Rethinking Sponsor Packages

With both sponsors and attendees growing more savvy, the days of promising a logo on signage in return for event sponsorship are long gone. Companies investing in your event want a clear story around their return on investment and they know that in the age of advertising everywhere, attendees are fully able to decipher and ignore traditional brand advertising.[Tweet "Days of promising logo on signage in return for event sponsorship are long gone."]

We've come up with a couple of tips for making sponsorships stand out and provide measurable returns.

• Offer sponsorships around things attendees really want - Set up a charging station and have one of your sponsors "underwrite" it. Plaster their logo over the area and help them create a catchy tag line that blends "charging" with their brand message. If you have sessions streamed online, give a sponsor the pre-roll space (an ad while video is buffering). Sponsors will get brand recognition as people must view their logo/ad to get to the video they want to watch.[Tweet "Offer event sponsorships around things attendees really want"]

• Logos in unexpected places - This list shows logos on pillows in a lounge area. It also shows one event's illuminating idea of light up charger plates on tables. Think about places and things that you typically would not brand and offer that to one of your event sponsors.

• Content - companies understand the power of content marketing but many lack the resources to keep a steady stream of blog posts, infographics, and whitepapers flowing. Offer to develop content for sponsors both from their own presentations and from other event materials. You should be doing this for your own use, making it easy to tailor it for sponsors. They can use that content after the event to push out to their audience, positioning themselves as a resource for valuable insight and information.

• Social Marketing - have a sponsor struggling to get Twitter followers? Offer to help drive some of your followers to their social sites through a social campaign that shares posts between handles and sites. This will likely dovetail with your social plan, requiring very little work to tailor parts to include a sponsor.

What non-traditional sponsorship packages have you seen out there? What is working for your event or marketing plan? Let us know in the comments.

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