Sponsors are critical to many events, but actually securing event sponsors can be challenging. The truth is many prospective sponsors will say they just want to support your event or show, but what they really want is revenue. They expect a return on investment – either in awareness or revenue, or both – and it’s up to you as the event organizer to deliver the expected return.
5 Ways to Use Ticketing to Secure Event Sponsors
The more ways you can drive expected returns for sponsors, the better. When you use the right ticketing platform, you’ll have access to multiple ways to drive sponsor revenue as well as data that proves the returns you generate for sponsors.
Let’s take a look at five popular ways event organizers use features in the AttendStar ticketing platform and services offered by the AttendStar team to secure event sponsors (and so can you):
1. Audience and Reach
If you’ve held your event in the past, such as an annual festival or fair, then you probably have some demographic data about your event audience. Don’t worry if you don’t. You may be able to get audience information from your performers to build your event audience’s demographic profile.
With this data, you can show potential sponsors that by investing in your event, they’ll get the kind of visibility that leads to increased sales. Once sponsors see data that proves your event will help them get a positive return on their investment, they’re more likely to consider sponsoring.
Next, sell your offers to them. Your offers are the ways you’ll promote the sponsor so they can get the returns they want. For example, you could offer a certain number of brand impressions in email marketing messages to potential ticket buyers and/or actual ticket buyers.
If you use AttendStar as your ticketing platform, you can send a series of emails about features of your event to people who have already bought tickets or are thinking of buying. These are perfect email messages to deliver brand impressions to sponsors.
RELATED READING: How to Develop and Sell Sponsorship Offers and How to Find Sponsors
2. In-Person Pre-Event Promotion
Get creative when it comes to the ways you can promote sponsors before your event. When most people think of event sponsor promotion, they think of signage at the event, brand mentions from the stage or public address system, the sponsor’s logo in the event program, and other things that attendees see during the event. They’re missing everything you can offer a sponsor before the event, and some of those things can be really fun and unique.
For example, if you sell tickets using the AttendStar software, you could have a kiosk from AttendStar at the sponsor’s location to help the sponsor get traffic to their place of business. A ticket sales kiosk is a great way to collect and send the money from ticket purchases to your account instantly. It’s much easier to use the AttendStar system rather than the sponsor’s point-of-sale system, and you’ll get up-to-the-minute ticket counts too!
3. Sponsor Location Foot Traffic
Here’s another creative pre-event sponsor promotional opportunity. You can pass out ticket discount coupons to sponsors for people to pick up at a sponsor location. Potential attendees have to visit the sponsor’s location to get the discount coupon, and then, they can use the discount code to purchase tickets online through your chosen ticketing platform.
You can take this idea a step further! The sponsor could have a unique code associated with the discount coupons they pass out. When someone uses the discount code to buy tickets to your event, the sponsor could earn “promotional points” that can be used for additional brand exposure during your event.
4. Brand Visibility
As I mentioned above, everyone knows about the typical ways sponsors are promoted at events, but you can do better. Put together a list of all of the different brand visibility opportunities that you can give to sponsors. This includes things like logos printed on tickets, social media mentions, radio ads, TV ads, billboard ads, newspaper ads, digital ads, websites, email marketing, event signage, an event booth, space in event programs and handouts, mentions from the stage or public address system, and more.
Once you identify the ways you can promote sponsors, build sponsorship packages at different price points to give sponsors increasing amounts of promotion as the prices go up. Always be prepared to negotiate with sponsors. They never want to pay full price and will always ask for more than you offer. Therefore, have some promotional options available that you don’t advertise but could add to packages as needed to close the deal with potential sponsors.
RELATED READING: The Guide to Successful Event Sponsorships
5. Post-Event Promotion
Give sponsors something extra by providing additional promotional opportunities after the event. You can use email marketing to do this. For example, when your event ends, set up a series of email messages to go to attendees that mention the sponsors. Messages could be event recaps, a thank you for attending message, and even a note to tell them you’ll see them again next year if your event is an annual event.
The key is to offer ways for sponsors to see returns from their investment in your event leading up to, during, and after the event date. It’s much easier to sell sponsorships when the investment will lead to online and offline brand visibility for weeks or months rather than just onsite at the venue on the day of the event.
Key Takeaways About How to Use Ticketing to Secure Event Sponsorships
There is a critical relationship between event sponsorships and ticketing. Bottom-line, your ticketing software could help you sell more sponsorships if it offers features and services that create more sponsor promotion opportunities and deeper access to data about ticket buyers, demographics, brand exposure, and results. You can do all of this and more with the AttendStar ticketing platform. Contact us at (615) 223-1973 or schedule a call to learn how you can sell more tickets and secure sponsorships with the right software and team of ticketing experts.
