Boxing marketing
Thinking outside of the box
There is huge potential for online marketing campaigns within the boxing industry. The sport lends itself well to link baiting and viral strategies, using videos, online games and unique concepts. These strategies can generate lots of traffic and inbound links to your website, which helps build your online fan base and increases general interest.
Below is an example of a unique concept for a David Haye vs. Wladimir Klitschko fan site created by Box Pro:
The aim of the poster was to summarise the history up to the current events surrounding David Haye in a format suitable for both the casual fan and more dedicated followers of boxing. A comic stripped format was the perfect mechanism. The result was a very visual, stylish and high impact design that was also very unique. The combination of these elements made it perfect for a link bait strategy, because this is something that visitors linked to and shared with friends.
The style of comic strip portrays David as the Hero and the Klitschko's as villains to create the conflict, and so that the reader automatically roots for David. The fighters need to be seen as representing very different sides. David is the up and coming challenger, entering the division as an underdog, and the Klitschko's are the untouchable champions.
As with any good comic strip, the final scene shows a cliff hanger where Vitali Klitschko potentially sees weaknesses that he can exploit in David. This helped create the hype around the fight to encourage people to enter the site and find out more. There needs to be doubt over the outcome of the fight to make it exciting. If the user thinks they already know who will win, they won't be as interested. This theme was then carried on throughout the internal pages of the web site.