The world is dealing with a massive global pandemic since the beginning of the year 2020. Almost every sector of the industry was shaken by the drastic effect that COVID-19 brought along. We all can agree that even after the sudden shift of the world economy, we did find our way out to continue with our everyday chores safely from the comfort of our home.
No doubt, the past few months have been challenging, but the global expedient came to us with excellent advantages. One of them is Hybrid events. Event professionals saw a huge downward curve at the beginning of the year 2020. But they did work hard to re-establish the magic of offline gatherings, communities and businesses. Today, event planners and big brands can reach out to wider audiences, gain more nuanced data analyses of their clients and attendees available in virtual interaction, and scale down immersive organisational expenses.
Hybrid events may sound very easy to organise, but the truth it is, it comes with many challenges. Managing both sides of the attendees and keeping them engaged in the first challenge in a virtual setting. A lack of event technology knowledge is the second challenge, and confusion about creating valuable sponsorship opportunities is the final challenge.
In this particular blog, we will discuss the sponsorship challenges.
As an event planner, you must keep in mind that your event’s success and failure ultimately depends upon the sponsors you choose. The correct event sponsor can bring legitimacy to your event and, at the same time, offer you excellent financial support. This helps in improving your overall attendee experience as well.
A worthwhile sponsorship is not only crucial for the long term viability of your hybrid events but is also an essential aspect for curating a successful event.
This is where the good news pops in!
A hybrid context adds up more potential value to your organisation as you have online and in-person attendees, enabling the sponsors to reach out to larger audiences. Now before we head into the ideas of creating valuable opportunities for sponsorships, let us first understand what service your event can provide to your sponsors. Time to get started!
What Services You Can Provide To Your Sponsors
While approaching the sponsors, you must first consider these questions- How will the event benefit them? What are their goals? What value are they hoping to achieve from your event?
To attract more sponsors to your event, you must offer them the best-personalised sponsorship packages according to their needs and convenience. Think about creating a brainstorming session wherein you and your sponsors can recreate the sponsorship package.
This process will nurture your relationship with your potential sponsors. It will also lead you towards a thoughtful and unique agreement that might equally recompense your objectives and goals.
In terms of value, your sponsorship package must offer the three most essential phenomena that tie better ROI for your sponsors. These are as follows:
- Organisation Development: Help your sponsors most effectively by enabling them to generate or meet the critical objectives in response to their business development plans.
- Awareness of the Brand: Enables sponsor’s to generate awareness about their brands and what services and products they will be offering to the event participants. This will help in expanding their reach at a global level.
- Engage Audiences Directly: Helps sponsors and participants to interact and engage with each other in your event seamlessly.
In the following section, we have assembled some best out of the best ideas and tactics that will inspire you to co-create a sponsorship package that will excite both you and your interested sponsors immersively.
Drive Sponsor Revenue With The Following Ideas And Tactics
Provide Visibility To Your Sponsors in your event platform
Offering visibility to your sponsors is easy to accomplish a task in response to your sponsorship package. This should be your prime responsibility if you want to make this preposition effective. Incorporate more value by generating virtual links and consorting between their brand and the top valuable experience you will provide to your event attendees.
Consider your sponsor as experts and thought-leaders
Hybrid events provide great opportunities to your sponsor in terms of enabling them to showcase their expertise. A sponsor can easily connect and network with the attendees by simply organising a workshop or a panel discussion from their remote or live location. This allows both parties to share their opinions and acquire essential knowledge.
Consider choosing a virtual platform that genuinely offers innovative ideas to position sponsors as thought leaders. This will allow event sponsors to strategically curate quality content and mark their team’s interest and expertise.
Provide real participant insights to your sponsors
One of the most promising advantages of a hybrid setting is that event professionals can easily acknowledge both sides of the attendees effectively. They can also know what their participants are looking for on a much granular level.
Having an experienced event tech platform carries excellent advantages, such as – gathering critical information of event participants. This information holds all the insights about an attendees desire, motive, and action. For an event sponsor, these details can help them drive more targeted, relevant and customised sponsor messaging. Besides that, offering your sponsors these valuable insights can also help them curate a more engaging and meaningful event experience.
Offer more valuable details to your event sponsors
What other offering can you give to your sponsors to help them accomplish their goals at your event?
Here are some ideas that you can include:
- Offer sponsors the tickets to your event or other similar events.
- Invite sponsors to your VIP sessions
- Introduce or refer qualified leads to your sponsors by allowing them to network with the interested members of your event.
- Offer sponsors to create a workshop, a session, or a brain date topic that significantly caters to their learning objectives.
Your goal must be to create and rethink your ideas that could add more value to your sponsorship package.
Over to You
After reading the blog, one thing is for sure; hybrid events will be the future of the event industry. After the emergence of the novel coronavirus, things have pretty much changed. People who were once sceptical about virtual and hybrid attendance are now slowly getting used to the new normal. Event sponsors realise the value of offering quality content, online events and meeting environments to maintain a physical presence wherever possible.
It is natural for sponsors to be a little wary about their over-exceeding expenses because of the financial restrictions. However, we are no alien because generating qualified leads and target marketing are the most important elements for any event to be successful. We hope these ideas will be a great help to you and your sponsors! Happy reading!
