Advertorial
‘I’ll be moving all my marketing budget into social media and digital marketing,’ says Steve Cookson – General Manager, Bletchingley Golf Club
I must admit that I’ve always been interested in social media, its marketing power and the benefits that it can bring to a golf club. Over the years I’ve built our Facebook page up to over 1200 ‘likes’ and ideally I’d like to try and post daily on the site if I had the chance to fit it in with my other numerous daily tasks.
I had read stories and been on marketing boot camps about how online and social media marketing had worked for other golf courses. I’ve followed those courses by reading numerous books on golf course marketing during my years as both a Golf and General Manager. My biggest problem was finding the time to actually study, learn and implement the many skills needed to run a proper digital marketing campaign.
By chance I met James Wilkinson from Albatross Digital Golf at the London Golf Show last year. Albatross is a specialist digital golf marketing agency and James is the founder and CEO. During our conversation he took me through a case study of their work with Sale Golf Club and it was pretty compelling stuff but I must admit I wondered if the same type of online campaign could work for us. In May of this year I decided the time was right to take them on for a 3month trial. They offer a guarantee that any revenue not recouped from the money spent on their retainer would be returned in full and that was a deciding factor in us going ahead with them.
It was an extremely smooth process getting up and running with them. James worked directly with me and created a membership acquisition campaign that has helped us generate nearly a thousand leads.
With these new leads we managed to separate the contacts that we knew were interested in memberships and playing rounds at Bletchingley with the ones that were just signing up to win the prize we had offered. This analysis from Albatross was extraordinarily valuable to us. The data that James subsequently supplied to us of these ‘hot leads’ included phone numbers and that meant we’ve now managed to get on the phone and speak directly to these potential customers, building up a relationship with them, and more importantly getting them to the club to meet with me face to face.
The phone hasn’t stopped buzzing and whilst it’s been a lot of work, the reward has been sizeable and well worth all the effort. We still have people replying to me personally from emails sent by Albatross about membership, enquiring about prices, tagging each other on Facebook and I can categorically say we have massively engaged with golfers in the area, the large majority of whom probably never knew we were here!
However, the best part of it all of course is that in just 2 months we’ve managed to acquire 33 new members and our green fees were up by over 30% in the month of July!!!
In all honesty, I never thought we would come close to this level of success and myself, along with the owners of Bletchingley, are absolutely delighted with the results we’ve achieved in such a short space of time.
Now the Membership Acquisition campaign is over we’re looking at new promotions we can run for the rest of the year to keep the momentum going.
This is not an advert for Albatross Digital Golf, however, it is a personal endorsement of the work we’ve done together and the results we’ve achieved.
If you are looking to do more work using social media and digital marketing but don’t have the time to manage it yourself then I couldn’t recommend Albatross Digital Golf enough.
Steve Cookson – General Manager, Bletchingley Golf Club
http://www.bletchingleygolf.co.uk
T: 01883 744 848
E: generalmanager@bletchingleygolf.co.uk
Learn How To Setup A Membership Acquisition Campaign Yourself In Just 1 Hour
Albatross Digital Golf founder and CEO, James Wilkinson, will be running an online webinar training session for golf course managers and owners at 7pm GMT on Monday 12th September or Tuesday 13th September 2016.
The purpose of this webinar is to go through the end to end process of what it takes to setup a membership acquisition campaign like the ones used by Bletchingley Golf Club and by Sale Golf Club who generated over £23,000 in revenue in 9 months using the exact same method.
To save your seat on this FREE webinar training session sign up here: http://albatrossdigitalgolf.com/membershipwebinar
Or for more details call:
James Wilkinson – Founder & CEO, Albatross Digital Golf
http://albatrossdigitalgolf.com/
T: 07966 072952