In a sponsorship management world that is constantly evolving and can often be difficult to navigate, time means everything.
The proper handling of a sponsorship deal effectively requires teamwork and necessitates that both sides of the partnership remain on the same page in order for success to be achieved.
SponServe has emerged as the frontrunner in providing sponsorship management solutions. Not only has the Australia-based software firm saved clients an average of 54 percent of the time spent each week managing sponsorship deals, but the platform has bumped up client confidence that the job is being done correctly by 78 percent, which, in turn has led to a 31 percent increase in revenue growth for clients.
But while money matters, the sponsorship management landscape has experienced a shift from clients focusing solely on their return on investment to instead placing greater emphasis on their return on objective.
Rather than viewing sponsorship strictly as a financial means to an end, SponServe’s top Australian and European sporting organizations, which includes six Premier League franchises, now use sponsorship as a strategic tool to align with the objectives that their marketing campaigns are constructed around.
The results speak for themselves.
“The brands are really starting to trigger to the fact that sponsorship allows you to access an audience in a much deeper way that you can’t reach through other channels – just through standard advertising and promotion and PR,” said SponServe managing director Mark Thompson. “You’re not going to get the engagement with a sports fan that you will by engaging with their favorite thing in the world – that being their sports team.”
Ensuring that the partnership between rights holders and sponsors remains intact and runs effectively is where SponServe enters the equation.
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As opposed to years past when sponsorships were managed through a spreadsheet-based process, in which important details often fell through the cracks, SponServe offers clients a more effective way of doing business.
SponServe effectively tracks sponsorship measurables with much more accuracy and precision than before. In a market where departments within a rights holders group need to be able to make certain all of the boxes remained checked and that tasks are completed, sponsorship managers were left to rely on only spreadsheets that were never built to handle that kind of workload.
Now, all of that has changed thanks to SponServe’s way of doing business.
“What SponServe does is it helps you track what you are meant to be doing for your partners and helps you understand what success looks like for that brand and how each individual benefit is aligning to their objectives,” Thompson said.
In order for everything to fall into place, however, the partnering relationship has to be built and managed correctly, Thompson said. If done the right way, a relationship that was once transactional becomes more personal and allows for better results for everyone involved.
Establishing the right kind of partnership remains critical.
As the relationship between the rights holder and sponsor begins, the initial step is truly understanding what that sponsor is looking for. Objectives might include brand awareness, better positioning the brand, networking, building an audience, building and establishing better business relationships, engaging the community the brand is seeking to serve and establishing better leads and generating sales.
To best understand the objective, however, it becomes vital to first comprehend what a brand’s current marketing efforts look like, what made the right holder’s organization an attractive option to work with as opposed to a competitor striving for the same results and perhaps most importantly, what a successful venture working together might look like.
Once rights holders and a prospective sponsor establish a relationship in which one side understands the role of the other, creating a mutual understanding around the strategic selection of benefits becomes increasingly important. If used correctly, SponServe can be integrated to produce engaging offerings that will drive far better results for sponsors.
But before those results are agreed upon, it is critical to learn whether the brand actually has the ability or the mechanisms in place to make such results possible in the first place.
One important facet is to determine ahead of time if the total value of the benefits that the rights holder can provide, versus what the brand is willing to contribute financially. But equally important is the rights holder’s understanding of what the costs of servicing such benefits will entail.
Managing this sponsorship requires proper planning, but executing the partnership also means overseeing the details. SponServe takes much of the worry out of that process in ways that spreadsheets never could. Rather than constantly stressing over making sure every aspect of sponsorship management is seen to, SponServe’s system manages the relationship in real time.
Having assurances that everything is being taken care of, SponServe’s clients, insist, makes all the difference.
“Just having that centralized point where we know exactly where all of the information is, just makes life so much easier,” said a representative from the Western Bulldogs of the Australian Football League. “Also, improving the accuracy of tracking deliverables and receiving reminders means that nothing gets missed and, again, that gives us great peace of mind.”
“This single source of truth tells us exactly what has been delivered and what’s left and it is so much more efficient than anything in the past.”