best practice guide: delivering roi from sponsorship and event marketing

Over the years, brands investing in sponsorship and event marketing have sought to extract value from three areas: (i) brand exposure, (ii) VIP hospitality, and (iii) promotion activation. Prior to emergence of digital analytics, measuring the ROI from a sponsorship investment was primarily based on advertising value and other fuzzy math methodologies.

VIP hospitality efforts often focused on business introductions and entertainment in the hopes that business relationships and revenue transactions would occur organically. That is, the job of the event marketing agency was largely complete once they ushered their brand sponsors and VIPs into a hospitality setting. This passive approach largely amounted to “business deals by accident” as sponsors and prospects searched for shared business interests and a way to generate revenue.

With regards to promotion activation, measuring financial outcomes also varied as brand marketing teams were often inconsistent in their use of direct response tracking such as unique tracking phone numbers, promo codes, or coupons.

Measuring the success of customer appreciation or sales channel incentives has largely focused on qualitative insights in the form of attendee sentiment (post-event satisfaction surveys, opinions from executives, etc.) These insights are directional at best and fall short of a fiscally responsible approach to marketing investment.

In recent years, the availability of digital tools such as web analytics and marketing automation (lead scoring) has provided greater visibility into marketing performance. As a result, today’s CMO is under increasing pressure to deliver ROI and that extends to their investment in sponsorship and event marketing.

For sponsorship and event marketing profes-sionals, this translates to a greater need for tracking lead capture and attribution from events and sponsorship all the way through the sales pipeline to revenue. It also means a need for greater collaboration with internal sales teams to set goals, coordinate involvement, and track CRM data.

For those selling sponsorship opportuni-ties, it means aligning data capture and ROI tracking to support brand marketers’ need for tying their investments back to revenue and profits.

TradiTional approaches To Measuring sponsorship roi

a new age of evenT MarkeTing accounTabiliTy

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Best Practice Guide:Delivering ROI from Sponsorship and Event Marketing

Today’s CMO is under increasing pressure to deliver ROI and that extends to their investment in sponsorship and event marketing.

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The rise of MoTorsporTs MarkeTing


Over the past few decades, professional sports have emerged as a hotbed of opportunity. With exponential increases in fan attendance, media viewership, and the rise of digital/social, corporate brands have jumped in on the action seeking to increase brand awareness and generate incremental sales. While team sports historically dominated the sponsorship and event landscape, professional motorsports (led by NASCAR) has risen to prominence in the past 20 years. Recently, it’s been sports car racing that has been on the rise featuring brands such as Aston Martin, Ferrari, and Porsche.

One reason that sports car racing is on the rise is that many corporate brands have “been there, done that” with regards to inviting customers, sales prospects, and channel partners to a golf tournament, NFL luxury box, etc.

TRG-Aston Martin Racing has been on the leading edge of this growth curve by leveraging sportscar racing as a venue for B2B relationship marketing to drive sales results. There is no other venue where executives have the opportunity to network with peers and prospective buyers from so many diverse industries– all in one location. What’s more, the setting is different from all other forms of sports/entertainment in that attendees can participate in the action and become a part of the experience by attending the team strategy meetings, listening to the driver/crew conversations during the race, walk on the track during pre-race guided tours, watch the action from pit lane and enjoy VIP hospitality.


Sportscar racing provides a business setting that is unique from all other forms of sports/entertainment.

AWARENESS

CONSIDERATION

PREFERENCE

PuRChASE

LOyALTy

ROI

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The opportunity for relationship marketing and sales networking is substantial in sportscar racing, however not everyone is getting it right.

Like broader tradeshow and event marketing, many brands and agencies struggle to correctly structure a program and then measure results.

Studies by trade show marketing firms have shown that up to 50% of business owners and marketing managers don’t measure event ROI. Overcoming this requires a disciplined approach to your event marketing.

