Reimagining Event Sponsorships with Event Marketing Partners EMP

Now that IRL experiences are back in full-swing, brands need to establish the “new normal” that treats sponsors as partners, and places the needs and behaviors of the evolved B2B buyer at the heart of sponsorship strategy. The result? Greater value for sponsors, a curated experience for attendees, and a higher return on experience (ROE).

Join InVision Senior Strategist, Phil Stanley and Event Marketing Partners Managing Partner, Gordon Stake as they discuss how we’re working with our clients to build the new sponsorship model, focused on the collaborative development of sponsorship opportunities that serve the objectives of both event owners and the sponsors.

What You'll Learn: 

– Weaving sponsors into a cohesive, overarching story
– Leveraging new content delivery opportunities and guidelines
– Driving meaningful moments of interaction – 1:1 and 1:few
– Taking ownership of how sponsors and exhibitors show up at events

Listen now and don’t forget to rate, review and subscribe to the InVision Xcast to stay fresh on the latest industry trends, technologies and insights:

Transcript

Phil Stanley (00:11):

Welcome to the IVC podcast where we help brands navigate audience engagement in times of change. My name is Phil Stanley and I am a Senior Strategist at Invision Communications. Today we're going to talk about our clients' Event Ecosystems. They have been fragmented by the pandemic's isolation, and that fragmentation requires a realignment of their goals and objectives. And what that means is we need to consider a new evolved strategic approach to both sponsorship and expo management. In response to this fragmentation, InVision has partnered with a company called Event Marketing Partners. We feel this is a necessary add on to building the overall attendee journey. Joining me today is my good friend, Gordon Stake. Gordon welcome and thanks for joining us.

Gordon Stake (01:08):

Thank you, Phil. And thank you for the opportunity to have a great discussion with a good friend on event marketing sponsorships. We've had years of experience selling sponsorships at leading events, and look forward to our discussion today.

Phil Stanley (01:19):

Awesome. So we'll start the first part of our discussion focused on creating a new normal or now remember, during the years prior to the pandemic where sponsors and exhibitors really reviewed primarily as sources of revenue by our clients and sponsors in term viewed their attendees as commodities, really sort of faceless figures. The result was really a couple things. We saw decreased sponsorship value. We saw declining exhibit hall attendance. Too much of the activity was being moved off of the show floor. And when we conducted measurement, we realized that dwell times were also diminishing. And most importantly what we saw is that the expo floor lacked decision makers.

Gordon Stake (02:29):

That's right Phil. Seems like so much has happened since then. I really do think the pandemic, there's a lot of learnings that came out of it. As we think about returning to live events, we need to reevaluate our clients' event ecosystem of attendees, sponsors and exhibitors. The pandemic's isolation fragmented their ecosystem. We can bring it back together by a realignment of goals and objectives. What we need is it evolves strategic approach to sponsorship and expo hall management. We really are developing a new normal for sponsorships at these times.

Phil Stanley (03:06):

Yeah, I completely agree with that. Sponsorship packages really have to consider the hybrid experience, and they need to focus on putting this new B2B buyer at the heart of that sponsorship strategy. And that really entails weaving sponsors into an overarching ecosystem story. And that really manifests itself in a couple of ways. First, clients need to take ownership of how sponsors and exhibitors show up at events, which prior to the pandemic was absolutely a challenge. Next, sponsor, and we've always known this, that sponsors want thought leadership opportunities, but what's critical to those thought leadership opportunities is providing them with the guidelines of how to present their stories. We also know that the show floor has to deliver those moments of interaction, whether it's one to one, viewing a demonstration or those more intimate one to few engagements where there can be multiple viewpoints being discussed.

Phil Stanley (04:39):

And then finally, we have to provide them with insights from our brand's customer data. And with the way technology has evolved, we have reams of data. And this is one of the best ways to utilize that data. Also, when we develop these curated experiences for our attendees, by using this kind of data, what we start to see is a higher return on the experience for their investment dollars. So Gordon, I want to pose a question to you. So before you start with a client, what are you seeing when you review their sponsorship packages?

