Many clients of mine complain to me about their small audiences. They wonder why a sponsor would have any interest in a group of several hundred people when other companies can offer access to thousands.
I always tell them something that surprises them. A small audience isn’t a weakness but a superpower. That’s right, a superpower!
I’m sure you’re wondering how that is, right? If so, join me as I’ll explain the benefits of a smaller audience and how to seek sponsorship as your customer base grows.
Quick Definition – What Is a Small Audience?
I find it so interesting when I talk to sponsorship seekers lamenting their small audiences about how the definition varies so much.
According to some sponsorship seekers I’ve spoken to, a small audience is 1,000 people or less. Others say it’s 50,000 or under. That’s a substantial disparity.
It doesn’t stop there. If you can think of a number for an audience size off the top of your head, I promise you, I’ve heard a client or potential client describe it as a small audience.
For some reason, every sponsorship seeker seems to believe their competition has audiences in the thousands or tens of thousands.
Some do, of course, but not all. Just as many sponsorship properties are sized similarly to yours or are–gasp–even smaller.
If you compare a bigger sponsorship property, then yes, your audience looks small, but it’s all relative.
Is a Small Audience Unappealing to Sponsors? Don’t Buy into the Myth
What’s the problem with a small audience, anyway? I have worked on sponsorship properties with hundreds of thousands of people…and hundreds of people.
Here’s the interesting part. Both properties brought in million-dollar sponsorship deals.
The sizes of these sponsorship properties couldn’t be more disparate, yet they earned the same amount of money.
If you walk into a sponsorship deal assuming what you offer is not good enough because you have a small audience, you’re going to set yourself up for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everything from the way you present yourself and your audience to how you talk to a sponsor will broadcast your lack of confidence.
Sponsors want to work with consummate professionals. They want an equal. Part of what helped those sponsorship seekers with small properties achieve million-dollar sponsorships was believing their opportunity was worthy.
That’s a small part of it, and you can’t overcompensate for lacking in areas of your sponsorship property, but your attitude is the first thing you can set.
Stop assuming that you have no chance at sponsorship because you don’t have a large customer base. The size of your audience is not the most important part of sponsorship. It’s the quality of the audience.
Don’t buy into the myth. You can hold back your sponsorship endeavors and keep blaming unrelated mistakes on your audience, so it’s hurting you more than you realize.
My Biggest Sponsorships Were Not Large Audiences
There was a period when I personally sold $80,000 to $150,000 individual sponsorship deals for an audience of approximately 150 people. We sold dozens of these sponsorship opportunities.
I think any way you shake it, 150 people is a small audience. It’s not opinionatedly small, but objectively small.
However, I had no problem selling sponsorship. The wrong sponsors will get hung up on audience number instead of audience quality, and do you know what? Those aren’t sponsors you want to work with.
When the Sponsorship Collective ran its first conference several years ago, we had an attendance number of 350 people. That’s a reasonable amount for a first-ever conference, but compared to other conferences, it was small.
However, my conference won out for total sponsorship revenue hands down, proving once again that it’s not about the size of the dog in the fight but how strong its bite is.
Audience Size Is Quality Over Quantity
Sponsors want specific audience data. They want to know more than how many members of your audience are 35 years old, but what your 35-year-olds do for a living, how much disposable income they have, and what their family size is like. And that’s just for starters!
Why do sponsors care about this data? They know that 35-year-olds who make $85,000 a year and live in Evanston (a suburb of Chicago) are part of their demographic, and they’re eager to see if you have more of those people in your audience.
It’s all about marketing to a target audience, as that’s what sponsorship is: marketing. Rule Number One of marketing is don’t advertise to a broad audience. It doesn’t matter what you sell; your audience does not consist of everyone.
People have preferences for brands and products, so it’s a waste of a company’s money to broadcast marketing messages to unreceptive audiences. Finding out that your audience enmeshes with a sponsor’s target audience secures sponsorship deals, not sales spiels, not sponsorship proposals.
It all comes down to audience data.
It doesn’t do any good to rest your hat on the fact that your audience is 100,000 strong if you don’t know anything about them. At the end of the day, a sponsor would rather have 50 event attendees who fit their target market than 6,000 people who don’t.
Why It’s Easier to Get Sponsors for Smaller Audiences
If you’ve struggled with sponsorship to this point and attributed it to your smaller audience, I promise you your audience size isn’t where the difficulties lie. It’s far easier to obtain sponsorship when you have a small audience for these reasons.
