9 costly golf marketing mistakes and how to avoid them

9 costly golf club marketing mistakes and how to avoid them

7 minute read

If you’re looking to attract more customers to your golf club in the coming years, when it comes to your golf club marketing there are several things you need to make sure you do, and several others you need to make sure you don’t.

Get it wrong, and it can cost your club £10,000s in lost revenue every year. Get it right, and it makes for a very happy committee, board, owner, etc, come the AGM…

I’m sure many of you reading this will have experienced some of these first hand, and here are 9 of the most costly golf club marketing mistakes we regularly see at the 100+ golf clubs we’ve supported over the last 9 years.

Golf club marketing requires consistency.

You – the management – know how great your club is and how much you love it. The majority of people don’t.

We’ve lost count of how many times a club’s said ‘it doesn’t work for us’, after running a solitary social media ad having previously not advertised at all for years.

And, by their own admission, being relatively unknown in the area compared to competitors.

Golfers need educating about what you offer, and it often takes time to generate interest, and even more time to convert that interest into money in the till (see mistake 5 for more on this).

So, you need to capture their attention in a variety of ways on a regular basis to educate them enough to turn their intrigue into an enquiry.

Tip:

Develop a marketing strategy for your golf club that includes consistent, regular, varied advertising content across a variety of marketing platforms.

We have conversations about a club’s medium and long term plans pretty regularly.

Clubhouse renovation – designed and built over the next 3 years: £500k.

Course improvements – 2 year project: £300k.

Membership growth – 150 net growth over the next 5 years: £150k.

But, when it comes to golf club marketing…

Marketing strategy – ‘Haven’t really thought about it’. Budget – ‘as little as possible’.

Clubs so often only look a few months ahead when it comes to marketing.

And, only allocate investment of a tiny percentage of the potential revenue value.

Part of good marketing is consistency (as we touched on earlier). Another part is planning.

Don’t fall into the trap of just looking only a few months ahead.

Tip:

Prepare a 12 month marketing plan, focusing on all key areas the club wants to promote.

Include a breakdown of both the topic and the platform(s) – Social media, email, Google, print – that you want to promote it on.

And finally, ensure you have the expertise on hand to utilise each platform to its full potential.

Golf clubs typically cut marketing spend over the winter to ‘save money’.

Without realising that they’re actually losing money by cutting marketing investment in the winter.

Why?

People are not always ready to buy.

So, investing in capturing their data ahead of time can be invaluable.

Whilst your advertising will likely attract new members in the lead up to and throughout the season, it will typically attract more if you get messages out there over winter to spark interest and capture prospects’ contact information.

Why?

As well as the chance to attract members to join straight away, it allows your sales team to nurture prospects ready to convert before they renew at their current club.

For context, we started work with a new client in Northern England on 1st October 2022.

By 1st March 2023 (5 months in) we had attracted over £23,000 worth of new members. And the rest of the year has seen a steady stream of those enquires we generated over winter converting too.

Tip:

Don’t see winter as a bad time to advertise. Use it to attract prospects

Note: If your course really struggles in the wet and you close a lot in the winter, be strategic with your winter advertising to make sure prospects experience the course when it’s in good shape.

‘It’s JUST marketing, we can do that ourselves’.

Many committees play down the importance, and complexity, of marketing, deciding they can do it themselves by leaving it to J. Smith who’s kindly volunteered because they had a loose connection to a marketing role in a previous job, or have a friend/family member who ‘knows a bit about marketing’.

More often than not, after a few short months, results suffer. And it’s for 1 of 2 reasons:

J had the best intentions and some of the skills to deliver good quality work, but as they’re a volunteer other things have come up that they had to prioritise – job, family, kids – which stalled progress and the chance of real momentum.
J is enthusiastic and really wants to help the club, but doesn’t have the skills and/or knowledge to manage the marketing effectively. So, whilst they’re really trying and giving their time, they are fighting an uphill battle and the results suffer.

Tip:

Don’t think you’re saving money by not investing in professional marketing staff and/or agency support.

Yes, less money will be going out each year if a volunteer takes the reigns. But less, potentially £10,000s less, will be coming in each year as a result of the limited effectiveness of the golf club marketing efforts.

The net result is the club is worse off due to the hundreds of opportunities failing to be created and converted.

Invest in a professional sales and marketing resource to help your club reach its full potential.

So much money gets left on the table every year by this mistake.

You run an event, an offer, an advert, get a load of contact information from interested golfers.

Then what?

In a big percentage of cases, next to nothing.

Maybe a single email sending some more info:

‘Thanks for your interest, here’s some more information. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be any further help’.

Question: How many emails do you get on a daily basis?

Would 1 email from a company you’re partially interested in stand out as the deal clincher, when you have a busy lifestyle and are contemplating spending several £100?

Probably not.

Our sales team see that on average it takes 2-3 months to convert a prospect into a member. And that’s with regular calls and numerous emails sending information, answering questions, organising visits to the club, etc.

