Sponsorship activations are simpler than they seem, even though first-time sponsorship seekers usually vehemently disagree with that assessment. However, I stand firm. Once you know what it takes to put together a successful activation, the ideas begin coming to you one after another.
Okay, so what exactly does it take? I’ll reveal all my secrets in this article, so don’t miss it!
Secret #1 – You Must Have a Discovery Session
What is an activation? It’s an experiential marketing opportunity that connects your sponsor and audience’s respective needs, setting the stage to gel.
You can create an activation without knowing what your sponsor wants, but will it be successful? Unless you’re a mind reader or you happened to take a lucky stab in the dark, no, it won’t be.
The only way to know what a sponsor needs is to have a discovery session. If there was a simpler way around it, companies would have so many sponsors they wouldn’t know what to do with them, but that’s not the case.
A discovery session is an informal meeting between you and your prospect. You can have the meeting in someone’s office or on Zoom. Even a phone meeting suffices.
The point of a discovery session is to ask questions of your prospect to understand more deeply what kinds of challenges they face and why nothing they’ve tried has worked. This is the kind of information you can’t find on LinkedIn or in press releases.
Getting to the meat of the matter requires asking the right kinds of questions. Here are five to get you started. If you begin with those questions, you’ll learn a lot about your prospect.
Once you know their challenges and what they’ve tried that hasn’t worked, it’s your job to formulate a strategy that will work. This is where your activation ideas come into play, which will accompany your assets, or intangible and tangible goods that help a sponsor achieve their goals.
Secret #2 – You Must Know Your Audience
If an activation is about connecting your audience and sponsor, it’s not enough to only understand your sponsor’s challenges. You must know your audience like the back of your hand.
I’m not talking about superficial data like what city or state they live in. You need deep, rich data. The only way to get it is to survey your audience and dig deep.
Request detailed demographic, psychographic, and geographic data. Don’t ask too many questions, as a long survey will not get many responses.
Give your audience two to three weeks to complete the survey, incentivize them with an exclusive giveaway or coupon, and wait for the results to come in.
Look for common threads in your audience’s responses to generate broad groups. Then I want you to take each of those audience groups and add 25 datapoints or more. That means digging very deep into your data to its core.
As you do that, you’ll begin shrinking your audience into specific groups, which is the goal of this exercise.
Knowing your audience this deeply helps you identify their challenges and pain points. You can now take the challenges of your audience and the challenges of your sponsor and determine what kinds of solutions tackle both while uniting the two.
Secret #3 – Budget Isn’t as Important as You Think
One of the biggest sticking points I see among sponsorship seekers planning activations is the cost. While you certainly want to be cognizant of what you’re spending on activations, that’s not where sponsorship seekers get stuck.
Instead, they tend to follow the erroneous belief that an activation must have a high budget to be worthy of a sponsor.
Fortunately, this couldn’t be further from the truth. More so, you don’t want an activation to cost more than it has to.
Here’s why. You can end up using the bulk of your sponsorship funding toward the activation. That’s simply not good budgeting. You might have other sponsors who deserve just as much of your budget.
Even if you don’t, you can’t count on 100 percent of your audience gravitating toward one sponsor. Funneling too much money into one activation means having fewer funds for other areas of your event, program, or opportunity. This can impact the enjoyment of the event, reducing attendance next year.
So what should you spend on activation if not thousands to tens of thousands of dollars? There is no one right answer.
The cost of your activation depends on what you learned about the sponsor and the discovery session, your audience needs, the type of event you’re throwing, and your budget.
However, the amount of money you spend does not necessarily denote the value of your activation. You can spend $50 on an activation, but if your audience is happy and so is your sponsor, it did its job.
Don’t plan your activation oblivious to its costs, but don’t get so caught up on what you’re spending as a sign that you have a good activation.
Just as you can spend a low amount on a great activation, you can just as easily spend large sums on an activation that’s a dud.
Secret #4 – You Can Borrow from Existing Activations You Like, Adding Something New
Here’s another enlightening secret. Every activation doesn’t have to be completely new..
What do I mean by that? You can be inspired by activations you see at events you attend or read about.
The keyword there is inspiration. Do not lift an idea and use it without changing something. Add your own unique spin or personalization element.
You can also make the activation better. For example, if you love the idea of a pop-up shop, but all the activations you’ve seen attract long lines, your pop-up shop might include entertainment or refreshments in the line.
As you can see, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every activation. However, you must determine whether your audience and sponsor would enjoy a type of activation before employing it. You can’t just choose based on what you like, but what will achieve the most success for your sponsor.
