While most of the member events in 2020 pivot to virtual, so are the sponsorship activations. Here are some tips to help keeping your sponsors engaged:
1. Sponsorship Branding on Registration Pages
The registration page offers prime real estate for sponsorship logos, links, text or contact information. Be careful: Don’t create too much friction in the user experience by adding too much information. Ultimately, you still want people to complete their registration instead of being distracted or clicking away.
2. Sponsor Lobby Slides
Sponsor lobby slides work great. During presentations, you can add branded slides as place holders. If your sponsor is also a speaker, make sure to include sales contact information and/or headshots. These slides also work great when transitioning between slides, speakers, or event in between sessions.
Pro Tip: Keep text to a minimum and use visuals instead. Product shots can work great here. It’s also a good idea to negotiate the time the lobby slide will be up for.
3. Sponsored Q&A
No matter if you’re offering text-based audience Q&A with tools like Slido & Glisser or live Q&A via audio, you could offer the opportunity to sponsor a session. Further, you can add sponsorship logos to your audience Q&A to increase brand awareness and visibility.
4. Sponsored Intros
Do you like listening to podcasts or watching YouTube? Most of those channels are substituted through sponsored introductions or mentions. So, why not take some inspiration from those established models? Introduce sessions by mentioning a sponsor or use breaks to encourage attendees to watch a short video created by one of your sponsors.
5. Sponsored eLearning Courses
eLearning is on the fore-front, especially in times when face-to-face education. Have you considered using eLearning as a way to increase sponsorship benefits? No matter if you have them sponsor a whole course or a single module, the benefits are two-sided: Valuable, thought-leader content for you, plus increased brand engagement for your sponsors.
6. Branded Breakouts
During an in-person event you would probably have multiple simultaneous sessions. Virtual events are no different. Think how you can create value-based discussions, where attendees have the opportunity to engage with the sponsor in an informal way.
7. Sponsored Social Media
If you have a presenting sponsor, consider giving regular shout-outs on social media can build awareness. You could even use your sponsor pre-event to host contests, competitions or content.
8. Sponsored Virtual Icebreakers
Virtual events often lack the interactive networking elements of traditional face-to-face events. You can make up for that by creating sponsored icebreaker sessions. It also benefits you as people get to know each other and become more comfortable with the online format.
Conclusion
The best way to come up with digital sponsorship ideas is by thinking outside the box. Take existing digital channels that already exist (YouTube, Spotify & Co.) and see how you can apply those concepts to virtual events. Yes, you may need to tweak a few things here and there, but ultimately you’re still adding value and benefits to your sponsors. In fact, membership organisations that opt for virtual events tend to provide richer data and analytics allowing you to measure the impact and return on the sponsor’s investment.
Blue Sky eLearn provides a full range of learning technologies, including a proprietary learning management system & a complete set of virtual event services. Blue Sky helps organizations capture educational content from live or virtual settings, then facilitates the management & delivery of content to a global audience through its learning platform.
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