Sponsorship and marketing your business online go hand in hand. In a world where people spend as much time on Facebook and in their email program as browsing commercial websites, having a strategy for getting your company’s name wider than your website is essential, and either of the types of sponsorship outlined below is a great way of doing this.
Charity begins at home
“Give to get” is a proven mantra, and by putting your money behind a local team or charity (or giving your time and expertise: it doesn’t have to be hard cash) you reap the rewards of knowing you’ve used your business to help your community, while hopefully also attracting new customers.
Being in partnership with a suitable local charity gives you a nice, non-commercial aside to add to your company’s web home page; but also, if you sponsor (say) a fundraising event locally, you could expect to get your logo on their web banners, the event’s website, emails/online press releases and blog posts.
Many companies organise their employees and enter teams into charity events, and a reliable way to do so online is to use the biggest charity giving website, www.justgiving.net. This site allows people to sign up to undertake charity events and then get their friends and family to sponsor them online, donating via credit card or PayPal over the internet.
One way the site works is by every individual participant emailing everyone they know, asking them to sponsor them, and then to email their friends too, and so on. This is a form of what’s known as “viral” marketing. It’s good for your company’s brand awareness because every person who receives the call to give some money to the cause is led back to the page your company set up to administer the event, complete with your logo and sponsorship message.
Sponsoring online media
Another smart form of sponsorship is where a company pays to sponsor the activities of another organisation. For instance, say you’re a music promoter. If there happens to be a local website that promotes new bands, has a directory of promoters on it and a busy forum of wannabe musicians, your company could pay for the site’s hosting and email software in order to have a “with the support of…” on the site and in the footer of the email blasts, making clear that the website and email newsletter are produced in association with you.
You gain exposure to a new audience, and hopefully cement your relationship with a disparate range of people within your sector that you may struggle to get positive recognition from in other ways.
Choose your associations wisely
Of course, as with all good marketing, it is the associations you make that will make or break you in all of these areas – and the internet can help in your research
Want some ideas as to what others are doing? Think of the largest company in your sector and type their name into Google or Bing followed by “in partnership with”.
So for instance, if you’re a computer company, you may search for (including quotes) “IBM in partnership with”. This will return sites speaking of IBM’s partnerships, and hopefully giving you some insight into the nature of these arrangements. This should help to trigger ideas for you locally that could produce similar synergies.
This article first appeared in Essential Magazine
