All about sponsored webinar | How to find and get a sponsor
Because of some changes, we are limited to do some gathering, events, meetings, and many opportunities to host some events. That’s why many businesses and companies pivot their wheel from physical to digital hosting.
And a webinar is known to that, as one of the best hosting platforms. That is why webinar hosting is used by many businesses and companies.
Though some businesses and companies offer their webinar as free, some others use paid webinar, the webinar is still one of the effective tools in many industries. The webinar has many interactive features that one company can use as a helpful marketing strategy.
As it has many features it also has many types. In our previous articles, we already talked about the live webinar, we also discussed the on-demand webinar, and the latest one is the simulive webinar.
Now it is time to discuss further what a sponsored webinar is about.
What are sponsored webinars?
A sponsored webinar is one of the greatest and most effective ways to generate revenue at the same time raise brand awareness. The sponsored webinar can also help you to engage with a larger scale of audience and potential customers.
Sponsorship is the means to generate revenue with little cost on your audience members at the same time building a relationship with some partnerships with the other companies that could and would benefit from sponsoring your online webinars. Having webinar sponsors is undoubtedly beneficial to both parties. As a webinar hosting event, you will receive monetary support for your online webinar, on one hand, the sponsors will have the opportunity for what they called “brand exposure” and a chance to increase leads and many more.
How do sponsors benefit you?
The mentioned below are some of the benefits you can gain in doing sponsored webinars.
Budget
Sponsorship helps you aid your financial limitation, with having a sponsor you can reach and generate more leads and revenue when compared without having them. You have 2 options to choose from, either it is ticket-based registration and sponsoring companies. In this way you will expand or increase your revenue from your webinar event, or, you can use your sponsorship to lower your ticket registration for your audience. You are making your webinar more affordable yet still valuable, this option can also lead to increasing your sponsor and your revenue.
Credibility
Sponsorships coming from well-known and trusted companies have a big impact on your webinar to make it look more credible. And because you are sponsored by a credible company, this will also help your webinar to gain more credibility and also registrations for your webinar event.
Cons of a sponsored webinar
As it has some pros, it also has cons, one of its cons is what they called shark-sponsor.
Shark-Sponsors
In finding the right sponsor make sure you are aware of what they called shark-sponsors. Shark-sponsors are ones who are looking for some webinars for their own benefit. They will use rules, claiming credits as if it was their own webinar event. These shark sponsors can also do small or big ways to ruin the entire event.
How do you find sponsors?
There are things you need to consider in finding a sponsor such as:
Audience Matching
In finding a sponsor for your webinar event you should consider some important things and one of these things is a connection between brand and audience. Sponsorship is worthless if it failed to connect the brand with your audience. Just make sure you are making a bridge between your brand and your targeted audience and potential customers. Audience matching is about matching or connecting your event’s audience with your potential sponsor’s audience. It talks about finding businesses that are willing to make connections with the people you are putting together.
Offer Your Sponsors Unique Digital Assets
Know their objectives
After you find the best sponsor for your webinar, it’s time now to understand what kind of valuable sponsorship you can give to them. For you to determine the benefits you can give is to consider some questions, such as What are the sponsor’s objectives: What things you can do to help them achieve their objectives and goals.
What are the common objectives of sponsors, anyway? Based on IEG, a sponsorship data firm: brand awareness, showcasing unique content, generating leads, obtaining audience data are some common objectives according to some surveys regarding sponsorship decision-makers. So, let us go further with these objectives to identify the ways to help your sponsor achieve their desired goals virtually.
Common objectives
Brand Awareness – Making your customers be aware of or be familiar with your brand.
Showcasing Community and Social Responsibility – Showing obligation and cooperation towards individuals for the benefit of a particular or a large organization.
Generating Unique Content – Bringing out unique or unexpected content.
Generating Leads/ Stimulating Sales – Increasing or growing of a sales/ demand or even an individual that is interested in your product, brand, or service.
Obtaining Audience Data – Acquiring information about individuals who respond or take an action to your advertisements that lead them to visit your webpage.
Related Article: WHY BUILDING A LANDING PAGE IS IMPORTANT | JETWEBINAR CUSTOMIZED TEMPLATES
What to offer as solutions for their objectives
Offers for the following:
Brand Awareness
You can help your sponsor to increase their brand awareness by promoting your sponsor through social media, emails, website, and even during your webinar presentation.
Showcasing Community and Social Responsibility
After the successful event, send some emails about thanking sponsors and other participants to make them feel they are a valuable part of the successful event.
Generating Unique Content
Releasing articles, announcements, and interviews with your sponsor can be one of the helpful techniques to generate content.
Generating Leads/ Stimulating Sales
Showing some digital samples of your product, sharing product demo, on behalf of your sponsors, and even giving some sponsor coupon codes to offer to your participants can be a big help to stimulate sales.
Obtaining Audience Data
Sharing your compiled demographic data, and even giving a survey through email on behalf of your sponsors can also be a big help to obtain audience data.
Build the Perfect Sponsorship Proposal
Cover
As they say, “Don’t judge the book by its cover”. But in this online marketing, it is important that you have an enticing cover. Think of the best and effective eye-catching covers that will help you reach large scales of potential sponsors. If you are worried that you do not have skills in creating this kind of staff, there are a lot of online tools to help you create enticing cover designs with just a few easy steps.
