You have to come up with approaches to identify and bring in sponsors for virtual events.
Hosting an event, even online, is expensive. Revenue from ticket sales alone may not be enough to cover all the expenses.
This is where event sponsors come in.
What is Event Sponsorship?
A connection between a brand from outside the company and an event planner is established in an event sponsorship. This arrangement involves the sponsor offering monetary or material support for your event in return for something from your company, usually a form of publicity.
In exchange for having their brand advertised, they can financially cover the event costs and allow you to make a nice profit.
But how do you get online event sponsors?
10 Strategies for Finding a Sponsor for Your Online Events or Conferences
Getting sponsorship for a live event is challenging. Obtaining financial support for virtual occurrences is far more complex than usual.
Many brands are uncertain that they will gain a beneficial return from their expenditure.
It is essential to craft a plan for identifying sponsors for your virtual events. Here are ten tactics that may assist you in obtaining event sponsors.
1. Find Event Sponsors Who Share Your Company Values
An essential component of acquiring backing for your virtual occasion is discovering businesses that identify with your business’s ideals.
Searching for common ideals can help you speed up the process of finding the right entity to collaborate with, making it less likely you will end up wasting time conversing with those who are not a good fit. This would also give you a higher chance of finding mutual principles to negotiate on.
Shared beliefs could lead to similar customers, even if the companies you operate are offering different items or services as a reward. For example, if your event and its partners concentrate on green initiatives, eco-minded shoppers might be curious about the details of each.
Having the same ideals as your event sponsors will lead to a more enjoyable environment for your participants, since the messages and promotions that they promote will pair nicely with the event.
2. Find Event Sponsors Who Work in a Related Field
Beneficial to both parties is the fact that securing sponsors in related fields means that both you and the sponsors will be able to access the same intended audience. People who offer the same products and services might visit the location to look around, hear presentations on the same subject, and other comparable activities.
Obtaining contributors from unrelated industries could be detrimental to your event rather than favorable. Brands and advertisements that are not in line with your brand and the theme of your event may cause confusion among attendees or even be in direct opposition to your messaging.
3. Offer Something of Value to Your Online Event Sponsors
Sponsorship is not a donation. It’s a give-and-take relationship.
You have to provide something of value to the potential sponsors of your event. Their sponsorship is an investment on their part.
Construct a tempting virtual event sponsorship package. A sponsorship package is a bundle of advantages that your supporters will receive for subsidizing your event.
Examples of incentives you can offer include:
- Opportunities for collaboration: This includes opportunities to be interviewed or to be part of a special panel. Collaboration affords your event sponsors maximum visibility.
- Virtual environments: You could create virtual environments where event sponsors and attendees can interact.
- Social media exposure: You should develop special hashtags for event sponsors to include in posts event attendees share. You can also add links to their websites in social media posts during your event.
- Branded waiting rooms: Most online events have a 15-30-minute waiting period before the event begins. Leverage this time by creating branded waiting rooms. You can display your sponsors’ logos during or show short ads during these times.
Here are some rewards you can offer to the sponsors of your event. Develop offers that will provide your sponsors with a platform to achieve visibility or raise their chances of gaining prospects, and they are almost sure to have an enthusiasm for teaming up with you.
4. Run a Paid Campaign to Find Event Sponsors and Attendees
Using financial support through advertising on social media, search engines, and other websites might assist in obtaining backers for your virtual event.
It is essential that you perform keyword exploration in order to personalize your advertisements for payment. Employing a keyword exploration program to examine terms and expressions that your potential sponsors employ and utilizing them yourself. Construct distinctive campaigns if you are shooting for various possible sponsors.
Two objectives may be achieved by utilizing paid advertisement. You can employ paid advertisements to draw in and capture both sponsors and participants of the event.
5. Reach Out to Potential Sponsors on Social Media
Approximately four billion individuals actively use social media, making it much more than just a way to maintain connections on a personal level. It has become a powerful business and marketing tool.
A few ways you can do this are:
1. Create a Public Post
Post a message on your page asking for sponsors for an upcoming event. Don’t be scared to request your fans to contribute to the promotion of this. You can broaden your audience by allotting money to elevate your post.
2. Post in Groups
Inform any social media groups in which you are active that you are searching for sponsors for your next occurrence.
3. Reach Out Privately
Instead of sharing on your timeline, you can also send private messages to your potential customers. For this strategy to work, make sure to:
- Target decision-makers: Research the brands you’d like to partner with for your event and find the decision-makers. These are the people you must reach out to.
- Personalize your messages: This requires you to study your prospects and tailor your message to appeal to them.
- Clearly outline the benefits of sponsorship: Introduce your brand and the event, then spell out the benefits of partnering with you.
- Keep it short: Get to the point. Your prospects are busy. Besides, they receive many DMs and don’t have the time to read through a long pitch.
Do not undervalue the strength of social media in procuring sponsors for your virtual gathering. If utilized correctly, it could potentially help you get a large amount of leads.
6. Organize Training Sessions For Your Sponsors On Your Virtual Event Platform
The most significant blunder an organizer can commit is to not offer instruction to their sponsors and exhibitors on the platform. According to a recent report by Swapcard, it appears that exhibitors lose around 40% of potential business at virtual events, which might be due to undertraining about the platform.
