3 Primary Blog Topics: Sponsorship insights and tips of the trade. Sponsorship news, innovation and notable deals. Sponsorship sales.
What are some of the best ways to use Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality for events? In this clip from my interview with Dan Kimball the Senior Vice President of Marketing at eventbrite.com headquarters in San Francisco we discuss some specific examples of successful integration of VR and AR.
Technology is changing how events are produced and how sponsors activate. In this clip from my interview with Dan Kimball the Senior Vice President of Marketing at eventbrite.com headquarters in San Francisco we discuss the impact of this technology on events and sponsorship.
Larry Weil, a branding and sponsorship expert who goes by the title “The Sponsorship Guy,” said that “part of the challenge here is frequency.”
“There’s going to be a crest in sponsorship….
From the Cannes Film Festival to Wimbledon, all elite events share a wealthy target audience. One of my favorite culinary events Once Upon A Kitchen is a great example. It features multiple award winning celebrity chefs in an experience that will attract wealthy diners from all over the world to Miami Beach this coming December.
When marketing to Ultra High Net Worth individuals (UHNW have $30MM+ in assets) through high profile events you will always find three elements in common.
Typically, the goal is to get as many people into your event as possible but that’s not the case when your event is meant for a UHNW audience. Once Upon A Kitchen applies this principle by limiting access to only 300 guests, pricing tickets at a range from $1,500 to $5,000. The more rarified the location and limited the access, the more desirable an event becomes.
The wealthy are no strangers to the world’s finest cuisine but to duplicate the fare they would have to travel to the restaurants all over the world including France, Italy and Brazil. Any event meant for this audience adds to its aura by being prohibitively expensive. To deliver on the promise of being a one of a kind or bucket list level event this year’s Once Upon A Kitchen event is bringing together:
Not all sponsors are the right sponsors for the UHNW market. Brands that want to be a part of events that target the wealthy should be prepared to create bespoke experiences that WOW. This audience is not easily impressed. They are used to exclusive access, to being treated like royalty and have traveled and dined at the finest destinations. So to connect with them, you have to bring in bold entertainment, engaging activations and price is no object partnerships. These should include luxury vehicles, yachts, fine wines and spirits.
The lifetime value of a new client in this channel can be very significant. For brands whose survival is predicated by cultivating UHNW audiences one of the most effective ways to connect and demonstrate your brand character is through and elite event like Once Upon a Kitchen. The right event or experience can be a brand’s best pathway to connecting with luxury consumers. By following the principles of exclusivity, very high pricing and partnering with other elite brands you ensure that your event.
There are many advantages to sponsoring a food centered or food driven event because food has a way of connecting people in ways that even music and sports cannot. These partnerships present unique opportunities that lead to major results.
Sponsors often spend a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to engage or entertain consumers long enough to actually educate them about the product. This problem is almost entirely negated when you partner with food communities for whom the questions “How is it made?”, “How does it work?” and “How can I use it?” are required fields. Whether you have a new ingredient, cooking device or app – if it will improve how attendees at a food event eat or enjoy food then they will want to hear about it.
The worlds of live events and Influencer Marketing will be further connected in 2019 and the food industry is no different. Blue Apron’s recent partnership with Chrissy Tiegen With most food influencers only reaching their audiences online from their homes or kitchens, live events create an opportunity for them to connect with their fans. Sponsoring an appearance, activation or social takeover with a key influencer at a food driven event is a great way for your brand to turn those fans into your consumers.
In 2018 there were over 76, 239, 441 images of food shared on Instagram. People love posting photos and now, videos of or about food. The World Food Championships (which recently announced a move to Dallas for 2019) boasted 23.6 million Social Media impressions in 2018, doubly 230% from 2017. Sponsoring a food event all but guarantees social engagement for your brand.
There are a lot more than three benefits to sponsoring a food event and I would love to share more of them. Please share your thoughts on food event, communities and influencers and some of the best events, practices and activations.
Are you connecting with sponsors at the right time of year? Because when it comes to creating sustainable relationships, timing is key.
With over two decades of experience and over 4,000 brand and industry contacts, President of The Sponsorship Guy™ Larry Weil has some tips to make sure you’re connecting with sponsors at the right time.
It’s never too early to nail down your festival sponsors — but it’s usually too late.
If you want to sell high value sponsorships, use this timeline to make sure you find the right sponsors, secure their partnership, and get them to sign on for another year.
Learn what you can be doing year-round to win over your sponsors.
Collect info about your attendees— key behaviors, interests, and spending habits. What type of activities do they like generally?
Ex: if your attendees love luxury travel, spas and resorts should
be on the table.
Make a list of potential sponsors and research them. Learn everything you can about those brands — look through the company’s website, press coverage, and social media accounts.
Create your outreach strategy. How many emails will you send and phone calls will you make? What’s your social media strategy? When are you sending your press kit? Create your schedule.
Start pushing out your content. Use your CRM to track your outreach — your phone calls, email sends, and social media contacts. Get potential sponsors excited about your event.
Don’t sell during this first meeting. Instead, discuss the prospect’s goals and establish their needs. That will allow you to design a proposal that’s unique to your potential sponsor.
What better way to get your sponsors excited about your event than to actually show them? If you have the opportunity, invite them onsite to check out your event.
