You have a great idea for an app, but you need funding to make it happen. This will be your first sponsorship opportunity and you’re not sure how to approach it. What should you do?
Here’s how to get app sponsorship:
- Set goals
- Find prospects interested in your application
- Choose and value your assets
- Write your application sponsorship proposal
- Schedule a Discovery Session
- Negotiate Sponsorship Terms
- Planning for sponsorship renewal
From companies creating an event app to app developers, many parties may be interested in app sponsorship.
This complete guide to sponsorship applications will be packed with lots of valuable information for first-time sponsorship seekers and repeat sponsorship seekers who want to create a process for future sponsorship opportunities.
Let’s get started!
How to Get Mobile App Sponsorship
Set App Sponsorship Goals
Right Now , you are likely to be at a crossroads with your application. Maybe you poured your blood, sweat, and tears into its development only for it to barely make a splash on the app store. He hopes that by adding a bigger brand to his app, more people will be inclined to download it.
Maybe you’ve run out of funding for your app, but you’re not done developing it yet. You might even be in the middle of developing an event app, and you need funding and promotion, and soon.
You know where you want to be and how much of a chasm there is between where you are now and that desired outcome. That makes it much easier to start formulating your app sponsorship goals.
Your goal might be to raise $30,000 so you can finish your app and market it properly. You may want to increase the number of downloads you receive by 25,000, so you need a brand with influencer potential.
Be clear about your goals at this stage. Your goals may change as the sponsorship process progresses, so give yourself some leeway to change them.
I always tell my sponsorship seekers to start thinking about the other side of the equation as well , who is your sponsor. .
Sponsorship is as much about what you give to the sponsor as what it gives to you. That doesn’t mean you have to give the sponsor money, but it will offer you other valuable assets that can further your goals. However, I don’t want to put the cart too far ahead of the horse, as I’ll talk more about assets shortly.
Find the right sponsorship prospects
You know what you want from a sponsor, but who the hell are you going to choose to sponsor your app or event?
This is a difficult question for many sponsorship seekers to answer, especially newbies. Your first instinct will be to search for the most anticipated fruit, big tech brands, or names in fitness, fashion, food, or whatever your app’s niche is.
Those are the brands that can catapult your app into the stratosphere. They are also the brands that are so inundated with sponsorship requests that yours is likely to go under the radar.
I’ve had many clients who searched for the wrong sponsorship leads, got no response, got discouraged, and abandoned the sponsorship altogether. It’s not that their approach was wrong per se, just that they picked the wrong prospects.
I usually tell my sponsorship seekers to use their audience survey data as a benchmark for Determine which prospects to reach. .
For app sponsorship, it’s a little different. The application you are developing now could be your first product. Therefore, you don’t have an audience to survey.
Okay! You may not have an actual audience yet, but you do have a hypothetical audience: your target audience.
All along, you’ve kept this target audience in mind when building your app. They influenced most of your decision-making, from the name of your app to the color of the interface, the features your app would include, to the font you used.
They are the ones who will ideally download your app and then leave a favorable review on the app store so that other people will be inclined to download the app as well. Hopefully, they’ll talk about your app on social media or among their friends, family, and colleagues to inspire more people to try it.
There are multiple segments of your target audience. You have to go one segment at a time and decide which brands your audience segments would like.
Go beyond apps.Are the people in your audience segments more of the Netflix or Hulu type of people? The New Yorker or New York Times? Audi or Hyundai?
You may feel like you’re splitting hairs here, but what you’re really doing is building a list of potential sponsors.
Once you have that list, dig deeper. Of the brands on your list, what types of companies do you market to these consumers? Which companies should advertise to these consumers?
You will continue to expand your list of prospects more and more.
To finish this exercise, you can go through your list and research each brand. For those that don’t fit your app’s merit or values, cross them out. Using the method I described above should reduce these kinds of mismatches to outliers.
Instead, what you’re left with is a long, viable list of potential backers to connect with when the time is right.
Select your assets and determine your app sponsorship price
Earlier, I started talking about assets. You might be wondering what the hell I meant by that, so let me explain.
An asset is what you sell to a sponsor to solve their problems or help them meet their goals. An asset can be something that can be seen, touched and felt, or it can be something purely intangible. Often assets are a combination of both.