Faster Surveying
The first stage of obtaining audience data is surveying your audience.
Usually, you must wait several weeks for all the responses to come in, but not you. With a smaller audience, you won’t be on the hook for nearly as long for your respondents to send in their feedback.
The faster you have survey data, the sooner you can begin collating it to gain insights about your audience, thus moving you through the sponsorship process.
Optional Focus Group
What if you don’t have enough time to do an audience survey because your event is coming up soon? Or what if you have an audience that’s harder to identify than most? You have the option to run a focus group because your audience is smaller.
You can find like-minded individuals as part of a focus group and survey them, then compare that data against whatever metrics you have on your audience (even something broad like attendance data for your last event) and begin to understand your audience better.
More Niched Audience Data
I must reiterate the value of niched audience data, as the riches truly are in the niches. Since you have a smaller audience to work with, you have no excuse not to generate dozens of data points for each group.
You should know almost all their preferences and interests, their occupations and industries, their marital status, where they live, the number of children, how much money they make, and which brands they use.
It’s faster and easier to do this compared to a large property with 10,000 audiences. They have to create more segments because their audience is so large to begin with, whereas your audience starts out sort of segmented from the get-go.
Can Easily Understand Their Needs
Here’s another exceptional benefit of working with a smaller audience: less ambiguity about their needs. A smaller audience only has so many pain points, so once you can identify them, you can easily create customized assets and activations that speak to your audience’s needs and fulfill them.
Your next event will be a slam dunk because you’ll have a happy, engaged audience. That’s what a sponsor wants, as it means your customers or donors are more receptive to them.
Tips for Sponsorship Properties with Small Audiences
Given my experience selling sponsorship as a small property, I’m in a unique position to offer pointers on how to approach sponsorship and what to avoid. Here are my top tips.
Ask Who Your Audience Is Valuable To
The right approach to pursuing sponsorship with a small audience is asking who your audience is valuable to. You should have already surveyed your audience and extrapolated data by this point, so use that as your guide.
The brands your audience mentions in the survey are a good starting point. Do some research to determine if companies of your size fit the standard sponsorship profile, but don’t necessarily disqualify yourself if they don’t.
It’s about audience connection more than size. If Mercedes-Benz was interested in your 150-person audience because they fit so well into the car brand’s target market, you could sell hundreds to thousands of vehicles and generate a multi-million-dollar sponsorship opportunity.
Think Twice About Sponsorships with Consumer Product Brands
However, I would caution you to move away from sponsorships dealing in consumer products for the most part.
That car example was illustrative of how a small audience can still bring in valuable sponsorship opportunities, but here’s another way to think about it.
If you partner with a coffee brand, and a cup of coffee costs $5 a cup, a small audience doesn’t interest consumer brands as much because the money potential isn’t there.
It all depends on what the brand sells. A car manufacturer can make a killing with a few hundred people, as can brands selling homes or software companies selling CRM.
Forget About Vanity Assets
Companies and organizations with smaller audiences must move away from vanity assets, especially logos.
A logo on a sign at registration for your event is worth three cents per view at most. If you multiply that by 150 or 200, it’s a very small amount of money.
I would still strongly encourage you to eschew logos as sponsorship assets even with a larger audience, but at least the logos are worth more because more people will see them.
Engagement Matters
The level of engagement among your audience is also significant. A sponsor won’t mind a smaller audience if you can say with certainty that all 200 of them are highly engaged in your events and likely to participate in the sponsor’s activation.
Grow Your Small Sponsorship Opportunity
The steps to securing a sponsorship deal don’t change whether your audience has 100 people or 100,000. You still must have niched audience data, prospect using your audience’s preferences, hold a discovery session, customize your assets and activations according to your sponsor’s needs, and deliver.
A small audience is not a stumbling block. It’s an advantage. The sponsorship seekers I’ve spoken to who bemoan their small audiences often make other sponsorship mistakes and blame it on their audience.
Sending gold, silver, and bronze packages or using other outdated sponsorship tactics won’t work even if your audience is a million strong.
Set up a chat with me today if you’re ready to take your sponsorship endeavors further and bolster your small audience.
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Chris Baylis is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Sponsorship Collective.
After spending several years in the field as a sponsorship professional and consultant, Chris now spends his time working with clients to help them understand their audiences, build activations that sponsors want, apply market values to their assets and build strategies that drive sales.
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