We’d love to sponsor your next event! We welcome opportunities to partner with customers, prospective customers, and industry peers. As a sponsor, Webex Events can offer partners:
As an in-kind sponsor, Webex Events will provide a product discount in exchange for being a sponsor at individual or multiple events. Financial event sponsorship packages (i.e. product and sponsorship trades, product and sponsorship discounts, product add-ons and customized event sponsorships, etc) are custom-built and case-dependent. We’ll work with you on a package that benefits both parties. Complete the form to request Webex Events sponsorship. We’ll be in touch in 2-3 business days to schedule an informational call.
A brand that gives financial support to a person, organization, event or activity, such as a trade show or a charity football match, is engaging in sponsorship. A subtle form of marketing, it's a non-salesy way to align your brand or products with the causes your customers care about.
In the physical world, sponsorship is where a business pays to have its name and logo placed on the materials associated with an event or organization. For example, you may purchase new kit for a Little League team and, in return, have your business name on the shirts or printed in the match programs.
Promotional opportunities like these come in all shapes and sizes, for example:
In the online world, sponsorship is where a business pays to have it's branded content on a site that's relevant to its audience. This content could include a blog post, social media post, videos, a logo or a review of your products. The content may be written by you or by a third party, such as a social media influencer who tests your beauty products and then writes a review. It's sponsored because you pay to have your brand or products mentioned in a positive way.
As a branding exercise, sponsorship is looked on favorably. For example, sponsoring a charity event means that you have reduced the cost burden for the charity, making life better for both the charity and the people attending the event. The benefit to the business is a tangible boost to your reputation – your company is now a good corporate citizen, associated with the type of causes your ideal customers care about. That's the reason why sponsorship spending exceeds $24 billion in the U.S. annually, according to IEG.
Here are some other benefits:
Cost-effective: Sponsorships are often cheaper than traditional advertising, especially if you provide value in the form of goods and services, known as in-kind sponsorship. For example, a hotel might provide free accommodation for event attendees in return for mentions and signage.
As Billboard reports, Hilton Hotels and Live Nation successfully concluded a five-year sponsorship deal, where Hilton offered reduced rates for artists and staff under Live Nation's umbrella, and Live Nation drove concert-goers to Hilton hotels by advertising on its website. This is an excellent example of a mutual sponsorship in kind.
Drive sales: Sponsorship is an easy way to introduce consumers to a product in a way that encourages them to make a purchase. A food company might offer free samples at a trade show, for example, at the same place where they can buy the full-price product. Sponsored content on a blog site might provide a discount voucher and a link to the sponsor's online jewelry store.
Reach more customers through word of mouth: Sponsorship encourages word-of-mouth marketing, which Social Media Today describes as "the most valuable source of marketing" because customers trust their friends. Word of mouth marketing has a snowball effect; one person who has a positive interaction with your brand tells another, and that person tells another, making it a great vehicle for mass exposure.
We see this most clearly on social media, where consumers follow influencers to get their opinions and reviews on products and brands. Advertisers can sponsor influencers to promote new product launches and special offers, getting their product before a ready-built and engaged online audience.
Generate media buzz: For a small business, getting media mentions is tough and out of financial reach. However, if you sponsor an event or a trade show, you can tap into the media coverage for the event. If your logo is tied to the event branding, it will appear in all the photographs.
Sponsorship is complex; it is not merely providing financial support because someone has a good cause. When properly done, sponsorship creates a meaningful three-way relationship between you, the organization or cause you're sponsoring, and your audience. The key goal is to quickly create a quality audience. To do that, you must align with the right opportunities.
The first thing to consider here is reach. Who is the audience for this event or cause? How many people will your branding reach? To take social media influencers as an example, the size of the audience is important, but so is the engagement level of the audience. You need to make sure your sponsored content is seen and does not disappear into the void.
You also need to think about relevance. Sponsorship expert Sophie Morris, writing at LinkedIn, warns against the "logo slap," where you just put your logo onto something and hope it pulls in sales. To get the best possible returns for your sponsorship, you need to be relevant to the audience and the event that you're sponsoring.
To find relevant opportunities, try your local Chamber of Commerce or use a sponsorship matching service like Sponsor My Event. To find relevant influencers, sign up at platforms such as Upfluence, Izea and AspireIQ. These platforms let you search for influencers according to their niche, posting frequency, engagement rank and number of followers or fans.
How much sponsorship is too much sponsorship? That's a question that every online sponsor should be asking since the saturation rate – the number of sponsored posts an online blog site or influencer has done relative to their total content – can reduce the effectiveness of your campaign. According to Forbes, audience engagement on Instagram decreases as the saturation rate increases.
Simply put, too many ads are a turnoff for consumers.
The definition of ads here is something of a moving target. Some brands and influencers do a much better job than others at disguising the sponsored nature of their content, such that a sponsored post may perform just as well as an organic one. Quality, rather than quantity, is the key to success. The trick is to find the sweet spot between the saturation rate and audience engagement to understand exactly how many posts you need to buy to keep the interest of your audience.
