Adding loyalty to your sponsorship package

Ask most cycling team managers at any level of the sport what benefits their team can offer to sponsors and you’ll pretty much always hear some variation of the word “exposure.” But what exactly is exposure and why do sponsors want it?

Most of the time, people take “exposure” to mean something along the lines of “brand awareness.” In this model, the public sees a team sponsored by Company X at races or reads about them in ROAD Magazine. Then, more people are aware of Company X.

If you’re Company X and all you want is for people to have heard of you, sponsoring a cycling team can be a cost-effective way to put your brand in front of people.

This way of looking at a sponsorship can work especially well for an emerging brand that has a limited marketing budget and a feeling that once people try their product or service for the first time, they’ll keep coming back.

But not all sponsors stand to benefit from increased visibility and brand awareness.  Some companies are already so well known that incremental brand awareness provided by a cycling team – or any other sponsorship – means nothing to them.

For a brand like Coors Light, almost everyone is aware of them and has tried their product. So all the money that they spend on sponsoring the NFL isn’t about “exposure.” The objective is to translate football fans’ loyalty towards the NFL into a similar feeling about Coors Light.

I’ve used Coors Light as an example because one of their advertising campaigns offers a really simple illustration of this idea: they put billboards near football stadiums that show a can of beer, the NFL logo, and the text, “Official Beer of the NFL”

Apparently, brand loyalty isn’t rocket science.

But it is important. In fact, sponsors actually ranked brand loyalty slightly ahead of awareness as their most important objective in a study conducted by sponsorship consulting agency IEG.

So how can a small cycling team sponsorship offer increased brand loyalty in a way that doesn’t require an expensive advertising campaign in support?

Your sponsor’s website is a good place to start. Encourage your sponsor to create content on their website about the team and send constant updates and high-quality images. This way, customers will be able follow the team’s progress in a way that brings them back repeatedly to the sponsor’s website.

This isn’t to say that you should forget about brand awareness. It’s always worth something, and most companies still need it. But one could say the same things about brand loyalty.

So the next time you’re pitching a sponsor, offer them some loyalty with their exposure.