Spice up your strategy by speaking your sponsors’ love language.

By Ernie Smith

Event budgets are tight these days—and your sponsors are looking for more.

A recent Gartner study found that the average CMO marketing budget, which bottomed out around the pandemic, is dipping down once again. And your event is their biggest line item. So, what’s a good event planner to do to emphasize value?

Dahlia El Gazzar, the founder of the marketing firm DAHLIA+Agency, puts it bluntly: 

“Your prospectus, just kill it. Just like, burn it if you can,” she said. 

El Gazzar, joined by Scrappy ABM founder Mason Cosby and AVIXA exposition sales director Dan Cole, laid into the lack of evolution in sponsorship models in the recent Events Masterclass, Can’t Buy Me Love: Creating Sponsorship Experiences That Sell Themselves. She says that outdated terminology like “prospectus” or “gold tier” is a big part of the problem.

“If you think of sponsorship as real estate, it’s not going to work,” she added. 

Other gems:

» Underpromise & over-deliver. From a pricing standpoint, event organizers may promise the world, but making your guarantees a bit less ambitious—say, a 10% trim—might effectively right-size ambitions, says Cosby. “Frame it in such a way that it’s such a no-brainer that, obviously, this fits well into their overall marketing mix,” he added.

» Everyone’s on the sponsorship team. Your sales team may be the folks tasked with bringing in new event sponsors, but they aren’t the only people involved in the process, a point Cole emphasized heavily in his commentary. “Let’s just all remember the salespeople, nothing against us, but we just have the privilege of being on the front lines,” Cole said.

» Lean into your tiers. If you have an ongoing sponsor who is giving their commitment to your event a second look, it might be a good time to embrace that multi-tier strategy you’ve had hanging around for a while. Cosby suggests when you find something that works, you put it in the highest tier—and make it a deterrent for big-ticket sponsors. “So if you don’t go with this tier, I can’t guarantee that same level of success,” he said.

Check out the full Events Masterclass recording here.