Advertising / sponsorship revenue

colsku

I am planning a sports tournament for the end of August which was very successful last year.

Our sponsor paid us €2,000 for naming rights of the tournament which we were very happy with. Now we have got a really nice tournament website and based on research we are pretty sure we will get around 4,000 unique visitors over the course of the weekend.

How much do you think the sponsor will now be willing to pay, considering we have a new site giving them a lot more exposure compared to last year when it was really basic?

Or if we were to add banners for other local companies, how should we calculate how much to charge? I have less than no idea! We are gonna get a lot of visitors though, so I am hoping we can bring in some extra revenue.

mneylon

colsku wrote: »

How much do you think the sponsor will now be willing to pay, considering we have a new site giving them a lot more exposure compared to last year when it was really basic?

The site's design is irrelevant to a sponsor. Just because you've got a new website doesn't mean that it's going to be seen by more people.

Why do you think that a sponsor is going to *want* to spend more this year compared to last year?

colsku wrote: »

Or if we were to add banners for other local companies, how should we calculate how much to charge? I have less than no idea! We are gonna get a lot of visitors though, so I am hoping we can bring in some extra revenue.

How do you *know* that you are going to get more traffic to the website?

colsku

It's not the design that is better, it is the quality of information. Real time score and table updates, embedded photos, tweets etc. It's a major overhaul.

Obviously I cannot be 100% sure, but a sister tournament introduced the same system earlier this year and their webtraffic was ridiculously higher compared to the year before and the only major difference was the new section of the website.

I want to show these numbers to our sponsor and I would just like to know how much extra I might be able to get out of them!? The sponsor was in place before I got involved so I've no real experience of these types of "negotiations"....

mneylon

colsku wrote: »

It's not the design that is better, it is the quality of information. Real time score and table updates, embedded photos, tweets etc. It's a major overhaul.

That's irrelevant.

colsku wrote: »

Obviously I cannot be 100% sure, but a sister tournament introduced the same system earlier this year and their webtraffic was ridiculously higher compared to the year before and the only major difference was the new section of the website.

That *might* be relevant, but unless you're talking about serious web traffic eg. hundreds of thousands of page views it won't make much difference to anyone with a clue

colsku wrote: »

I want to show these numbers to our sponsor and I would just like to know how much extra I might be able to get out of them!? The sponsor was in place before I got involved so I've no real experience of these types of "negotiations"....

Again you're assuming that the sponsor will want to pay more - they won't.
You'll be lucky if you can retain sponsors - don't try gouging them for more money.

PaulPinnacle

colsku wrote: »

It's not the design that is better, it is the quality of information. Real time score and table updates, embedded photos, tweets etc. It's a major overhaul.

This is fantastic for the users of the site and is a great benefit for the event itself, but from a sponsors point of view it might not actually achieve that much (if anything).

The reach of the sponsorship won't actually grow all that much from the features you mentioned. It will attract more of the people present at the event to visit the website, but these are all visitors that would have been 'touched' by the sponsorship regardless of that additional visit. Even for those using the site that wouldn't/aren't at the event, it's providing limited additional exposure (in terms of what other channels can/would achieve) relative to the cost. Unless it's providing a very clever and strategic call to action directed to the sponsors site, is a very targeted niche/market for the sponsor and ends up with a crazy high conversion rate you'd find it very difficult to justify an increase in cost to anyone that understood the digital space.

I'd suggest that the positive branding of being associated with the event in terms of helping out the local community is the 'value' behind the sponsorship rather than the website and the number of visitors. Take care not to burn bridges and lose the good will others may be showing by being too greedy/aggressive.

colsku

Thanks Paul, a far more clear and concise response, despite having the same findings as the other poster. I agree with a lot of your points.

However, I will don my thinking cap in order to find ways to convert the web traffic into something of significant value for the main sponsor, which is something they are not currently getting with the current "bricks and mortor" sponsorship.