What Price Should You Charge for Business Ads in Your Media Guide?
Set Your Fundraising Goal
Determining the right price for advertising space or sponsorship tiers in your media guide is key to running a successful fundraising campaign. You want to strike a balance between offering real value to sponsors while ensuring your team raises meaningful funds.
Firstly, think about your fundraising goals. How much do you want to raise? Divide that goal by the number of ads or sponsors you can reasonably sell to ballpark your pricing. Always make sure the pricing feels fair, and clearly communicate how the money raised will benefit the athletes and the program—it helps sponsors feel good about their investment.
But before you do anything else, set a fundraising goal!
Ad pricing is often based on the engagement or “distribution” that a platform or ad will get (magazine, social media ad, newspaper, etc). And while it may seem intuitive to consider factors like audience size and visibility, how many copies will be printed, etc., don't worry too much about this.
Sponsors know they are effectively making a donation to your sports program - so provide as much value as you can - but make sure your price your ads so you are making good money.
Add Value, Raise More
There are plenty of ways to add value to sponsors and justify a higher price.
For this reason, we recommend all teams take a hybrid approach; publish a digital version for the distribution advantages, unlimited accessibility, interactive/clickable ads and a print version for people who want a printed copy that they can keep. But more on this later.
If your media guide is digital and distributed at every home game or sent out weekly via email and social media (in the case of a Story of the Season Media Guide), you can justify higher prices because of repeated exposure, interactivity and higher engagement.
Smart Pricing Strategies
Consider the community you live in. If you’re in an affluent community that has many businesses, or whose residents own businesses in the surrounding area and can afford a higher price, you may want to charge higher prices across the board.
This is also the case for schools and teams that have strong connections to the community and community support. We have some clients that sell 50+ sponsors a year at $400 minimum!
If you are in a lower income community, consider lowering the price of ads and selling a lot of ads at lower prices. However, if you are going to lower the price you need to have high ad volume.
✅ Pro Tip: - this is where “logo ads” or “business card” ads are great - they are cost effective and don't take up too much real estate in your media guide so as to bog it down with ads.
In addition to standard ad sizes like ¼, ½, and full page, some of our clients will sell a “program sponsor” which just gets the businesses logo on a single page logo wall. This is an easy way to make $50. Sell 20 of these and you make $1,000 and don't have to design any ads! SWEET!
Many new clients underestimate how much businesses are willing to donate and consequently set prices too low and get subpar fundraising results. Regardless of the socioeconomics of your community - you will be surprised at how many big sponsors you can still sell. We have countless examples of schools and sports programs in non-affluent communities that sell dozens of ads and raise $10,000+. There are an abundance of opportunities and you must have a mindset of abundance when selling!
For basic ads, like a quarter-page or business card-size ad, prices might range from $50 to $400. Full-page ads typically go for $250–$800 depending on your community and other factors. Sponsorship packages—which include premium ad space and perks like logo placement on team gear or shoutouts at games—can range from $500 up to $1,500 or more.
Lastly, Don’t Overthink It!
Pick your prices and run with them. The key to a successful sponsor/advertising campaign is action, not overthinking the prices and details. We will provide more info on how to sell ads and sponsors in a later section.
As a benchmark - we recommend the following range for our client’s business ad prices:
Program Sponsor / Logo wall ~$50
Business Card Ad - ~$100
¼ page ad ~$100-$400
½ page ad ~$400-$600
Full Page ad ~$600-$800
Full Spread (2-pages) ~$800+
As a rule of thumb - it's best to charge on the higher end of this and provide maximum value in return.
Separate from solo ads, we have another page dedicated to creating sponsorship packages. You can access this here. Whether you are selling individual ads, or baking them into larger sponsorship packages, the overall process is the same. The only difference is the offering in the package. In our blog about sponsorship packages, we provide tons of ideas of how to package up different sponsorship deliverables to businesses and patrons.
