Sponsorship is a vital source of revenue and exposure for professional soccer teams, but how can you measure its effectiveness and return on investment (ROI)? In this article, you will learn some practical methods and tools to evaluate the impact of your sponsorship activities on your team's performance, brand awareness, fan engagement, and media coverage.
Before you can assess the ROI of your sponsorship, you need to have clear and realistic goals for what you want to achieve with it. For example, do you want to increase your ticket sales, merchandise sales, or fan loyalty? Do you want to enhance your team's image, reputation, or visibility? Do you want to attract new partners, sponsors, or investors? Depending on your objectives, you will need to choose different indicators and metrics to track your progress and outcomes.
Nascent soccer teams provide brands a unique opportunity for growth and revenue as they cultivate a devoted fanbase. To maximize this opportunity: Focus on creating awareness, engagement, sales, and community outreach within the team's expanding fanbase. Employ specific campaigns to track sponsorship exposure, utilizing metrics such as media impressions, social media engagement (X, Insta, TikTok), growing web traffic, Cost-Per-Impression (CPI), and direct sales. Prioritize naming rights and kit sponsorships, ideally secured early to benefit from lower costs. These avenues not only provide initial affordability but also become more valuable as team popularity rises, offering the most measurable visibility.
Evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of your sponsorship can be done through various methods and tools, depending on the type and scope of your sponsorship activities. Surveys and interviews with fans, customers, partners, and sponsors can help you assess their awareness, recognition, preference, satisfaction, loyalty, purchase intention, behavior, and frequency related to your team and your sponsor. Media analysis can measure the quantity, quality, and tone of media mentions featuring your team and sponsor, as well as calculate the media value and equivalent advertising value of your sponsorship. Social media analysis can track the number, reach, and impact of social media posts involving your team and sponsor; sentiment, emotions, and keywords can also be tracked with social media analytics tools. Lastly, performance analysis can measure the achievements, improvements, and challenges of your team and sponsor in terms of their competitive, financial, and operational performance; it can also compare them with peers or rivals in similar markets.
I think there are three broad areas on how to optimise sponsorship spending that CEOs, FDs and Marketing people should be thinking about. 1 .Do I know how much I am spending on my sponsorship activities, and where? Everyone knows what the headline price is be it $100m a year for the Olympics or UEFA or $20,000 for the local swim team. But do they know where the activation dollars go? What about CRM, prizing, research and all the other elements? 2. Do I know where I should be investing my sponsorship spend to maximise returns? 3. Do I have a simple and effective process to plan, execute and track sponsorship investments?
One very easy way to see return is through a coupon code at matchday. We've had local pizza chains use a specific code with clubs I've worked with in the past and that made it easy to track who came in from the game.
Once you have chosen your methods and tools, you need to collect your data from various sources and platforms. You can use primary data, which is the data that you collect yourself through surveys, interviews, media monitoring, social media monitoring, and performance tracking. You can also use secondary data, which is the data that is collected by others and available from external sources, such as market research reports, industry publications, databases, and websites.
This is talking about data from an external POV. I'd encourage sponsorship marketers to be really interested in internal sales, supplier and human resources data. Answer the question. "Do I know where I should be investing my commercial spend to maximise returns?" Thinking about it strategically across the portfolio (e.g., brands, products and markets), across objectives (e.g., acquisition versus retention) and across target segments and tactically in terms of the right level, mix and timing of activities by campaign and initiatives. Then they can create transparency around current commercial investments relative to objectives and re-allocate commercial investment based on business potential and commercial response.
After you have collected your data, you need to analyze it to extract meaningful insights and conclusions. You can use quantitative analysis, which is the analysis of numerical and statistical data using mathematical and statistical methods and tools. You can also use qualitative analysis, which is the analysis of non-numerical and descriptive data using interpretive and evaluative methods and tools. You can use both types of analysis to identify patterns, trends, correlations, and causalities in your data.
Very important as well to appreciate the negative ROI from fans of rival teams who will go out of their way to avoid the rival teams' sponsors' products. Something not fully appreciated by sponsors. Ps It's Professional Football.....
Letting the data speak is so important here. I though I knew how our ticket sales process worked at MotoGP. Once we started to get high-quality data it changed everything. There was so much we didn't understand until we let the data speak.
Finally, you need to report your findings and recommendations to your stakeholders and decision-makers. You can use different formats and channels to communicate your results, such as reports, presentations, dashboards, infographics, and videos. You can use different styles and tones to tailor your message to your audience, such as formal, informal, persuasive, or informative. You can use different elements and techniques to enhance your message, such as charts, graphs, tables, images, colors, fonts, and stories.
When reporting your findings, you want to make your audience FEEL your findings more so than just read the results. Reports, charts, and presentations are all good ways to do so, but nothing promotes your findings more than assisting your audience in FEELING the results first-hand through a modality that engages as many of their senses as possible depending up the format that you use. When you grab their heartstrings or affect their gut feelings, your report will hold more and longer meaning for them than any other reporting method. When they walk away feeling strong emotions, you have done a better job at sharing your findings.
I think letting people dig in themselves is really useful. Hosting sessions where you and the BU owner together explore data and find insights into how they are getting value and can increase return is invaluable.
There are some methods to ROI that apply across sports, but more unique to Soccer is it's potential global reach, audience diversity, target-ability through distributed dynamic signage or other marketing (e.g. tourneys) and merc. That said, I'll focus on one: Club Loyalty & Culture: The intensity in how a fan identifies with a club means that assessing how your brand attributes match the club’s culture is an important first step. You have to identify the potential lift in product adoption (e.g. you find that your brand is actively consumed by a club’s fans, so calculating the potential lift in different parts of the marketing funnel, as well as the loss potential if a competitor were to partner with the club.
Creating transparency is a critical first step to optimisation. I often see no clear, consistent articulation of objectives or budget visibility across activities and units. For instance, we found that circa ~25% of the sponsorship budget was hidden via internal re-billing.
When evaluating the impact of a sponsorship, it is important to compare the total expenses, including fees, activation costs, and associated marketing expenses, with the value derived from increased brand exposure, engagement, and sales. It is also crucial to consider any intangible or ancillary benefits that may arise from the sponsorship, such as improved brand positioning, strengthened relationships with stakeholders, or favorable media coverage. All of these factors will contribute to the overall assessment of the sponsorship's effectiveness.