GOLF COURSE
CONTENT MARKETING
You may be asking yourself at this very moment, What Is Golf Course Content Marketing?
Relevant and useful content that both entertains and engages your customer should be at the core of all your marketing initiatives.
Traditional marketing has become less effective each and every day as the consumer becomes more aware and educated and less tolerant of spam based promotional marketing. As a forward-thinking marketing company, we believed strongly in the fact that there must be a better way.
Enter Content Marketing.
The Content Marketing Institute defines Content Marketing as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.
Over many years of marketing our own golf courses as well as throughout this past 10 years of marketing golf course for our clients, we have discovered one very important thing; we needed to be different in how we communicated to the consumer. Whether it was through our website, blog, social media, Eblast or any other form of communication if we did not do something different in our marketing than how is it we could expect different results. We found most golf courses were providing very static, fact-driven, sales oriented type copy in everything they did all geared around nothing other than always trying to sell something. The problem was the end user or consumer was being bombarded with this exact approach from many different companies in many different industries and they soon grew tired of the sales only approach and began to tune-out, opt-out and look elsewhere.
Synergy's approach became very different at this point as we began to focus on engaging and entertaining our customer with the thought that if we did it this way and got the customer to navigate our website, read our blog or open our Eblast etc. we where more likely to sell them something if they didn't realize we where trying to do so!!!
Synergy introduced the first Eblast template with built-in ways to entertain the customer. Each beautifully designed template has buttons connecting back to the golf courses website that show Golf Quote of the Week, Golf Article of the Week, Golf Tips of the Week as well as Golf Video of the Week. These different pages are updated automatically each week so your customer is always seeing something new and interesting.
Synergy also introduced the FYI & Fun page or section of the website which was also designed to entertain and engage. We made available on our golf courses website The Rules of Golf, The Fun Golf Vocabulary, Golf Etiquette, Golf Videos, Golf Trivia Contests, Games To Be Played At The Golf Course, you could even go on our sites and Play A Virtual Game of Golf. Imagine the look on the customers face when they find these interesting amusing and downright fun things to ready play and do on your website.
Synergy recently built the first interactive News & Blog webpage that provided an easy way to engage, entertain, as well as educate, with feel-good information posted directly from the club and strategic blog writing by key staff in addition to the 3 to 5 post generated by Synergy Golf each week. The key to this new system is that the information posted here will automatically syndicate or is automatically posted to your main three Social Media Channels, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as an additional 5 - 10 handpicked sites like Word Press, Blogger, Gravatar, Tumblr, Delicious, Diigo, Evernote, Get Pocket, GDrive, One Note, BufferApp and Bitly. This is the easiest way to disseminate your information onto the World Wide Web to achieve not only marketing results but SEO and Backlinking objectives also.
On this same page, we also have a video feed so that you can provide your own video as another form of entertainment or we can program it to update weekly with the Golf Video of The Week. The last part of this page just introduced is a news section with a live feed from Golf Digest. Your golf customer can now come to your website and receive all their golf news right from you.
The most successful form of content marketing and the greatest accomplishment we have introduced to the golf industry has been our innovative, interactive and fun to play online contests. We found one of the greatest issues facing the industry was the ability to collect data on their customer. Most understood how important it was but could not find a way to easily and consistently collect name, email and phone number. Our customers now have no issue as we currently have two different contest that runs right on their website. One is a Long Drive Contest and the other is a Closest To The Pin Contest. These virtual games are used to offer the customer a chance to win a prize through well-known games like long drive while really distracting them from the real purpose of the contest which is to gather their data. We found that these contests can be run on tablets in the shop or on a Kiosk setup and staff with very little effort can direct people to play these games and hence collect data
Currently, we are recommending to use the new Long Drive Contest as you main Data Collection tool and offer the main prize as a qualification to a Long Drive Day at the course at the end of the season so now we turn a contest into an event that can also bring in new revenues.
The Closest to The Pin Contest is going to be utilized to collect data on all tournaments and events at your club. Most tournaments that are played at your course, there are two things that have generally happened, you had difficulty collecting data on the customer playing in the event and you were always asked to donate a prize to the event. Now you can use the contest to collect data while they play a virtual Closest to the Pin Contest introduced at the registration table and the prize they win is the same as you were always donating anyway.
Content marketing is used by leading brands and by many prominent organizations around the world, including P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and John Deere, and it is also developed and executed by small businesses and one-person shops around the globe. Why? Because it works.
Specifically, there are three key reasons — and benefits — for enterprises that use content marketing:
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Increased sales
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Cost savings
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Better customers who have more loyalty
Content is the present – and future – of marketing
Go back and read the content marketing definition one more time, but this time remove the relevant and valuable. That’s the difference between content marketing and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.” Companies send us information all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable (can you say spam?). That’s what makes content marketing so intriguing in today’s environment of thousands of marketing messages per person per day.
Marketing is impossible without great content
Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part of your process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing:
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Social media marketing: Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.
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SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
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PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.
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PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
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Inbound marketing: Content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads.
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Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.
