The Mobile Opportunity for Sponsorship Sales Growth

The rapid expansion of mobile marketing and advertising is providing fuel for many new business opportunities – and one of the most interesting is sponsorship sales.

Traditional sponsorships are easy to define: They involve events, fundraisers, donations, etc. The brand benefits through the halo effect of partnering with these organizations, ideally generating new leads and building loyalty with current customers.

But the mobile world is adding more flexibility and innovation to these traditional forms of sponsorship – in addition to increasing the size of the potential audience and the efficiency of sponsorship campaigns.

Let’s take a look at several of the new forms of mobile sponsorship, and discuss just what makes these options so appealing for both corporate sponsors as sponsorship sales teams.

Is it possible that your organization could adopt any of these strategies for its next big sponsorship push?

1. App Sponsorship

This is perhaps one of the simplest options for the sponsor: They simply fund the creation of an app by the sponsored company, paying for the funding and perhaps lending some of their expertise to the app effort.

Note that this works best when an app is being created directly for a particular event – think of music festivals, big sporting events, large-scale auctions or fundraisers, and so on.

The app itself can be quite simple, perhaps informative or focused on a single task (parking, seating, directions in the event space, available pet adoptions, live scores, etc.).

2. App Creation

This is a step up from app funding, and works better if the sponsor has the most experience and resources for building an app.

Here it makes more sense for the sponsor to donate the app itself as part of the event. There is a lot of inherent flexibility in this approach. The app can actually be a web page or download, as needed, and it can cover a broad range of value offerings for participants.

The key here is to start very early, because even simple app development needs a long run-up, (preferably with a couple test phases before the launch date.

3. Mobile Coupons

Mobile coupons are an easier, less formal method of using mobile tech to activate sponsorships.

For example, participants attend the event or purchase the product, and receive an immediate mobile coupon from the sponsor. Or, if the sponsor wants to be more directly involved, the coupon could make the event itself more affordable.This type of coupon makes consumers sit up and take notice, helping to tap into those micro-moments when instant mobile decisions are made.

4. Mobile Connections

Tech, hardware and related companies have an additional option open to them: They can provide the mobile connections themselves.

In other words, the sponsor takes on providing mobile hotspots for the event itself. Of course, this only works well where free Wi-Fi is not readily available (hint: tie the password into your brand).

5. Mobile Advertising

Mobile advertising covers a broad range of potential sponsorship options: Typically a company logo or ad is included either on an app or on a mobile device as part of the event.

Just like traditional sponsorships, the goal with this strategy is to increase brand awareness with new audiences and brand loyalty with current customers.