It also requires designing and executing event strategy to align with the stages of the sales cycle: prospecting, deepening relationships with leads, and closing late-stage opportunities.

here are some tips to help get started:

1. Set clear, quantifiable goal(s) for each field marketing event2. Involve your Sales leadership early and often in the goal setting exercise for shared

buy-in (after all, Sales will need to attend the events to network for sales leads)3. Ensure your event and sponsorship marketing team(s) and your motorsport partner

marketing team understand the goals and that a reporting structure is established4. Structure VIP events into three types: networking for prospects, deepening

relationships with Leads, and closing late-stage Opportunities.5. Since the focus of any field marketing event is making connections, capture every

interaction in a CRM database (pre-registration conversations, registration data, at-event conversations, post-event communications)

6. Be sure that your CRM Lead Source field (standard in Salesforce.com) is configured so that the pick list values in the field to reflect your unique event types (it is critical to use a consistent event naming taxonomy for reporting accuracy)

7. Consider creating an additional custom field that allows additional data to be captured about the specific event (year, location, etc.)

8. use your CRM mobile app to capture real-time event conversations to avoid losing business cards or conversation details days after the event

9. Aggregate event leads from individual events by use of tags (standard in Salesforce.com) to track aggregate performance tracking and ease of reporting

10. Establish a reporting process with your Sales team to track the progress of event-sourced leads through the sales pipeline (e.g. conversion rates to Opportunities Won)

11. It’s profit that runs your business (not revenue) so measure it. Specifically, consider measuring customer lifetime value (LTV) to determine customer profitability from your events as compared to other marketing tactics

12. Collaborate with your Sales team to calculate sales close rates, average revenue size, and average profit margin between events to compare results

13. use the sales close rates, revenue, profit data to help you determine where to allocate your funds to maximize ROI

14. use LTV calculation to guide how much you can afford to invest to acquire a new customer

15. Get predictive - group all of the leads from one event using their tag, then divide the total profit by the amount of leads to predict how much each new tradeshow customer is worth.

16. Avoid the last-click trap -- measure assisted attribution where your events or sponsorship were a contributing touch point to a lead or sale (remember: your event was one of many touch points that led to capturing a lead and converting them into a customer)

17. use campaign tracking (such as Google uTM tags) to track registration landing pages 18. Compare results across different field marketing events 19. Test different event formats to determine which works best for a given business goal20. Regularly solicit feedback from prospects, customers and your sales team for

improvement.

generaTing sponsorship and evenT roi



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For sales and marketing professionals, it’s important to align with partners who understand your business strategy and can deliver results. To find the right partner, we suggest you ask a few questions:

Successful sponsorship and event marketing partnerships require a blend of sales and marketing skills, plus collaboration between brand and partner.

If you are considering an investment in motorsport relationship marketing for demand generation, be sure that your motorsport partner can deliver. If you are already investing in motorsport marketing and not seeing results, it might be time to contact TRG-AMR to re-assess your current program.

choosing a MoTorsporTs parTner for business resulTs

PRIORITIeS

Q: Are they a racing organization, or a business organization that uses racing to drive business results?

Q: Do they have the on-staff business skills to help you and your marketing team integrate events and sponsorship into your demand generation strategy?

PROCeSS

Q: Do they have experience with tracking campaign performance?

Q: Can they go beyond making business introductions to actually brokering business opportunities?

Q: Do they have experience planning and executing different types of business networking events (prospecting, building relationships with leads, closing late-stage opportunities)?

Q: Do they have a sponsor on-boarding process that includes setting business objectives?

Q: How frequently do they report/share metrics with their sponsors?

Q: Can they articulate what they need from you to ensure they can demonstrate ROI?

TOOlS

Q: Are they using a CRM system or do they have CRM expertise to potential use your system?

Q: Do they use marketing automation or do they have experience with email nurture campaigns for pre/post event engagement?

Q: Do they understand website or other analytics?

Q: What is their level of social media expertise and can they support your need for content to engage your customers and prospects?



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best practice guide: delivering roi from sponsorship and event marketing

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