Let me use an event as an example. You’re hosting an event, and part of that involves building an event app. What can you offer your event sponsor that is valuable?
Well, that depends on the type of event, but you have many options. If your event will have a lot of guest speakers, you may be able to give the sponsor a place to speak as a guest. If the event is more like a convention or expo, they may have their own booth.
Okay, but what if you’re not doing an event app? Your app is in development and is not targeted at any specific event.
You may still offer something of value to the sponsor. If you have a cult following on social media, you can offer to post a series of sponsored content on various social media platforms.
What makes you a good asset depends in part on the needs of the sponsor. That’s why the discovery session is such a valuable part of your sponsorship program, but I’ll get to that.
Another factor that makes a good asset is how much it’s worth. How can you assign a value to a guest speaker spot or a series of social media posts? That’s not like going to a grocery store and buying a head of lettuce.
No, it’s not, but you should price your assets anyway. This is known as valuing them.
My advice? Trust market research. Do some digging to determine what other companies have charged for similar services. Then adjust your prices accordingly.
You can even use your app competitors for inspiration. If those other app brands have sought sponsorship, you may be able to get the details from their asset menu. Again, use their prices as a reference, but don’t copy them down to the decimal point.
Using these pieces of research as a reference point is like checking your work. You can determine if your asset prices are where they should be or in left field.
Write Your App Sponsorship Proposal
Once Now that you’ve estimated the approximate value of your assets (that is, appraised them), it’s time to put it all together in your application’s sponsorship proposal.
The sponsorship proposal is a six-page document that includes all the pertinent details of your sponsorship opportunity application. You’ll talk about your business or app, your cause, and your audience. It will also include your assets.
I have a lot of great blog resources on how to write a sponsorship proposal, like this post here. I’ve even produced detailed templates that you can follow to put together your own successful proposal.
Therefore, I won’t talk about writing your proposal in this section. Instead, I want to break down two aspects of your app sponsorship proposal in more detail. The first one is your sponsorship menu and the second one is your activation opportunities.
Let’s start by talking about the sponsorship menu, which is the home of your assets. Instead of using prescribed tiers or tiers, you want to put everything into one complete, clean-looking menu.
I provide a sample menu in my sponsorship proposal template, but I don’t recommend copying it. As an app developer or designer, I’m sure you can create an attractive asset menu.
Okay, what are the activation opportunities, right? They are another crucial part of successful app sponsorship, and something you should excel at given your experience. An activation opportunity is a way to link your target audience to your sponsor.
In other words, you’re filling a need your audience has while doing the same for your sponsor.
When you collect data about your audience, pain points are likely to emerge.For example, you may have asked your audience about a past event you created an app for and what they thought about it. Maybe your audience responded something to the effect that they wanted more entertainment options at the event.
Okay, so your audience wants to be entertained.
Now let’s look at some problems your sponsor is having. Using a simple example, your sponsor might want more email signups or a stronger social media presence.
By entertaining your audience, you bring them to your sponsor’s booth. Then it’s just a matter of collecting contact information for the sponsor to achieve their goals.
Okay, so how do you get people to sign up? Well, the sponsor could host a scavenger hunt at the event. Winners will know by the end of the day if they’ve won, so they may need to provide a phone number or email.
Once the sponsor has contact information for the audience, they can begin interact and nurture the audience. audience to convert them.
That’s activation in a nutshell. A good activation idea is not about how much money you can spend or how awesome it looks. It’s all about bringing your audience and sponsor together while addressing their needs.
Contact Sponsors for a Discovery Session
You’ve done a lot of research and writing at this point, you start to wonder when you’ll be able to contact the sponsor and get things rolling.
I know it doesn’t always seem like it, but all you’ve done up to this point is get the ball rolling. . You are prepared to meet with the sponsor and discuss a potential app sponsorship deal.
As app developers, you’d probably prefer to contact a potential sponsor online, such as via social DM or email. How you communicate is not as important as contacting the right person.
I always recommend that sponsorship seekers have a connection to the potential sponsor. This does not have to be a direct connection. Maybe one of your colleagues knows someone or you have a friend of a friend. You only need that.
