Sponsorships can be a great way to raise brand awareness and (potentially) increase sales, IF you chose the right events, but there are a number of questions you should ask before you take the plunge. Here’s a look at some important things to think about before committing your time and marketing dollars to any sponsorship.

Important questions to ask

The first question to ask yourself is, what do you hope to get out of the sponsorship? Are you hoping to raise brand awareness and get your name out to more people? Are you going to leverage the opportunity to get more sales in the short or long term?  Be clear from the start about your goals so expectations are managed.

The second key question to ask is, does a sponsorship align with your overall marketing strategy? Does the audience for the event or opportunity align with your target market? Does the event fit with your company mission, values and how you want to be perceived in the market?  For example, if you position your organisation as being family-owned or family-friendly, you’ll want any sponsorships to align with this.

Here are several other questions to ask before committing to any sponsorship:

• How will your company be identified or showcased? Just getting your logo on something is NOT going to cut it.  Despite what you may be told by the sponsorship organisers, there’s little value in adding your logo to programs or TV screens, or having a name-check in announcements.  These things can help with branding and awareness, but there’s no real call to action or longevity if you just get your logo on a poster. See if you have a chance to tell your story or reach out to potential customers in a way that’s meaningful. Getting leverage from sponsorship is key.
• How many other sponsors are there?  Will you have exclusivity in your industry category? If you get a mid-range sponsorship level, will you be overshadowed by bigger sponsors?
• Does the sponsorship deal include perks such as free passes, VIP tickets, an email lists of attendees you can use, a designated table for guests, etc.? All of these things can be used as leverage by holding contests for customers to win tickets, provide benefits for staff, build relationships, gain new emails for future marketing, etc.
• How will you measure success? How will you gauge whether or not your investment was worthwhile – and worth doing again?

The REAL costs

Last – but certainly not least – you need to assess if the sponsorship fits your budget. The dollars spent at any given sponsorship level are usually just the beginning. Overall, the rule of thumb with sponsorships is that you need to spend at least twice the amount of the sponsorship on supplementary activities to get the appropriate return on investment.

For example, if the sponsorship level is $10,000, you need to plan on spending $20,000 in total, looking for additional PR/advertising/communications opportunities, to get the full value out of your investment. Examples of this extra spend may come in the form of printed materials, banners, giveaways for attendees (like pens, t-shirts, other branded items, etc.) to help promote your brand or products way beyond your logo appearing on a program or some signage.

Need help deciding whether a sponsorship opportunity is right for you – or how to make the most of one? Contact Breathe Marketing today.

That’s where SEO comes in. As mentioned in a previous post on SEO, search engine optimisation is all about creating websites so that search engines (namely Google) can easily identify, categorise and select them when a user does an online search. This means that users have an easier time finding your site.

In the past, some companies tried to use underhanded practices (known as ‘black hat’ techniques) to improve their search rankings, such as duplicating content, putting in bad links or adding keywords into their page content just for the sake of getting extra keywords in there (a practice known as ‘keyword stuffing’). But Google is onto these tactics and constantly updates their algorithms to improve results for users and reward sites that follow legitimate, or ‘white hat’ SEO practices.

If you’re building a new site, it’s a good idea to include SEO best practices from the start, but you can also improve an existing site by making adjustments that keep Google (and your users) happy.

SEO is a huge topic (plus there’s onsite and offsite SEO techniques to consider too).  There’s way too much to cover in this blog – but here are 4 best practices for designing or updating a site so that it’s SEO-friendly:

1. Make sure your content can be indexed

Creating good, engaging content for your site will always benefit your company and your viewers. But you can do more to help Google understand exactly what your content is. Why is this necessary? When Google sends out its “spiders” or bots to crawl the web, they collect data to bring back to Google’s massive database. But the spiders can’t ‘see’ images like photos, Flash animation or videos – they can really only collect HTML text – so it’s hard for them to index this information.

Of course, photos and videos are very valuable, because they help you tell the story of your brand, sell your products, make your site more attractive and improve user experience. Therefore, the best thing to do is to help the spiders out by creating ALT text for photos and images (by assigning actual text that explains what’s in them), adding supplemental text for Flash images and providing a transcript for videos and audio recordings whenever possible. Your web designer can help you put all these in place.

