How To Create Value For Sponsors and Exhibitors in Hybrid Events?

Due to Covid-19 pandemic, hybrid events have got the limelight new common. And event organizers are giving more preference to this conferencing mode. 

According to a poll, 15.9% of the people normally prefer hybrid meetings while 6.1% of the people strongly prefer hybrid events. 

So, if you are also up for hybrid events, you must create virtue for event sponsors and exhibitors. Because they are the important aspects of your hybrid event. They are the backbone of the event and provide resources to carry it out. 

You need to make sure to create value for sponsors and exhibitors so that you build promising connections. Thus, making your upcoming hybrid events successful.   

But…

You may ask, “How can you create value for sponsors and exhibitors?” 

To answer this query, we have formulated this post to save you from hustling on Google. Hence, stay hooked to this post till the end and you’ll learn a lot.

Who are Sponsors and Exhibitors for a Hybrid Event? 

Sponsors and exhibitors have the major difference in level of interactivity. 

Sponsors

• Provide the logo position on the event hub lobby- offering an opportunity to connect with the event attendees. 
• Offers the logo placement on the event’s landing page- helping you build new relations with businesses. 
• Help showcase your products or services to the right audience 
• Provide financial assistance for the event

Exhibitors

• Offer interactive booth in Expo area- guiding people how to behave in the booth
• Provides logo arrangement on the event’s landing page- Ensuring security for the live attendees
• Offers live reps to talk to attendees

Why are Sponsors and Exhibitors important? 

Owing to this pandemic, many event organizers have made their way to bring people together and conduct hybrid events. 

Fortunately, this is not some unexplored domain, and event organizers carry a lot of worth. Precisely, they are called the jack of all trades who manage the project, apply tactical strategies, and multitask things to make the event successful. 

Innumerable hours are spent on laboring the event – be it transmitting the cords of speakers and sessions. Expanding skilled growth chances to assist attendees to prosper in their careers and build new connections. Or enrolling event exhibitors and sponsors that will entreat attendees.

Considering all these efforts, you still need to face it- you can’t make your event successful without the sponsors and exhibitors. 

That’s because sponsorship carries worth. In 2017, it was found out that 47% of the people know that sponsorship carries importance. And if we consider 2021, you are wise enough to understand the value of sponsorship. 

Therefore, to cheer the resources of the sponsors and exhibitors in your events, you need to create value for them and appreciate their contributions to erect long-term connections. Because without these sponsors, your events carry no value. 

“If I had to choose just one single lever for us to grow year after year, it would be partnerships where we leverage our community by providing value to our partners, and in exchange, they provide us with a service or media promotion for our events.”

• Vasil Azarov, Founder, Growth Marketing Conference 

With that being said, let us tell you how you can add value to your sponsors and exhibitors. 

Sip from your coffee cup and continue reading. 

How To Create Value For Sponsors and Exhibitors? 

Here, we are sharing methods that you can apply to provide visibility and ascertain the worth of the sponsors and exhibitors for a hybrid event. 

1. Organize Dedicated Activities for Sponsors and Exhibitors

Do you know your sponsors and vendors have got numerous choices to invest their exclusive resources (time and dollars)? You know, right. 

“We work with sponsors to have really fun interactive activations. At Forbes, we really try to guide the sponsor experience so that they’re creating meaningful activations that can actually build the event.”

• Chardia Christophe-Garcia, Marketing Director, ForbesLIVE 

Hence, be assured that you formulate such an occasion in which both exhibitors and sponsors are esteemed. You can carry out dedicated activities to facilitate both of them to engage with attendees and substantiate the significance of your hybrid event.

The activities may encompass the gamification that attendees vie to attend various exhibitors for awards and raffle blueprints. 

Other than that, what you can do is host an exhibitor arena where firms endorse their antidotes and product contributions. 

While the last but not the least option is to conduct a get-together intended for new attendees and sponsors to enable first-timers to build new connections and swap opinions.

2. Steer Traffic for Sponsors and Exhibitors through Website, Social Networks, and Community 

Why do you arrange an event?
Definitely to attract the attention of your audience to what your event serves, right? 

You want to show that the extraordinary significance that your event can give to unravel a challenge or fulfill a goal.

This is where your sponsors and exhibitors come in handy. 

When you represent the sponsors and exhibitors, you stimulate the ROI of the exhibitor by building high visibility for their association.

What we recommend is to be confident that your exhibitors and sponsors are starred prominently on your company’s website. You can ensure this with an interactive ground proposal and a link to more data about the exhibiting institution. 

Likewise, make sure that you create room in the calendar for your social media program and your online audience. It is to emphasize sponsors and exhibitors that will be at your forthcoming meeting or we can say hybrid event. 

With that, you also have to be sure that you have backlinked to the exhibitor’s website to steer up their SEO usefulness.

Quick suggestion: You can also post an appreciation post after or during the event for sponsors and exhibitors on your social accounts to help them gain visibility. 

3. Celebrate the Success of Your Sponsors and Exhibitors with your Constituents 

Along with giving time and area in the program for people to attend the expo hall. You should create an awards protocol or a gratitude dinner to bring about constituents’ accomplishments. 

This not only enables your partners, contributors, and recruits to learn and adapt from their industry counterparts. But also furnishes an outlet for exhibitors and sponsors to showcase their treatments and partnership chances with your association.

For instance, you can call attention to consumers’ achievements from the earlier year. You can also include opinions of your sponsors and exhibitors that labored with your consumers to enable them to achieve their goals.

4. Make Sure to Directly Connect the Sponsors and Exhibitors to Attendees 

You know it is a traditional problem when attending a conference, people or attendees look for a tech tool that can assist them to do certain things. 

However, they are not sure and unable to decide the right exhibitors who provide that type of antidote. Therefore, they pay time roaming around the event hall wishing to come across a seller that meets their needs.

But to solve this problem, we have got a better solution. 

And that is intelligent matchmaking that encourages an attendee to connect directly, face-to-face with professionals that have an antidote for a particular pain point in their institution. 

Attendees can also ask for the varieties of solutions they’re peeking for at the event. And sponsors or exhibitors can concede before or during the meeting about how their antidotes can work for.

5. Event Mentions

Along with event analytics, trace and keep reporting how attendees are communicating about your hybrid event life and on social media. 

You can record mentions on websites, blogs, social networks, etc. 

You have many options to keep the record such as you can employ Facebook Audience Insight, Google Alerts, and your event platform for this reporting and analysis.

6. Polling Results

In the end, do share the outcomes of your live polls and post-event questionnaires with your collaborators. 

You can also purposely poll your audience on sponsor-oriented topics. These include brand inclination and dedication, product choice, institution size, industry tendencies, company spending, etc.

7. Revenue Generation

You can send post-event polls to sponsors and exhibitors to learn how much earnings was produced through your hybrid event. 

When you get the data, you can share the revenue report with all sponsors and exhibitors so that they can retain data on the event’s ROI. 

You can also employ such data to retail more event sponsorship for your upcoming event.

The Bottom Line 

There is no wonder that with around 80% of the businesses going digital amid COVID-29 concerns, hybrid events are the future. Therefore, you must build good connections with the event sponsors and exhibitors as they add value to your events. 

In this article, we have shared some valuable tips you can use to improve your relationships with the event sponsors and exhibitors. Try implementing most of them and, we are sure, your next hybrid event will be a boom. 

Do you have any other tips to add to the list? Do share with our readers in the comments below. 

Do you want to know how technology can give more visibility to your sponsors and exhibitors? Book a demo today.