How to measure value and effect?

Sponsorships, product placements and events can be a great way for your brand to gain valuable brand awareness in a favourable target audience, or to drive sales. As an integrated part of your marketing strategy sponsorships should be treated as such, and therefore also benchmarked on the same standards as any other media placement in your mix. The idea of just placing a brand in front of an audience and expecting it to return a favourable impression, is a thing of the past. We need to have a broader outlook and take all parts of sponsorships in to account when analysing it.

Sponsorships is often seen as the sum of times you manage to expose your brand logo to a recipient, but do we even know that these people are being aware of your brand logo on the players jersey, the led signage or frozen in the ice rink? For the most part, the simple answer is; No, we don’t. Measuring impressions or views is not like a Google Search Ad or a Facebook campaign where you can micro manage and track every KPI from Click-thru-rates and conversions, to attribution. So this means that in addition to using the standards of the business, we need to have a closer look at some other indicators as well to be able to see the broader picture.

‍

“Needless to say, it is a jungle of KPI´s out there,”

‍

Needless to say, it is a jungle of KPI´s out there, and there is no easy way of just connecting everything to gain a perfect system for measuring ROI. There is no single solution measurement tool out there today which can perfectly give the answer to your ROI questions. But that does not mean that there are not some key metrics that every marketer with in the sponsorship business should be watching

We need to take these metrics serious and have a holistic approach to measuring the return you get from your sponsorship activities, or to identify the value you as a rights-holder can deliver to your partners. In an industry with a yearly spend of close to 6 billion NOK (2019) in Norway alone (almost 700 million US dollars), sponsorships should be treated the same way as any other media investment. We need to measure the impact of sponsorships in terms of real brand awareness and fan engagement, not just the impressions we have managed to produce to empty couches in peoples living rooms.

So then, what should you be measuring?

This depends on what your goals are for the sponsorship you are investing in. Do you want to build favourable brand associations, drive sales or just boost your brand recognition?  At the end of the day, what matters is sales and revenue and insurances that your rewards exceeds your investment.  

For sponsorships it is not always as simple as saying "if you do this you get double back in sales tomorrow". Sponsorships are about the long game, about building brand equity. Still, there are quite a few metrics we can use to get a crisper and more holistic understanding of what impact the sponsorships has on an advertisers brand value. A holistic approach to measurement takes in to account the following metrics:

• Impressions - How many times have your brand been seen by the target audience through your sponsorship
• Reach - How many people have you reached across your media channels
• Engagement - The impressions and reach are great numbers for showing the potential of the activation your are doing. But that’s it. If you want to know more about how the activation actually is working, you need to see how many people you actually engage. How many people click your links, like your posts, comments or shares. This is where value comes in to play
• Attribution - Do we see any growth in page visits during the time your brand was activated by the sponsorship? Did you manage to grab the attention of the people watching on the other side of the screens or on the stands. ‍
• Mentions - How many times to your brand name pop up in combination with your sponsorship
• ‍Follower growth - Did the sponsorship lead to a spike in your followers on social media platforms?
• Lead acquisitions - Did you gain any new leads or subscribers from the sponsorship?
• Time “in screen” - How much “air time” do you get from the sponsorship, and how is the logo portrayed on the tv-screen? do you have a god presence on screen or where you just a small player amidst all the other

All of these and more are structured and combined in one simple to use dashboard that autogenerates rapports that feed straight in to your inbox and keeps you updated on the return on your sponsorship investment every month. With our keen eyes and strategic comments working together with AI and machine learning to give you the best possible sense of how your sponsorship portfolio is holding up. And what you could do to perform better in the battlefield that is sponsorships. 

If you are ready to start measuring your sponsorships, and taking charge of your sponsorship portfolio, please feel free to contact us. We will be more than happy to get you on your way to the measurement hall of fame.  

‍

‍