Not All Sponsorships are Created Equal

Sponsorships Won’t Work Unless You Do Your Part

By Laurel Hess, Account Executive, Foster Marketing

It’s 8:30 p.m. and I’ve been standing in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome’s Stadium Club on the 300 Level for more than two hours. Recently renovated, Anheuser Busch has held the sponsorship rights to the room for several years. In previous years the Bud Light logo was projected on the wall but with a bevy of high-profile events on the horizon, Anheuser Busch was eager to maximize this sponsorship opportunity. Discussed is changing the fascia of the bar from its painted stripe design to the beer maker’s trademark blue condensation pattern. I silently applaud Anheuser Busch’s persistence to maximize its sponsorship dollars. Anheuser Busch knows something many potential sponsors fail to realize: You have to work your sponsorship in order to get the most out of it. When it comes to sponsorships, the rule is: If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.

Why Sponsorships?

Sponsorships are a great way to launch a brand and to be seen as a major player in the marketplace. They are also great for community outreach and a way to boost your level of interaction through social media and dialogue within the community. Why is Bud Light so pervasive in sporting arenas? They have a strong sponsorship plan that grants them high-profile visibility in sporting facilities and aids their brand recognition efforts. If you’ve been staring at a Bud Light sign for long enough, sooner or later you’re getting up for that beer.

You can also leverage your sponsorships in your company’s advertising and social media program to engage with the marketplace, giving you reasons to reach out and post non-sales related messaging. For example, if you’re sponsoring your local sports team and you tweet about an upcoming game or recent win, you will most likely get re-tweets or more followers, boosting your visibility.

What’s the Real Return on Investment?

One of the thorns of sponsorship marketing is the difficulty to track ROI. Since sponsorship is mostly a public relations and brand awareness initiative, there are not as many tangible impressions to track or dollars/purchases to follow. So, how can one effectively track sponsorship ROI? The easiest answer is that you can’t — at least, not without room in your budget for multiple tracking surveys and other efforts — and even this could miss some gains.

If you plan to dip your toes into the world of sponsorship marketing, it would be foolish to jump in without a concrete plan to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Setting benchmarks and using follow-up surveys ensures that you spend wisely and allows you to make informed changes to your sponsorship campaign in years to come.

Why Do I Have to Track My Return When the Sponsorship Provider is Already Watching Impressions?

Can’t I just rely on the team/sponsorship entity to track for me? Aren’t their measurements good enough? Not if your brand is relatively unknown in the market.

Say you sponsor a sign at a stadium. The team tells you that you can get 250,000 impressions per game if you sponsor the sign next to the jumbotron. More than 2 million impressions per season sounds pretty good; however, if you are not quite as established, time and work will be required to eventually see this type of impact.

For example, if you are Coca-Cola, this opportunity makes sense and hitting 2 million impressions in a season is attainable — people will see your brand and it will register in their minds from the first preseason game.

If you’re Jim Bob’s Cola with little to no brand awareness at the start of the season, the recognition will not be there right away. Your impressions will grow over time as your brand name is out there but you won’t be hitting the promised 250,000-impression impact early on.

To get a true measure of sponsorship impact, we suggest doing a benchmark survey at the start of the season or sponsorship and then a survey at the conclusion to see how much your brand recognition grew as a direct result of the sponsorship. This way you can determine if sponsorship dollars are well spent and if you should continue or upgrade your deal.

