ROI & Why Brands Sponsor

A panel of sponsorship executives and marketers explain how they calculate return on investment, ROI, (if they do) and why they sponsor. How a company calculates ROI will determine if sponsoring you has  value to them and whether they renew or find other ways to spend their marketing budget the following year.

Learn what each panelist values and what their companies need.

Different companies have different needs. Retail stores want foot traffic. Service providers want leads. Food and beverage manufacturers want sampling. Tool companies want craftsmen to try their products. Equipment manufacturers seek to demonstrate functionality. Endemic brands want winners to use their products. Young companies want visibility. Mature companies want B2B, hospitality, and sometimes to bring back customer who were lured away by a competitor.

The session will teach you why different companies sponsor racing, what they expect in return from their investment, and what you can do to create enough value to get their attention for a potential sponsorship.

Decks & Proposals

Many racers don't get a call back after soliciting a potential sponsor because they sent a proposal instead of a deck, or vice versa.

Decks and proposals are different.

Decks attract attention, open doors, and start relationships. Decks are used to get attention. They can be colorful with lots of photos. Decks need to display your personality, style, and brand. Don't use decks to sell. Use them to start relationships.

Proposals close deals and propose official business relationships with specific deliverables at an agreed upon price. They are typically documents with few or no images. Proposals are often templates for legal agreements. Their content can be cut and pasted into contracts and become binding, so they should contain accurate values and realistic deliverables.

This session will explain the difference between decks and proposals, how to create them, and what goes into each.

Valuing Tangible & Intangible Assets

As a sponsored racer, you have two types of assets, tangible and intangible.

Tangible assets are logos on the car, screen time, TV time, magazine coverage, publicity, articles, media mentions, tickets, hospitality, etc. Tangible assets have a fair relative value that can be estimated by comparing them to similar media. Intangible assets include reputation, integrity, fan loyalty, series strength, relevancy, and things that you can’t measure in traditional media.

Intangibles are priceless. They can raise your overall value to a sponsor even if your tangible assets aren’t worth a lot.

Learn how different marketing directors value assets in motorsports and how to create value with intangible assets if you don’t yet have any good tangible assets to offer.

Valuing Social Media

Learn from Hookit, the company that built the first and most powerful Sponsorship Analytics and Valuation Platform™ to quantify and track the value and performance of sports sponsorships in social and digital media, how companies put monetary value on sponsorships. Rich Houseman will explain, ‘What is an interaction?' or 'What does it mean to post natively?' and how Hookit’s algorithm estimates a dollar value from the data.

SIM Racing & Virtual Sponsorships

Covid accelerated the shift online. Most professionals now train and many compete in simulators. Online events exploded in popularity during the quarantine creating advantages for those who were early adopters. One of the first professionals to enter the new sport, Jim Beaver is an eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series franchise holder, owner of the Jim Beaver eSports eShort Course Triple Crown and World Cup, and Host of the Jim Beaver Show.

Beaver and Joe Bricky, the Marketing Director of Virtual Racing School, will talk about opportunities in the growing world of SIM racing,how the best SIM racers in the sport are becoming influencers, and how to create value for brands in virtual motorsports.

Creating Value with Podcasts 

How to Post Consistently on Social Media 

Megan Meyer, creator of Driven By Social Academy shares her secrets on creating value through social media by posting consistently.

Megan will explain how to make a content calendar, planning and scheduling posts ahead of time, and the right times to post. She will also discuss staggering your posts between Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

Linkedin is Where the Money ls 

Getting into Magazines 

As a racer, you have many ways of telling your story.

Magazines have fueled our love for racing for over a century. Dan Schechner, Editor of PRI Magazine and Marty Fiolka, writer for RACER Magazine explain how they select content and stories to write about, and what you can do to increase your odds of getting published.

Articles in popular magazines target very specific audiences, and that's exactly what sponsors want.

Activating at Events 

Paying for a sponsorship is only half of the marketing equation. Activating at the events is the other half. To maximize the returns on sponsorship marketing, teams and companies must activate in ways that resonate with the events participants and spectators.

Matt Martelli, CEO the Mint 400 and the California 300 and Kevin Miller, CEO of USAC explain how proper activation can increase the results and returns of sponsorship investments many times more than their actual cost.

A Sponsorship Success Story 

What started for an off road racer as an ask for a deal on springs after one year became a primary sponsorship of the Eibach Springs Trophy Truck.

Jason Coleman will tell the story of how he picked, approached, and landed a sponsorship with Eibach Springs to race King of the Hammers. Then, Dave Cole, Series Director of KOH explains how the difficult terrain is both a testing and proving grounds for auto aftermarket manufacturers, and Julian Gill, Eibach's CEO, will explain from the company's perspective what the team offered that had enough ROI for the brand to fully support the program after only one year.

This session includes a short video.