Golf Marketing Strategy #18 - Marketing Domination

Over power the competition with a superior marketing

Excludes – Those without a good marketing budget, rural non-destination clubs without a suitable population base within driving distance

Targets – Best suited to large population bases where a huge audience can be reached within a 5-25, mile radius although works for destinations on a much wider basis.

Examples – Treetops Resort, Garland Resort

Tactics: Dominate search engines, dominate landing pages, build massive email list, create large social media following. Communicate often across multiple channels to dominate top of the mind awareness.

Commentary: At Treetops Resort we grew their email database by 42,000 names in a single season while increasing their Facebook fan base to 52,000 fans. This gave them a massive tactical advantage in frequently and inexpensively reaching a large numbers of golfers with their message while their main competitor had just 3,000 fans and around 8,000 emails. We also dominated the search engine rankings. The results were dramatic they went form a ten-year history of million-dollar losses to a 1.2 million-dollar profit in just 12 months!

At Eagle Sticks we built a database of 18,000 subscribers in just over a month! At Mayakoba Resort in Mexico we built a database of 15,000 golfers in just 90 days. At Druid’s Glen in Dublin, Ireland we did built a database of almost 16,000 in a week!

All thing being equal he with the biggest database wins. If your database of local golfers or Facebook fans is 20,000 and your competitor has 2,000 you reach ten times more people with your marketing message. This is not rocket science in fact it’s one of the simplest and proven strategies I know, yet few clubs commit to it.

Opportunity: With the amazing popularity and targeting offered by social media it has never been easier to build a huge media following for your club. If you think about it that is what your various digital assets actually are, a media company. If add up the traffic from your website, the number of emails you have, the number of Facebook fans you have, the number of YouTube subscribers you have, the number of Twitter followers you have and continue on with this Pintrest, Instagram and whatever other social media you use you will find you already have substantial reach. If you make doubling or tripling that reach as your primary marketing strategy you will undoubtedly have a dominant position in your marketplace in terms of the cost effectiveness of reaching golfers in your market.

If you use this dominant position two nurture and engage with golfers in your marketplace and follow up with relevant sales promotions there’s little doubt your business will increase. This has been the primary strategy we have used at Legendary Marketing since our inception over 20 years ago. The only thing that has changed is how we drive traffic to the various landing pages we offer. Originally, we did this through print ads and direct mail offers that sent prospects to a customer’s website. Now it’s done almost exclusively through social media or pay per click ads and landing pages thus making it more cost-effective and more potent than ever.

Sidebar - An Inconvenient Truth - How Club Mangers Make a Conscious Decision to Lose!

Every strategic marketing decision comes with a win or a loss attached to the outcome, there are rarely any ties. Let’s say the previous manager at your club made the decision to use a Golf Now website. (or EZ-Links or for that matter just the very lowest cost provider) The fact that he’s made that decision means you cannot possibly have the best website. The sales copy on your website will be generic. There will be little effort to collect data. You will not have the latest technology with tools like send time optimization to maximize your email open rates. Or marketing automation to follow up automatically with the traffic that lands on your website.

What you will have is a low-end, inexpensive, (of course that’s mainly what Golf Now wants you to think) trading one tee time a day could in fact be very expensive, two could be devastating. 

On the plus side, you’ll have a national brand that run ads on their TV channel promoting their booking site, of course all of your competitors are also on their site. Golf Now or EZ-links incomes from selling tee times. They have no interest in helping you sell golf outings, memberships, weddings, or enhancing your income from your food and beverage operation. None!

They are only interested in selling tee times and you can bet your life they are more interested in selling all their trade tee times, from all the others course in town before anything else.

The previous manager may have thought that trading tee times for a website and email marketing rather than paying cash was a smart and cost-effective thing to do. He had of course only looked it from a cost perspective and not for a moment considered the massive disadvantage the course would have by consciously opting for inferior marketing at every level.

Every strategic decision about marketing has consequences and the consequences of having outdated technology, poor sales copy, little effort at data collection, no creativity and no real interest in growing any revenue source at the club other than green fees will in fact have a devastatingly effect on overall revenue. The lost opportunity cost of using inferior marketing tools is staggering.

Choosing superior technology and professional marketing is easily worth six figures or more to a club but since few managers understand the implications they just blindly opt for what appears to be cheap and easy.

• What would it be worth to your club to double the number of golfers in your email database?
• Triple the number of outing or wedding leads?
• How about doubling your email deliverability rates?
• Then having a corresponding increase in your open rates and response rates?
• Have marketing automation follow up and sell retuning visitors automatically?

The short answer is a great deal but you cannot get that type of performance from any company where the website and marketing efforts are nothing more than an inconvenient service they must offer to support their very different agenda. Anyone who does not understand this is an idiot!

It would be like playing in a tournament with persimmon woods and balata balls because they are “Free” while your completion bombs Pros V1’s with their Epic drivers 100 yards past you!

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