Gordon Stake (05:27):

It's a great question Phil, because there isn't much change from 2019, and that's the challenge. I always like to say to clients, you cannot simply drop your 2019 agenda and sponsorship strategy into an event today. The pandemic has taught us so much that we can apply to our industry. Most sponsorships and exhibit models are based upon selling prepackaged tiered opportunities like we've done it for 20 or 30 years before. These tiers are designed to feature multiple companies. Sponsors need to be able to customize their presence at an event to maximize their value. In fact Phil, in 2019, Exhibit Magazine survey stated that 52% of companies would rather à la carte options rather than tiered options. And that my friend was three years ago. Looking back, the tiered sponsor format was already feeling misaligned with the needs of B2B buyers. Buyers are showing up at events already in the sales funnel, whether sponsors or exhibitors realized it or not. The typical B2B buyer has already researched your sponsors products and services. They know who they want to see on your show floor, but that's not the biggest challenge, is it?

Phil Stanley (06:37):

No, not from what we've seen. Really the biggest challenge with the old model is that it never contemplated virtual events. So because we were all so frazzled and crazed when the pandemic started and events were getting shut down and we were able to move into the virtual space, brands instinctively just tried to replicate the in person sponsorships into the virtual space. And this really just created all sorts of challenges, including the fact that attendees did not have the intention spans nor the interest to spend hours on virtual trade show floors. And frankly, the sponsor booth staffs, they didn't have the level of engagement. They didn't have the dwell times. And so qualified leads did not materialize.

Phil Stanley (07:48):

And sponsors for the most part, lost interest in investing in virtual overlays, really because of the lack of qualified leads. So now here we are, two plus years later, and these trends have all been accelerated. Event attendees have higher expectations for engagement. They expect sponsors to know them as a persona, and they also expect that brands know how to communicate with them. And for sponsors who are now investing in your event, they have an expectation that they will get more bang for the buck, from their booth, from the floor activations and from their sponsorship. But Gordon, we're at this point, where do you think we go from here?

Gordon Stake (08:48):

Phil, let me add to what you were just saying though, a very interesting story. During the pandemic, one of our clients actually paid to manage and host their booth for the virtual event platform. And then Slack when an attendee, came to visit, Slack one of their experts to now join us for a discussion because the value they were getting from those opportunities, like you said, were not what they were doing in the past. So the new model focuses on the collaboration and development of the right sponsorship opportunity. The goal is creating mutually beneficial sponsorships that are aligned to the event owners and the sponsors goals and objectives. Phil, the exhibitor survey I mentioned earlier, in the same survey, 37 sponsors pitched new sponsorship ideas to the host company.

Gordon Stake (09:35):

Why? Because these are the benefits that met their objectives for the event to help them make their ROI requirements for that event. Your sponsorship strategy has to evolve to meet the needs of your ecosystem. Sponsors know how to sell, that's a given. Where they have struggled is with the event strategy and the way in which they show up at events, they communicate as it was an infomercial. We can help them with integrating the host messaging with their own and show the value of unbiased thought leadership opportunities. The role of our clients is different in the new model, right Phil?

Phil Stanley (10:12):

Yeah, for sure. I mean it really comes down to our clients needing a process, a process for developing this new model. And it really starts with a discovery. It's conversations with the sponsor, the sponsorship sales team, as well as the event team. And it happens as early as possible in the planning process so that the experience design of the event, the experience design of the show floor, that the needs of the sponsor, the needs of our clients are immediately uncovered, known, and then we can build the best possible experience. And that allows us to have this curated ecosystem for the attendees and not just a disjointed collection of logos and booths.

Gordon Stake (11:35):

One thing to say though Phil, it's important to mention that sponsors will not get everything they desire. One of the things we're saying is you cannot customize every sponsorship opportunity. You've got to pick and choose those most important partners. Maybe you do it by tiers, but allow any sponsor to come to you with what they're trying to accomplish in those discovery meetings so you can understand and create a sponsorship opportunity that meets both the host company and the sponsor. The focus must remain on the attendee and the sponsor's business needs. That's most important. What's the value of a sponsor? Talking to an attendee is to make sure that the attendees needs are being met. It will result in a higher rate of return. A recent 2022 work, WARC study reports 44% of marketing executives find sponsorship to be the least understood channel in terms of ROI. That's a problem for our industry. The key is the alignment of goals and objectives during a discovery, which you mentioned Phil, and mapping them back to relevant KPIs. Phil, what sticks out in your mind from the spring?

