Sponsorships are often an essential aspect of many events, and as Covid-19 continues to keep us meeting online and will well into 2021, it is more important than ever to be able to provide value to your virtual sponsors and maintain relationships. Finding and maintaining sponsorships for virtual events has certainly been an interesting experience for many event professionals. Without physical space to offer sponsors to use for branding purposes or kiosks to hand out goodie bags, event professionals have had to rethink and reconceptualise what value can be offered to sponsors in the virtual environment. How to bring value to sponsors and ensure there is a worthwhile ROI for them, is not a new challenge for event professionals, however, providing this in the virtual environment is.
Creating digital sponsor packages can feel like a daunting task, but it is made easier with a virtual platform like ours. In this post, we’ve put together a few ideas to help you add value to your virtual sponsorships.
Firstly let’s cover the virtual spaces available to sponsors. Virtual platforms have many virtual spaces available to sponsors that make for perfect branding opportunities, such as a virtual exhibition hall. This is perhaps the most obvious virtual space to offer your sponsors, and for good reason. There are great opportunities for sponsors with a virtual exhibit, such as one-to-one meetings, exhibitor presentations, brochure downloads, and a video gallery. The amazing analytics dashboard and lead retrieval functionality can help sponsors see in real-time their ROI, more so than they would at a live event. A way to add value too. A second virtual space that is great for branding purposes is virtual meeting rooms. Sponsored meeting rooms are a great branding opportunity. Sponsoring a breakaway room is another great virtual space on offer to your sponsors.
Then you have your traditional digital advertising options such as the rotating banner ads at the top of the timeline which link through to various landing pages, each with their own analytics. There is also the option for individual sessions and functions to be sponsored by one or more sponsors. The sponsor logo is displayed in the timeline for the sponsored function or session. These built-in options are not all that is available though, with a virtual platform, it’s about using the amazing tools available to get the most out of your virtual event.
You can use the live host function to play a short video or display a promotional message from your sponsors. There is gamification that can be used to create opportunities for attendees to connect and learn more about exhibitors and sponsors in creative ways. This is a great tool at your disposal to add value to your sponsorships as you are driving and encouraging engagement. A premium package sponsorship option could include an image of the sponsor’s choice on the login page. Another great option is that your sponsors can host networking sessions. Groups of 2-20 attendees are placed in randomized groups and your sponsor can host the function, they can also filter the attendees chosen.
Combined with the already used ‘traditional’ offerings we are all used to, there are more than a few ways to bring value to your event sponsors in a virtual and/or hybrid event world.