How to be successful with sponsors for virtual events [5 point sponsor strategy]
As marketers feel an increasing demand from management to demonstrate online conferences ROI, sponsors for virtual events becomes a great untapped field to explore.
The world of virtual events has lots of ad placements opportunities. This opens the door to raise even more money from sponsorship and ad placements in the virtual world, while providing concrete evidence about ROI to your sponsors.
Here are some tips and tricks on how to maximize the revenue you generate from selling ad placement for virtual events.
1. Create dedicated rooms for each sponsor and add their logos on the background
Recognizing this chance for imaginative online spaces, branded meetings and rooms can happen just as in-person.
In addition, offering to exhibit brands logos as if these rooms were their own spaces promote brands in a collective work that advertises their innovation values.
Branded rooms stand for a good opportunity to offer visibility and also produce positive PR return.
Lastly, it is an advertising method that can be used for essentially in any virtual conference. The essential thing to keep in mind here is to take into consideration the company who’s intended to sponsor each room, as well as the segment they serve and what kind of interaction they expect inside that branded space.
2. Create ads for each sponsor of your virtual event and add dedicated tracking links.
Organizing virtual events, eventually you’ll come across the acronym UTM. It stands for Urchin Tracking Module, and is the model that Google uses to track links published on the web.
Simply put, UTM parameters are small pieces of information that can be placed at the end of any URL to provide additional data to Google about that link.
There are UTM parameters for different levels of information, but essentially, the main objective here is to know if sponsor’s links and adds at a giver virtual event are converting on visitors and buyers on their own website.
Also, it’s the perfect opportunity to use the high effective tactic of remarketing. We have recently updated our article that describes and teaches this technique in detail: Remarketing for event planners: how to increase registrations and engagement.
3. Create quotas
Another strategy to consider when prospecting sponsors for your event is offering varied investment options. Also, increase your odds of finding a match with different levels of sponsors, including more benefits according to the price invested.
For instance, you could split 3 categories for brands rated as Bronze, Silver and Gold:
Bronze Benefits:
- Create separate environments for each sponsor;
- Display and track ads on mobile app.
Silver Benefits:
- All Bronze benefits, plus: build stores and 3D booths;
- Share branded files.
Gold Benefits:
- All Silver benefits, plus: Handover leads.
4. Share analytics and reports of your virtual event with sponsors.
These reports contain rich information about the occasion and attendee’s journey. And contrary to what many people think, an event does not end when people leave. It is necessary to invest in the post-event: send a satisfaction survey, thank you e-mail and also make the event report – document to attest the general balance of the actions that took place.
It is very important because it provides data to the sponsors and measures the results, assessing whether the event has achieved (or not) its objectives. Therefore, you can check the degree of success and the points that need to be improved for a second occasion.
And analytics are the very best source to capture the results of your virtual event and produce a post event report to tour sponsors. With it, you will have the ability to find important statistics, going across information with different resources of information.
It’s also the best way of having a systemic and integrated vision of different areas and segments of clients. Other resources of details, such as existing tickets sales, attendee’s journey and who’s getting involved with each other can be caught in real time. Plus, to properly be able to measure and determine your ROI after the occasion, the generation of thorough reports to be sent to sponsors gets easy and quick.
5. Conclusion and key takeaways
While finding and closing deals with sponsors, it’s critical to have an impactful event.
In the end, all sponsors must add value to the attendee experience. If you don’t always act with the audience in mind, then you risk lowering the value of the event and damaging the brand.
In the same way, if you treat the sponsors as collaborators and manage to create a mutual benefit relationship, it will not be difficult for them to support you on your next virtual events projects such as online congresses or conferences.
- How to pitch solid Virtual Events for brands and sponsors [with slide presentation plan]
- Why a video call tool alone isn’t enough for your online conferences.
- The 2020 guide for perfect online events [and how to migrate your live event to webinars, virtual meetups and live streaming]
About the Author / InEvent
