As traditional mediums like network TV ad spots become less relevant, less targeted, and more expensive, brands now look at social media as a primary source of media value when looking to invest in sponsorship deals.

In fact, Social24 claims that select sponsors generate more than 40% of their total media value from social media efforts. In the NBA, for example, the top 10 sponsors in terms of spend across teams drive 60% of their media value from social media. This shift in media buying presents a massive revenue opportunity for teams, leagues, and other accounts that carry a large following. However, there's a difficult balance between monetizing content, standing out as a cohesive brand, and creating content native to each platform. Let's dive into some strategies and tactics to accomplish this balance.

Identify Repeatable Branded Moments

In order to sell effective sponsorship packages, you need to first align on buckets of content that are repeatable and engaging to the audience, so your content team can consistently execute them, and you’re still serving the desire of your following while delivering value to the partner. For a sports team on game day, this could include:

Player or Play of the Game

Post-game Pressers & Celebrations

Day-to-day Content

Having co-branded assets available in Slate unlocks these real-time moments as new sellable inventory because teams can still turn around content quickly enough to keep it relevant and own the moment. Beyond gameday, there are plenty of other opportunities to leverage day-to-day content for partner assets such as:

• Weekly Trivia

• Throwback Moments

• Keys to the Game

• Travel Days

Creative Strategies & Packaging Tactics

With the repeatable buckets of content outlined, it’s important for sales, creative, and social teams to work collaboratively to develop concepts that stay true to your brand while catering to different levels of sponsor commitment. A best practice that we often see from our partners is to prepare a variety of co-branded executions within a specific sponsorship package, so the content doesn’t get stale throughout a season, and more subtle branded assets can drive additional impressions.

To help aid the sales team in negotiation with partners, we’ve also seen teams sell certain creative assets at a premium over others such as an animated filter that catches the attention of the viewer. It can also be helpful to tier out traditionally higher-performing content over others. For example, the post-game win celebration video will likely draw higher engagement than a fan cam, so it should be sold at a higher value.

Why Use Slate for Sponsored Content? 

1. Speed to Feed: Unlock real-time moments and post them faster. The Slate mobile app allows creators to capture moments from the sideline, quickly apply pre-approved branding, and share directly to social. Being the first to post the final play or the first arrival gives you ownership of the moment and typically drives higher engagement, which means more value to sponsors and more revenue for the sales team.

2. Larger Inventory: Slate enables content teams to produce a higher volume of posts, opening up more inventory for the sales team to sell.

3. Control Content Integrity: The only creative assets available for content creators are those that are uploaded by your team, so you can ensure sponsor logos are up to date and applied consistently across every social platform.

4. Content Archive: Slate’s Content Hub provides a centralized real-time archive of all content created in the app. Simply filter by the sponsored asset used, and export the output for reporting or sharing with partners. 

Create with Slate

Whether you’re trying to catch the latest trends (more theme songs, please), produce high quality content, or just get more efficient creating for TikTok, Slate is your one-stop shop for slick, quick, branded content.