Phil Stanley (12:42):

There really are a couple things, and I think that I'll tie this first part of my comment back to the exhibitor study that you talked about. And I find it really interesting that sponsors were coming to the host client to talk about their needs and come up with ideas for sponsorship. Because we had a couple of clients of mine who told us that their sponsors wanted no part of the virtual overlay of their hybrid event. And I found that really interesting that juxtaposed to what you just described as part of that survey. But some of the things that we saw this spring is that the brands all have a different definition of what hybrid means to them. And I think that's sort of the challenge going forward.

Phil Stanley (13:53):

And really what 2022 is turning out to be is it's experimentation. So perhaps moving into 2023, we'll see a more consistent definition of what hybrid actually means. We do know that buyers have been trained on the digital attendance, that they're, as we said before, that they have evolved expectations for what they're going to experience. We know that new technologies have combined to make a very strong business case for hybrid. We saw a study earlier this year from Gartner that says by 2024, a third of large IT companies will adopt a virtual first event model. So virtual is really here to stay with us.

Gordon Stake (14:55):

I agree Phil. A virtual first event model really is the next step to unlocking sponsored value. Smartly marketing to the virtual audience, utilizing campaign thinking year long events should be just one touchpoint on an ongoing campaign that drives and accelerates the pipeline. And Phil, you just said something that I brought back a memory is everyone says hybrid is new, hybrid is the new thing. But look outside our industry and Phil, my family is a soccer family and I love football is called in Europe. But what, look at the way folks consume media and hybrid has been around for years. Look at the World Cup. There are folks that want to watch the World Cup Soccer tournament on television. They want to do it from their home and their own experience. Others like myself want to go out to my favorite Irish bar in Killington, Vermont and have a pint of Guinness and enjoy the comradery of watching the game together.

Gordon Stake (15:53):

Then others in my family would want to go to the World Cup, whether it's being held in France or wherever, and experience that event the way they want to experience it. So hybrid while new, maybe to the event industry has been around for years in other forms of industries. So in theory, the value of a hybrid sponsorship should exceed the individual values of virtual or in person opportunities alone. We'll need to use 2022 as you're saying Phil, to develop the metrics that will enable us to understand in report out at attendee segment in behavioral changes driven by attendance at hybrid events.

Phil Stanley (16:32):

Yeah agreed. So really I think where we go from here with our discussion I think really is to begin to delve into how are we going to do this? How are we going to put together this new sponsorship model? And after producing so many virtual events over the past couple of years, as you said, sorry to say that we know that hybrid event models are expensive. We haven't yet determined if event attendance will return to pre-pandemic levels. We do know that most of our clients prepared themselves for smaller audiences, one thing that we know is clear to us is that sponsor and exhibitor revenue is even more important to our clients. Given that we didn't, where we aren't back to 2019 attendee levels. So working with you, we offer our clients a comprehensive sponsorship strategy that really is going to transcend formats from live to virtual and hybrid. It's going to be a strategy that will be focused on the brand's business requirements, the sponsors objectives and exhibitor needs, and driving qualified attendees into their pipeline. So Gordon, what is your approach in working with your clients in this new normal?

Gordon Stake (18:24):

I think Phil, first and foremost, our approach is out of a consultant. We need to deeply understand the sponsor's business, their goals, their challenges, and most importantly their business relationship with the client. Then we can define their objectives. We can think beyond the booth, develop opportunities which drive value, but the drive value, we must focus on lead generation and building pipeline. We always seek out sponsor feedback combined with industry trends and competitor analysis. This drives a cycle of process improvements year over year, event over event.

Phil Stanley (19:00):

Great. That's it. That's terrific. So brands, they've got an opportunity to reinvent sponsorship to drive the value that you just spoke of, to drive revenue for themselves as well as their partners. Change means placing a higher value on their sponsorship, their sponsor relationships. Now it means educating and leading sponsors through a strategic process, which is very different than the approach that we tried prior to the pandemic. It certainly means being much more closely aligned to new B2B buyers who we've said multiple times in this discussion, that their expectations have changed. They are used to spending much more time now online understanding products and services before they show up at an event.

Phil Stanley (20:02):

So at InVision, we deliver these strategic programs that are built on data and insights and a clear understanding of the needs of new B2B buyers. So we ask our audiences here to reach out to me at Phil.Stanley@iv.com to learn more about how InVision and Event Marketing Partners can help clarify your sponsorship objectives, build an enduring sponsorship platform, and to be able to drive revenue for you and your community of sponsors. And thank you very much for joining us at our podcast. Thank you.