_{published March 2024}

When you've put strategy and budget into activating a sponsorship deal, the next step is to evaluate the success of each activation. Knowing this information will help you understand what resonates with your audience and allow you to refine future brand marketing strategies for your marketing partnerships.

What are your initial goals for the sponsorship activation? With any activation, you'll want to set clear objectives. Whether it is increasing brand awareness, driving sales, enhancing brand image, or engaging with a specific target audience, having clear objectives is essential and will serve as your benchmark for success. 

And speaking of benchmarking, you'll also want to benchmark the current activation against those you've done in the past. This can reveal trends, improvements, or areas needing attention, providing a historical context to your current metrics and outcomes. This information can also help you plan out corporate sponsorship opportunities in the future.

In addition to having clear objectives and benchmarking against past strategies, below are other things you need to do. This list is based on the seven ways to activate a sponsorship we detailed in part one of our sponsorship activation series:

1. Leverage Social Media

Track engagement metrics like shares, likes, comments, and mentions. Use social listening tools to gauge the sentiment and overall reception of your sponsorship messages. Analyze trends over time to figure out the sustainability of interest.

2. Use Digital Platforms

Evaluate the reach and engagement of content across digital platforms. Metrics such as click-through rates, video views, and interaction rates on sponsored content can provide insights. Additionally, use analytics to track how users interact with virtual events or webinars.

3. Create On-site Activation Strategies

For on-site activations, collect data on foot traffic, participation rates, and direct interactions. Post-event surveys can also capture attendee perceptions and experiences, providing qualitative data that complements quantitative metrics.

4. Utilize Content Marketing

Measure the effectiveness of content marketing by tracking website traffic, page views, and time spent on pages related to the sponsorship. The performance of SEO and the engagement levels on articles, videos, or podcasts should also be analyzed.

5. Capitalize on Data and Insights

Utilize the data collected from activations to better understand audience behavior and preferences. Look at conversion rates from specific calls to action linked to the sponsorship and gauge whether these align with audience insights.

6. Build Strategic Partnerships

Assess the reach and impact of partnerships by examining audience growth, engagement rates, and how these partnerships drive traffic or conversions. Feedback from partners can also provide a deeper understanding of the activation's success.

7. Integrate Sponsorships into Marketing Campaigns

Determine how well integrations are working by tracking unified brand message consistency across channels. Metrics to consider include engagement rates and the incremental lift in brand awareness or sales directly attributed to the sponsorship and its various activations.

Final Thoughts

To truly gauge the success of your activations, it's important to not only rely on sponsorship data and other sponsorship intelligence but also on direct feedback from participants and partners. Combining quantitative metrics with qualitative insights will provide a comprehensive view of how your activations resonate with the audience.

As you continue to launch unique experiences to activate your marketing partnerships, remember that each campaign offers valuable lessons. Regularly reviewing the success of your activations will help you refine your strategies and achieve better alignment with your overall marketing goals.

Once you see how to achieve success in your individual sponsorship activations, you'll want to put together a plan to figure out your return on investment of the deal as a whole, so see our comprehensive list of potential KPIs of a sponsorship deal and learn how to measure and evaluate ROI for your marketing partnerships and corporate sponsorship packages. You can also visit our insights page to read about corporate sponsorship trends and other news.

Sign up for a quick demo to learn more about our media and sponsorship database. Clients might refer to our sponsorship platform as a sponsorship marketing platform or even a sponsorship analytics platform since we track over 360,000 brands, 1.8 million deals, and 16.9 million data points across sports, entertainment, media, and talent.

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