6 Ways To Get Your Sponsors Virtually Engaged

Enhancing your sponsor relationships to fit a more virtual model can be a great source of additional revenue. Sponsors are a vital part of your business, but one of the most challenging parts of securing those sponsors is being able to provide them with enough value to convert. We’ve put together some ideas on ways you can start to enhance your virtual events while elevating sponsorships in this new era. 

Social Media

With your participants documenting their virtual runs online, social media is one of the best places to include your sponsors.

• Ask your community to show how they’re using a sponsor’s product on their virtual run. Use a unique hashtag to keep track of entries and award the winner with a virtual sponsored prize.

• Offer fitness or at-home training classes on Facebook and Instagram. Use product placement to advertise your sponsors throughout the class.
  
  

Utilize haku’s new virtual event enhancements

Find incremental benefit in using haku’s new virtual event features by utilizing them to deploy specialized sponsored content across multiple touchpoints. This will open up new avenues to advertise highly valuable space to sponsors.

• Create a co-curated running playlist presented by your sponsor. Your playlists will be displayed across multiple touchpoints, including the participant account, registration thank you page, and email. 

• Include sponsors on your participant’s results page. Participants are likely to share their results on social media, which can incentivize your sponsors to pay a premium for that space.

• Increase sponsor visibility with a presence on virtual bibs and finisher certificates. Include your sponsors throughout the entire customer journey to drive incremental value.
  
  

Virtual Goodie Bags

Increase sponsorship revenue by creating a virtual goodie bag (VGB) for your virtual event. Including a sponsor in your VGB is a great way to provide value at this time. 

• Rotate offers to make them more relevant to the needs of your participants at a given time. For example, free shipping codes will be more valuable to your participants than a free movie ticket during this time.

• Virtual goodie bags can include discounts on sponsor products, free trials, links to sponsor websites, an entry to an online contest, and more!
  
  

Incentivize product sales

Collaborate with your partners to create limited-time products or fundraising initiatives that will incentivize additional sales for your online store. 

• Offer your community a co-branded product for free when they spend over a certain amount in your online store. 

• Advertise that you’ll be donating a percentage of your online store sales to a nonprofit partner for a limited-time. Though this seems counterintuitive, case studies show that people are willing to spend more if they’re supporting a cause.
  
  

Up-Sell Experiences

Get innovative and think of sponsored experiences you could offer during your future in-person race weekend and upsell these during the registration of your virtual event and in your storefront.

• If you had to turn your event into a virtual run this year, offer a specialized medal or additional sponsored drink tickets for next year’s event. 

• Talk with your sponsors about allowing them to offer more elevated experiences at your next event. Use this as a way to up-sell exclusive or early access admission into these sponsored activations. 

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Reach out to partners that you may have not considered in the past, particularly geared towards home fitness or door delivery. For example, your community can receive 10% off their next food delivery when they add an additional participant to their virtual run.