Accessing a Desirable Audience

Sponsorship’s Critical Criteria - Part 1: Accessing a Desirable Audience

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Similar to advertising, selecting properties that reach the right audience is the first critical step to ensuring a sponsorship is successful. The goal is always to access as many fans as possible that match the sponsor's addressable market, while avoiding paying to access fans that fall outside that desirable market. It sounds simple, but there are a few things sponsorship marketers should keep in mind to ensure they are selecting the properties that attract the best fitting fan bases.

Sponsors need to take the time to appropriately define the target customer they are trying to reach. There are certain sponsors that tend to over-generalize who they would like to pursue as customers. This certainly helps to establish the highest reach of potential business, but these sponsors should press themselves to define a target customer that does not simply qualify as an eligible customer, but one that is most likely to be influenced to purchase. On the flip side, certain sponsors over-engineer their ideal customer profile, which severely limits the number of potential customers matching that profile. There needs to be a ‘Goldilocks’ pursuit where the target customer is defined enough to not resemble the general population, but not over-defined to the point where the pool of potential consumers does not meet a critical mass.

When evaluating a property fan base, you need to understand its specific audiences. Yes, a fan base represents the full amount of people that can be influenced by the sponsorship. However, many fans are in name only and different fans consume property content in different ways. It's necessary to understand the fan profiles of the various asset channels sponsors plan to use (television vs. radio vs. attendees vs. social media vs. streaming, etc.) This way, sponsors can make more precise calls on whether their asset package, activation, and messaging strategy will be reaching the appropriate target in the way they would like to.

Do not be overly concerned with redundancy. Many sponsors want to invest in properties whose fans are not already customers nor fans of other properties they are currently sponsoring. Customer loyalty is all but non-existent this day and age. It's all about maintaining preference. One of the better ways to stay in the good graces of customers and make them feel a sense of pride in the brands they purchase is by supporting a property they are emotionally connected to. Also, sponsorship influence is a cumulative effort. It sometimes takes years for it to begin delivering results at expected levels. Having multiple sponsorships hitting the same individual fans will likely shorten this necessary impact ramp time.

It is important for sponsors to select the right properties to not only ensure they are reaching appropriate target customers, but it also mitigates the risk of wasting other resources. If a sponsorship is pointing at the incorrect audience, not only will the fee be inefficiently allocated, but so will all supporting strategy, activation, management, and measurement resources as well.

First things first, sponsors need to make sure they are selecting sponsorships based on their ability to efficiently reach, engage, and influence potential customers.