What do the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, McLaren, Formula 1, and the Chicago Bears have in common? A powerful secret weapon: advanced sponsorship management tools. This article uncovers how elite sports organizations harness cutting edge tools to drive monumental growth in their sponsorship.
Grow Sponsorship Revenue, Renewal Rates, & Efficiency
Read: How the Australian Grand Prix Corporation (AGPC) Increased their Renewal Growth by 22%
The Australian Grand Prix Corporation achieved remarkable success through its partnership with KORE, by optimizing their sponsorship operations, resulting in a 22% spike in renewal growth. By implementing deal sheets and the deal manager from KORE’s Sponsorship platform, the AGPC can now:
- Quickly tell which assets have been sold, such as naming rights or popular activation spaces at events.
- Pitch assets with concrete data, and demonstrate asset performance with comparisons to market standards.
- Share near real-time tracking and comprehensive reporting with stakeholders.
- Tools Used: Sponsorship Platform
With sponsorship revenues growing across the series, McLaren needed new ways to stay on top of the competition and capitalize on the expanding market. To capture new opportunities, McLaren first needed to demonstrate how their social media and digital content campaigns would benefit current and potential sponsors. Using the Evaluate Social tool (formerly called Hookit), McLaren became a top 3 team in F1 measured by total social media followers, fan engagement on social media posts and sponsorship value generated on social media for brand partners by the end of 2021. They accomplished this with Evaluate Social’s:
- Adjusted Ad Value model which assigns a dollar value to a social post based on various factors such as
- Clear, quality logo visibility
- Audience data and watch-through rates
- Built-in computer vision for authentication
- Impressions-based models for current and new partners
- Ability to benchmark against competitors
Tools Used: Evaluate Social
2. Measure What Matters to Partners
Read: How the Chicago Bears Evolved Their Partnership Evaluation Process to Grow Sponsorship Revenue
Established in 1920, the Chicago Bears are one of the most storied American sport franchises with a vast and fiercely loyal fan base. As of April 2023, they have 8.5M followers across five social media channels and saw a 2.6% growth in followers since the beginning of the season. It’s clear why brands are attracted to the Bears considering their social reach and nearly 100% retention rate for season ticket holders.
The Bears increased partnership revenue by uncovering what mattered most to their partners through a variety of KORE solutions. These tools allow them to:
- Understand objectives of four key partners through an OKR survey
- Upload the data needed to measure and evaluate performance with a custom data submission portal
- Use social data in their evaluation framework with the Evaluate Social tool
- Create near real-time access to reports and dashboards with their key partners
Tools Used
“We’re getting help flagging assets that are underselling on the rate perspective based on the value that they’re delivering, which is helping us generate revenue with other partners.”
3. Prove Value
Read: How Forsberg Racing Quantified ROI & Doubled its Partnership Investments.
Forsberg Racing builds additional revenue by offering full-service digital marketing solutions for brands of all sizes. Despite their coverage generating high engagement, proving ROI was difficult. Since partnering with Hookit, a KORE company, for full social data evaluation and reporting in January of 2022, Forsberg now has the ability to put a dollar value on the content they create. As a result, they doubled their adjusted ad value (AAV) within the first year of using the tool. They accomplished this through:
- Identifying social posts that drove incidental value and optimized with deliberate mentions.
- Ensuring capture and positioning of content with clear logo visibility for the tool to recognize.
- Measuring and growing AAV through their own, and their partner’s account handles with deliberate keyword strategies.
- Monitoring of measurement and near-real-time reporting, shared with partners
Tools Used: Evaluate Social
"Our investment into the social tool has paid for itself ten times by now."
4. Improve Efficiency & Boost Revenue
Read: How Minnesota United FC (MNUFC) Improved Lead Tracking & Ticket Sales.
Minnesota United FC has only been in MLS for six full seasons, and yet they have already established themselves as one of the league’s most exciting teams. To continue their early momentum their business intelligence (BI) team wanted to improve the speed of data sharing and automate and improve lead tracking to improve the customer experience. Here is how KORE’s Planning & Insights (KPI) group helped them develop a better fan experience.
The KPI team:
- Developed matching logic functionality and contact/person account creation into Salesforces via Flows.
- Built a custom workflow in Salesforce that allows the user to create opportunities and activities based on the type of form a customer submitted and automates assignments to sales reps.
- Customized integrations between MNUFC’s three main platforms, form provider, CRM and email marketing.
The new workflows and integrations eliminated a massive amount of manual work, and duplication, ultimately improving speed and efficiency for a better experience.
Tools Used: KORE’s Planning & Insights (KPI) group
“Since working with the KPI group on our custom integrations, the BI team has eliminated the need to manually create leads. The ticketing team has improved their follow up time, and we’ve increased the rate at which we’re adding engaged fans to our database”
5. Gain a Competitive Edge with Sponsorship Tools that Help Increase Your Speed & Efficiency
The Shell V-Power Racing Team (operated by Dick Johnson Racing) had multiple tools and untracked data spread out across multiple platforms making it difficult for their team to navigate, even losing track of assets. Now they use KORE’s Activate product to organise their partnership information, specifically assets, into one source-of-truth to create more time for strategy and achieve data transparency across their organisation. With KORE’s Activate tool they:
- Can view all their data from 33 partners and suppliers in one place and make better decisions accordingly.
- Can access previous and current records from one source of truth which provides a consistent brand experience to all partners
- Gained a competitive edge on the speed and efficiency in which they deliver on every asset developing response agility to any changes in contracts.
Tools Used: Activate for Rights Holders
6. Bringing it All Together
Read: How the Seattle Sounders Built a Best-in-Class CRM Ecosystem to Drive a Better Fan Experience.
In the spring of 2021, the Sounders implemented one of KORE’s 2nd generation CRM-integrated products, Ticketing, to take advantage of Salesforce’s built-in functionality and incorporate their web chat and text third-party apps. They also began working with KORE’s Planning & Insights (KPI) team to build these customizations within their CRM. These two operational shifts enabled the Sounder to more than double their expected engagement with season members, compared to past seasons.
Tools Used: Ticketing & Fan Engagement
Summary
The sports sponsorship landscape is evolving rapidly, and only those equipped with the right tools thrive. As showcased by McLaren, Forsberg Racing, the Chicago Bears and more elite sports organizations, leveraging data-driven sponsorship platforms can amplify revenue and efficiency and fortify relationships with partners. In the end, it’s not just about having the tools but mastering their potential that leads to the wins. Learn how KORE can help you optimize the leading sponsorship management platform for your own success.
KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.