Sign your contract. Next, you and your sponsor should begin advertising and marketing plan your partnership.
During your event, take pictures of attendees interacting with your sponsor — visiting their booth, wearing or holding their swag, talking to the reps. Collect video endorsements from attendees.
A fulfillment report will dramatically increase renewals and prevent issues. Include anything that will demonstrate the success of your event — actual attendance numbers, news coverage, social traction, and ads promoting your event. Next, you’ll start researching your next round of sponsors.
For more details, please contact me.
Do you have difficulty securing meetings and conversations with corporate contacts in marketing and other departments outside of corporate philanthropy?
For the full survey, click here.
Imagine you didn’t win over the sponsors you needed for your festival or event, so you’re left footing the bill for items your sponsors would have covered. You’re then forced to provide a subpar experience because your budget is tight. Then, attendees (and the press) condemn you on social media.
Don’t let that happen to you. Find out how to get into the heads of sponsors — and create relationships that are long lasting and mutually beneficial.
Download this ebook to learn how to:
In a saturated market, events are looking for new ways to stand out. The right sponsors can be a major draw for your attendees, and can actually be the deciding factor for attendees on whether they click “Buy” — or if they pass you by. That means in the near future, brand partnerships could be the difference between building a sustainable business — or stalled ticket sales.
But some brands might already be in multi-year contracts. Some brands might be more interested in your competitor (or already sponsoring them). Some brands might not be the right fit for your audience. So how to do you find the right sponsors for your brand? First things first: Do your homework.
Whether you’re a pop-up bridal show or a multi-day car show, the key to winning the right sponsors is proving your value.
“If there’s one thing I would underscore, it’s that every sponsorship should be approached as a collaboration, a partnership based on customized goals and execution” says John Riccardi, Strategic Account Manager at Eventbrite. Now on the music team at Eventbrite, Riccardi previously managed sponsorships for various large-scale promoters and festivals.
Want your sponsors to see you as a true partner? Here’s how.
Sponsors talk — so if you damage one relationship, you’ll damage them all. Here are four mistakes to avoid to make sure you don’t become a sponsorship pariah. Share this list with anyone on your team who interacts with sponsors.
According to IEG, nearly six out of 10 sponsors are looking for an early exit to at least one of their sponsors. To make sure you’re not one of them, you need to continually maintain that relationship — and prove your worth.
For more details, please contact me.
Sponsorship is a multi-billion dollar industry, with an annual growth rate that has surpassed advertising and other forms of marketing. Yet this steady growth rate doesn’t mean it’s easy to find sponsors for your event. If anything, it’s harder than ever to secure them!
In fact, a recent ESP survey found that 58% of sponsors said they planned to end a sponsorship prior to the contract term — a 28.8% increase from the previous year. So how can you grow your sponsorship dollars while keeping the sponsors you already have?
To find out, we at Eventbrite talked to sponsorship expert and founder of The Sponsorship Guy, Larry Weil. Read on to discover his secrets for winning sponsorships today.
Today’s sponsors have many choices for how they will to connect with their target markets. So it’s not enough to sell the activation and call it a day. You have to manage that relationship and stay relevant to your sponsors.
“The important part is to remember that there are more things that sponsors have to choose from than ever,” Weil says. “They’re also measuring more than they ever have. And if you get to the mid-season or the middle point of a sponsorship deal, and you don’t know how the performance is, you’re not doing the job.”
So what does success look like? Practicing basic client relationship skills, including:
Sponsors today don’t have time to go through your sponsorship deck and figure it out themselves. They’re looking for strategic partnerships who will support them to meet their goals.
“It’s all about them,” Weil says. “You have to get your value proposition in the first five or six seconds and that requires study… What’s the value [to the sponsor]? ‘We help engage this audience.’ ‘We help reduce costs X.’ That’s what you have to be able to do.”
The most important thing? Listening to your potential sponsors, because they’ll tell you what they want. Then you can get them into a conversation, so you can find out things like:
Technology has changed everything for events, including how sponsors measure their return on investment. That means you need to know where to find the right data and how to report it.
“Data is where the CMOs are today. People get a lot of data on television advertising, digital advertising, and if you don’t have some of that to give them on what they’re doing around your event, then you’re going to be at a disadvantage when they’re deciding how much they’re going to allocate to events and how much to not events,” says Weil.
Take your event app, for example. You can find out information like what apps attendees are using, how did they get to your event, what influencers do they follow. With that data, you can:
For more details, please contact me.
So when I was contacted by The Second Annual African Muzik Magazine awards my first reaction was: I don’t know anything about this channel, how can I possibly be the right guy to represent this property? But they persisted and so I dug in and did my homework.
It quickly became obvious that I almost passed on a great property that the mainstream knows almost nothing about.
I had to dig, but here are a few highlights:
It was like finding the secret fishing hole that almost no one knows about. And isn’t that one of the biggest problems we marketers have? Dealing with the noise of over marketing in our channels?
I was so tied up in making quick judgments that I almost passed on a real jewel. We are having great success with our outreach. It took time to distill their messaging and perfect the outreach and now we can see the path to continued growth for many years.
P.S. I wrote this to share the business lesson that I learned from a prospective client. If you would like to know more about the African Muzik Magazine Awards please contact me.
