Go Beyond Demographics To Win Sponsorships

How much do you actually know about your audience?

I’m not talking about their age, gender or location. But WHO are they? Every sponsor prospect wants to know about your audience. Understanding your audience creates two distinct advantages:

• You can use the information to better identify prospects that want your audience
• This data makes a powerful argument that they are in the right place

Today, brands and businesses rely on two data points to understand their target audience: psychographics and behavioral analytics.

Psychographics is focused on collecting and analyzing the characteristics of an audience, the intangible, such as interests, habits, opinions, lifestyle, attitudes, emotions, and preferences. Psychographics are thought to help explain why people buy.

Behavioral analytics is focused on how buyers act and why. These insights are the result of tracking behavior online and includes eCommerce platforms, online gaming, web, and mobile applications and can be very effective in predicting future behaviors.

Where can you find this information?

Opening a deck and finding information other than some general demographics such as age range, attendance, male to female ratio is very uncommon. However, gathering this information at the point of sale is fairly easy to do.

Here are some resources that you likely have:

• Event ticketing and registration technology. If you’re not selling tickets or registrations online, you’re missing out on potential sales — and valuable insight about your attendees. “Your event ticketing and registration platform should do more than accept payments,” says Eventbrite Content Strategist Ronnie Higgins. “If your events are on Eventbrite, for instance, you can pinpoint the source of sale and use Google Analytics to analyze traffic to your event page,” Higgins suggests segmenting visitors who bought a ticket from those who didn’t. From there you can learn what type of device they use and their interest categories, for example, if they are Foodies or DIY enthusiasts. These categories are the same ones that brands use to target their display ads, so now you are really speaking their language
• Facebook Audience Insights. If your property has an email list that you own, you can upload it and it will give you back a profile of the cohort. It will tell you what pages they like if they are in the market for a new car, new running shoes or like to cook. Of course, this is past attendees, but if you are in your nth year of running your event, this is great data.
• Surveys. Utilize your email list, onsite polling, and post-event questionnaires to collect insights. Providing an incentive such as a drawing for tickets will yield lots of information. Just be sure to keep the length to no more than ten questions and per the advice above ask about interests and lifestyle rather than age and income.
• Event Applications. If you have an event app it will collect lots of information about your attendees far beyond their name and email address. In addition to registration information, you can glean insights about the popularity of content, create surveys, question and answer engagement from speaker sessions, the popularity of content by download, social engagement, lead tracking utilization, gamification, polls, and quizzes.

The more you know about your audience makeup, values and behaviors the more likely you will be able to create a compelling case to your prospective sponsors. Big companies and therefore big sponsors live in the world of data. They always prefer working with properties that know their audience.

Not sure where to start when it comes to finding potential sponsors and marketing them? Check out our consultation page to book some time if you are interested in learning more.?

New Client Announcement:

New Jersey Advance Media stands as the foremost source of local news for the entire state of New Jersey, and is also the driving force behind "Jersey Eats: A Taste of New Jersey." The Sponsorship Guy is thrilled to announce our collaboration with New Jersey Advance Media to secure sponsorships for the highly-anticipated event scheduled for March.