KV Oostende’s unique sponsoring concept

Tine De Groote, Marketing Manager at KV Oostende (KVO), shared the club’s hospitality and sponsoring opportunities during the ESSMA Summit.

Hospitality concept 

Instead of having dinner on seperate locations (in the skyboxes), all VIP guest eat at one centralised dinner location. Furthermore, dinner is always served ahead of the match (for a match starting at 18:00, guests are invited for ‘dinner’ around 15:00). The reason for this is that VIP guests don’t miss out on KVO’s third half with a concert and a DJ (up to 4 hours after a match). Moreover, in the VIP area guest have a view of the player’s tunnel.

Sponsor connection - offline

For their top 60 sponsors (which comprises 2/3 of their sponsor budget), KVO developed a retention plan focusing on personal contact, anticipating, activation and creativity.

Other sponsorship activations include:

• During home matches, sponsors can use the player’s bus for business purposes
• ‘Sponsor’ competitions in the fan zone
• Fashion show on matchdays
• Beach Business Club (BCC)
• Sponsorship awards 

The main objective with the Luc Willems Sponsorship Awards is to activate all sponsors within 5 categories:

• Best online activation
• Best coorperation between sponsors
• Best matchday activation
• Best integration with staff
• Best sales activation

Sponsor connection - online

With the platform of KVO’s ticketing partner and ESSMA Corporate Partner iXpole, sponsors can order additional tickets, catering, parking spaces, send (personalised) tickets directly to your clients, etc.

Furthermore, the club implemented a marketing automation and CRM tool to know what their clients are doing on the KVO website. The tool includes:

• Behavioural tracking
• CRM module
• Gamification: 1. motivation/ goal tracking and 2. social/customer engagement and brand loyalty
• Platform Management: both BtB and BtC
• GDPR proof

At KVO, they are constantly evolving and looking for new (sponsorship) opportunities. Their strategy is built on two pillars including a fully performant commercial well founded apparatus and a strong sportive strategy. All players are fully owned by the club and focussing on developing and upward streaming from youth players to top team.

Key takeaways:

• Have a warm and unique hospitality in place at the club
• Create a personal relationship with your sponsors; define an evaluation plan and determine key moments: execute and evaluate sponsor activations
• Have the right CRM tools in place to know your fans; at KV Oostende they gather data from their VIPs thanks to ESSMA’s Corporate Partner iXpole

Access his presentation on the ESSMA Knowledge Platform

The recorded version of Tine De Groote's presentation can be found on the Knowledge Platform. All presentations of the ESSMA Summit are available on the Knowledge Platform. The ESSMA Knowledge Platform is only available for ESSMA members. If you have not received your login, contact communications@essma.eu.