Sports sponsorship offers a huge opportunity to reach a target audience in creative ways via athletes, teams, and leagues from all over the world. Reach millions of consumers, drive excitement around your brand, or increase sales of your product or service.
OpenSponsorship goal has been to enable brands and athletes to seamlessly connect for sponsorship opportunities. Brands large and small can search through 7000+ athletes, teams, and leagues (spanning 50 sports and 40 countries), to find their ideal fit.
Here are 6 core features to help you maximize your time on our platform.
Let's dive in!
1. Campaigns
Campaigns are the most efficient way to welcome athletes to partner with your brand. Once your campaign is published, it is fully accessible to all athletes, teams, and events on our platform:
- Start with a predefined campaign template, or with blank template.
- Work with a local, national or global star, and filter what you're looking for based on sport, location, and follower count.
- Pick a goal to help you maximize your returns. The most popular goals are increasing following or driving engagement on social media, increasing website traffic, and increasing sales of products or services.
- Detail the goals for your campaign by setting deliverables. Be as clear and concise as possible so that applicants know what you're looking for. For example, "Post an Instagram story holding our water bottle with the logo facing to the camera, and also tagging our page."
- Choose one or a combination of reimbursement types to best suit your marketing goals. Pick from Cash, Product, Royalty or Equity.
2. Search
One of the most challenging tasks when brands look to create sports sponsorship deals is finding athletes that are a good fit for your campaign. That's where OpenSponsorship Search comes in:
- Target athletes whose followers are similar to your customer profile.
- Find athletes who are married, have kids, have pets, or drink alcohol.
- Filter athletes based on their personal interests.
- Type in any keyword related to your brand and it will show you athletes who have mentioned these keywords on their social media.
3. Social Insights
OpenSponsorship has valuable social insight data to help you find the athlete whose followers best match your customer profile:
- Utilize trend statistics such as social media performance, reach, activity, and engagement.
- Find athletes whose follower demographics (based on age, gender, and location) match your customer base.
4. Send Campaign Invites Directly to Athletes
A great way to attract specific athletes to your campaign is to send them a direct invite. You can only start messaging athletes once they have applied to your campaign, so make sure you get those invites out!
- Use our search box to find specific athletes who fit your budget and deliverables
- Click the ‘Work With Me’ button, and then select ‘Send A Campaign Invite’
- Athletes get instantly alerted once you invite them to apply to your campaigns
5. Messages
Once an athlete has applied to your campaign, you can use our messaging feature to directly chat with them and iron out any details.
- Discuss terms with athletes through our message center
- Click the 'Request a call' button to have a member of our team set one up with the athlete
- Negotiate price and deliverables until both brand and athlete are happy.
- Once you have come to agreement, prepare a proposal for the athlete using the 'Create Deal' button. This will be the basis of a contractual agreement.
6. Application Review
Once you publish your campaign and athletes start to apply, you're ready to review their applications:
- Athletes will include a short pitch to convince you why they’re the right fit for your campaign.
- Athletes can answer any specific questions you might include in your campaign details.
- Easily compare applicants based on price, social media following, and average engagement.
Over to you!