Why I believe a SaaS brand should sponsor a sports team

I had always puzzled why small local companies support small local sports teams.

Like the 2-3-4-5th divisions and lower-level teams. (Or, in the case of Estonia, any team)

Of course, big companies can do that. They have endless marketing budgets, and supporting the “little ones” is a great angle.

But the small companies.

The ones with a couple of million in revenue. Local manufacturers or service companies.

Making a long-term commitment to support a sports team doesn’t make much sense.

You don’t know whether your target customers are in the arena. Or that they’ll even notice your logo. You can’t track it. What’s the ROI of it?

But I was wrong.

It makes a lot of sense.

It’s just that I was approaching it from the wrong angle.

I happened to see a documentary that was following a manager of a local small-town basketball team.

The team was sitting in the second half of the tournament table.

So they were in a sponsors' meeting, and the sponsors couldn’t be happier with their sponsorship.

Why?

The sponsorship isn’t to grow the business.

It’s for the employees.

Working at a company that supports the local sports team brings a lot of clout to the employees.

It’s their team. They get to be part of it. (More than their friends and neighbors)

So it helps the company with recruiting.

It drives local awareness.

The sponsorship deal comes with tangible employee perks, such as team events and VIP tickets.

And recruitment is a big challenge for these companies.

My takeaway?

Sometimes the value of something isn’t what you think it is.

And it pays off to set some budget aside for “wasting” and experimenting whether something affects some side of your business.

Maybe you take your target customers to ball games, have fun, and close big deals. Maybe you can hire more people thanks to this, etc.

You just can’t know everything in advance. You have to try it out.

So, right now, I came up with an idea.

What if a B2B SaaS vendor sponsors a local sports team? That would be interesting.

Actually, not sponsor it. Own it. Use it. Ryan Reynolds it.

They could get a yearly sponsorship deal with less money than their monthly Google Ads budget.

Content, ads, and community events with key partners and target customers.

Easy PR.

Differentiating marketing move.

Seems interesting.

Who's the brave one to take it up?