It might seem strange to suggest that a sports organization should hire a designer to create digital ads for their sponsors. Aren’t sport sponsors supposed to do that themselves?It might seem strange to suggest that a sports organization should hire a designer to create digital ads for their sponsors. Aren’t sport sponsors supposed to do that themselves?
Ideally, yes. But if your sponsors’ ads aren’t up to scratch, it makes sense to work with a designer to fix them. The cost is minimal, yet it can have a significant impact on your business.
Let’s say you secure a modest sponsorship deal with a local business to run ads on your live streams for a season. The sponsor then supplies you with a very basic banner ad that just has a logo and a telephone number on it. You run the ads, but the sponsor doesn’t tell you if the ads have been successful. When next season comes around, they decide not to renew.
You could probably get another sponsor to take their place, but that misses the point. It’s easy to blame the sponsor for the campaign's failure – but any campaign you run should be seen as a chance to prove that your ad space can generate new business for the sponsor.
It’s not good enough to just take the money, run the ads and see what happens. You have to exercise some quality control and ensure that the ads you run are optimized for live stream sports. If necessary, you will have to take matters into your own hands and fix the ads yourself. No matter how small the initial sponsorship deal is, if you can prove that the campaign generated a return on investment, then the sponsor will always increase their ad spend with you next time around. This is how successful advertising agencies build a portfolio of advertisers. It’s not about selling ad space; it’s about making sure that the ad campaigns generate revenue for the client.
The best way to ensure that your sponsors’ ads are fit for purpose is to work with a designer. Depending on the size of your organization, you may already work with an agency or have in-house designers. The idea of this might worry you if you’re used to working with design agencies. You’ll know that design work can be expensive. But banner ads aren’t a difficult job for a designer. We aren’t trying to win any awards here. We just want to create ads that are designed for purpose.
You can find experienced digital banner ad designers on freelance design platforms like Fiverr. As little as $10 will buy a high-quality banner design, while $35 will get you a 10-size ad set. Well worth the investment if it improves the chances of your sponsor renewing their sponsorship deal.
You might need to try out two or three different designers until you find one you are happy to work with, but at $10 a try, it’s not a big risk. Eventually, you’ll find a reliable designer who can work on the ads for all of your sponsors.
Once you have this relationship in place, you can offer banner design as a value-added service to your sponsors. Some small businesses just don’t have the time or know-how to put together an ad campaign, so if you can offer this as part of your services, then all they have to do is sign off the investment. It makes it much easier to agree on a sponsorship deal if the sponsor doesn’t need to do anything to make it happen.
Choosing a designer might seem tricky for the uninitiated, but it really is very straightforward on a platform like Fiverr.
Just go to fiverr.com and search for “banner ads.”
You can then set your budget to under $10 and take a look at the designers’ profiles.
There are lots of experienced designers who create banners for Google Adwords every day. Read the reviews, take a look at their previous work, and choose one to work with.
You’ll find that most of the designers with good ratings offer excellent value for money and will strive to please you to get a good rating. Many of them are actually small creative agencies, so you’ll get the benefit of an entire team’s experience.
Designers are used to working with very little input or assets, so they will be quite happy to collect the information they need from the sponsor’s website.
The most important part of the briefing process is to supply the designer with the lead offer (see the previous post in this series for more on this). If there is a message or offer that the sponsor wants to lead with, you need to communicate this to the design team; otherwise, they will make a call based on what they see on the company’s website. Then, all you need to do is brief them on the differences between Google ads and ads for live-streamed sports (also covered earlier in this series).
It might be daunting at first, but it doesn’t take a lot of work to ensure that your sponsors’ ads are optimized for live-stream sport. As an advertising platform, any time you invest in this will pay dividends in the future.
No matter what size budget you are working with, it pays to take control and work with a designer to create digital ads for your sponsors. If you include ad design as part of the deal, it will also help you to win new sponsors.
In the next post in this series, we’ll take a closer look at copywriting for digital ads. We can’t stress enough how important it is to ensure that your sponsors’ campaigns include an enticing offer. To learn more, read: How to Craft Powerful, Appealing Messaging for Your Sponsors Ads.
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