It’s taken as long as 10 months and a chain of 50+ emails to convert an enquiry into a member, as people aren’t always ready to buy. Even if they really are keen.

Whether it be waiting for their membership to run out at their current club, a change in jobs, a new baby, or a dozen other reasons, so many people need some time before they can commit.

And, you need to be there when they’re ready.

If you’re not, you could be losing out on £1,000s, even £10,000s of lifetime value per member over the coming years.

Tip:

To avoid this mistake, ensure you have someone responsible for managing sales and make them accountable.

Use a CRM like Zoho and set up processes to streamline the sales process.

Finally, be proactive. Don’t just wait for prospects to come to you. Contact them, add value, and be as helpful as possible.

Recently a new GM, at a client we were managing the membership sales and marketing for, wanted to go a different way with the golf club marketing and take it back in house.

No worries, we’re here to help and if you have the resources in house then great!

The reason I’m using this as an example is the GM position was part time, and when we were finalising sales numbers the comment was made ‘these members only contacted you via Facebook because they couldn’t reach anyone directly at the club’.

What they didn’t realise was that that’s the entire point.

We managed communications with these now members BECAUSE they couldn’t get hold of the club.

If, like in this scenario, the main office contact is part time then the phone isn’t constantly monitored, meaning there are periods when no one is there to answer the phone or respond to enquiries.

People are impatient. If they can’t contact you about joining, a booking, etc, they WILL look elsewhere.

So, if other channels aren’t monitored whilst the office is empty you WILL lose out on sales.

Clubs with small resources miss out on £1,000s each year because they don’t answer the phone or respond to messages in a timely manner.

Tip:

Make sure you are as contactable as possible.

If you are low on resources, set up auto responders on the various platforms the club uses – email, Facebook messenger, etc – to help manage the expectation of when they can expect reply.

Ideally, utilise a resource so people get an answer straight away as people are significantly more likely to convert if dealt with immediately. But, autoresponders will if nothing else help manage expectations of when they can expect a reply.

‘Book now’. ‘Come to our event’. ‘Buy from the pro shop’.

We see it all too often.

So, why is trying to sell too much through organic posts such a big mistake?

People go on social media to have fun. To laugh, look at things they find interesting, get involved in the latest trends. NOT to be sold to all the time.

A constant barrage of sales style posts will lose people’s interest very quickly, and they will stop interacting. Even the most supportive members that ‘like’ EVERYTHING the club puts out will give up eventually (trust us, we’ve seen it).

When your posts start getting less interaction, they will be seen by EVEN less people. The platform’s algorithm picks up that they are getting less interaction and flags them as low quality content, meaning it won’t show future posts to as many people either.

So, not only are you not interesting your potential (and current) customers, you’re getting less and less exposure to them. So it’s totally counter intuitive.

Tip:

Golfers love golf. Show them pictures/videos of the signature hole at sunrise, the view from the clubhouse at dusk, the latest competition win by your juniors, a finished project by your greenkeepers…

Stop the ‘book now for just £25’. Save that for paid ads.

Content is king. So, if getting a professional photographer isn’t in the budget, work with your team to get the best from your creative people and ensure your database of photos and video is always growing.

Green keepers are on the course every day, and can be a great resource for capturing attention grabbing images of the course.

For the majority of companies, the commercial value of organic social media content is dropping all the time.

It’s being seen by less and less people, and it’s not easy to create high quality content that your customers want to engage with on a regular basis.

There are many brands that do this very well and reap the rewards, but the reality for the majority of golf clubs is investing in only organic content is not time or money well spent.

Paid ads allow you to specifically target people by interests (e.g. golfers), age, location, gender, and whole lot more.

Whilst you have to invest money into these ads, when you compare it to the cost of investing in a human resource to create top quality organic content you’re getting a much better and more trackable return from paid ads.

Tip:

Continuously run specific ads with specific objectives, e.g. membership lead generation, online green fee bookings, etc, and don’t try and encompass everything all in the same ad.

This keeps the message clear for the consumer and allows your sales team to make sure their messaging is relevant to the prospect.

‘How big is your visitor email database?’

The 2 most common responses I hear is ‘not very big’ and ‘I’m not sure we even have one’.

There are 2 ways to generate more revenue.

Get new customers
Get your current customers spending more.

Social media and Google are 2 great (and cost effective) ways to attract new customers.

Email is a great way to get your current customers coming back and spending more.

If you were to send an email out advertising last minute green fee availability to past customers, what are the chances of filling those slots sending to a list of 50, compared to 5,000?

You get the idea.

Tip:

Put processes in place to capture as much data as possible.

If you’re using an online booking platform – Intelligent Golf, BRS, ESP, etc – this data should be easily extractable and can form the start of your database.

Other ways to build your database are competitions and incentives.

Just make sure they’re GDPR compliant.