Increasing the Value of Your Sponsorship Offerings

Some of the most frequent questions I get are regarding sponsorship pricing and value. Many racers, and racing properties and events, struggle with knowing how much to charge and how to justify their pricing.

That’s one of the reasons that I wrote a popular blog post on the difference between pitching racing sponsorship that’s too expensive versus a package that’s just not worth the price. You can read it here if you haven’t already or need a refresher. That’s also why I created an advanced training workshop on crafting and valuing sponsorship offerings that marketing partners will be thrilled to sign up for. You can learn more about that here.

One of the questions I was most recently asked is how to increase the value of your sponsorship offerings. That’s a great question because if you want to charge more, you better be prepared to deliver the equivalent value.

Here are a few ways that you can increase the value of your offerings:

• Increase the size of your audience.
• Increase the depth of connection to your audience.
• Reconfigure your offerings.
• Create partnerships with other properties.

Increase the size of your audience, and the depth of your connection to them. 

This is the easiest way to add the most long-term value to your sponsorship offerings and your team as a whole. If you’ve been around here before, you know that sponsorship is a marketing investment. Many companies are making that investment so that they can access your audience.

If your audience is aligned with their target market – i.e. the people who like you are their potential customers – then it only makes sense that more is better. It also means that a deeper connection with your audience means that they are more likely to harness some of that connection for their brand. A highly engaged audience (one who interacts with your content online and offline) is extremely valuable to a marketing partner who wants to reach them.

That’s great news! How do you do it?

In simple terms: treat your racing as a business and your business as a brand. 

If you haven’t already gone through the free Build Your Racing Brand Challenge, I’d suggest doing so. It’s 30 days of free content that covers how to deepen your connection to your audience and grow it organically, along with tons of free resources on how to improve the look and feel of your brand platforms.

Over time, when you show up consistently and professionally with content that’s meant to serve your audience, your brand will increase in value.

Reconfigure your offerings.

If you’re just providing logo placements on your car and hauler, it’s time to re-evaluate your sponsorship program.

As we’ve talked about many times here at DirtyMouth, your sponsorship offerings need to align with your marketing partners’ goals. If you want to increase the value of your offerings, you first need to align them with your current or potential marketings partners’ goals. You can then figure out ways to add value based on those.

For example: If you are currently offering social media mentions in your sponsorship package and your marketing partner’s goal is to get the word out about a specific product, provide messaging (not just mentions!) about that specific product. Talk about the benefits of that product, how it helps you in your racing career or life, and why you use and love it.

Messaging vs. mentions might seem like only a slight shift, but it can be a major value-add for your marketing partners.

Other examples? If your partner values the hospitality aspect or ability to network at the race track, create a ticket package or behind-the-scenes garage your for their VIPs. If your partner values community relations, include a donation, monetary or in-kind, to their charity of choice or an appearance at a community event in their fee, or work with your local newspaper to showcase their involvement with a certain cause.

Think outside of the box on how you can design offerings that they’re going to value more because they closely align with their goals for the partnership.

Partner with other properties.

This sounds scary because we instantly go to worst case scenario: the other property might swoop in and ‘steal’ your sponsor. Yes, that is worst case scenario, and it’s pretty unlikely if you’re doing your job.

Our team is happy to work with sponsors who also work with other properties in the sport because we offer things that they can’t, and vice versa. Most companies are working with more than one advertising medium – billboards, television, social media ads, and more – so it’s best to think about other racing properties the same way. There’s more than enough to go around.

So, how do you use this to increase the value of your offerings? As I hinted above, you may not be able to offer all of the benefits you’d like to package together for a marketing partner yourself. That’s when it’s time to bring in another property, like your local race track, for example.

It’s not hard to put together a package with your local track or series that creates a win-win-win situation for you, the track and your marketing partner. Hospitality packages are the most obvious – including race tickets, a hospitality suite, or an event sponsorship. But you can also think outside of the box for the property – like integrating the division sponsorship, a category exclusivity (think: the exclusive beverage of X speedway!), the kid’s club naming rights, exclusive content and more.

Just because you’re not the star of all of it doesn’t mean you can’t put it together in a pretty box for your marketing partner. The more touch points your marketing partner has with their target audience, the more valuable that exposure becomes. And if you can be the one that creates those opportunities for them (which also saves them a lot of time and effort), the more value you’re offering them for the same investment, if not less, than if they built the package themselves.

And there you have it – four ideas for how to increase the value of your racing sponsorship offerings. More ideas? Drop me a line at Kristin@DirtyMouthCommunications.com, share them in the comments below, or hop on over to our free Sponsorship Success Community on Facebook!

xo.
Kristin