Secret #5 – Involve Your Sponsors in the Planning Process
This next sponsorship activation secret might boggle your mind. You don’t have to plan your activations alone.
Many sponsorship seekers go into obtaining sponsorship relationships believing they must have all their ducks in a row. In some ways, yes, you must, but not in all.
For instance, you should have audience data by the time you meet with a sponsor. You should have had the discovery session. You should have valued your sponsorship property, at least your assets.
However, you needn’t have your activations and assets set in stone. An inflexible attitude can turn sponsors away. Your mindset comes across as very, “my way or the highway.”
Sponsorship can be a collaborative process if you allow it. However, that means inviting the sponsor in. Bring them some loose activation ideas and ask for their thoughts and opinions.
A sponsor understands their challenges and difficulties best, so they will have the best activation ideas for this sponsorship property. Through a collaborative effort, you two can come up with activations that might even be better than what you could have planned on your own.
There should no shame in admitting that. After all, it’s not about who came up with what idea. That will never matter in the grand scheme of things. Instead, you should concern yourself far more with the quality of your activation.
Secret #6 – Simple Is Okay (Yes, Really!)
This isn’t a secret among more experienced sponsorship seekers, but beginners often don’t realize that it’s fine to select simpler activations.
The complexity of your ideas and their cost go hand in hand. The more ornate your plans, the more you will spend to pull them off.
However, while a beginner sponsorship seeker might feel comfortable presenting an inexpensive activation idea if they’re truly confident in its merits, they often don’t like the thought of a simple activation.
So they tack on things unnecessarily, like lasers or holograms or other costly additions.
Are these things cool? Yes, but that’s not enough to make an activation successful. Remember, a good activation connects your audience and sponsor.
You can’t lose sight of that in the planning process. Burying the goal under bells and whistles muddies up the waters and makes it harder to efficiently plan activations.
When you come up with an activation idea, stop and ask yourself, “does it really need to be this complex?”
I’m not eschewing complex activations. Sometimes, your activation might benefit from holograms or lasers, but more often than not, you can leave these extraneous features behind, and the core activation will be more or less the same.
You’ll spend less but still deliver a high-quality activation.
Secret #7 – Photos and Videos Are a Must
You should be proud of the activations you planned and brought to life. Naturally, you’ll get out your smartphone and begin shooting photos and videos of the completed activation. That’s great, but if this is before your event, you need to take it a step further.
You must have photos and videos taken during your event when your audience is interacting with the activation. You probably won’t have the time to do this yourself considering you’re running the event.
I recommend hiring a few photographers and videographers to help you out. Station them throughout the building so they can get footage of the activation while your audience uses it.
Photos and videos prove that your audience enjoyed the activation and helps your sponsor visualize the crowd. The person you’ve worked with throughout your sponsored event might not be the one who shows up, as they might send a representative.
Your footage tells your sponsorship contact that your event was a homerun.
Secret #8 – You Must Track Your Results
However, photos and videos don’t paint the entire picture of how successful your event was. Only metrics can do that.
You must have a system in place for measuring the results of your event. I wouldn’t really call this a secret, per se; at least, it shouldn’t be. However, I think it’s important, so I’ll talk more about this point.
You must know KPIs like event attendance, sponsor email list subscriber growth before and after your event, social media followers before and after your event, new leads before and after your event, conversions, and sales.
I wrote about all the sponsorship ROI metrics here, so make sure you read through them and begin tracking each KPI.
Metrics tell your sponsor how successful the working arrangement was. Sponsors will appreciate the irrefutable numbers as part of your sponsorship fulfillment report. This report details all your deliverables.
It’s good practice to write a fulfillment report even if you’re not interested in working with a sponsor again. It’s like showing your work and proving your value to the sponsor.
If you are interested in prolonging your working relationship, send your sponsor a fulfillment report and request a meeting. You can talk business at the meeting and get valuable feedback that can help you improve for Round Two of working with this sponsor.
Unlock More Sponsorship Secrets
Successful sponsorship activation doesn’t have to be a secret anymore. Before you begin planning a single activation idea, survey and segment your audience and hold a discovery session with your sponsorship prospects.
Then let the ideas flow freely. Don’t let cost or grandiosity get in the way of your initial round of ideas. You can begin whittling down your ideas based on factors like budget and your sponsor’s opinions and needs.
Once your activation goes live, make sure you have dedicated photographers and videographers there to capture the magic. You also need metrics to incorporate into your sponsorship fulfillment report.
Are you ready to get your activations off the ground? Do you need help with another area of your sponsorship program? Why not get in touch with me today to discuss your sponsorship goals?
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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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