In recent times, there has been a noticeable uptick in financial companies leveraging sports sponsorship strategies to enhance their brand presence.
Social trading and multi-asset investment company eToro is among the companies capitalising on football and other sports popularity to boost brand recognition while educating people about finance.
Stephanie Wilks-Wiffen, Director of Marketing of UK and DACH at eToro, discussed with Insider Sport how the company has leveraged football and other sports in recent years.
Insider Sport: What initially motivated eToro to enter the European football sponsorship market?
Stephanie Wilks-Wiffen: We began sponsoring European football teams not only because many of our key markets are in Europe, but because European football is hugely popular around the world and has a massive international viewership.
We are a global business with clients based in 75 countries around the world, so it makes sense for us to harness one of the biggest platforms in the world to reach hundreds of millions of people, raise awareness of eToro and spread the word about investing. We want to equip as many people as possible with the tools and knowledge needed for investing, and sports events are a very effective way of reaching a wide audience.
Sports teams also have very engaged communities of fans and there is a natural synergy with eToro in this sense, as we’re a community-based investing platform where users communicate their strategies and learn from each other.
IS: What factors drove eToro to significantly increase its presence in European football recently, despite the challenges faced by other companies?
SWW: Our presence continues to expand in Europe and wherever we see strong growth potential, we will include sponsorship within a broader marketing approach and seek out sports partners, which share our values.
As a multi-asset investment platform, we’re less susceptible to market ebbs and flows than firms specialising in single assets, like crypto for example. This gives us the ability to implement a consistent long-term sponsorship strategy.
IS: With the crypto market’s downturn in the last several years, how did eToro approach its partnership deals with clubs to shine the positives of crypto?
SWW: While we offer crypto, eToro is a multi-asset trading and investing platform with over 6,000 instruments including stocks, ETFs, crypto and more. In addition, users can access our CopyTrader system to replicate experienced investors’ activity in their own portfolios and our curated Smart Portfolios for unique investment strategies. Whilst eToro is popular with traders, most of our users are investing for the long term.
We want to support our clients to build long-term wealth with a diversified portfolio of assets and our platform enables this – this is the message we want to project with sponsorship partnerships.
Additionally, eToro has been built on its community of investors and the platform allows users to share and learn from each other. Our partnership deals – with community-powered football clubs – help to highlight this part of the eToro experience to a wide global audience.
IS: What criteria does eToro use when selecting which football teams to sponsor? How do you ensure these partnerships align with your brand values and objectives?
SWW: We aim to sponsor teams in markets where we have a presence and where we feel there is a thriving retail investor community with significant growth potential. In terms of specific teams, we look for synergies in terms of how the clubs market themselves and their openness to being bold with marketing. Other than this, in key markets where we sponsor multiple teams, we prefer to have some geographic spread so that we can engage with supporters from different parts of the country.
Beyond football, is eToro considering expanding its sponsorships to other sports? If so, which sports are of particular interest and why?
SWW: Adding to our strong presence in professional football across Europe, we formed a partnership with Premiership Rugby and started sponsoring the Spanish basketball club Baskonia in 2023. Different sports attract different audiences so it’s important that we diversify our sponsorship approach rather than putting all our eggs in one basket.
IS: How does eToro ensure that its sponsorship deals deliver maximum value? Are there specific strategies or initiatives you implement to achieve your objectives?
SWW: Determining the worth and measuring the success of sponsorships is not a simple task but there are a combination of metrics that we would consider. These might include measuring brand awareness over a set period, looking at new user sign-ups in localised areas relevant to the teams we sponsor, and measuring engagement levels on certain activations that we do with partner clubs. We often look to bring sponsorships to life with creative original activations with shareable quality.
As an example, last season we filmed videos with Premiership Rugby players – this example gained 935 thousand video plays on Instagram alone. We also give back to the fans and our users at games with gifts like co-branded scarves. There are many more approaches you can take and none are perfect, but when considered together, you can get a strong sense of the impact of a sponsorship deal.
IS: What are the long-term benefits of educating fans and clubs on investing? How can trading and investing products enhance the fan experience?
SWW: Football fans come from all walks of life and so do investors. By educating football fans and clubs on investing, we can empower millions of people around the world to use investing to grow their wealth and improve their overall financial well-being. There is a big knowledge and awareness gap when it comes to investing and speaking to a huge audience in an environment in which they are highly engaged feels like the best way to address this gap.
IS: How does eToro see the future of sports sponsorship with the financial sector evolving?
SWW: We are early movers in the sports sponsorship space within the investment world. I think we will increasingly see investment platforms, and more financial institutions, engaging with sports.
Many financial services firms with retail audiences talk about the need for better financial education, but many neglect to make use of the largest platforms with the widest reach such as sports and entertainment. This is because of the harmful notion that money and investing as something that should ‘sit above’ day-to-day life and be delivered in the most serious way possible.
