Being able to line up sponsors can make or break some events. In a recent Convene article, Dave Lutz of Velvet Chainsaw Consulting said, “Sponsorship is the most sophisticated and emotional marketing-spend category of all.” He also says “one of the best tactics to up your sponsorship sales game is to become an expert at compiling post-conference proof of sponsorship activation.”
With the latest mobile technologies, it’s possible to deliver measurable value to any organization sponsoring your event. In fact, 77% of attendees usually download and use an event app when it’s offered, which makes it a great platform for positioning sponsors in a digital environment. Who wouldn’t love having their brand in practically every purse and pocket at your conference?
And with the app’s analytics platform, you can track the value your event offers your sponsors and show them tangible data that they can use to measure their ROI on your event.
Creating an event app sponsors will love
PCMA advises that you shouldn’t “assume sponsors’ needs. Ask for their objectives, which will different from sponsor to sponsor.” Start by gathering intel that will help you understand the organization’s goals for sponsoring your event. Ask them if they want to:
- Increase brand exposure?
- Influence the audience to engage with their specific offers?
- Drive traffic to their web properties?
- Understand the target audience’s behavior and attitudes?
Once the goals are established, align them with your mobile event app’s features and functionality. Here are a few ways:
Branding exposure
Help your sponsors shine as attendee’s interact and use the event app. Put their logo on the splash page every attendee sees when they open the app or on banners located throughout it. Offer organizations the chance to sponsor the entire app and highlight their company in a big way (think of all the marketing opportunities you can provide for “The XX Conference App: Sponsored by YY”). Don’t forget to utilize video – like welcome videos – to help connect sponsors to attendees.
Audience engagement
Not only is adding a game element to your event way more fun, but it can also be used to drive attendees towards your sponsors. Create an app game and assign points for visiting sponsoring vendors’ booths, or web pages. Assign check-ins at vendor speaking sessions and reward anyone that attends them. Push out messaging with special offers from sponsors. You’ll be able to report on the exact amount of webpage visits and click-through rates!
Driving web traffic
Is your sponsor looking to bring your attendees to their website? Help them out by making one of the feature icons in the app a link to their site. Drive attendees to this feature by sending a push notification to them with a special content offer from your sponsor.
You can also highlight your sponsor’s thought leadership by including their reports or white papers as part of the content available in the app. Attendees can even email this content to their network, which helps extend your sponsors reach even more.
Audience behavior
Be it a new product launch or measuring audience interest towards a desired topic, the event app can be a great tool to gather intelligence and analyze “real-time” behaviors. Pushing out surveys and live polls, tracking check-ins (aka attendance) for sessions your sponsors are speaking at, and noting views/downloads of their content provides a wealth of data that can be reported back to sponsors and provide actionable intelligence.
Just like how websites and digital behavior tracking tools helped marketers around the world carefully track their impact on business and revenue, mobile apps provide incredible tools to help event marketers show the measurable value their events are providing to sponsors. Sponsorship packages are no longer measured in assumed views and impressions, but rather on tangible data that can be tracked down to every attendee and justifies every dollar spent on their sponsorship.
