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Sponsorship: Your December To-Do List

Can you believe it’s already December?!

Believe it or not, now’s the time to kickstart your 2017 season sponsorship program if you haven’t already.

Although many businesses are focused on their end-of-year activities and not on hearing your marketing pitch, there is still a LOT you can be doing to:

• do right by your current marketing partners, and
• get prepared for the 2017 season, off the track.

So, that’s what we’re talking about today: five things you should be doing in December to boost your sponsorship results in 2017.

Thank your current sponsors. 

If you only do one thing this off-season, this should be it.

I know that many racers – many people in every industry – have the ‘take the money and run’ attitude. But we’re not going to even touch on that, because I know you aren’t those kind of people. Instead, we’re going to assume that you fulfilled all of your promises over the season and activated those partnerships.

That being established, now’s the time to thank your marketing partners for their part in your 2016 program. You might send them a thank you card or a holiday gift, do a little extra activation with a ‘sponsored’-type social media post or email to your newsletter list, take them to lunch or simply get on the phone and spend some time talking about what their support meant to you.

It’s also a great time to break down any kind of data you can for them with an analytics report on the season – that might include data from the track (for example: number of team t-shirts with their messaging or samples distributed) and off the track (for example: website and social media traffic, most popular posts, etc.).

Create a time-and-execution plan for 2017. 

Most racers that I know spend certain nights in the garage no matter what. For us, if nothing else, the team is in the garage every Tuesday working on the car whether we’re racing or not.

What if you treated your marketing program the same way?

Take some time this month to layout a plan for both dedicating time to your marketing program – for finding and signing sponsors, for example – and to executing your activation.  Maybe you want to set aside a few hours every Sunday afternoon or Wednesday night to building your materials, adding to your prospect list, following up on leads and creating sponsor content.

Now’s a great time to lay that plan out and schedule it in before things get hectic and sponsorship becomes an afterthought.

And speaking of execution…

Start looking around and asking questions. 

This is a great time to build your prospect list – the people you are considering approaching about sponsorship – and that starts with looking around and asking questions.

What products and services do you use regularly? What products and services do your audience rave about? Are you seeing marketing for new companies, or new marketing for established brands? Might they be a good fit for your program?

Regularly check-in and take a look around – you’re likely exposed to more retail (and more retail marketing!) in the holiday season, so now’s a great time to notice what companies are putting themselves out there, what companies aren’t, and what audiences those companies are targeting.

Build your assets inventory. 

This is your list from which you can reference to create the right packages for the right marketing partners. In this (internal) list, you should also note what you feel the value is to a sponsor, and what the costs (both hard, as in cold, hard cash, and in time and effort) are to you. Note what the cash value might be to the sponsor, and the non-cash value. Will they be building their brand share in a certain demographic? Will they receive press or community relations benefits? Note them.

Need more insights on assets? Check out this blog post for more tips.

Gather data. Build your materials.  

Once you’ve built your assets, you can start gathering the data that will assist you with building your marketing materials.

By ‘marketing materials’, I don’t just mean your sponsorship proposals. This might be your autograph cards for next year, social media infographics, PR assets like the information in your email newsletter or boilerplate at bottom of your press releases, announcer information packets for when you travel to new tracks and more.

Now might not be the best time to pitch companies, as their focus is likely elsewhere, but it is a great time to get a jump on your off-the-track program for 2017!

xo.
Kristin

The Right-Sized Sponsorship Prospects

Sometimes, marketing your race team to potential prospects can feel like finding the Goldilocks of companies: not too big and not too small.

A few weeks ago, I got a great question from a prospector who detailed the struggle: many companies are too small and local to be interested in racers who run a regional or even national schedule. They don’t benefit from the traveling, so they don’t want to pay what, say, a regional or national team would charge for that advertising.

On the flip side, most big corporations aren’t interested in smaller, regional programs. And if they are, it’s extremely difficult to cut through the bureaucratic clutter to find the marketing person who is going to pay attention to something that’s a very small percentage of their marketing budget, especially when it’s less quantifiable than, say, a regional magazine or Facebook advertising campaign.

So, how do you find those Goldilocks companies: the ones that aren’t too big to care about your market but too small to get the cost-benefit of your program?

Here is some food-for-thought on a very valid question: 

The little bear’s expression = priceless.

First, like we’ve talked about on the blog in the past, it’s most important to align your prospecting to the interests and spending habits of your audience than the region and the size of the company. I’m going to assume that if you’re deep enough into the prospecting process that you’re looking at company size, you know that and, like our question-asker, are on top of this principle.