Why do I suggest this? It’s like passing the goalie. Also, that connection you have with another person might make your potential sponsor a little more willing to listen to you.
When you finally call the sponsor on the phone (or respond to their email), what do you say? You want to set up a meeting, and not just any meeting, but a discovery session.
What exactly are you discovering? Good question! The gist of a discovery session is this: You ask the target sponsor a handful of questions about their goals, challenges, target audience, products/services, etc. Your goal is to determine if your services can solve their problems.
You can ask questions like “what action do customers take before buying something from you? How to get them to act? Or “what are your sales goals for the next quarter/year?”
As I said before, the information from your discovery session will influence the assets you place in your app’s sponsorship menu.
Negotiate the terms of your app sponsorship agreement
The discovery session concludes and you have a feeling that you and this sponsor could work well together . Brilliant! As you shake the sponsor’s hand (or say goodbye virtually), be sure to ask an important question.
“Can we meet again to talk about X?”
It’s a mistake beginner to walk out of a discovery meeting (or any meeting after it) with no other meeting on the cards. You want to maintain sponsor engagement and keep your app sponsorship program moving forward.
One meeting will become two, then three and four. Only the first meeting is a discovery session, but the second meeting can take a similar format. What the planning and negotiating phase of a sponsorship deal looks like is different for every sponsor seeker.
I’ve had a few clients who landed a sponsor during the first meeting. For others, it takes several meetings before a sponsor makes a decision.
I want to give you one of my best sponsorship tips: Don’t bring your app sponsorship proposal to any meeting unless asked. In many sponsorship relationships, the first few meetings are about testing each other out. When the sponsor wants more information about your opportunity, they’ll ask for it.
Here’s another helpful tip. When you sit down and negotiate your application sponsorship deal, always consult a lawyer. I’ve written about writing endorsement deals and you can take my advice. However, since these agreements are legally binding documents, both parties should have everything read by a lawyer before anyone signs anything.
Produce a compliance report and propose sponsorship renewal
In the weeks or months that follow, you and your sponsor will work to meet each other’s goals sides. Your application will come to fruition, perhaps in time for an event.If so, that event will occur with the sponsor’s support.
You did what you said you would do, and the sponsor did what they said they would. That’s the end, right?
Not exactly. In your application sponsorship agreement, you will write down the goals and results you are trying to achieve for your sponsor. I want to emphasize again that this agreement is legally binding.
That’s why it’s not a bad idea to have proof of the results obtained. That proof comes in the form of your post-event report, also known as your compliance report.
I recently published a post about what goes into a post-event report, so give it a read. It will certainly come in handy as you progress.
To quickly recap, your compliance report includes tables, graphs, and other data that should prove unequivocally that you did what you promised in your app sponsorship agreement.
That said, you can’t lie and pretend you got the sponsor $50,000 in sales when it was only $10,000. The sponsor can prove where their sales came from and the discrepancy will be obvious.
Assuming you delivered as promised and the sponsor is pleased, you should address the issue of renewing the sponsorship of the app. The next time you host an event or start an app, you could work with that sponsor again.
While sponsors are primarily concerned with their ROI, their results aren’t the only factor influencing their decision to become a partner again. How easy and pleasant you were to work with and the quality of your activations and assets will also influence your decision.
Even if a sponsor refuses to work with you again, there’s no reason to burn down that bridge. Stay cordial, stay informed by email or phone several times a year, and you never know what could happen. The sponsor may recommend other opportunities, or they may become available for re-association at a later time.
Conclusion
With apps more popular than ever, the field of app sponsorship should continue to grow as well. Regardless of your app goals, I hope this guide can act as the springboard you need to jumpstart your app sponsorship program.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Baylis is the President and CEO of The Sponsorship Collective and a self-confessed sponsorship fanatic.
After several years as a sponsor ( that’s right, the investor of the money!) Chris decided to go over to the endorsement sales side where he has personally closed tens of millions of dollars in endorsement deals. Chris has been at the forefront of multi-million dollar endorsement deals and has built and coached teams to do the same.
Chris now spends his time working with clients to value their assets and create strategies that drive sales. . An accomplished speaker and international consultant, Chris has helped his clients raise millions in sponsorship dollars.
.