Obtaining clutch sponsorships for your competition is essential to its growth and success. A valuable sponsorship immediately increases your operating capital (and/or profits!) as well as bolsters the overall credibility of your competition. Although you might be able to do some bartering and get some “hook up sponsorships” without investing a lot of professional energy, the best sponsorships are business deals with clear ROIs that comes with strings attached and very real expectations. We’ve recently introduced some new features to help you “wheel and deal”, so read on…
How to get sponsors for your competition
In terms of business model, a sponsorship is a form of advertising with a common goal of “brand exposure” or “lead generation” that will ultimately drive sales. Therefore, you must be able to make a compelling offer with a clear ROI to your sponsor. Typically, the compelling offer is an opportunity to be prominently featured in tastefully appropriate ways to their target audience that will ultimately drive business and help them make money. Since the overall digital footprint of your competition is by far your highest point of leverage, we’ve recently introduced a new Advertising Kit in our app that’s now available for all competitions.
The primary job of your competition’s Advertising Kit is two-fold: 1) to help you build and manage a highly robust sponsorship inventory and 2) prominently feature your sponsors throughout your competition’s digital experience with beautiful rotating carousels of logos and well-placed logos. In addition to increasing exposure, viewers can click or tap through to visit your sponsor’s site, so your sponsors can measure click/tap-through attribution.
Do you have a specific sponsor for each workout? Great! Feature each unique sponsor with their corresponding workout page.
Do you want to add your primary sponsors in the header carousel and the secondaries in the footer? Easy.
Let’s do this!
Adding sponsors
Add multiple sponsors to use in your ad campaign by locating the sponsor tab within the advertising section of your dashboard.
Simply add each sponsor by uploading their logo and adding the sponsor’s name along with a link to their website, so that when someone clicks on the logo, it will open a new page and take them to that sponsor’s website. Keep in mind that the link to their website can be designed such that it helps your sponsors attribute traffic or revenue directly to you and, thus, better understand ROI!
Add as many sponsors as you’d like to your overall inventory. Then, customize carousels and logo placements throughout your competition’s entire digital experience.
Create ad carousels
Once your sponsorships are added, you may begin customizing your ad carousels, which will present your sponsor logos and rotate at regular intervals. You can choose to mute the logos or keep them in their original form.
Check out this short video to see how it’s done:
Manage ad campaigns
After creating one or more carousels, select which pages you want to display your ad carousels on and when you want the campaigns to run. For example, you could feature the same carousel on every page, or feature specific sponsors on specific pages of your site depending on the context. For example, you might feature a sponsor that promote’s women’s health products on the leaderboards for female divisions of the competition and feature a sponsor with unisex product offerings on a mixed teams division. As a rule of thumb, you should do whatever creates the most compelling ROI for your sponsors and delivers the most value to your participants.
Finally, set a time and date for when your ad campaign will start and begin. Again, you might run the same campaigns throughout the entire lifecycle of your competition, or you might have a schedule that varies. For example, a 2-day competition might have title sponsors that are featured on both days, whereas all other sponsors are promoted on one day or the other. The schedule you create is easy to manage for all of your campaigns through the Ad Report menu int he following video:
Here are a couple of screenshots that show some carousels in action for some recent events that have used our Advertising Kit to deliver value to sponsors, participants, AND increase their own bottom line.
For tips on how to secure sponsors, check out this blog post.
See for yourself how simple it is, and start maximizing your profits.
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This post is tagged competition, competition planning, online competition, sponsors
