Marketing executives in the financial sector are overhauling their sponsorship evaluation activities — and for good reason. Re-engineering your ROI processes provides you with deeper marketing analytics and measuring tools so you can determine the right price to pay for sponsorships, facilitate activation strategies and optimize your investments.
Is it time to spring clean your own sponsorship strategy? Dust off your marketing hat and maximize ROI before summer rolls around. Here's how you do it.
Improve Your Marketing Analytics
You're probably no stranger to analytics — all those metrics that provide insights into your experiential campaigns. But how much of this data is really actionable?
Going forward, you need big data technologies that forecast trends in the sponsorship space, not poor quality data that disrupts your marketing efforts. After all, bad data leads to bad decisions in the financial sector, and it costs brands
6 percent of their annual revenue.
"To this end, it is important for marketing leaders to begin with the questions in mind and build the analytics strategies to answer them."
Choosing the right metrics, however, will optimize sponsorship ROI evaluation and provide you with greater campaign insights.
Don't waste your time any longer. Track these key performance indicators (KPIs),
and more:
- Collect social media insights from customers before, during and after a sponsorship event. This lets you discover what people are really saying about your financial brand (when they think you're not listening!).
- Analyze customer reach and, in particular, the number of people exposed to your marketing messages at a sponsorship activation. Were these customers more aware of your brand message after the activation than they were before the event?
- Scrutinize customer satisfaction metrics. Find out how many customers were happy with your sponsorship event and whether they would recommend it to their family and friends.
Use Better Measurement Tools to Quantify ROI and Improve Your Activation Strategies
The right KPIs won't improve your sponsorship ROI evaluations on their own. No, you need to use the proper measurement tools to garner all of these metrics in the first place. Less than half of marketers have a
standardized process for marketing measurement at sponsorship events, while 25 percent don't gather, analyze or use data in decision-making at all.
If you're one of these marketers, don't panic. Investing in the right measurement tools will help you
evaluate sponsorship ROI so you know where to double down and pull back with your future marketing campaigns.
In short, you need a measurement tool that provides you with accurate, real-time data that you can access anywhere. Big brands like Facebook, Netflix and Match.com use
predictive analytics tools to identify future trends and compile useful data.
"To truly gain a sense of visitor behavior, software must be capable of analyzing individual customer behavior and not just compiling aggregated data,"
says online marketing entrepreneur Neil Patel. "If a particular person ends up converting and spends several hundred dollars, I want to know the sequence of steps that led to this so that I can rinse and repeat."
Determining the Right Price to Pay for Sponsorships and Optimize Your Investments
Once you retool your ROI processes, you'll encounter the following question: "Are you paying the right price for sponsorships?" Sponsorship valuation is difficult to gauge. Whether you work with brands that sponsor your experiential campaigns or sponsor other brands at events, you need to learn how to price up properly. Here are three quick tips:
- Calculate the total audience size of any company you want to sponsor. Brands with a small social media following might provide you with less return than companies with hundreds of thousands of Twitter or Facebook fans. However, check out other data like total email subscribers, registered members and average event attendees per year, which could prove just as lucrative as social reach.
- Work out customer value. Brands that provide high lifetime customer value (LCV) — the amount of profit an average consumer will generate over his or her lifetime — will result in a good ROI.
- Measure the strength of brand communities. Sponsorship partners with a strong community of customers will provide you with more value than partners with a large pool of disengaged customers. "A community-based brand builds loyalty not by driving sales transactions but by helping people meet their needs," says the Harvard Business Review.
The right measurement tools and KPIs can make sponsorship valuation a breeze, of course. Use
the latest tech to gather insights before you switch up your sponsorship prices.
Want to get more from sponsorship ROI this spring? Follow the strategies above in order to track your investments with 20/20 precision. As a result, you can find out how much you're really spending on your campaigns and whether your investment is worth the bother.
