Data is a huge thing in marketing. From big data forecasting to person-level customer journeys, attribution models to unified marketing measurement, conversation volume to sentiment ratio, marketing has never been so thoroughly analysed. And that’s mostly a great thing.
Unless it comes at the expense of empathy, creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking.
When it comes to sponsorship, this is even more the case, because you’re not marketing through a “channel”, you’re marketing through something that people love; that they’re passionate about. It’s a different animal than any other kind of marketing, and how and when data drives decisions and implementation is just as different.
So, at the risk of throwing the cat amongst the pigeons, here we go. This is my take on the limitations of data-driven marketing and sponsorship.
So many data-driven marketers use data to match up audiences, with the goal being to use the sponsorship to simply “get in front of” the right people. While using data to find properties with appropriate audiences is perfectly reasonable, that’s only the very beginning of what a brand needs to know to make a optimise the power of sponsorship.
The overarching goals of sponsorship are the same as for disruptive marketing: Alignment and advocacy. (And best-practice sponsorship has been there a lot longer!) This is a big shift from the old-school focal points of awareness and sales. The thinking is that if a brand improves brand alignment and evokes brand advocacy, then consideration, sales, preference, loyalty, increases in lifetime value, and more will come. Certainly, these can be pursued individually, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to do it if your target market believes you’re the right brand for them, you stand for things that are important to them, and they’re valued by you.
Sponsorship is an incredibly powerful tool to build alignment and advocacy, providing you with more points of market relevance, more meaningful points of alignment, more channels, more options for market collaboration, and more options for marketing content and topics. It gives you more ways to add value to both fans and customers, while demonstrating what your brand is really about.
Side note: There is this school of thought that maybe brands shouldn’t sponsor at all, when they can target the exact same people with a social campaign. This is literally swapping a two-way, multifaceted relationship for a one-way messaging campaign. For more on this counterproductive approach, read Ambush Marketing has Never Been Easier… or More Pointless.
Sponsorship provides an exceptional platform for demonstrating your brand values and attributes and/or your company’s purpose. You can not only sponsor something that aligns but, even more importantly, sponsor in a way that demonstrates who you are and what you’re about.
The thing is, without a deep understanding of fan motivations and the fan experience (including the remote fan experience), you can try to do things that demonstrate brand values, but it’s unlikely to work. It will be all about your brand, and nothing to do with fans, because you haven’t put in the effort to understand what matters to them, what will resonate. It’s like blindfolded archery. You’re shooting the arrows, but you don’t even know where the target is.
You could have tons of collated marketing data, and that data can serve you really well, in predictable ways. I’m not knocking that at all. But if the data is primarily transactional – eg, if we make this offer, the market will respond by doing that – do you really know who they are, or just how to make them jump?
If your primary use of data is to determine the appropriate channels, segments, messages, offers, and brand content to achieve your brand goals, then having deeper insights into who your markets are may be extraneous.
The issue for sponsorship is that there is now another entity involved – the property – and that doing sponsorship well requires both data and passion-driven insights that your current dataset is unlikely to provide.
Okay, so you’ve got a deeper understanding than simply transactional and targeting data. You’ve got customer data, lifetime values, psychographics, clickographics, and more. That’s great for you, but it still has only limited value when it comes to sponsorship.
You may even have a set of personas or flagbearers, which can be very helpful to understanding your market, but they may be very different than the personas for the property you’re sponsoring.
For instance, you may have used data to develop a collection of well thought out personas for your snack food brand or new EV. These personas can inform product development, positioning, marketing, and more.
But what if you sponsor a breast cancer charity? They’ll be targeting people based on why they care about breast health; what motivates them to get mammograms or otherwise proactively engage in breast health; what motivates them to donate, fundraise, or advocate for them. You may have a mountain of data, but those fans have agendas that have little or nothing to do with your brand, so what then?
This leaves you reliant on rightsholders to fill in that intelligence gap, and not all of them have the wherewithal to provide what you need.
Data? Sometimes. Actionable insights for their own marketing? Fewer. Insights that will help you to understand fans and how to effectively leverage to them? Fewer still. Rightsholders, listen up… This has to change!
This is the kind of insight you need from rightsholders:
This insight augments your data, so you know not only who to target through sponsorship, but how to make it matter – how to make it work for your brand and your target markets.
As a sponsor, you have a couple of choices:
The last issue I’m going to cover around data and sponsorship is around data harvesting. The thinking goes something like this:
You sponsor a property, and create one or more give-us-your-data-to-win activities designed to harvest the data of individual fans. You’ll then aggregate that data with your existing dataset, and at some point in the future, use it for a marketing campaign.
Sounds reasonable, right? That is, until you pick it apart.
First off, transparent data grabs are just that: Transparent. Fans know you’re doing it, and they’re not going to enter your contest unless they’re going to get something in return. And no, the chance to win something isn’t enough for most people. Seriously, think about how many contests you enter. Not many, I’ll bet.
Second, if you’re a sponsor, you’ve already got the most meaningful, passion-driven marketing platform there is. Use THAT platform to achieve your brand goals. Use THAT platform to nurture your bonds with fans and potential customers. Use THAT platform to incite brand advocacy. Don’t waste the power of a well-chosen sponsorship so you have more emails or mobile numbers or consumer data for use sometime in the future!
And you can always develop compelling leverage activities that have fans volunteering their data to you. Not enter-to-win, but something that offers real added value to the fan experience. For more on win-win-win sponsorship, read Last Generation Sponsorship Redux.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Why do you hate data-driven marketing? What has it ever done to you?”, let me clarify. I don’t hate data-driven marketing. Not at all. But as the title says, with sponsorship, there are limitations on its usefulness.
That said, there are some fantastic ways to use your data in aspects of sponsorship, mostly around sponsorship selection:
All of these get you to properties with some potential – and that’s a good thing – but it’s still going to be incumbent on you to dig into fan motivations and the fan experience to come up with leverage strategies that are going to be effective, efficient, and meaningfully impact all of your key target markets.
As for measurement, sponsorship measurement is multifaceted, accountable, and requires benchmarks. Some of the techniques and benchmarks you use for measuring sponsorship may be the very same ones you’re using to track other marketing. For more on sponsorship measurement, read Sponsorship Measurement: How to Measure What’s Important.
As already noted, I’m not a data hater, and the data we can now access and harness is bloody amazing. I’m also not advocating gut feel as a sponsorship strategy.
What I want is for you to harness the full power of sponsorship for the betterment of your brand and your alignment with target markets. It doesn’t matter how finely you can slice your data, you won’t get to that full power until you put in the effort, develop empathy, and apply some serious creativity.
For more on this, I strongly suggest you download and read my white paper, Disruptive Sponsorship.
You may also be interested in my white papers, “Last Generation Sponsorship Redux” and “Disruptive Sponsorship: Like Disruptive Marketing, Only Better“. I’ve also got a self-paced, online sponsorship training course for sponsors, covering the whole process of sponsorship strategy, selection, negotiation, leverage, measurement, and management, with lots of inclusions. Interested? Check out the Corporate Sponsorship Masterclass. I’ve also got Getting to “Yes” for rightsholders.
If you need additional assistance with your sponsorship portfolio, I offer sponsorship consulting and strategy sessions, sponsorship training, and sponsorship coaching. I also offer Sponsorship Systems Design for large and/or diverse organisations. Please feel free to drop me a line to discuss.
© Kim Skildum-Reid. All rights reserved. To enquire about republishing or distribution, please see the blog and white paper reprints page.