4 ways to ensure your sponsorship is a success
Sponsorship can be a valuable and powerful marketing tool for Brands, just as it can be an income source and amplification tool for rights-holders. Successful partnerships are mutually beneficial, with Brands and rights-holders becoming synonymous with one another.
Unfortunately, for every successful partnership there are those that simply do not work or aren’t renewed (a tell-tale sign that the sponsorship wasn’t doing its job). More often than not, the lack of success is baked into the partnership long before contracts are signed.
To combat some common pitfalls, Fifty and Orchard Connects have collaborated to share some top tips on ensuring sponsorship success.
1. Find your why
Why sponsorship? Your ‘why’ is the reference point for all your decisions and actions. Once you have a clear answer, i.e. what business or marketing need it will satisfy, you can then start planning how to make it happen.
2. Build strong foundations
A strong foundation is at the core of any successful partnership, so whether you’re a brand or a rights-holder, we strongly recommend the creation of a sponsorship strategy. A carefully considered strategic approach, aligned to wider business objectives, offers the best chance for success.
A sponsorship strategy clarifies exactly what the sponsorship needs to do for the brand by looking at your audience, your objectives and associated KPIs, in addition to many other contextual factors. From this foundation, a narrative/story can begin to be built around a sponsorship.
Ensuring this step is part of the process makes sure that all decisions are underpinned by a framework of data and insight aligned with any key objectives.
3. Be Analytical. Be Critical/Define your objectives
Whether you’re a brand or a rights-holder, it’s easy to get caught up in the process and forget your ‘why’. After all, who wouldn’t be excited about the prospect of a big check or a partnership with Manchester United?
That said, a robust strategy will help to tame any judgement-clouding emotion and ensure objective - and effective - decision making. In sponsorships the head must rule the heart! How many times have you seen straight through a poorly planned partnership where the only thing holding it together was the CEO’s lifelong loyalty to a sports team?
4. Share passions/make sure it's a partnership
One of the keys to success is to view the sponsorship as a strategic partnership. Both parties need to put in the work to align their goals and ensure the relationship is mutually beneficial.
At Orchard, understanding of fans and customers is central to any strategy we develop. We work closely with our partners at Fifty to understand, target and reach key audiences that can then be directly activated. It is the richness of Fifty’s insight that provides the foundation for our strategic sponsorship work.
This unique partnership offers a joined-up approach and a turnkey solution for Brands. Fifty specialises in activating audience insight through unrivalled human understanding, media execution strategies and sustainable technologies. By harnessing Fifty’s full-funnel approach to marketing, we can build robust sponsorship strategies that tap into the shared passions, beliefs, and interests of key audiences. Based on these findings, we create data-powered sponsorship recommendations to boost relevance, engagement, and consumption.
Together, we help you connect rich insights and strategy to ensure you’re reaching the right audiences, at the right time, on the right channels. Unlike many traditional partnerships, it also means we measure the impact of the sponsorship in real time, constantly optimising throughout the partnership’s term to maximise ROI.
For rights-holders, the depth and granularity of this insight helps us at Orchard shape and frame the proposition, ensuring that it is tailored to the most relevant brands and, therefore, increasing the likelihood of success. This evidence-led methodology also demonstrates to Brand decision makers that you have a holistic understanding of their business and can provide bespoke solutions to best suit their needs.
Notes from Fifty and Orchard:
“Orchard and Fifty offer expertise in different areas, but both are directed towards the same goal. As long-term partners, we have aligned our businesses to create a new vehicle targeted at driving innovation and value into a landscape in desperate need of it. With the expertise of Orchard in Sponsorship and the insight-led approach of Fifty’s digital media offering, we have the perfect solution for any brand or rights-holder looking to maximise the value of their sponsorship proposition.” - Patrick Cook, Client Manager at Fifty.
“Sponsorship has struggled historically with a reputation that decisions are driven by emotion rather than data. Our partnership with Fifty brings best-in-class insight to the heart of the exploratory work we do for brands, and also provides valuable understanding to our rights-holder clients as to what their audiences are looking for from corporate sponsors.” - Kirsty Matthews, Director of Brand Partnerships, Orchard.
Click here to learn more about how Fifty & Orchard can help your brand transform granular audience insights into robust sponsorship strategies.
Click here to book a free of charge sponsorship consultancy call with Orchard Connects.
