THERE is a misconception that sponsorship is a scattergun approach to reaching your market.
Sceptics see sponsorship as a tick box exercise - great for the ego, but with limited impact on the bottom line.
The truth is, when the chosen event or product is a neat fit with your business and if you’re determined to make the sponsorship work for you, the results can be incredibly powerful.
Petrofac Training Services (PTS) sponsored the Scottish Challenge Cup for the first time during the 2014/2015 season.
The tournament is open to teams from the Scottish Championship, Scottish Leagues 1 and 2 as well as the Highland and Lowland League champions with a huge fan base, mostly male and predominantly in urban areas across Scotland.
This made it a close fit for our target market of individuals who work in the oil and gas sector or who hope to enter the industry.
We hadn’t aligned our name with a large-scale event before and set out to approach the sponsorship in the same way that we approach our business.
We placed football fans at the heart of our activities, making a conscious effort to create memorable experiences for them and worked hard to engage with and excite the online community.
This mirrors the same customer-focused mentality we have when training our delegates.
We even ran a competition with a national newspaper for a fan to present the trophy to the winning team rather than the usual “suit” - a world first for a competitive football final.
These initiatives combined to create maximum engagement, with fans and families, as well as fantastic brand awareness for Petrofac Training.
In the current climate it’s more important than ever to demonstrate how marketing activity supports the bottom line and business growth.
Since the sponsorship commenced, alongside marketing activities, traffic to our website has increased by 43%.
We’ve received 60% more training enquiries and our profile in the media has increased too, with more than 600 pieces of press coverage generated.
The Petrofac Training Cup website has had 50,000 visitors to date and the Twitter and Facebook accounts boast over 6,500 followers.
We’re benefiting from social media mentions from the Cup’s participating teams and the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) – the combined reach is 1.5million people.
In our experience, sponsorship creates new opportunities.
If you’re considering sponsorship, make sure the business justification and your objectives are clear and remember you only get out what you put in.
You’ll need an activation budget as well as the cost of sponsorship rights to ensure your campaign gets off the ground and you may even consider engaging with a specialist sponsorship activation agency.
You’ll need enthusiasm, so you continue to benefit for the duration of the relationship.
Bear in mind you may need to commit for an extended period – our experience has borne out the general theory that many of the benefits of sponsorship come in the long term.
In the rush to engage with new audiences, make sure you don’t overlook existing stakeholders.
In parallel with our sponsorship we ran the Petrofac Training Corporate Cup, held in partnership with the Aberdeen FC Community Trust.
This was a seven-a-side competition open to teams from oil and gas firms across Aberdeen including Premier Oil, BG Group and Apache.
It was a great success and one that we’re considering running again.
We tackled the opportunity with vigour and as a result, scored a winner.