Golf is going underground!
How can we continue to innovate? This was the question we (The Revenue Club) asked ourselves on behalf of our partner Get Golfing. Having partnered for over seven years to deliver a sales and marketing solution across all thirteen of their golf clubs, all venues have recently moved over to Golfmanager, allowing them to access the gold standard of tee sheet technology in the industry. The CRM system ‘HubSpot’ has been implemented at each of the venues, helping them to optimise and maintain ongoing sales and marketing campaigns. And hundreds of Google ads are run across their 13 venues, with dozens of Meta campaigns containing hundreds of adverts for their target market. The outcome of all these initiatives was that 86% of their casual green fee sales were made online in the last calendar year, and of the £4 million+ generated in online sales, 74% came through our online ads. This is a return on ad spend (ROAS) of over 2,000% that has proven to be a success, but how could we innovate further?
Across every element of marketing we deliver at The Revenue Club, we focus on the flywheel model of attracting potential customers, engaging with them both onsite and digitally, then delighting them with a great product and smart automations. This helps turn strangers into prospects, then into customers and finally into promoters… doing our work for us!
A key component of the flywheel strategy is our complimentary marketing strategy. A customer sees our Meta ad, which stimulates interest. If they search for ‘golf tee times’ on Google they’ll likely see our ‘search’ ad, further cementing their interest. Then they’ll be served by our Google ‘Pmax’ and ‘Video’ ads across YouTube, Gmail and other Google products. This might prompt a visit to one of the courses at which point they’ll be registered in HubSpot, which will allow us to retarget them with membership ads and eventually convert them into a member and then into a promoter.
It’s a successfully proven cycle but it lacked one thing, an offline presence to keep Get Golfing venues firmly rooted in the subconscious of the customer when they’re not on their phone.
Enter the idea to advertise on the London Underground, a transportation network that handles over 4 million passengers on a working day and an untapped resource not used by golf clubs. We ran a two week campaign featuring LEP’s (posters on escalators) across 18 stations including Waterloo, Bond Street and Clapham. The objective was to target corporate stations that customers typically travel to for work, as well as stations nearer our venues where our target demographic resides. Over the two week period we generated over 3 million impressions.
The main promotion of the ad was to promote Get Golfing’s points based flexible membership, which allows a golfer to play any of the courses using their points and an app (powered by Pacesetter) to book. We utilised a simple design showcasing the “13 venues, 1 membership” slogan. We also anticipated that this would evoke curiosity in Get Golfing and their venues leading to green fee sales, golf day and event sales. More than this, we wanted to enhance the brand of Get Golfing. This campaign and partnership with TFL, portrayed them as a major player in the golf landscape.
This wasn’t designed as a standalone campaign, but rather as another pillar in our complimentary marketing efforts. We altered our Google ‘Search’ ads to target tube locations and focus on keywords associated with the London Underground ad. We ran a complimentary Meta flexible membership campaign centered around the same slogan. All enquiries ran through Hubspot, building the databases further.
The results were impressive. We achieved a 39% YoY increase in traffic to their venues membership pages. Total membership enquiries increased 101% YoY, and there was a 167% increase compared to the preceding two week period. Membership enquiries from our Google ads increased by 41% YoY, and 186% compared to the preceding two week period. Total enquiries increased by 68% YoY and Get Golfing enjoyed their most successful April for green fee revenue, increasing their online revenue by 80% YoY, aided no doubt by an effective integrating marketing campaign linking both physical and digital marketing.
