One of my favourite spectator sports is boxing. Like many sports there’s a significant gap in earnings between the elite boxers at the top and the vast majority of professional boxers who rely on sponsorship, often at local level, in order to make a living.

I’ve written my thoughts on sponsorship generally in another post here, but wanted to give you some specific ideas on how you could create great visibility by partnering with a local boxer.

One of my points in the previous blog was that sponsorship should focus on your target market, so whether you personally like boxing or not is irrelevant, but dependent on the work you do and your location it could be a great match for your practice.

The demographics for Boxing News Magazine for example are:

• 90% are male
• 80.54% are between 18-45 years old
• 36.17% fall into the ABC1 demographic group
• 63.30% fall into the BC1C2 demographic group

I strongly recommend looking for someone local to your firm who has a good social media following. There are many boxers who may not be that well known to the general public, but have a significant local and regional following on Twitter and Facebook. Through sponsorship you can tap into this, usually for quite modest sums.

If you get asked to sponsor a sports person or team often the packages can be quite basic, perhaps based on where your logo appears on clothing etc. To really get a great return for your money though you might want to think a little wider……

Training blog

Ask your sponsored boxer to write a weekly training diary with photos that will only appear on your website. They can also then promote this via their social media channels once they are published. This will drive traffic to your website over a longer period of time, giving those potential clients great exposure to your firm name and services.

Super charge it: Once these blogs are written think about where else can you use them. Will your local paper or radio promote them? Can you include links to them in your e-newsletter? Can you keep it going beyond a particular training camp and have monthly blogs on fitness and training generally, perhaps tied with some other local health initiatives?

Office appearance

Depending on the profile of your boxer they may be able to attract enough people to come into your offices to have photos taken with them and sign autographs. This is a simple way to get people through the door and see a lighter, friendly side to your practice.

Super charge it: Take photos on the day, turn it into a press release and blog then promote it on your social media profiles and client newsletters.

Signed gloves competition

A low cost way of build up your social media followers. To enter the competition clients must follow you on Twitter, retweet the competition details and tweet a message with a hashtag of your choosing. You then select a winner at random.

Super charge it: Don’t just send them the gloves. Get the winner to come into the office to collect them, take some photos and write a blog/press release on it. Promote this on your social media channels, tagging in your boxer and the winner who will retweet this to their followers.

Training day!

Offer the chance to train with a pro! This will make a great competition for clients or you could get a few members of your firm involved, take some pictures / video and produce a great write up for your local press and your own website. Again it’s a chance to show a different side to law firms and solicitors.

Super charge it: If you decide to involve the firm why not see if any local introducers want to get involved? Estate agents, mortgage brokers, surveyors. This then gives you all the benefits above and turns in into a corporate event that will give you something to talk about for months to come!

Hopefully this post has given you some useful ideas and if boxing isn’t for you, most of these suggestions can be used with other sports. If you’d like advice on sourcing and maximising sponsorships drop me a line here.