What Is Digital Sponsorship?

Digital sponsorship is like sponsoring an event, activity, company, or cause except that you are “partnering” with whom you are sponsoring because this partnership will help you reach a new market or enhance your brand quicker. In all cases, the sponsor’s objective is to achieve goals that coincide with their overall business goals.

For example, take a small business who has developed an application that will enable you to navigate in the forest better. A company such as REI might “sponsor” that company and distribute that application “exclusively” for a specific time period to its much larger database of customers. This not only enhances sales of the application, but it also increases sales for REI because they are the only ones who have it and customers will come to their stores to buy it. These same customers will bring their friends and family who may or may not purchase the application but may buy something else instead. These two companies may partner with another company who specializes in video marketing. Another company is brought in to produce the videos within the campaign and finally a company who are experts in “buzz marketing” are on the entire “sponsorship” team. All of these companies benefit through the use of their special tools and relationships, thus the campaign is a huge success, and now other companies want to partner with these companies to establish their own digital sponsorships.

Most of the campaigns are distributed using various means of digital media marketing such as mobile marketing (SMS and MMS texting), video marketing (YouTube and Viddler), social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), and email marketing (primarily to the company’s customer database) with a viral marketing campaign.

Extensive tracking of all campaigns is essential to maximize ROI and reduce waste in sticking with a campaign that is not working. Digital media marketing allows companies to change their campaigns quickly without having to wait on deadlines or printing limitations that you find in newspapers, magazines, and television.

What Digital Sponsorship Marketing does is leverages the power of a group of companies instead of one to implement a robust and highly effective marketing campaign.