Equip sponsors with the tools they need to be successful by organizing activities and teaching them how to use an online event platform that delivers all the necessary tools. Prepare them for accomplishments, so that they will come back again and again. To optimize future results, select a platform with detailed analytics so that sponsors can get a better understanding of how to approach an event and use the same techniques for succeeding events.
An Event Manager Blog 2020 study discovered that sponsor/exhibitor profiles (78%), analytics/reporting (77%), and banners in high traffic areas (70%) are the top three features provided by virtual event tech providers.
Swapcard is a great example of such a platform. For the article, we’ll show how our company’s functions and resources can be used to instruct your patrons on a particular process that can be valuable in creating a trusting environment and permitting them to securely join to promising contacts.
Organizers that utilize Swapcard can demonstrate to a potential sponsor precisely what their contributions will be spent on. Making use of thorough and clear reporting can assist in making the sponsor more receptive to the advantages of a virtual event.
7. Sell Exhibitors Customizable Virtual Booths
In order to persuade someone to put money into an event, you have to guarantee them that it will lead to an increase in their organization’s success. Organizers have to ensure that sponsors are reachable and able to present themselves in a classy manner. Swapcard’s recent data states that booths are the best location for sealing business transactions, almost as successful as sessions provided by sponsors on event listings. The virtual workstation must be alluring, engaging, and rouse interest.
One of the simplest approaches to achieving this outcome is to make use of a comprehensive virtual event platform that has been developed with the needs and interests of sponsors and those they intend to engage with.
Swapcard, for instance, begins the process of selecting sponsors by requesting they provide some information.
Sponsors can make the most of an event by displaying their brand, products, and presentations on a platform attended and visited by the event’s participants. This enables them to strategically present their information for maximum effect.
Some features a person could expect if they use a premier platform are: a video or photo header, logo display, open meeting times, real-time demos and Q&A opportunities, plus regular information like webpages, social media profiles, and contact information. Sponsors have the chance to add items such as products, services, vouchers, discount codes, and additional things to integrated all-in-one platforms.
A sponsor on Swapcard could also advertise their products and services on their profile, connect with people coming to the event, and link to the sessions they sponsor. In addition to easy integration for a sponsor, the only expense needed to set up these pages and attend these events is downloading an app—no extra hardware is required.
8. Offer Sponsored Sessions In Your Virtual Event Sponsorship Package
A sponsor can have a major influence on a virtual or physical event by hosting networking sessions with virtual point-of-sale vendors aimed towards their intended audience. Sponsors can design any event, be it a roundtable discussion, live stream, or pre-recorded on-demand presentation, to meet their precise requirements and feature their branding. The results from almost half a thousand virtual occasions show that a majority (up to 60%) of potential customers originate from the sponsored roles in the event plan.
Examples of personalizing activities include including a sponsor’s logo on a presentation screen, playing a commercial emailed by a sponsor right before the event commences, and gathering cheers from virtual presenters.
As well as connecting sponsors with exhibitors and people in the audience who might be possible customers, online meetings also give an invaluable opportunity for promotion. Virtual gatherings that are structured properly can have thousands of engaged participants.
9. Sell Visibility On Event Communications
Sponsors should not just focus on branding within the platform, but should also consider other strategies. What about the emails sent by the organizer, posts on social media and other forms of communication that draw participants into the platform?
Think of including enhanced visibility on messaging as an extra charge in your virtual event sponsorship deals. It is crucial to ensure the most extensive visibility among the attendees prior to the occasion, so be sure to put a focus on the time period prior to the event in your sponsors agreements. Using logos and banners in emails, carrying out social media shifts, making sponsored posts and hosting a pre-event fireside chat or eblast can all help to get sponsors important exposure.
10. Offer Sponsored Happy Hours & Meetups
Gatherings that are more relaxed in nature can be just as beneficial to sponsors as presentations, lectures, and formal events. In the end, it’s the relaxed and enjoyable communication that the majority of individuals have been devoid of since around 4 billion people have experienced some type of confinement for approximately 12 months.
Allowing time for discourse and recreation is just as crucial to a digital event as it is to an in-person one. When event planners provide their clients with an event platform that is suited for holding sponsored social hours and encounters — they are granting them a powerful instrument for creating awareness and connecting.
The corporate backer who has a sense of when it is appropriate to put some background tunes on and enjoy a couple of beverages is able to interact with prospective customers in a distinct manner. Along with creating a more engaging and interactive atmosphere, these kind of gatherings place an emphasis on connecting with others. Exploiting the always efficient combination of mixed drinks and socializing, contemporary sponsors can also employ more innovative matchmaking approaches.
Getting face-to-face meetings with prospects and actual customers is becoming increasingly easier and much more efficient on the internet, especially when making use of AI-powered program like Swapcard. An example of what our system is capable of is strategically placing people who join in on virtual events, like meet-and-greets or happy hours, according to how well their characteristics match with the sponsor’s desired demographic. This enhanced interconnectivity can only come about with the assistance of an online environment, and so it’s an incredibly beneficial attribute for a coordinator impressing sponsors.
Conclusion
Obtaining sponsors for a virtual event poses difficulties. By employing the techniques discussed in this post, you can increase the amount of positive replies to your pitches.
In order to boost your prospects of success, it is essential to be acquainted with digital marketing.
It is advisable to team up with an agency to look after the challenging facets of event marketing, e.g. paid promotion, social media promotion, and search engine optimization. Correctly securing these elements will also aid you in gaining sponsors for your next virtual gathering.
Leave a Reply