Restaurants, dealerships, storefronts – a wide range of business types that share one common element: their role in your local community. They’re where you and your neighbors already eat, shop, and spend their time.
The "local" piece is why brick and mortar businesses should be at the top of your sponsor prospecting list ahead of this off-season. There’s a chance you have direct (or even loose) ties to some of these business owners, or if not, you can often find a way to an introduction.
We all know that sponsorship funding is crucial to keeping yourself on-track and competitive, but forming the right relationships with prospective sponsors takes time. Thus, if you’re setting out to sell sponsorship for the first time this off-season, you should focus your efforts within your current, localized network.
Focus your outreach to the brick and mortar businesses and owners you know. That way, there’s a stronger chance you’ll be able to drum up some initial conversations around sponsorship this winter. Learning is so critical when conducting outreach – from presenting yourself and your reason for reaching out, to handling their questions and gauging the overall conversation. If you want the greatest chances at success, start here.
Now, you’ll still need to effectively present a case as to why these businesses would benefit from sponsoring you (which is the entire purpose of this article). So without hesitation, let’s dive into how you can make a successful sponsorship case by helping brick and mortar businesses achieve their goals.
Consider the unique ways that you can highlight your sponsor’s products or services to your social media followers. The key that you hold is your true-to-you, personable approach — in other words, your authentic self. For your sponsor, your followers likely represent a combination of new and current customers they want to reach – this is a monetization opportunity!
To showcase your sponsors effectively, think beyond simply the race day decal spotlight and hashtag. Away from the track, can you make the time to travel to one of their locations to capture your own content? Photos and videos are the perfect format for this, and can provide you with a readily-accessible library of content for future sponsored social media posts.
To use a restaurant sponsor as an example, you might choose to create a video where you share your favorite items on the sponsor's menu. Use these moments as an opportunity to let your personality away from the track take lead. Encourage your followers to visit your sponsor’s page, or if local to your followers, even stop in for a meal to the sponsor for supporting your race team. Throughout the year, does your sponsor have any special in-store or online events that you can help them create extra awareness around? Helping your sponsors on any of these fronts directly supports goals of increasing foot traffic, which translates to sales and ROI for these businesses.
For each sponsored post, you should price accordingly based on two factors: 1) average post engagement rate (how many people, on average, tap “like” or post a comment), and 2) average post impressions (total number of times your content displays). Calculating your exact per post rate is a whole other topic for another day, but Get Hyped Media shares that for 1,000 Instagram followers (real accounts, not bots), your rate is likely in the ballpark of $20 per post.
Awareness is nice, but what your sponsors are truly after is sales. If you can prove that your race team’s marketing capabilities produce consistent sales results, your sponsors will be more likely to stay on and fund your program, year after year.
If your brick and mortar sponsor has digital coupon capabilities, find out if you can craft an agreement around a special offer created just for your followers. That way, you can actively promote their products or services across social media, and your sponsors will be able to measure the precise sales impact. For followers local to you, they can use this offer the next time they visit the sponsor’s location. For non-local followers, if your brick and mortar ships products across the country, then an online promo code is the way to go.
Similar to point #1, it’s essential that you’re willing to visit your sponsor’s locations in support of your partnership (after all, these activations allow you to charge a per hour rate!).
Think about this: like most, even if you’re not exactly a celebrity-status driver, your racecar is an incredibly unique, attention-capturing asset which cannot be missed outside of the racetrack setting. With this activation, you can help your sponsor become the “talk of the town” by drumming up interest around an existing occasion.
For instance, does your sponsor take part in any community-wide events or celebrations? Or, do they host their own events every so often? If so, you can pitch adding a car display opportunity into your sponsorship proposal. Communicate the added value that you can bring, like helping promote the event to your followers and getting the word out. For race teams, these opportunities are always high-value and can afford significant sponsorship payments.
The marketing capabilities of race teams – and, the opportunities provided through motorsports in general – are uniquely suited to support brick and mortar businesses. Racers who dedicate just a little time and effort to growing their online fanbase and brand, even when away from the track, stand to gain a ton when seeking out sponsorship from current business relationships.
For racers, it’s just a matter of 1) identifying what your capabilities are, and 2) understanding how to package those together into a tailored sponsorship proposal (both topics that are to come in future blogs!)
If you’re already thinking about your sponsorship search this off-season, you’re probably thinking about what materials you’ll need to show for your capabilities … if so, be sure to check out our step-by-step guide to creating a marketing deck that sparks sponsorship conversations!
Happy sponsorship hunting this off-season! Be sure to stay tuned for our next article.