If you can get keywords into your ALT tags and transcripts, that’s even better. On that note . . .

2. Watch those keywords, and use them wisely

It’s a good idea to work with your web designer to do some keyword research prior to building your website, because it can help you focus your content, build your meta data such as title tags and descriptions (more on that in a moment) and determine where you can target potential searchers.  To start, you’ll definitely want to include the name of your business as a keyword, as well as particular products or services you offer. If you have a local business, using your name with your location is important for searchers.

For instance, if you’re an accounting firm in Adelaide, you’d probably want to consider keyword phrases such as “Adelaide accounting firm”, “Adelaide accountants”, or “top accounting firm in Adelaide”. As noted above, it’s not a good idea to throw in more keywords just for the sake of getting those terms onto your pages. Doing so makes for bad content, and Google will punish you for this kind of ‘keyword stuffing’.  A good rule of thumb is to choose a couple of keywords to focus on for each page.

3. Title tags

Title tags are one of the most important elements of SEO. A title tag is the main text that describes what’s on a web page or in a document, and these tags appear in three key places: browsers, search engine results pages and external websites. Even though you probably won’t see them when viewing a web page, they’re in the source code and show up in searches.The text in blue below is an example of how and where a title tag appears in search results:

Ideally, each page of your site should have its own title tag – preferably including a keyword or two – so Google knows what each one is about (and so do your searchers).  However, don’t make your titles too long or they’ll get cut off – if you keep your titles under 55 characters, at least 95% should display correctly.

4. Meta descriptions

Like title tags, meta descriptions help search engines and searchers understand what’s on your web pages. Meta descriptions are in your source code and appear underneath your title tag and URL in search results, as shown in the grey text below:

A meta description gives you a chance to introduce your brand and what you offer to searchers before they come to your site – they act as ‘organic ad text’, helping connect searchers to your content when keywords appear in the text and match a search.

With meta descriptions, you have a little more text space than with title tags, but you still need to keep them fairly short and sweet. Ideally, your meta descriptions should be between 150-160 characters so they don’t get cut off.

As I said earlier, there is a lot more to SEO than I can talk about in one blog.  If you need help improving your onsite or offsite SEO, contact Breathe Marketing today.

What is branding, anyway?

In marketing, branding refers to the creation of a name, symbol (such as a logo) or design that identifies what your company is and does. Not only that, but a brand also helps differentiate your company’s products or services from your competitors – it helps express who you are and what you offer.

For instance, as part of their brand, many companies have established logos that you can immediately recognise without seeing the company name at all – and just by seeing the logo, you know exactly what they offer. Here are a few examples:

Seeing each of these probably also makes you feel something, such as, “Oh, I love my new iPhone!” or “Ah, that’s my bank,” or “Ugh, I hate Big Macs!” In each case, you have some type of recognition and reaction.

A company like Apple, for example, sells many products, but you immediately recognise their logo and know what it represents. Whether in print, online or on a billboard – and whether it’s black and white or in colour – you know that symbol and the company it refers to. If you want to buy a computer (or a smartphone) and it has the Apple logo on it, that immediately tells you something about the quality of the product and what to expect. Plus, you’re going to be willing to pay more for it than for a computer from a company you’ve never heard of because Apple has established itself as a leading, high-quality brand. Just as an aside, I was delighted to visit the new Apple store in Adelaide recently. Their strong brand certainly pulls in the punters, as seen in the photo I took.

Defining your brand

Your brand is ultimately your promise to your customer. You want to create a brand that not only helps your customers identify you, but helps you create a connection with them – and ideally, you want them to choose your brand over your competitor’s. So how do you go about building a strong brand? Here are three starting tips:

1) A logo by itself is not a brand, but having a good logo that can be used in all kinds of applications (such as in print, online, on t-shirts, etc.) is an important start. Work with a good designer to help create something that represents who you are and what you do.

2) Have clear guidelines about what your company offers and stands for – and then make sure that message gets communicated to your employees and customers in everything you do. Is great service what sets your company apart? Low prices? High quality? Whatever it is, share that message and back it up in practice.

3) Be consistent with your brand. Once you have a good logo and an established look for your brand, use it in your invoices, ads, on your website and in your emails to communicate your message. Help your customers learn to recognise you.

Have questions? Need some help building or improving your brand? We can help – contact us today.