Every marketer needs to know how to measure the effectiveness of their sponsorships. Now it's easier than ever and social media is leading the way with a plethora of measurement tools to help you track sponsorship performance. It's in every marketers' best interests to know how their sponsorship is performing to be able to tweak the activation as it's happening and ultimately to understand the return on investment.
If you are yet to start managing your sponsorships in this way, here's a simple approach to measuring sponsorship that will help to get you started.
- 1.Know your objectives
- The first step to measuring sponsorship outcomes is to know exactly why you have entered the sponsorship in the first place. What are your sponsorship objectives? Your objectives could include increasing sales; improving brand awareness; changing consumer perceptions; to generate publicity; to demonstrate social responsibility and the list goes on.
- 2.Generate activity
- The number of objectives isn't a problem so as long as you are generating the activity to achieve these objectives. If for example your target is to demonstrate social responsibility, logo mentions in the pre-event build up isn't going to score you any points. What will resonate is if you use the sponsorship to raise funds and awareness for a particular social cause. Every objective must be matched with a specific activity that will help you reach your goals.
- 3.Assess the impact
- In many cases, the data you need to assess impact is now readily accessible via social media platforms. For this reason, it's really important to always engage a social media component in your activations so you are able to accurately measure performance. The hashtag is a useful tool to use when measuring brand awareness. Hashtags can be anything you like from #eventsponsors to #visitmelbourne to #thingstolove. When you promote your own hashtag alongside the campaign, you are creating a filing system that means every time someone else uses that hashtag, they add to your count.
- Hastags are just one of countless measurement tools now available through social platforms. Any content generated by you as a result of your sponsorship activation can be measured online. You can know who your audience is, where they come from, how long they view your material and exactly their time of engagement.
- Prior to social media providing all sorts of metrics and new ways to activate sponsorship, participation surveys via SurveyMonkey have been and still are very useful. The thing is, it's important to have a database big enough to provide a representative audience and an incentive attached to the survey to ensure you receive a good response.
- When you know your sponsorship objectives and generate activity that directly matches each one of your objectives, you are able to start assessing the effectiveness of your sponsorship program. Need more assistance? We can help. Email us directly at info@eventsponsors.com.au or visit www.eventsponsors.com.au and register your question online. You can also check out some of our other blogs for more on managing your sponsorship.
