisers are willing to give concession booths, and in some cases exclusivity to only sell your product, which again is a great way to generate leads and boost sales.

Sponsorships must be authentic and require specialist marketing expertise to ensure that the brand activation strategy is in place to excite consumers and thereby maximise the impact of your sponsorship. To find out more about how ECHO can help you with corporate sponsorships and more, you can get in touch with us at  hello@weareecho.co.uk