Sports Sponsorships Can Make A Winner Of Your Brand

Strength and a desire to succeed, characteristic of athletes, are excellent features for your business to be associated with. Choose the right sport, create an appropriate partnership, and score.

The year 2016 has been a big one in sport, from the European Championships in football to the Olympics. As a result, the business of sport has been placed firmly in the spotlight. In marketing terms, athletes and sports stars have matured into a wider cultural landscape that transcends the sporting arena. Pop, fashion, shampoos, finance—sports stars and their sponsorship deals are the stars of it all.

If you need proof, take Cristiano Ronaldo. As well as captaining, and then managing, his team to victory at the Euros, he’s also playing a major role as a fashion icon.

Team GB Olympians, who smashed the nation’s medals record in Rio, can now be seen in reality TV shows, on red carpets, and as icons for kids outside of the realm of sports. Clearly, sport is part of our everyday culture, and athletes and teams are the cornerstone of marketing strategies for brands in sectors as varied as furniture retail (such as sponsorship of Team GB by DFS) or mobile phones (where Samsung featured past and present Olympians and Paralympians in its Road to Rio campaign).

Sports sponsorship is no longer about slapping a logo onto an athlete and hoping it’ll stick. Ultimately, sponsorships should never sit in isolation—they are an important part of the marketing investment mix and should be seen as working in partnership with every other strand to achieve goals.

This means marketers need to do their homework. They need to have clarity on their sponsorship objectives that tracks back to return on investment. Core to this is acknowledging that sports sponsorships require close working relationships with the athlete, their management team, and their agencies, using their shared expertise to identify the right sport and players to match brand aspirations.

Building A Sponsorship Platform

Recapping on sponsorship 101, it’s vital to understand how your current traditional marketing investments are performing to reach your targets, but also understand the gaps you believe an investment in a sponsorship strategy could help fill.

Obviously, different sports and athletes attract different audiences, so the sport you sponsor should align with the values and profile of your target consumer.

Take DFS, for example. The U.K. furniture retailer wanted to boost engagement with a wide consumer base through its Olympics sponsorship, and communicate its handmade, British values. It designed a limited-edition sofa collection called Britannia, which was inspired by the best of British design, materials, and workmanship. This was presented as a tribute to the athletes who help make Britain great, and share the same passion and expertise in their field, just like DFS.

Mark Mallinder, head of marketing at DFS, claimed that the content featuring the Olympians saw an engagement rate on social media three times the usual average. It had a high view-through rate and traffic migrating to its own channels; and, of course, it had a “pleasing commercial performance,” as he put it.

Developing A Talent Strategy

Using talent just to fill in the gaps around the rest of your marketing is a rookie mistake.

The talent has to fit into your overarching marketing strategy. This can be tiered, and depends on whether you want awareness or engagement from this partnership.

Emerging talent, or lower-level athletes, are likely to be more accessible so are better for usage, and can be used to boost engagement steadily with fans. Big names are good for leveraging their star appeal to create instant awareness. There’s a reason why Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are the highest-ranked sports stars when it comes to sponsorships.

Within athletics we’re approaching a really interesting point. Usain Bolt and Mo Farah are expected to run their last track events next summer, and this changing of the guard offers new opportunities for emerging sports stars to enter the spotlight.

Outstanding performances from junior athletes obviously hint at the returns you can expect as a sponsor. However, this doesn’t tell the full story. CMOs and brands should also consider how that athlete is represented off the field. Sportspeople are role models to many, and their personality off the pitch, as much as on it, can play a big role in their commercial success.

Bolt is undeniably a sensational athlete, but his rise to becoming one of the most marketable sports stars in the world owes much to his personality off the track. His persona is that he’s a big kid, enjoying himself in whatever he does, and fans identify with that.

Whether you look at his exit from a Rio press conference with samba dancers, his claim that he celebrated his historic treble of golds at London 2012 with a box of McDonald’s chicken nuggets, or his iconic lightning pose, Bolt understands how to perform both on and off the track. In the past 12 months, when he successfully won three gold medals, he also earned $32.5million, making him the highest-paid person in the history of athletics.

These quirks of personality can define and add to your brand campaigns, and one of the best ways to identify this is via an athlete’s social media account. Sports stars who have the right followers and share the same values as your brand can be the perfect match to your marketing.

Extending The Sponsorship

With athletes crossing over into every aspect of consumers’ lives, brands now have an opportunity to extend their partnerships beyond traditional TV or print campaigns. Good, regular, and engaging content through social media not only amplifies traditional marketing spends, but it maintains and grows the connection with fans, the athlete, and the brand.

O2 offers one of the best examples of this with its long-running Inside Line series. The online videos offer behind-the-scenes interviews, training ground routines, and team perspectives from England’s test series and previous Six Nations tournaments.

Samsung also played up to sports stars’ personalities with its School of Rio ads for this year’s Olympics. Comedian Jack Whitehall can be seen taking lessons from past and present Olympic and Paralympic greats.

Clearly, the benefits sports sponsorships can bring to your brand as a marketer are huge. Athletes embody strength and a desire to succeed, and that’s not a bad thing for a brand to be associated with. Find the right sport or athlete that embodies and shares your brand values, work on appropriate partnerships that create real engagement with your core audience, and there’s a clear win-win for brand, athlete and, most of all, consumers.