An often overlooked but potentially very effective form of local marketing, sponsoring a local sports team can help build your local network, earn goodwill for your brand, and can be a lot more effective than other traditional forms of advertising.
Depending on the scale and scope of your business, you can explore a range of sponsorship options in your local area. It could be a partial sponsorship in your city’s premier sports team with advertising boards around the stadium and press areas, or perhaps you want to look into becoming the title sponsor for a smaller team, where you can provide the sports kits, complete with your brand on the jerseys. Whichever option you go for, you can really help build your brand awareness amongst your local community and beyond.
Sponsorship In The Digital Age
Sponsoring a sports team can bring more advertising possibilities than the traditional avenues you may associate with it. Aside from your logo appearing on the kits or around the venue, there are numerous opportunities for digital advertising too, from the team’s website and social media presence to blog posts & articles and even sponsored ads when a visitor signs into the venue’s wi-fi. We recommend taking a bit of time to research your local team’s online presence and how they utilize modern technologies, so you can make an informed decision based on all of the possible opportunities your sponsorship could provide.
Return On Investment
If you can identify your target market, research the advertising outlets of your targeted team, and build strong and trusted personal relations, you can potentially generate a huge amount of publicity for a comparatively small fee. Marketing experts advise that sponsoring a local team could be up to 10 times more effective than the more common direct marketing campaigns that are traditionally utilized by small to medium-sized companies. They point out the huge costs associated with marketing, you can yield the same, if not better results, through a well-thought-out sponsorship plan. When it comes to return on investment, your sponsorship may not be easy to measure in terms of money in, however, if you can find ways to track the results, for example, from customer feedback forms, you can get an idea of the effectiveness and outreach of your sponsorship, allowing you to track and evaluate the value of the deal.
Personal Relationships
Our final thought about sports team sponsorship is the personal relationships you can build. From the athletes, management, staff, and fans, you can bring a personal touch to your brand, which can be difficult to build otherwise. If you can create a good reputation and make yourself known to the people associated with the team, you can add word-of-mouth to the brand visuals and digital outlets your sponsorship campaign can achieve. According to bestingeelong.com.au, the top companies in the area put a huge emphasis on building long-lasting relationships, maintaining repeat customers, and acquiring top reviews and testimonials can make your brand stand out amongst competitors and establish your company as a local mainstay that is recognized by people in your local whether they use your services or not. You can’t put a price on building personal relationships, so we recommend you take every opportunity you can
.
We hope this article has given you some food for thought on the benefits of sponsoring a local sports team, and hopefully, we will see your brand on local jerseys and sports coverage sometime soon.
