Having title and presenting sponsors for your event is the penultimate dream for many event owners, but even smaller level sponsors can add a ton of value and revenue to tournaments of all sizes. Below are some tips for how to increase the event sponsorship value of your tournament to help get the most out of your brand as possible!
Increase the Foot Traffic
In general for grass-roots events, the more people present, the more value there will be to your sponsors and vendors. This will come naturally as your event grows, but can also be manufactured by partnering with other events to host at a singular location to combine forces and become a more sponsorable activation. Foot traffic isn’t just about total participants though, it’s also about getting them to interact directly with your sponsors and vendors on-site, which even for larger events can be a challenge if spread out between multiple smaller fields or complexes at different locations.
Getting creative with ways to drive your participants and fans to your vendors at your event can be key to getting those vendors to renew and return, whether it be through a killer captains meeting and check-in that sponsors can activate at prior to games played, or raffles and giveaways drawing player and fans back to your sponsors area, this tends to be the biggest challenge in a good experience for most vendors.
Have a High Quality Website
Organizations and events with high end websites are a must in my book, partly because website design is what I’m passionate about, but also because it can give you additional opportunities to add value to your company through sponsorship. Being able to build landing pages for your sponsors on high-trafficked areas, create featured articles, add sponsored by logos, provide data on clicks and traffic, and other bonuses can help you lock in bigger sponsors, especially one’s interested in long-term deals and not just on-site activations.
Grow your Social Media
Similar to having an active and high quality website, an active and booming social media can only help your ability to secure higher paying sponsors interested in promoting their brand and products to your participants and fans. Social media gives them real-time access, stat tracking, and communication with your demographic that’s measurable and popular. It can help directly drive sales through promotions and offers an is a good tool to keep sharpening for enhancing your sponsorship value.
Televise It
If you really want to get in front of the top tier sponsors, televising your event can be a big way to gain their interest. While it is a daunting and often expensive undertaking, it also provides the type of exposure many high level sponsors are looking for through commercial and spotlight opportunities. Television production can be manufactured for your event at your own expense and recouped through sponsorship sales, or for big enough events possibly secured through major stations as content they procure, and can also enhance the value of your event to participants as well as act as a good form of marketing for your future tournaments.
Location is Key
Where you host your sponsorable events isn’t only important to your participants, it’s a big key to how likely a sponsor is to work with you as well, and at what price. Sponsors who activate on-site have to factor in the cost of travel, shipping, hotels and other fees that come with events outside of their staffed locations. A lot of brands are very regionalized as well when it comes to who they’re trying to reach, so your location can play a big role. The closer the location to a major sponsor’s headquarters and major cities the easier it will be to increase the value of your event through sponsorship.
If you’re looking for ways to add new sponsors, check out this article on the top 5 ways to acquire sponsors for your events here!
Travis Burnett
A pioneer in the flag football community, Travis helped co-found the Flag Football World Championship Tour, FlagSpin and USA Flag. Featuring 15+ years of content creation for the sport of flag football, creating and managing the largest flag football tournaments on the planet, coaching experience at the youth and adult level as well as an active player with National and World Championship level experience.