Five Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Sponsorship:

• Bigger isn’t always better: A well-placed logo on a program or scoreboard that’s often checked by patrons may increase visibility and repeated views over another location.
• Non-traditional sponsorship opportunities: Look beyond the typical sponsorship placements for unique outlets. Perhaps that large sign by the jumbotron is out of your price range but instead you can put your logo on all of the stadium’s beverage cups if you pay for the inventory
• Change the message/look or position each year: Patrons will become blind to your brand if you never move or change it. They will get used to seeing you in the same place or with the same message and they will cease to see it. If you are in a prime position, change the color or message each season/year so the patrons have something fresh to register. If you have the ability, move your messaging each season so patrons have another chance at seeing it and registering it.
• Milk it for all it’s worth: Incorporating “Proud Sponsor of:” on your advertising and engaging fans via your social media outlets and website can start a dialogue and also support your sponsorship money. If a patron sees “Proud Sponsor of:” on your ad and then goes to the game, they are more likely to recognize and register your signage.
• Take responsibility for tracking: Don’t rely on the sponsorship venue or event coordinator to give you a true impression count or ROI on your sponsorship. They often have blanket numbers and apply them across the board. The truth is Jim Bob’s Cola and Coca-Cola will not have the same rate of impressions and return on investment.

Sponsorships are a great way to boost your brand awareness in the marketplace, but you may be missing out on real gains if you aren’t working your sponsorship plan, measuring your efforts and cross promoting these efforts in your advertising, marketing and online campaigns. A few well spent dollars can bring eyeballs to your name and lend credibility to your brand.

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If you’re interested in identifying potential sponsorships for your business or making the most out of your current sponsorship initiatives,Foster Marketing is here to help. Click to contact Foster MarketingAccount Executive Laurel Hess.

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A Contrarian View of Digital Marketing

By George Foster, CEO, Foster Marketing

There may be no bigger supporter of digital marketing than I. However, I have learned to be skeptical about most things (I guess it’s my journalistic upbringing). Along that line, you all know the nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.[1}

The common belief is that Humpty Dumpty is an egg. However, there’s another version of its origin.

In 1648, during the siege of Colchester in western England, a huge cannon, colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the town’s wall for defense. A shot from one of the Parliamentary cannons damaged the wall and Humpty Dumpty came tumbling to the ground.

The Royalists (all the King’s men) attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but because the cannon was so heavy, ‘All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.’

For awhile now, I’ve been thinking of applying that contrarian thinking — like the origin of Humpty Dumpty — to the value proposition of digital marketing.

We are asked all the time what kind of results we will get from our digital efforts. We mention awareness; impressions; click-throughs; sales leads; and, ultimately (hopefully) sales.

For the longest, I’ve kept articles on the changes in digital marketing, especially the rise of social media — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, tracking, etc. In preparing this article, I basically threw out any article more than a year old. The uses and technology are changing so fast.

In fact, Facebook just this month filed an initial public offering which could value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion and put the company on track for one of the biggest U.S. stock-market debuts of all time. The rise of Facebook is the subject of the movie Social Network, an interesting view.

First, let’s look at digital advertising from a contrarian view and then move to the social contrarian view.

Contrarian Idea 1: A third of ad
impressions are never seen.

In a recent article on www.paidcontent.org, author Danny Frankel mentioned that, “There is a growing consensus that digital advertising, whose targeting abilities were supposed to eliminate waste in marketing campaigns, is still very much a work in progress. Barely a week goes by without another person bemoaning the lack of reliable measure of ad effectiveness.”

ComScore, a global leader in measuring the digital world and a source of digital business analytics, recently produced a study titled “U.S. Digital Future in Focus 2012.” It can be downloaded by registering at comScore. Some key findings:

• Across all measured campaigns, 69 percent of ad impressions were classified as being “in view”. The remaining 31 percent, the study says, were delivered but never seen by a consumer for various reasons.
• An average of 4 percent of ad impressions were delivered outside of their targeted geographical region.
• 72 percent of campaigns had at least some of their ads running next to content deemed “not brand safe” by their respective advertisers.

Contrarian Idea 2: You can’t break up conversation with ads.

Even before the Facebook IPO, Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the world’s biggest advertising group WPP, cast doubts on whether advertising will ever work on Facebook.

Sorrell said the social networks were “not the right context” for commercial advertising because they would interrupt something that was fluid and informal.

