Best of 2023: Playing the game of sports sponsorships

Sports sponsorships are historically difficult to measure against return on investment. Does their impact go beyond brand visibility?

Financial marketers say they are under more pressure than ever to quantify return on investment, but sports sponsorships – despite their recognised difficulty to measure return – continue to thrive at a rapid pace.

$2.5 billion (£2.05 billion) is spent annually on sports sponsorships within the payments sector alone, according to the GlobalData Sport Intelligence Centre’s June 2023 data, with Mastercard spending an estimate of over $100 million.

In a mainstream setting such as a sporting stadium, where a company’s target audience is only a small percentage of the attendees, marketers must measure the hard, quantifiable data they collect with a cautious approach.

According to Braze’s annual Global Customer Engagement Review, 80% of marketers agree they are collecting more data than they can spend time analysing, but sports sponsorships are the exception.

In interviews for Financial Promoter, financial services marketers noted how they are more accepting that sports sponsorships generate comparatively little data, citing that “brand visibility” can be intangible in terms of transaction value or spend.

What is also clear is that the love of sports – and thus sponsorship – often comes from “the top,” leaving marketers to fashion innovative ideas when it comes to justifying the spend of their sports strategies.

Marrying brand message

Aligning a sporting partnership with a brand’s core values is the fundamental starting point for any organisation.

Apex Group’s chief marketing officer, Rosie Guest, speaks to Financial Promoter about Apex’s core message: driving positive change.

Apex’s sponsorship of Sail GP, an international sailing league, aligns its two core values: diversity and inclusion, with a particular focus on women, and climate change.

As sailing’s most sustainable league, Sail GP also commits to driving female talent. With different roles on the boat, such as the grinder and the strategist, Sail GP mandate that the strategist must be female.

“Their plan is not to pigeonhole women, but to look at how we can get more women into the driver role, into those main seats,” says Guest.

Similarly, in financial services, Apex’s women’s accelerator programme aims to elevate women into C-suite roles – not just within HR, marketing, or comms, but to CEO and CFO level.

Sports sponsorships are best placed when organisations can harness an inward-looking angle to their own organisation.

Symbiotic relationships

The most impactful sports partnerships are the ones that last multiple seasons, according to interviews with marketers, conducted by FP. A new stadium naming sponsorship, for example, might take a couple of years to become fully adopted by the club’s supporters.

Creating a two-way partnership where both brands benefit is crucial to long-lasting relationships.

PensionBee’s sponsorship of Premier League side Brentford FC was a case of right club, right time.

Firstly, the fondly named Brentford Bees created an obvious insect-related link. Second, both brands were up and coming. Brentford FC had just been promoted to the Premier League in 2021 and PensionBee was establishing itself as an essential tool for consumers to manage their pensions.

Jasper Martens, chief marketing officer at PensionBee, said the partnership allowed PensionBee to use brand equity from Brentford FC to strengthen its position as a key player in the market.

“Investing in your brand helps to make people more brand aware, meaning that more people will consider using your business or service down the line,” says Martens.

Marketers should look to building their brand by establishing relationships with like-minded sporting clubs, with football being a clear pathway to success.

Content is king

Building a content strategy around the sponsorship is crucial to tracking return. 2022 research from the Content Marketing Institute found that 77% of B2B marketers have a content strategy and yet only 40% of respondents said their strategy was actually documented.

Investec’s Tim Burnell, head of UK and international marketing, says the array of content opportunities that result from sports sponsorships should be imagined as the “tentacles” around the core sponsorship package.

“You start off with the brand awareness, you build the engagement, and then through all the content and all the community outreach, you start to unpack your business story,” Burnell says.

Marketers must spend time distributing and repurposing the sponsorship content in order to reach their indented audience.

Diversifying the content offering across a range of media is crucial to giving customers the tools to understand the brand and its product offerings.

Digital content is designed to convert customers who are actively looking or searching for your product, says PensionBee’s Martens, but marketers must look beyond digital advertising to attract new clientele.

“At any time in a company’s growth cycle, especially for a fintech company like PensionBee, there will be a time where simply growing through digital channels is not enough,” says Martens.

Marketing through only digital channels will quickly exhaust conversion channels and lead to diminished returns for companies with low brand awareness, he said.

PensionBee’s answer to diversified content was having its distinctive brand asset – the bee – flying over Brentford FC’s stadium.