But, as a reminder, that’s principle #1 of sponsorship searching: know your audience and your assets. Know what you have to offer.

(Want more on that? Here’s a bonus post on how to increase the value of your sponsorship offerings, while you’re at it, and our on-demand workshop on how to create and value sponsorship offerings for those who want to take it to the next level.)

Second, let’s break down the challenges of the too-small and too-large companies:

Too-Small Sponsorship Prospects.

Instead of crossing them off your list as having too-little budget for your team or no interest in regions outside of theirs when you’re growing your racing schedule, ask yourself: how can I serve them within their region and their budget?

Could you consider offering these types of smaller/regional businesses a (smaller) package based on their portion of your schedule? 

It’s a win-win – they make a smaller investment and aren’t paying for trips out of the region, and, as long as you’re up front with your intentions, you can actually sell that same opportunity to a local company in another region. You absolutely, positively must lay everything on the table, just to be clear, so nobody thinks they’re paying for a placement at all of your races and only getting the ones in their region. But having a wing or body panel that changes over depending on where you’re racing, and activation on the local level that reflects that local partnership, would be a good way to not stretch a local company’s budget with placements and activations that don’t benefit them.

(Hint: this is what we’re seeing so prevalently in NASCAR right now – paint schemes that change from race to race. Here’s a great article on why local companies are making a big splash with one-race sponsorship in their region for a smaller budget – something they never would have been able to do in years past with NASCAR when only season-long partnerships were offered.)

Too-Large Corporate Sponsorship Prospects.

The challenge with large or national corporations is two-fold: if you’re a local or regional racer, they probably not interested in ‘playing small’ and dedicating the time needed to activate a local or regional partnership when they can do that with larger media buys. It’s also difficult to reach a decision-maker at the national level when you’re playing in local.

One thing to think about here is franchising. While some companies own all of their own locations, many large corporations license franchises that are owner-operated. Meaning that each location is owned and operated individually. That means that although they generally need to have their marketing spend approved by corporation, the decisions are largely their own.

Approaching a franchise owner in your region is a way to get the ball rolling with a partnership that benefits that location and doesn’t require working with the national marketing director or, often the advertising agency that represents their marketing.

Many franchisees also own more than one location in the same region, so the same decision-maker may be able to pool funding from more than one store. That’s a way to turn a small business into a medium business, or a big business into a medium one, depending on how you look at it.

Another thing to think about is that they often receive a portion of an advertising co-op fund. That means that the company sets aside an amount of money for their franchisees to spend on advertising. The franchisees will either get a portion of that money or they will vote as a group on where to spend that pool.

If they are not a franchise model, they most likely have a regional marketing director or a regional manager that oversees stores in certain regions. They’re likely making the marketing decisions for more than one store. Just picking one region to start with may eventually lead you to a major partnership. Another way to turn a big business into a medium or small business that aligns with your audience size and reach.

One last thing to keep in mind with corporations is that one of the reasons that big companies like that are so difficult to reach is that they are utilizing an advertising agency to guide them on their marketing spend. Most advertising agencies don’t ever look at race cars for ad spend for a number of reasons – having worked in them, I could go on all day about why – but that’s one hoop you’ll jump through in trying to reach them. It’s often better to get one or two stores involved at first and have them take it to the person above them who works it up the ladder to the agency than trying to approach the national marketing director, who’s just managing the ad agency.

Just Right-Sized Sponsorship Prospects.

I know, we’re getting there…how do you find Goldilocks? Well, you can tailor your packages to make the too-small ones work, or you can break the too-big ones into bite-sized regions. Or, you can look at both of these companies’ competition.

For every large and small company that fits your brand, there is a competitor. There likely is a medium-sized competitor or regional competitor. 

When you think about Lowes or Home Depot as a good fit, minus the size and national-reach, there is likely a regional lumber supplier – for example, we have 84 Lumber in Western Pennsylvania. Or, there’s a franchisee that owns 2-3 Ace Hardwares in your region.

The same qualities that make your team a good fit with the audience of national brands are the same things that make your team a good fit for their smaller competition. Those who want to reach a medium-sized audience at a medium-sized price in the region they’re looking to serve.

The good news is that Goldilocks is out there. In fact, you can find her in places that you previously might have thought were too large or too small. All you have to do is look.

xo.
Kristin