I have been getting a lot of questions about in-kind sponsorship lately. Not so much focused on getting in-kind, but how to get your in-kind sponsor to “upgrade” to cash. In my post “The Seven Deadly Sins of Sponsorship,” I speak out against in-kind sponsorship as one of the deadly sins. In a world where cash is king, I am not a big fan of in-kind sponsorship. There, I said it! I am also not a fan of the philosophy that you should use sponsorship to cover off your expenses and let ticket sales drive your revenue. The hard costs of your event or program have nothing to do with the market value of your assets. Getting “free” wine, AV, lunch, dinner, photo booths etc. is actually costing you thousands of dollars. Why? Because the value of the wine as a marketing opportunity is unrelated to its hard costs. Every logo placement, call out from the stage, and opportunity to connect your sponsors to their audience has value. Apply your valuation calculator to your wine (and all in-kind sponsorships) and sell it to companies who care about your demographic. Bonus tip: I never sell wine sponsorship to wine producers. Instead, I look for professional services firms who want to connect with my audience. In a word: yes! While it’s true that in-kind sponsorship is probably costing you money, the decision to get “free stuff” instead of seeking a cash sponsor is highly personal and based on your goals, time, resources and ability to activate your sponsorship. The other scenario that I think warrants in-kind sponsorship is when you are getting services or products that offset genuine hard costs to your or your organization. For example, your law firm offers you free services that you budgeted $10K for in exchange for $10K in sponsorship. You are unlikely to find a “legal services” sponsor like you would a wine sponsor and if you are avoiding budgeted hard costs, a trade is in order. A penny saved is a penny earned, after all. If you are giving away sponsorship for a “nice to have,” then you have to budget for the opportunity costs of not being able to sell those tickets, exhibit space or title sponsorship. The take home message is to be careful and to use your valuation calculator for every single asset you have. This way you know exactly what you are giving away as an in-kind benefit. Moving Sponsors from “In-Kind” to CashSo, you’ve been getting free wine, lunch, product samples, AV, posters etc. from “sponsors” and you’ve been giving them the corresponding sponsorship along with a slew of benefits for free. How do you move them from in-kind to cash? Let me answer with a story: You go to the same restaurant every Friday. Every Friday your server brings you free dessert, free coffee and free cocktails as a thank you for ordering the steak and lobster and for being such a great customer. After six months of this, your server gives you your bill and has charged you for all of the things he has been giving you for free. How would you feel? Will you be back? Will you agree to all the extras next time? Once you tell your prospects that the value of the things you are giving them is $0, aside from the hard costs of the product, you are going to struggle to prove that your brand and audience is worth more than $0. If we go back to the narrative, one could argue that there is a market value for all of the free stuff you got…but it doesn’t mean you are going to pay it. The same is true with sponsorship. In other words, if you have been giving stuff away for free…you have created a market value of $0 to that “sponsor.” Here’s what I suggest. First, run all of your in-kind assets and related benefits through your valuation calculator to get a sense of the real value. Next, present the valuation to your in-kind sponsor and tell them how much you appreciate their support. Let them know that your plan is to move to charging the full market value to all sponsors over the next three years and that you want to talk to them about their marketing goals. Find out what they really want out of their sponsorship investment. Maybe giving you product is only part of the equation. Once you know what their goals are, maybe you can sell them another type of sponsorship tailored to their needs. They may walk away, and you should be ready for that. If they do walk away, make sure you have done all of the other steps in my article “The Five Stages of Sponsorship” and you will be in a good place to reach out to new prospects who value your audience and will pay for access to that audience. In-Kind Sponsorship Best PracticesSomething I hear a lot of is this: a property gets food given to them for an event for free. They accept the food and then the property goes out and gets a cash sponsor as well. The cash sponsor trumps the in-kind sponsor in terms of recognition and you end up with a very unhappy in-kind sponsor. The catch in upgrading your in-kind sponsors, if there is one, is that you can’t double dip! If you want a cash sponsor, you need to buy the food, wine, signs etc. yourself. But it isn’t really a catch because when you use this approach you add the hard costs of product to your valuation, which is passed on to the sponsor anyway! So how do you get your wine sponsor to move up from giving you free wine to paying you for the right to give you wine? The same way you sell all sponsorship: define your audience, define your assets, value those assets and meet with your prospects to find out what they want to accomplish. ABOUT THE AUTHORChris Baylis is the President and CEO of The Sponsorship Collective and a self-confessed sponsorship geek. After several years as a sponsor (that’s right, the one investing the money!) Chris decided to cross over to the sponsorship sales side where he has personally closed tens of millions of dollars in sponsorship deals. Chris has been on the front lines of multi-million dollar sponsorship agreements and has built and coached teams to do the same. Chris now spends his time working with clients to value their assets and build strategies that drive sales. An accomplished speaker and international consultant, Chris has helped his clients raise millions in sponsorship dollars. Connect with Chris via: The Sponsorship Collective | Twitter | LinkedIn |
An in-kind sponsor trades a product for sponsorship opportunities
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