When you’re a sponsorship manager, having to constantly Google potential sponsors, research their contact details, and then cold contact them can feel like a Sisyphean task. Especially when 95% of the effort is wasted.
How much better would your life be if these sponsors actually came to you, volunteered their contact details and indicated an interest in sponsoring?
Before you get giddy with excitement, while this is absolutely a realistic scenario, you’ll need to ensure your marketing team has a lead nurturing process in place first.
In this post, we’ll show you how.
Note if you’re a marketer, putting this in place should significantly reduce the amount your sponsorship manager bugs you for better leads!
What is lead nurturing?
According to Marketo, a leading provider of lead nurturing software, “Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects, and providing the information and answers they need.”
Translated, lead nurturing for event sponsorship is basically finding a way to attract potential sponsors to your site, automate your communication with them until you’re confident they’re interested in sponsoring, and then only utilise your precious sales resources on closing hot leads.
How do you get leads coming to you?
This is obviously the first question you need to ask, and the answer is – offer them something of value, typically in the form of interesting or useful content.
Examples could be:
- An industry report or summary of key trends created by your producers for an upcoming conference
- A survey of your fans and their brand preferences / purchase intent for a consumer festival
- An infographic of the total reach for your event’s marketing channels and a rough breakdown of the demographics they reach
The key is to be confident it is of interest or use to your target sponsors.
The only way to be confident, is to segment your potential sponsors correctly, using personas.
Personas are little snapshots that describe your ideal sponsor. They might include demographic info (e.g. they age, gender, job title, salary), firmographic info (essentially like demographics but for companies e.g. industry, size, turnover), or behavioural info (e.g. likes/dislikes).
You’ll most likely use a combination of the first two, so for example you might target brand managers and marketing directors at alcohol manufacturers in the UK with an annual turnover of x for your festival; or the sales and marketing managers at fast growth SaaS startups for your B2B conference.
How you segment prospects ultimately comes down to your event and your own industry knowledge, but the most common ways to do it is based on company size (or turnover) and industry.
Once you know who you’re targeting and have built out a persona, you can more accurately create content that will appeal to them.
With personas in hand, and having created some top-draw content matched to the needs and interests of your sponsors (and ideally you’ll produce it consistently, not just a one-off), then you need to make sure potential sponsors are aware of it.
To do this, you’d use all your usual marketing channels including social media, email, partners, ads and optimising your content for SEO, so it’s ranks high in Google for relevant search results.
How do you capture their information?
Once you’ve got potential leads coming to you event’s website, the next step is to try and capture their information (and interest), so you can continue to communicate with them.
To do this, you again need to have various options available to entice them to share their contact information with you. This is usually down to an exchange of value and again driven by content.
For example, you might have a newsletter you encourage them to sign up to; or if you’ve written a report, you might only have the summary available, with the full report available for download behind a form.
Often it’s not enough just to have these offers available on your site, but rather you need to actively let visitors know they’re there and encourage them to fill in their details.
A really effective way to do this is to use pops, slide-ins or top-bars in order to grab attention.
What information should you capture?
There’s always a trade-off when capturing information, with the received wisdom being that the more you ask, the less people will be willing to fill out the form, and so your conversions suffer.
Therefore you should try to limit what you’re asking only to the things you really need to know.
One important thing to note is that you shouldn’t aim for brevity just to increase the number of leads you generate if they’re not good quality leads, or you don’t have the necessary information needed to make that call.
Sending a ton of unqualified leads to your sales team will be just as bad as sending them nothing at all.
Therefore you should ask the questions that will tell you whether or not a lead fits with your target persona. These would be things like their annual budget, job title (inferring ability to make a decision), and other salient data points that indicate that they could be a potential sponsor.
One clever way to do this with many modern marketing automation systems (more on these below), is to utilise progressive profiling.
This allows you to ask only a small set of questions the first time you’re asking for information, but each subsequent time they fill out a form, you can ask a little bit more, which is a nice way of ensuring you get a complete picture without scaring off prospects at the first encounter.
How do you nurture them?
Assuming you’re successful in capturing their details, the next step of the lead nurture process is – nurture them!
What this looks like will largely depend on what stage of the funnel they’re at.
A funnel is a simple way to visualise how ready potential sponsors are to engage with your sales team and start talking brass tax, and it’s generally segmented into 3.
The top of the funnel (ToFU), is often classed as ‘awareness,’ and is generally where sponsors first become aware of you and your event, for example by visiting your website prior to providing any details. Social media engagement (e.g. following you, liking a tweet etc.) is often seen as top of funnel activity.
