How do you analyze event sponsorship and partnership trends?

1 Identify your goals and objectives

Before you approach any potential sponsors or partners, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your event and how they can help you. What are your specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your event? How do they align with your mission, vision, and values? How do you plan to measure your success and return on investment (ROI)? Having a well-defined event strategy will help you identify the most suitable sponsors and partners for your event and communicate your value proposition to them.

2 Research your target market and audience

Another key step in analyzing event sponsorship and partnership trends is to understand your target market and audience. Who are the people you want to attract, engage, and retain with your event? What are their demographics, psychographics, preferences, pain points, and motivations? How do they consume and interact with content, media, and technology? How do they perceive your event and your brand? By conducting market research and audience analysis, you can gain insights into the needs, wants, and expectations of your potential attendees and sponsors. You can also identify gaps and opportunities in the market and create personas and segments to tailor your event experience and sponsorship packages.

3 Benchmark your competitors and peers

You are not the only one seeking sponsors and partners for your event. You have to compete with other events and organizations that target the same or similar market and audience. That is why you need to benchmark your competitors and peers and learn from their best practices and mistakes. What are the types, levels, and benefits of sponsorship and partnership they offer? How do they price, promote, and deliver their sponsorship and partnership packages? How do they differentiate themselves from others and create value for their sponsors and partners? How do they measure and report their sponsorship and partnership performance? By analyzing your competitive landscape, you can identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) and develop your unique selling proposition (USP) and competitive advantage.

4 Evaluate your current and potential sponsors and partners

Once you have a comprehensive understanding of your objectives, market, audience, and competitors, you can begin evaluating your current and potential sponsors and partners. To assess their fit, interest, and value for your event, you can use criteria such as sponsorship fit (brand alignment with yours, relevance to your target market and audience, potential impact on your reputation), sponsorship interest (awareness of benefits, engagement with content and activities, responsiveness to outreach), and sponsorship value (contribution in terms of money or resources, visibility or recognition). You can also utilize tools such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, social media listening, web analytics, or CRM software to collect data on sponsors and partners. Moreover, you can use frameworks such as the sponsorship pyramid or the sponsorship matrix to rank and prioritize them based on their fit, interest, and value.

5 Design and pitch your sponsorship and partnership packages

Based on your evaluation, you can design and pitch your sponsorship and partnership packages to your target sponsors and partners. Customize the packages to suit their needs, goals, and budgets, and emphasize the benefits they can expect from your event. Utilize storytelling, visuals, testimonials, and data to make the pitch compelling and persuasive. When creating the packages, consider offering different levels of sponsorship or partnership, such as platinum, gold, silver, or bronze. You can also provide various benefits to sponsors and partners, such as logo placement, booth space, speaking opportunities, media coverage, social media mentions, email marketing, attendee data, or networking opportunities. Set the sponsorship fees based on market value, demand, and costs of the event and benefits. Additionally, you may offer discounts or incentives to attract sponsors and partners.

6 Monitor and measure your sponsorship and partnership performance

The final step in analyzing event sponsorship and partnership trends is to monitor and measure your performance before, during, and after the event. You should track and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that reflect your goals and objectives, as well as those of your sponsors and partners. Collecting feedback from sponsors, partners, attendees, and stakeholders is also important for evaluating satisfaction and loyalty. To do this, you can create a sponsorship dashboard to visualize KPIs and metrics such as impressions, reach, engagement, leads, conversions, revenue, or ROI. Additionally, you can create a sponsorship report to summarize achievements, challenges, learnings, and recommendations for improvement. Finally, a sponsorship survey can be used to ask sponsors and partners about their satisfaction with the event and the relationship. By following these steps you can analyze trends, optimize your event strategy, build long-term relationships with sponsors and partners, and create memorable experiences for attendees.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?