Brands spend more than $65.8 billion globally on sports sponsorships annually. The bar has risen when it comes to the performance needed to justify those expenditures, which puts a lot of strain on all parties involved. With that said, how do these marketers collaborate on the work and properly assess the performance of their partnership portfolios?
In this webinar, CDW’s Senior Manager Brand & Sponsorship Dan Frystak and Tigris Sponsorship & Marketing’s VP Operations, Client Service & Marketing Kelly Baird and Trak Software CMO Charles Reynolds join Front Office Sports CEO Adam White. The group discusses best practices for strategizing, executing, and measuring partnerships along with how you can enable your team to be an even more strategic leader and partner for your business.
Edited highlights appear below:
What metrics do you show to CFO or other execs to prove relevancy when it comes to partnerships? (9:40)
Frystak: “It’s all about compiling various data points that are all going to serve to supplement one another. A good example of this is we will track every single person that we will bring out to a hosting environment for any sponsorship related activation. Whatever the event is, we’re going to host thousands of people every year and we know every single person that is going to come out and we track it to the level of ‘who was the customer entity?’, ‘what was their title?’, ‘what sort of customer are they?’. Beyond that, we try to track what their revenue was prior to CDW hosting and then after…but that’s just one data point. After that, we can do surveying, we can ask our salespeople, we can ask our customers what they knew or thought about CDW before the activation and what they think about it now. All these data points together make this collage that you’ll then be able to draw your insights from.”
READ MORE: Why an Agency Has Turned to Tech to Streamline their Client’s Sports Sponsorship Process
On changes in performance-based partnerships today (34:27)
Reynolds: “The digital migration of everything the last couple of years has just been incredible. If you talk about five years ago, the standard was you could throw an ad up on Facebook and you have some buttoned-up metrics and results immediately. We compete with that as marketers. You’re selling a premium product and experience and you want to be able to tell authentic stories for your brands that you work with, but there’s a big gap. If you’re not using project management versus spreadsheets, how do you get the work done? How do you prove it? How do you collaborate together and stand out in this era of performance-based partnerships. That’s the dynamic that we’re all dealing with right now.”
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How emerging technologies are changing partnerships (50:10)
Baird: “Technology is making us all more efficient and time is money. Right now on the agency side, the hard part is trying to assess all the different options out there and what are the different platforms that have it all and what will never be. So it comes down to ‘how well do they talk to each other?’ ‘Are there open APIs?’ ‘Are there things we can automate?’ It’s an evolving process as we all try to figure out what are the tools each of us are using… So on the agency side, it’s more about assessing than helping get to that quicker close and execution process, but I do believe we’ll get there and we all need technology to get there.”
READ MORE: Why the Ravens Turned to a Software Solution to Deliver a Streamlined Partnership Experience
With the current digital landscape, should we expect more athlete sponsorships/partnerships? (54:38)
Frystak: “More and more athletes are becoming their own brands. There’s a lot more partnerships to be had with them directly versus the team that they’re on. It’s a landscape that I think is only going to continue to expand as they have greater opportunity and greater business wherewithal as well as greater social responsibility.”
Trak Software helps brands and properties strategize, execute and analyze their partnerships in one central location. Trak is currently offering a 14-day free trial of their software, plus a 25% discount on their software until May 2nd.
To learn more or schedule a demo, visit their website.
