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The Ultimate Webinar Sponsorship Guide
With the COVID-19 pandemic severely limiting events and opportunities to host large scale events, many companies are now shifting their gears to hosting online webinars and other virtual events.
Some companies are offering their webinars for free but many other companies are utilizing paid webinars to boost value and make some profit on their webinars with the use of webinar management software that adds more engagement to the typical webinar platform like ticketing, account log-ins, communities, live polling, virtual business card exchanging, and more.
These companies are usually charging their audience members for tickets but that puts all the cost of the webinars on your audience members, which could be limiting.
It could lessen the number of audience members that may not be able or be willing to pay for your webinars, but are still very much engaged with your brand.
In addition, it could limit the amount you can charge each audience member to ensure that the audience members see that the value from participation is much higher than the price of the webinar.
Sponsorships are another means to generate revenue without putting all the cost on your audience members and also create some partnerships with other companies that could benefit from sponsoring your webinars, the long term benefits are without understatement.
But first, ask yourself this:
Are Sponsorships Valuable to You?
Sponsorships on Webinars, not unlike events, can be valuable to you. Not too many reasons would spring to mind when considering Sponsorships for webinars.
You don’t need to rent out a physical space, catering is not needed, audiences who need to travel, and so on, however, sponsorships still can bring monetary aid as well as credibility to your webinars. Sometimes, the sponsorship leading to having the right logo on promotional materials is enough already.
Budget
Sponsorships can help with your budget as you may be able to generate more revenue than you could have without them.
If you opt-in for a ticket based audience registration as well as sponsoring companies, you would be maximizing the revenue generated from your webinars.
However, if you could use your sponsorship to lower the ticket prices for your audience members, then you could increase the value of the webinar for them by making it more affordable.
This can lead to larger webinar audiences which can increase your sponsors and your revenue, creating a positive feedback loop.
Credibility
Sponsorships by companies that are well known can help you improve the credibility of your webinars.
With all the webinars popping up during these times, people will be more likely to trust webinars that are sponsored by a credible company. This would increase your credibility as well as registrations for your event.
Beware of Shark-Sponsors
Be wary of sponsors that seek to leverage your webinar for their own benefit by flaunting the rules, claiming credit, or otherwise disrupting the event in a means to their benefit only.
It may seem strange, but some sponsors out there will use their large brand image to disrupt entire events and webinars in both minor or major ways, from claiming credit or otherwise marketing the event as if it was their own, giving away free tickets to registrants that buy their products, and so on.
How to Find Sponsors
There are steps that you need to follow before you can attain the right sponsors for your webinar. The first thing needed is to find the right sponsors for your event.
Additionally, you need to convince the sponsors that they are the right sponsor for your event and that they would be getting value from sponsoring your event as well.
Transfer Your Event Sponsors
This one is quite easy. If you ran events with sponsors in the past, simply reach out to them and see if they’d be interested in sponsoring your online events as well. Webinars have come a long way, and sponsorship of webinars is becoming just as fruitful as in-person events, thanks to leaps in technology making engagement easier online.
Getting The Right Sponsors
Getting the right sponsors for your webinars is an important consideration to make when looking for webinar sponsors.
The wrong sponsors can hinder your progress and could convey a message that was not your attention and attract the wrong audience members.
The right sponsors can help you target your audience a little bit better, and attract positive media attention as well as larger amounts of audience members.
Know Your Webinar
Knowing your webinar topic and target audiences can help you immensely in finding the right sponsors for your webinar.
This can help you find the potential sponsors you would be happy partnering with. Knowing all the information about your webinar can also help you answer questions to the sponsors you reach out to.
Many sponsors will have a myriad of questions to figure out if they believe that sponsoring your event is a good fit for them.
Having the information readily available can convey a higher sense of professionalism.
Target Your Audience
Knowing your target audience is an important step to any webinar, it allows you to cater to your topic and your presentation to your audience. But knowing what companies your target audiences frequent or have a positive view of can help you pick the right sponsors for your webinars.
Picking these sponsors can help you drive higher attendance and registration for your webinars from your target audience.
Proving ROI
Providing ROI on previous sponsors for your webinars can be beneficial in convincing new sponsors to become new sponsors of your webinars.
These numbers and data provide hard facts for your new potential sponsors to analyze and understand the benefits of sponsoring your events.
Webinar Data
Providing data on the webinar would be a beneficial asset to you and your sponsors because it gives them quantitative data to understand the benefits of sponsoring your webinar. Potential metrics to share with your webinar sponsors are:
- The number of audience members (attendees) of your previous webinar(s).
- The number of leads that each sponsor received in your previous webinar.
- The number of return audience members in your previous webinars
Demographics
Demographics can help a sponsor decide if sponsoring your event is the right fit for them. If the audience members to your webinars are not in the target market they would be less likely to invest in sponsoring your event.
However, with the target market matching the audience in your webinars, it becomes a worthy investment for your sponsors and they may be more willing to sponsor your webinar.
Testimonials/Survey
Testimonials and survey responses from audience members also give another layer of depth for qualitative data for your potential sponsors to consider.
The surveys and audience members’ testimonials can create an additional layer to the ROI you can provide to the sponsors to convince them that your webinar is the right choice for them to sponsor.
Sponsorship Packages
When asking for sponsors for your webinars, you should create different packages for different sponsors. This tiered sponsorship can help you differentiate different sponsors by giving different benefits.
The more expensive tiers can come with direct marketing and speaking opportunities from the sponsors as well as banner ads during the webinar.
The lower tiers can have a shout-out at the beginning or end of the webinar.
However, you must make it clear the prices and the benefits of each tier. You would not want your sponsors and you to have a misunderstanding because that can destroy relationships with your sponsors and destroy your reputation for other sponsors.
In addition, sponsors will only buy your packages if they are clear on what they receive when they purchase the package.
Ensure your package descriptions are clear on what the benefits and prices are.
Sponsorships for events are a common practice but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, events are no longer as widespread.
As webinars are on the rise, sponsorships on webinars will be the next trend.
Get ahead of the curve and start setting up sponsorship packages for your webinars, as these can benefit you, your sponsor, and even your audience members.