Event Visibility: Find Sponsors for Your Event

2023 is shaping up to be a banner year for events, with events substantially back to pre-pandemic levels: according to an American Express Global Travel report, however, the numbers are expected to stabilize in 2024. This will mean increased competition for sponsor attention and resources.

One of the best ways to ensure the success of your event is by making it easily discoverable by potential sponsors. In this blog, we'll discuss why event visibility is crucial for sponsorship success and provide three tips to help you make your event easier to find.

Find out how and when your sponsors look for events

To make your event discoverable to potential sponsors, it's crucial to research and understand how they look for events. Do they use search engines? Social media platforms? Third-party event listing sites like Eventbrite or Meetup? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you optimize your event visibility and identify potential sponsors.

After all, you can't make yourself more visible if you don't know where your customers are looking!

Here are a few things you can do:

1. Ask past sponsors how they found you. Was it word of mouth? Your connection with a specific association?
2. Ask connections at relevant companies how they look for events. What platforms or channels do you typically use to find events to sponsor?
3. Capture referrer information systematically. Forms are your friend here! Make sure you always ask how you were found - on paper and online forms!
4. Where do your competitors advertise? Looking at that may unlock new considerations, or help you differentiate against competition by increasing your visibility on underleveraged channels.

Develop a strong content strategy

Creating a well-defined content strategy can significantly boost your event's visibility online. This includes a publication strategy (what information do you want to put out, and when?) as well as SEO (optimizing your content to make it easier for search engines to discover and rank it).

Here are a few tools to consider:

1. Keyword research tools: Use these to identify the terms and phrases your potential sponsors use when searching for events like yours. (Semrush is pretty outstanding at that - even the free version is great)
2. Google trends: this is an outstanding and underutilized tool to see what time patterns exist on the topics you want to boost.
3. AI writing companions: tools like Jasper.ai facilitate the development of editorial plans, calendars, and materials

Utilize conference listing platforms

Conference listing platforms are excellent resources for both event organizers and potential sponsors. By listing your event on these platforms, you can increase its visibility and attract more sponsors. Additionally, many of these platforms offer tools to help organizers connect with potential sponsors and streamline the sponsorship process.

Some platforms, such as www.sponsormotion.com, allow you to enter the URL of your event, and then proceed to automatically extract the key data points a sponsor would be interested in.

Craft highly customized outreaches

We will expand on this incredibly interesting topic next week. The emergence of AI is making it possible and cheaper to mass-customize outreaches. Here is a preview of what is becoming possible today, and will become commonplace in the future.

As competition among event organizers increases, making your event stand out is more important than ever. By implementing these tips, you can make your event more visible and attractive to potential sponsors, ultimately increasing your chances of finding sponsors.

At SponsorMotion, we specialize in helping event organizers find sponsors. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you improve your event's visibility and attract more sponsors.