What makes for a good fit when working with a motorsports sponsor?
For Pt. 2 of our sponsorship series, we're covering how to spot businesses that make a good fit for your racing efforts. By no means are we discouraging reaching out to as many businesses as you can, however, you're first targets should fit the following criteria. Here are the Three types of sponsorship fits you should aim to find alignment with...
Audience Fit
The audience fit simply means the people you interact with in racing, or racing in general, are also your prospect's target market. Pick any racing oil company, that's a clear audience fit. In the case of a racing oil, that's technically a B2C fit. These are abuntantly common, and usually are paired with a point of purchase (PoP) display in the paddock. It's a bit old-fashioned, but it's still quite effective. The other type of audience fit is a B2B fit, wherein your prospective sponsor has potential B2B clients involved in racing, and sponsoring you will act as a gateway for them to obtain new clients. We mentioned this briefly in part one - feel free to check out our examples in that blog entry.
Product Fit
This one's pretty broad, but in essence, it means your prospective sponsor’s product (digital or physical) can be tested or used within your team/series to create a solid marketing piece for your sponsor. It can also be promoted within the paddock, and even to a larger audience via social channels. There are entire sub-structures of deals like this that we won't dive into here, but the possibilities with a product fit are vast to say the least.
Market Fit
These are some of the most fun types of strategies to put together! Occasionally, companies like to use racing solely as a marketing vehicle due to the parallels drawn between their product or service and racing. Whether that’s speed, efficiency, communication, durability, responsiveness, etc. These partnerships rely on clear marketing pieces being created regularly to promote the effectiveness of their offerings. They also tend to involve a lot of creative and usually quite expensive work to execute effectively (but not always). A great example of this is WeatherTech's Ferrari (now Porsche) IMSA team. Their TV ads that play during the races draw all of the right parallels between their team, and their products - highlighting durability, precision, etc.
So, when reaching out to prospective sponsors, be sure to explain how one or more of these “fits” can help your prospective sponsor. At the end of the day, it's about them, not you. The research to find these fits before reaching out is 100% worth it. It’s all about creating real dialog with prospects, even if it's at a high-level, and not just blindly asking for sponsorship.
Conclusion
Key Take-away: Find where your prospective sponsor stand to benefit through these aforementioned channels, and create real dialog around it when reaching out. In our next blog, we’re going to run through a fictional example of creating that perfect fit from start to finish!