“Facebook, Google+, Twitter are advanced forms of social interaction,” he said. “We used to write letters to each other and now we correspond through Facebook and Twitter. If you interrupt that with a message you may run into trouble.”

Makes sense to me. And, Sorrell went on to further diminish the Facebook play by saying that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had been forced to withdraw two “failed experiments” at commercial activity after they sparked a “revolution” by users.

Contrarian Idea 3: There is no revenue model

David Baker, another contrarian and a management consultant for marketing services firms, says that “the purveyors of social media are losing money at astounding rates (except when they sell the platform to someone else who can afford to lose even more money) and “everyone wants to be on the bus, but they really don’t know where it’s going.” To bear that out, in its IPO filing, Facebook showed revenues of $3.7 billion, $400 million under projections.

And, it’s interesting to read the comments on the Wall Street Journal on the Facebook filing. Among the more than 200 include:

• “85% from ad revenue with virtually zero verifiable ROI. Fun times.”
• “This IPO is ridiculous. Anyone who bought into this dot.com bubble 2.0 needs to have their head examined. Way over valued. There’s already starting to be a social media backlash due to privacy concerns (especially Facebook’s ever-changing policies) and new platforms every day that are going to compete with it.”

Finally, then, what’s there to love?

Lots. Digital is here to stay and growing. We are right in the middle of a major shift of marketing dollars for our clients from traditional to digital media and it looks to increase. In the same comScore study, the following points were made:

• Social networking continues to amass online users. Social networking accounted for 16.6 percent of all online minutes at the end of 2011.
• Bing closed out the year surpassing Yahoo! for the No. 2 position among search engines. Google is No. 1.
• More than 100 million Americans watched online video content on an average day to close out 2011, a 43 percent increase from 2010.
• 4.8 trillion display ad impressions were delivered across the U.S. web in 2011 magnifying the need for greater transparency and accountability in ad delivery.
• At the end of 2011, more than 8 percent of all digital traffic was consumed on devices such as smartphones and tablets.
• Total U.S. retail and travel-related e-commerce reached $256 billion in 2011, up 12 percent from 2010.

Thus, it’s a wild, wild wacky worldwide web ride. You need a firm that can make sense out of it. That’s Foster Marketing.

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Let Foster Marketing help manage your online presence.

New Year, New Plan of Attack

Tags

energy marketing, marketing, oil and gas marketing, strategic marketing planning, task method budget

Move Making the Most of Your Marketing Efforts to the Top of the To-Do List for 2011

By Tiffany Harris, President of Foster Marketing

Whether you are a deepwater drilling company or a wind turbine manufacturer, no energy company supplier starts the year saying, “We did well enough last year; we can let our competitors increase their market share this year.” … At least, not if they plan to still be in business in the future.

Acknowledge that the status quo is, in fact, losing ground and create a clear vision of the possibilities ahead for your company by improving your marketing efforts. As you develop your plan for 2011, add making the most of your marketing efforts to the agenda. Here are some tried-and-true methods that can increase market share, build brand awareness and ultimately bolster your bottom line.

• Set objectives. Would you start running a race without knowing the distance or location of the finish line? To get to your finish line and truly see a return on your time and financial investment for marketing, you must set mile markers so you can ensure you’re on the right track. Common objectives for businesses could include entering new geographic markets, increasing awareness or developing new sales tools, such as a brochure or website.

• Identify key target markets. Along with setting marketing objectives, identifying your key target markets helps guide your path. Key targets can be geographic, demographic or product/service specific.

• Develop a budget. Keep in mind, lofty objectives require a monetary commitment. So, plan accordingly. Having a spending plan also can help you define how much you can accomplish this year and what will become a priority next year.

• Develop a plan. An effective marketing communications plan should pull your objectives, targets and budget together into a single plan of attack. This can also include a timeline to help keep your efforts focused because a project without a deadline can easily turn into a wish.