Personalization
One of the most crucial parts that you need to remember in doing sponsorship proposals is to personalize information to your landing sponsor. Do not forget to display your prospect’s name, title, and your brand logo.
Opportunity Overview
Giving a high-level overview of the opportunity you are giving your prospects. The product value here should be the focus here, the prospects need enough knowledge about what exactly benefits they will gain from this kind of opportunity.
Target Market
In building a sponsorship proposal, you must have a clearly defined target market. This includes a profile that covers age, gender, location, desires, needs, interests and wants. Be sure that you present the sponsor that you have background knowledge of who exactly is your target market.
Advertising and Marketing Plan
This is the perfect time for the sponsorship proposal to show your very own advertising strategies and marketing efforts, and present how the sponsors will benefit from it if they will team up with you.
Activation Ideas
It is time to shine! Present your hard work and effort you made to know better your sponsor lead’s needs, interests, wants, objectives, goals, and make an activation idea for their brand. These activation ideas are customizable programs that create and produce specially for specific leads.
Pricing
It is better if you save pricing for a separate conversation with your prospects. Leaving your price off could lead to an increase in the opportunity for a follow-up conversation. This kind of conservation is where you can acquire more understanding and knowledge of your sponsor’s objectives, goals, wants, needs, and feelings about the activation ideas you presented.
A common recipe for a foolproof sponsorship package
Pre-registration efforts
Before you jumped into an online event, make sure you are prepared in all aspects such as pre-registration, pre-market strategies, and so on. So here are some common pre-event preparations.
Utilize all digital channels
Many people are using different social media accounts. Using digital channels can hook a large scale audience and potential customers. You can promote your webinar event by utilizing all digital channels, including email, website, ads, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Using these digital channels to promote your upcoming event, or you can use it as a countdown to your big event. And because of that, all digital channels now can be an effective marketing strategy.
Personalized opt-in email newsletter
The opt-in newsletter is a mailing list, a newsletter, or advertising, it is used when an individual is not officially or initially joined or participated in the emailing list. You can personalize your opt-in email newsletter according to your theme, you can use this email newsletter for announcing all available and archived webinars
Create a permanent, easy-to-find “upcoming webinars/webcasts” channel
Worried that your audience might not see and forgot your upcoming event? Well, you can create an easy-to-find and user-friendly channel in either publisher’s home page or the sponsor’s website, or you even both that possess the value content.
RELATED ARTICLE: HOW AFFILIATE MARKETING WORKS WITH WEBINARS | JETWEBINAR AFFILIATE TOOL
Registration and post-registration efforts
As you exert effort in pre-registration, don’t forget the post-registration. It is also an important part of your sponsorship.
Branded emails and registration pages
Branded emails and registration pages should have relevant content to encourage your prospects to register and make connections with your brand.
After registration, the online confirmation page or thank-you page
The connection between your brand and your prospects does not end after the registration. After the registration, think that it is the best part wherein you can elaborate and explain the sponsor brand more about the information and detail by detail. Why not create a way where you can link to a sponsor’s landing page with downloadable marketing materials that they can use and help them.
Include a confirmation email to the registrant and send reminder emails a few days and hours before the event – all with links to the sponsor.
Why do you need to confirm an email to the registrant? It is one way to motivate your registrants to come back again and purchase again and again and eventually turn them into a trusted client. This also one way to remind your registrants of the upcoming webinar event.
Activities during the webinar
Include the sponsor’s logo and other relevant content in the frame of the webinar viewing screen.
If you are thinking about what kind of activities you can do during the webinar for a sponsorship proposal, well why not impress them with the idea of including your sponsor’s logo during your webinar? Educating your audience at the same time as promoting your sponsors will strengthen the relationship with them. And this way, you are also helping them achieve one of their goals which are raising brand awareness. This technique can also benefit both parties.
Be sure the moderator mentions the sponsor in the introduction
Not because it is a sponsored webinar, it does not mean it should be an advertorial. You can simply have a brief introduction. It should not be abuse that you are trying hard to the point you are mentioning your sponsor all the time. Just make your introduction simple and not easy to notice for your audience, maybe you can make a simple and smooth transition from your topic up to mentioning your sponsor.
Consider offering a one- or two-minute portion in the middle of the webinar as a “commercial break” for the sponsor.
It might be boring if you have your online webinar continuously without any break. Consider giving an offer maybe one- or two-minute in the middle of your webinar as a commercial break for the sponsor.
Post-webinar efforts
Send thank-you emails to all registrants after the event.
Some webinar hosting implementers, forget about the post-webinar, this includes sending thank you emails to all participants. Make sure you are still having a connection between you and your participants even after the online webinar.
Producing an on-demand version of your webinar is a must to continue to drive viewers and registrations.
To continue to grow your webinar you should continue posting an on-demand version of the online webinar so that they will be able to re-use it as part of their own digital campaign strategy.
Conclusion
Sponsored webinars are truly the new “cash-cow” in the era of new normal. According to some data analysts, they predict sponsored webinars will help the B2B ad to increase their overall revenues by the year 2022, while for B2B publishers they predicted to increase their media revenues.
With that, it is clear the sponsored webinar is in demand for companies and businesses. But finding a sponsor is not as easy as that.
It is a give-and-take scenario. As I mentioned above give them what they need and want, and take in terms of you are also gaining benefits from them.
Your sponsor should be like you are meant to be to each other. But you can only say that your sponsor is meant for you if it works perfectly for you both.
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