When it comes to women’s sports, leagues and brands are thinking beyond traditional sponsorship and marketing efforts

This Women’s History Month, give the women in your life something special: money. If you’re a brand, you might consider putting that money toward women’s sports.

Some already are: Professional women’s sports sponsorships grew 20% year over year in 2022, according to sports and entertainment intelligence platform SponsorUnited. Still, media coverage and marketing dollars continue to favor men’s sports.

Speaking at a conference last week, Colie Edison, SVP and chief growth officer of the WNBA, said despite raising $75 million from investors last year—much of which is going to “digital products, brand awareness, and fan engagement activations”—the league ultimately still needs “more partners to step up.”

Brands looking to associate with women’s athletics often do so through traditional sponsorships, from paying pro (and, more recently, collegiate) athletes for sponsored posts, to sponsoring entire leagues, which can come with things like stadium naming rights.

But as women’s sports fandom grows, execs at brands and leagues are thinking outside the box about partnerships and marketing strategies that are more substantive.

Off-court work

The WNBA has been working with a handful of major brands to get them more involved. In 2020, the league announced its Changemakers platform, which is dedicated to “establishing a two-way partnership” with companies like AT&T and Deloitte, Edison said last week at the Sport Integrity Global Alliance (SIGA) 2023 Summit on Female Leadership in Sport.

Not only do brands in the program pay for traditional sponsorships, but they’ve also pledged to help the league in other ways: Google played a role in ensuring broadcast-TV slots for all WNBA playoff games, Edison said, and the company is serving as the presenting sponsor of the league’s ESPN broadcasts this season. US Bank is “teaching financial literacy to the players,” and Nike serves as the league’s outfitter in addition to helping with youth basketball initiatives, according to Edison.

Nike and the WNBA—in addition to the LPGA, NWSL, Adobe, Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, and more—are also part of the Women’s Sports Club, a coalition announced at the summit by Sports Innovation Lab co-founder and CEO Angela Ruggiero. The initiative, created by the Sports Innovation Lab and Ally Financial, is dedicated to “improving media investment in this landscape,” Ruggiero said.

Those that are investing seem to be finding it fruitful. Mastercard, for instance—which hosted the SIGA summit and is a partner of the NWSL, the Arsenal Women Football Club, and World Rugby’s Women in Rugby program, to name a few—has found that “women’s sport is good business,” Mastercard SVP of Global Sponsorships and Consumer Marketing Alison Giordano told Marketing Brew at the event.

“This is not a charity. We are a commercial organization, as are the other brands investing,” Giordano said. Fans of women’s sports are valuable for marketers because they’re “very, very interested in supporting the brands that support women’s sport,” she added.

Reaching fans in the stands

Some leagues are working to court more women fans. Take the MLB, which is taking steps to reach women in its marketing efforts, according to MLB VP of Partnership Activation Courtney Coppotelli.

Those efforts are “very preliminary,” Coppotelli told us, but she said MLB is looking at ways to “infuse baseball” into “culturally relevant events” along the lines of food festivals, concerts, and fashion shows.

Meanwhile, Edison highlighted WNBA League Pass, its own DTC platform, which is intended to be the “streaming home for women’s basketball,” she said.

“Fans of women’s sports have always had to seek out the product. They’ve always had to go digital first. It’s never been easy to find,” Edison said. “Our No. 1 goal is to make it easier to be a fan of the WNBA, and digital is the number one way we can do that.”

Ultimately, some brands are seeing firsthand that growing interest has an impact on sales.

David Picioski, head of global marketing partnerships and collaborations for team sports at Wilson Sporting Goods, said when the brand rolled out a men’s-sized version of the orange-and-white WNBA basketball, it promoted the product on social. “It was the best-performing social campaign of the year last year for conversions, for sales,” he said.

Plus, about 63% of purchasers were men, Picioski added, which “goes to show that there is interest and demand from the male side” in women’s sports, not just vice versa.