• Work the plan. With the prize in your sights, you can begin integrating your efforts to maximize the return on your time and monetary investment. Using a mix of marketing tactics such as branding, public relations, research, advertising (print and digital) and trade shows is an effective way to reach your goals. Identify and push your positioning statement and hone your message as you work your plan.

• Monitor. Be sure to check the pulse of your efforts along the way to determine if you need to push harder or adjust your plan. Building tracking methods into your marketing efforts allows you to track your progress.

Using these tactics in your marketing efforts can mean great gains for your company and lend support to a 2012 plan of attack that is even bigger and better.

Let us help you plan your 2011 marketing budget. Email Jamie Efurd or call 281-448-3435 or 337-235-1848 to schedule a meeting with Foster Marketing to discuss how we can help integrate and enhance your marketing program.

Budgeting in Tough Times

By George Foster, President of Foster Marketing Communications

October isn’t just the start of another hunting season; it’s also the start of the 2010 budgeting season. And, never has it been harder to plan for the future when you don’t know what the future holds.

It reminds me of the story about the man who sold hot dogs on the corner. The man was hard of hearing, so he had no radio. And, he had trouble with his eyes so he didn’t watch TV or read newspapers. But he sold good hot dogs.

He put up signs on the street telling how good they were and stood out on the corner and cried: “Buy a hot dog, Mister?” And people bought.

He bought a bigger stove, increased his meat and bun orders and eventually asked his son to come home from college to help him run the business. But then something happened.

His son said, “Dad, haven’t you been listening to the radio or reading the newspaper? There’s a big depression. The world situation is terrible. The domestic situation is worse.”

Whereupon the father thought: “Well, my son’s been to college, he reads the newspapers and watches TV so he ought to know.”

So the father cut down on his meat and bun orders, took down his advertising signs and no longer bothered to stand on the corner to sell his hot dogs. And his hot dog sales fell almost overnight.

“You’re right son,” the father said to the young man. “We certainly are in the middle of a great depression.”

No one plans to fail, but many times we fail to plan. Cutting marketing and advertising budgets in tough times is a recipe for failure.

There are a number of different methods used to establish budgets. Designating a percentage of sales is a common method, and studies have been done on what companies spend in various SIC codes on advertising as a percentage of sales and percentage of margin.

Another method, and the one we prefer, is the task method budget where tasks are budgeted to reach marketing objectives. More than ever, marketers are being held accountable for results.

Studies through the years have proven that a predictable percentage of buyers exist in every group of leads generated by a communication program. We have to know there are buyers out there, or why would we market at all?

When you can forecast the expected return on promotional investment (ROPI) for six-month and one-year periods, upper management looks at marketing communications in a whole new light. Marketing communications expenditures then become an essential cost, not a supplemental cost that is cut easily.

The rules for ROPI are simple: 22%, or slightly more, of inquirers will buy within six months — from you or your competition; around 45% of them will buy within one year.

Prove it to yourself: Telephone 100 leads you received one year ago. Within about five percentage points, the prediction will hold true. Call leads after six months, and most likely, 22% to 25% will have bought.

One of the toughest tasks in today’s information world is determining the best vehicle to reach your prospects. There are a lot more vehicles today than the few available to the hot dog salesman, some with minimal hard cost but a large amount of human cost (screaming from the corner), such as social media.

At a recent online marketing conference, speaker Joel Book (http://www.exacttarget.com) displayed a slide that showed the progressive growth of media vehicles over 20 years, from basically four media outlets — TV, radio, print and outdoor — in 1990 to the proliferation of media we have today. The medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan said years ago.

So, what’s a marketer to do when developing a marketing communications plan and budget? You can certainly wade through the myriad forms of media and cobble together a budget, or you can develop a strategic plan with achievable goals. Foster Marketing Communications has 30 years of experience helping clients budget and build their business. We can help you, too.