The middle of the funnel (MoFu) generally focuses around engagement and an interest in what you have to offer. Leads in the middle of the funnel, where you know some information about them and can judge that they might be a good fit to sponsor your event, are often known as ‘Marketing Qualified Leads’ or MQLs.
This would be the stage when they download your report, fill out a ‘learn more about the event’ form or sign-up for your newsletter.
Finally you hit the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), which is buying intent. This is characterised by an interest in learning more about sponsoring your event. For example if they download your sponsorship prospectus or request a sales call back, this is a strong buying signal. Leads at the bottom of the funnel, when you are confident they’re interested in – and have the ability to – sponsor your event, are known as ‘Sales Qualified Leads’ or SQLs.
Most people will enter a lead nurturing programme somewhere between the top and middle of the funnel, with a passing interesting in your event, and it’s then the job of your nurture programme to get them more interested, up to the point where they express a buying signal.
A typical lead nurture programme will consist of a series of regular emails sent out to your prospects, leading them closer and closer to the bottom of the funnel.
For example, let’s say they’ve signed up for your newsletter, you might have email 1 welcoming them to your newsletter.
Email 2 would encourage them to view a special report or infographic you’ve created.
Email 3 might invite them to review last year’s post-event report and key statistics.
Email 4 might start to talk about all the cool new things you’re doing at this year’s event.
Email 5 would then ask them if they wanted to talk to someone from your team about commercial opportunities (or as many people like to word it ‘a partnership.’)
Each nurture programme should be tailored to your potential sponsors’ interests, so if you have multiple personas, then you will need multiple nurture programmes set up.
These pre-set, automated nurture programmes can also be supplemented by ad-hoc emails too, such as ‘30% off exhibition booths this week only’ or ‘last workshop sponsorship available.’
When do you know they’re ready to be sent sponsorship info?
Knowing when a prospect is at the bottom of the funnel and ready to buy (i.e. they’re an SQL) is going to vary a lot from sponsor to sponsor, event to event and market to market.
It there should be based on your own data, which will help you create rules of thumb.
For example, you might know that when someone visits your programme page, they’re interested in sponsoring, so that would be a trigger to send the lead your sponsorship proposal or pick up the phone.
Other ways to decide on taking this action could be:
- How engaged they are with your site (e.g. if they open 3 emails in a row, visit 5 pages of your website in the same day, or download a certain number of content assets).
- Display an obvious buying signal such as requesting the sponsorship pack, or asking for a call back.
Managing your nurture programme
Nurture programmes can require some quite sophisticated tracking software to work well (e.g. they need to track behaviour on your site and match it to your CRM system, so that you can build up an overall picture of a lead’s behaviour to judge their interest).
The overall software that let’s you run nurture programmes is usually known as marketing automation software, and often they also have a CRM system attached, or offer integrations with other popular CRM systems like Salesforce.
There are lots of great software companies that can help though, with leading enterprise providers being:
- Marketo
- Hubspot
- Eloqua
- Pardot
For a full list and reviews of marketing automation providers, take a look here.
Measuring success
There are many ways to measure the success of your marketing automation and nurture programmes.
The most obvious one is how much sponsorship revenue you close from inbound leads.
However because leads times can be relatively long when closing sponsorships, particularly big ones, you might need to earlier indicators that things are working.
Starting at the top of the funnel, you should look at:
- Traffic to your website
- Engagement on your website (e.g. bounce rate, time on page, page views per session)
Looking at the middle of the funnel, you should be checking:
- Conversions from your website (e.g. number of people signing up for the newsletter, requesting brochures, downloading content etc.)
- Engagement in your nurture programmes (e.g. email opens, click through rate)
- MQLs generated
Finally when you reach the bottom of the funnel you’d be keeping an eye on:
- Number of SQLs
- Value of SQLs
- Conversion of SQLs to closed sponsorships
Ultimately you should be seeing that you spend less time and resources to close nurtured leads than if you were only focused on cold calling prospects.
In conclusion
Running an inbound marketing nurture programme for sponsorship leads could – and should – have a profoundly positive effect on your ability to close high value sponsorships for your events.
It should save your sales team a lot of wasted time and effort sourcing their own leads and chasing down cold or uninterested prospects.
However, setting it up and keeping it going requires some real time and effort (particularly up front), so it’s not for everyone.
If you do want to take the plunge, then hopefully this guide will have helped answer many of your questions and provide you a good guide to being successful.