“Consecutive use of distinctive brand assets increases the likelihood of your creative being noticed and helps you be instantly recognisable,” Martens says.

Good content needn’t be another expense on top of a big-ticket deal, according to Martens: homegrown content will go a long way to building existing client relationships and attracting new ones.

Identifying colleagues who already have a presence on social media and giving them the tools to create content is a cost-effective way to boost internal marketing channels, he says.

Internal marketing

Implementing strategies to ensure employees understand and engage in sponsorships is essential to success, according to Investec’s Burnell.

“We host half-day workshops where we’ll get all the stakeholders together and in teams to unpack the sponsorship and discuss how it can work for one particular bit of the business or particular book of clients, as well as how employees can bring this sponsorship to life,” he says.

Investec’s strategy assumes that engaged employees will nurture an environment of brand pride, which will subsequently filter out into client engagement. This is mirrored in the approach adopted by Apex Group.

The company’s internal marketing strategy marries employee engagement with purpose.

“We get our employees to come down to the race and litter pick, for example. They get to experience the day, but with a purpose,” says chief marketing officer Rosie Guest.

Sponsorships are then reinforced to employees on sailing days: “We have a tool that can change the backgrounds on everybody’s screen. When you’re trying to get messaging into 12,000 people, you can’t just send them emails – it would be death by email,” Rosie explains.

The consistent use of different mixes of media and tools ensures employees are reminded of the sponsorship, with the idea of promoting timely and relevant discussion with clients.

Does sport matter?

Insurance companies accounted for a global sponsorship spend of $1.12 billion (£960,000,000) in 2022, with over $361 million being in football sponsorships, according to Statista’s 2022 data.

For trading platform eToro, sports sponsorships are a surefire way to expand its geographical footprint, according to Stephanie Wilks-Wiffen, director of marketing at eToro.

“Wherever we see strong growth potential, we will include sponsorship within a broader marketing approach and seek out sports partnerships that share our values,” says Wilks-Wiffen.

For brands that invest generously in sponsorships, the sport itself matters less than location, brand equity, and the club’s values.

Recent years have also seen a shift towards more niche sports, with Apex, Swiss Re, Convex, and Gallagher Re among the financial services companies sponsoring sailing, for example.

The shift to a niche, where audiences are more specific and can be targeted with more accuracy, indicates that marketers’ priorities are shifting to the quality of audience engagement over quantity of views.

Tim Burnell explains that Investec’s sponsorship of the rugby Champions Cup presents an accessibility and growth opportunity that aligns with Investec’s core message.

“We’re very keen not only to promote our credentials as a sustainable organisation, but to help others do that as well. We want to play a supporting role in helping rugby achieve its carbon-neutral agenda.”

Investec also offers financial welfare support to the rugby community, particularly the players, helping them to achieve financial stability.

Can ROI be measured?

Measuring reliable, quantifiable data in an effective way is the optimum goal for all financial services marketers. 67% of those surveyed for Statista’s 2022 research agreed that brands are more appealing when they take part in sports sponsorships.

While brand appeal cannot be measured on an individual basis, PensionBee claims to have doubled its “prompted brand awareness” from 24% to more than 50% through its sponsorship of Brentford FC.

“In order to measure success you look at choosing the right brand channel cocktail to get the biggest impact to your audience against cost-effective investments,” Martens says.

By sponsoring football, which predominantly plays out on television, PensionBee can treat sponsorship as a TV activity and measure it with their in-house, mixed-media model.

“Measuring your total reach across your chosen (brand) channel mix, plus tying in the partnership with your flagship TV advertising campaign, means that the output meant we doubled prompted brand awareness from 24% to over 50%. We measure this every quarter and prompted brand awareness has remained above 50%,” Martens says.

Of course, sport has the ability to tap into audiences that cannot be measured with quantifiable data – future talent and future potential clients. For Investec, measuring return on investment means going beyond the hard data.

Burnell asks: “What effect is that having on your conversion? How are you measuring the sentiment and the relevance? You’ve created all this great story, you’ve reached all these people, are they in some way moved by it? Is there sentiment towards Investec changing? Do they understand more about investing?”

What’s clear from the sentiments of Burnell and his peers is that, while marketers are under ever-increasing pressure to justify their marketing spend, companies need to make greater efforts and look beyond the numbers if they are considering sports sponsorships as part of their overall marketing approach.

This article is taken from the print edition of Financial Promoter. Click here to subscribe.