Live equine events have always offered a unique blend of marketing opportunities for sponsors, attracted to the affluent (and often primarily female) audience.  However as lavish sponsorship budgets are slashed and events are put under more and more pressure to prove a return on investment to sponsors, does the traditional package of pre and on-event marketing offer enough for a sponsor in 2018?  Equally events are under increasing pressure to generate more revenue from all facets of their business.

You may already be embracing the concept of remarketing advertising to enhance your ticket sales.  (If you aren’t, then click here to find out more about it and increase your chance of selling tickets by 80%).

The digital custom audiences you have created from website visits, Facebook page interactions and from your contact databases are a prime source of ticket sales pre and during event.  But did you think of monetising these audiences post event by allowing your key sponsors to market to them?  This form of digital sponsorship for equine events provides new activation opportunities for sponsors and directly attributable return on investment.

The ability to follow up post-event adds a valuable extra step into the marketing funnel for your prospects.

Confused?  Let’s take a practical example.

A car company is the headline sponsor for an event.  They negotiate a package that includes branding on all event collateral, adverts in the program, a sponsored jump, arena banners, a trade stand in a prime location and regular promotion across event social media and email broadcasts.  During the event, visitors see the latest 4×4 model in the dressage arenas being used as judge boxes, ferrying officials around the cross-country and on the sponsor tradestand, alongside an array of other models.

The car company staff are working hard on their trade stand to demonstrate the models and potentially book test drives at a dealership local to the visitors home.

How does the car company calculate their return on investment for sponsoring the event?  They are unlikely to make many sales directly from their tradestand at the event & your visitors may be more interested in buying boots and handbags rather than booking a test drive.

Now imagine the following scenario.  Your event is over.  The last lorry has left the box park, the final spectators lingering in the bar are finally heading for the gates.  You & your staff are ready to collapse in a heap and catch up on your sleep.  Once the final results and press releases are loaded onto your website & social channels, your website will be left alone for a while until it’s time to re-open the box office for 2019.

Before and during the event you worked hard to drive a lot of traffic to your website and Facebook page.  Your digital custom audience size is at a record high  but you’ve got nothing to sell to them right now.

Let’s circle back to your car sponsor.  They need to follow up with visitors who expressed an interest on their trade stand but those will only be a small fraction of your total visitors.  Imagine if they could follow up with all of them digitally as well as the 1000s of visitors who tuned in to your livestream.

Well now they can because you can grant them access to your digital custom audiences, allowing them to show advertising from their own ad accounts, using their ad budget but to your audiences.  Effective, trackable follow up which allows them to clearly see the ROI they are generating from your event.

You monetise an existing asset at no extra cost to yourself and provide your sponsors with an effective, quantifiable addition to their sponsorship package.  A win win for all!

Here at Blacktype we are working with a number of international sporting events and National Governing Bodies to create and monetise digital audiences.  If you’d like to find out how we could help you too, get in touch.