Marketing on Big Stages and Small
It is refreshing to see brands grow their involvement in a sport from a small promotion to the point where they own and operate teams to unlock truly unique brand-building opportunities.
To understand what works exactly right for your brand, we encourage you to start small with your investment, experiment with different activation strategies, analyze results, and continually align investment to where you are seeing the results. This will help prevent expensive and high-profile errors that are often seen in sports marketing.
Targeted sponsorships
Your brand can start small by sponsoring up-and-coming talent through grassroots programs or personal deals with established drivers. This approach is a little like investing in a hot tech startup. While you may not get maximum reach and benefit immediately, your brand has the opportunity to offer valuable support to individuals working hard to succeed in their sport. Your support can start in grassroots programs, costing you as little as $5,000/year and go up to personal service agreements with professional drivers starting at around $100,000/year.
The brand building kicks in with social media integrations with the driver you are sponsoring. Capturing content from your driver that resonates with your audience can be woven across different campaigns and mediums. You can also see results from unique logo placement inside the cockpit, on the helmet and the racing suit.
Ultimately, starting here offers your brand a great window into the world of motorsports marketing opportunities, and lets you sample different areas where you can find the most engagement with your brand's existing and prospective customers.
Big sponsorships
Your brand can certainly go above and beyond an ordinary sponsorship. How about owning and operating a top-tier Formula 1 team? If you want to make a splash in the world, follow in the footsteps of titans like Red Bull and Haas Automation by controlling nearly every aspect of their experience in motorsports.
Operating in F1 is well known to be expensive. The cars are spaceships on wheels, making use of the most advanced materials in the world to continually push the limits of motorsports and automotive technology. The travel plans alone can reach into tens of millions per season. The drivers very much are competing in a World Championship, averaging 24 events in 21 different countries and 4 different continents. The cost to compete in this mega-sport can soar over $300 million per year when you go all in - even with cost cap regulations in place.
While the investment here is large, the opportunities for brand activation are limitless. Your marketing department will have unique opportunities to leverage the excitement of a global sport to drive business results. The world will quickly become your playground, with brand exposure that can only be rivaled by FIFA and UEFA on an annual basis.
You are among sports sponsorship royalty, nestled next to other F1 title sponsors like Rolex and Heineken. Your brand also has complete control over how your cars are displayed, how you activate your assets such as driver personalities and signage rights, and more.