A sponsorship is no joke — brands invest billions annually in sponsorships with top-tier partnerships, such as those with the Springbok rugby team or the Protea cricket team, involving multi-million rand, multi-year contracts.
Naturally, investments of this scale invites scrutiny. While sponsorships can deliver extensive visibility, they also bear the weight of demonstrating their effectiveness. In other words, with big investments comes big responsibility — and the ever present question in business, "What's the return on my investment?"
Measuring the value of sponsorship can be quite the sticking point for brands. However, the problem is often less about lack of data and more about how that data is defined and tracked, and then ultimately interpreted. As a result, poor measurement makes it difficult to prove ROI and improve future strategy.
If you want to understand the value of your sponsorship, you need to look past just visibility. One person sees roughly 5 000 ads per day — you want to be the ad that turns customers into conversion, not only viewers. This means asking "What did this sponsorship actually achieve?" instead of the stereotypical, "How many people saw it?"
Knowing what you want to see is where it all starts. Compelling measurements begin with distinct and explicit objectives, and well-defined KPIs that provide you with concrete ways to evaluate the success of your sponsorship.
Brands first need to establish what they want the sponsorship to achieve. Is it to:
Each goal requires different KPIs and measurement methods, but what's important is to combine both quantitative and qualitative insights.
Quantitative metrics may include impressions, website traffic, conversions, lead generation, or sales linked to a specific event. Qualitative insights focus more on audience attitudes, their response and favourability, and their purchase intent.
Modern day sponsorships also unfold simultaneously across social media, online publications and broadcast. That means that the media monitoring of your sponsorship needs to track across all these channels if you want to get the full picture regarding the value of your sponsorship. This includes tracking conversations, sentiment, media coverage from verified publications and audience engagement across platforms.
Brands that invest in structured monitoring and data-driven analysis before, during and after a sponsorship campaign are the ones that are equipped to justify spend and optimise their performance for future strategy, shifting the role of sponsorship from a visibility exercise to a measurable business driver.
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*Image courtesy of Canva
**Information sourced from Newsclip, Luth Research, USC Dornsife and BDS Sponsorship