Driving commercial value for UEFA’s partners through objective-led digital activations

The UEFA Men’s Club Competitions’ social and digital channels are among the most followed in global sports, with over 260 million followers across its social media channels and nearly 100 million cumulative visitors on its website and apps each season.

TEAM Marketing’s Digital unit works closely with UEFA and its commercial partners to develop the strategy and delivery plan to maximise partner value created from these digital platforms.

Begin with clear objectives

Clear and measurable objectives lay the foundation for effective digital activations, so the first step of any plan is to understand a commercial partner’s objectives.

Is the aim to target a certain demographic? Achieve a certain brand positioning? Sell products? Applying the marketing funnel supports the determination of these objectives.

Once we understand what UEFA’s commercial partners are trying to achieve – either with specific campaigns, or for the season as a whole – TEAM works with UEFA and agency partners to develop a plan to activate across UEFA’s social and digital channels.

Any plan for digital delivery needs to find a balance between achieving a commercial partner's objectives and creating authentic fan-focused content. Activations should extract maximum value for commercial partners, whilst ensuring UEFA’s competition channels continue to grow and serve fans the football-first content they want to see.

Select the right tools from the Digital Toolkit

Once objectives are defined, TEAM works closely with UEFA’s commercial partners to turn their concepts into reality by helping curate and amplify campaign messages via the Digital Toolkit.

The Digital Toolkit is a framework for how commercial partners can activate, holistically, across UEFA’s social and digital channels. It consists of six primary touchpoints.

Each touchpoint may require a bespoke message, tone of voice, or format type. TEAM, working together with UEFA, advises commercial partners on how to deliver effectively across each touchpoint.

Activating holistic digital campaigns, across various fan-facing touchpoints, brings multiple benefits and helps to maximise value across the marketing funnel, including:

Increased recall
Consistent messaging in different digital environments
Tailored and personalised content
Result-oriented delivery

The aim is to create a campaign that activates the right touchpoints that deliver against specific objectives. For example, if a commercial partner is looking to run a data-focused ticket competition in a specific market, the best touchpoints to leverage are paid media and email marketing, not organic social. However, if, for example, a commercial partner is seeking broad global reach and engagement like the artist announcement of the UEFA Champions League Kick-off Show, UEFA's organic social channels offer the greatest visibility.

Use paid media and audience targeting to drive effectiveness

Digital platforms allow for both broad and targeted activation plans, enabling commercial partners to achieve objectives across the full marketing funnel.

UEFA’s social media channels reach hundreds of millions of fans each week. For objectives of mass awareness, these are fantastic touchpoints to utilise. However, campaigns are increasingly shifting toward serving targeted consumers tailored or personalised messaging – with the aim of driving a higher degree of interaction, effectiveness and return on investment. Targeted campaigns are best delivered leveraging the power of paid media.

A robust paid strategy is essential to the success of driving commercial value for partners across UEFA’s digital assets. Through paid media – buying advertising inventory on social media platforms like Meta, TikTok, and X – commercial partners can tap into robust audience targeting.

Leverage performance insights to iterate and optimise campaigns

After every campaign, we measure performance, report on success, determine whether the activation has achieved planned objectives and gather lessons that help inform future campaigns. Even in areas of underperformance, insights are developed and highlighted to ensure that amendments and optimisations are made – either whilst the campaign is still live or as a key lesson for the next one.

TEAM leans on the data and guidance of our Insights unit to track and report performance numbers across the Digital Toolkit. Targets and benchmarks help guide performance indicators, which allow TEAM and UEFA to evaluate campaigns, then iterate (adapt based on learnings) and optimise to deliver the best results.

UEFA and TEAM work closely together to review performance and gather insights to allow for optimisations throughout the campaign and for UEFA’s commercial partners to apply lessons toward future campaigns.

Provide trusted guidance for long-term success

Through a clearly defined Digital Toolkit, a collaborative approach to campaign delivery, and hundreds of digital campaigns delivered, TEAM serves as a trusted advisor to UEFA’s commercial partners and UEFA in extracting partner value from UEFA’s digital assets.

To curate digital activations that drive partner value for UEFA’s commercial partners, TEAM and UEFA focus on the following steps:

Developing clear and concise objectives, with corresponding KPIs;
Tailoring campaign content to multiple touchpoints across the Digital Toolkit;
Managing versatile campaigns, that include defining a clear audience strategy, and allow for broad or specific targeting; and
Providing robust reporting and insights to assess performance against agreed objectives and success indicators.

Through these steps, TEAM and UEFA have helped drive significant value for commercial partners across the various digital assets. Digital is the fastest growing element of the UEFA Club Competitions sponsorship offering and is constantly evolving – our commitment is to continue to evolve as a team also, focusing on future digital trends and strategies to remain at the forefront of the digital sports marketing industry.