A year ago today it was announced that from the beginning of the month, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group had became a sponsor of the Brawn GP Formula 1 racing team.  The newly sponsored car, driven by Jenson Button, has been one of the biggest promotional successes in the past 12 months for Virgin, and Jenson Button’s been pretty happy about the past year too!

So how can a smaller business make promotion work for them?

Begin by planning at least six months in advance. If your business is seasonal, aim your big promotional push for a period at least 3 months ahead of your busy time – if you sell wedding cakes, doing all your promotional work in June is daft, as that’s when most brides are getting married – you need them to be thinking about you in January! Also, suppliers of promotional items such as overprinted bags will be able to offer you a better deal the longer ahead you organise your promotional supplies.

Think about sport as a promotional vehicle

Sports promotion has two big advantages: publicity and public relations – supporting local athletes is always good publicity and it’s good public relations for the sponsor.

Pick a local club such as a hockey team or a junior football league and ensure your name is on the sporting equipment such as kit and casual clothing worn for warm-ups.

Make sure you do all the public relations work you can – it’s not enough to have your logo on team clothing, you also need to organise things like visits by the team to your workplace, days out for local children who have special needs to meet the players and try out the sport in question etc. All this builds a strong brand association between you and the team and public service.

Use sporting success to support your business

If your team wins, get your staff into some printed celebration T-shirts marking the victory, it’s a talking point with customers and gives your staff a real motivational boost to be supporting a winning team.

In March, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group became a sponsor of the Brawn GP Formula 1 racing team.  Why do businesses sponsor sports teams or events?  For Branson and Virgin, the reasons are clear, ‘Virgin are trying to build the most respected brand in the world and an involvement with a great team will help’ the entrepreneur said. The newly sponsored car, driven by Jenson Button, now bears the Virgin logo and has been renamed  the Virgin BGP 001 as well as having a new colour scheme to reflect the sponsorship deal and logos on the team uniform.

For businesses, there are three reasons to get involved with sports sponsorship: publicity, public relations and brand association.

The first is easy enough – get your name on the club’s kit, on the side of the tour bus and on the programmes for each fixture, and you will become better known within that sporting community. It’s also a good idea to ensure, during your sponsorship deal, that the other useful aspects of publicity will be yours too. This means that you need to ask for a club rename if you’re a main sponsor so that your name is used in the team’s title in press releases and other publicity documents and that the casual clothing worn by the team on their way to the match: the team sweatshirts or polo-shirts at a minimum, should also carry your name or at least your logo.

Public Relations is your job, not the sport teams. You need to make sure that you build on the established relationship. You might, for example, organise a day for children to visit the sports club and have a ‘try-out’ or training with the players. You can give commemorative T-shirts to each child, bearing your name, the team’s name and the date, to reinforce the positive role you’re playing in promoting healthy living for young people.

Association is also your responsibility. Assuming you’ve chosen a team that’s doing well, use good results and outright wins to try and promote your business by association. Your staff, for example, could wear ‘Win with X’ T-shirts whenever the team you’re sponsoring has a win to strengthen the positive association between your company and the winning sports team.