There are over 15,000 golf courses in the U.S. which make up about 45% of the golf courses around the world. When it comes to marketing efforts, your online presence and activity is important because you are competing for the same audience as other courses in your area, state and region.
Digital marketing is an effective way to retain current customers and gain new ones each day. Today we want to uncover 6 easy digital marketing strategies you can implement for your golf course…
- Maintain a strong presence on social media. Make sure you run effective social media marketing campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and other platforms. It is important to upload high-quality pictures and videos showing off your beautiful greens. Engage with your audience. Ask the them to share and comment, and do the same back to them.
- Optimize your website. There are many layers to optimizing your website so that your golf course shows up high in search engine results. The first thing we like to help our clients do is identify and implement keywords, backlinks, internal and external links and image and video tags. Other ways to optimize your website include:
- write and publish blog posts using keywords and phrases
- optimize your website for mobile uses
- audit your website and fix any broken links
- understand your websites user experiences (UX)
- Offer easy online tee times and packages. Running special offers and attractive golf packages on your website can usually answer questions that might show up in your search engine results. Use your website to offer discounts on equipment, price cuts during an off season or to show pictures and videos of your courses. Signing up for a tee time should also be easy to do online and from a mobile device. Mobile devices account for over half of all organic search engine visits in the U.S. so we know that if people are looking for a tee time or are interested in your golf course, if you don’t allow them to easily sign up and find this information from their phone, you could potentially be losing 50% of new customers. With technology today, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to take reservations online and streamline this process. We can help you implement this on your website if you need.
- Encourage testimonials. When a golfer likes and has a good experience at your course, he/she is likely to return and tell their friends about their experience (just like you would do if you visit a hotel, store or restaurant.) Encourage testimonials through email campaigns, on your website, Google and more. And when you get them, publish them! Push them out to the public online. Check out the testimonials you have on Golf Advisor and make sure you have reviews so that when other golfers want to see other expert, unbiased opinions of you, they can find it. Just think, if the course 15 minutes from you has 25 reviews and you have 2-3, which course are more people going to trust?
- Capture leads. Make sure your website has lead generation forms that will provide you with leads who are interested in golf lessons, tee time and course info, events, etc. Your email campaigns should also contain lead generation forms and/or link to a landing page that has one. Your website should be working for you! Gathering leads is easy when it’s done the right way using calls to action online. Create social media posts that link to these forms as well.
- Use push and pull marketing techniques. Push marketing techniques focus on selling and growing your customer base. However, golf is a unique market that doesn’t require a lot of this. Engaging videos and pictures on social media will sell themselves. This is what is referred to as pull marketing. With pull marketing you let viewers come to the conclusion to visit your course on their own.
Give us a call today to learn more about how we can help you implement these and other digital marketing strategies that will help you grow!
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