Whether your golf course is in California, Northern Ireland, or Tasmania, you need an online presence. Golf courses aren’t just for locals, they’re distinguished luxurious locations for top-performing businesspeople worldwide. They’ve got the potential to attract a broader membership base by not relying on traditional, offline marketing strategies.
Online marketing can be difficult. You can easily find yourself struggling to wade through the plethora of strategies and campaigns available to you. Social media, digital PR, SEO, and website UX, to name a few, can seem alien. You’re an investor, a business expert, not necessarily a marketing guru.
This article aims to help you with just that – make the most of your sound investment. Keep on reading for some must-to-know hacks for growing your golf business online.
Why purchase a golf course?
If you’re still on the fence about buying a golf course as an investment strategy this article will help you. Many smart choices are made with thorough research. You need to ensure it’ll work before you sign the cheque.
You should learn more about how to purchase a golf course before diving in. It’s not as simple as “if you build it, they will come”. First and foremost, you need a stellar location that can be accessible by golfers, employees, food and beverage companies, maintenance and so on.
The back end of nowhere might be beautiful, but if it’s not easily accessible by those who do the day-to-day maintenance and upkeep, it’ll fall into shambles. Here’s a quick checklist to get you started:
- Location: easily accessible and attractive to golfers
- Condition: well-maintained course for revenue generation
- Amenities: you’ll need a clubhouse, pro shop, driving range, and restaurant facilities
- Market demand: is there a demand for golf in the area
- Regulatory issues: compliance with environmental and zoning laws
- Financial performance: your predicted profit margins
- Staffing: are staff available locally and willing to be trained
- Marketing: how will you get your golf course in front of your target audience’s eyes
At Growth Hackers, we treat buying a golf course like building a complex ecosystem that only works when every component is aligned. We’ll help you with number 8 (Marketing) in this article, but if you can cross off all the other points then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go forth and invest in a golf course, be it brand new or already established.
The 5 Pillars to Growing Your Golf Business Online
There are five points that stand out when planning to grow your golf business online. They are:
- Website and optimization
- Social media management and marketing
- Email marketing and campaigns
- Online advertising and paid ads
- Monitoring, analyzing and reporting
Let’s jump right into it
1. Website and optimization
If you don’t have a website you can say goodbye to growing your golf business online. It’s the focal point of your online presence. All your social media platforms, business cards, and brand merchandise should all redirect back to your website: it’s the cyber home of your golf business.
Hire someone to build your website in check with your brand book – your tone of voice and style created to attract your target audience. It doesn’t stop there. Websites are not evergreen. They need to be constantly maintained, updated and optimized to ensure they’re ranking top for search engine queries.
This strategy is called search engine optimization (SEO), your website’s H2O. There are two components, on-page and off-page. Both work with keywords and content. Build a content strategy for your website (on-page) and a digital PR campaign for your off-page concentrating on relevant keywords.
For example, start with a topic cluster around how to golf, golfing health benefits, golfing for well-being and so on. Have a whole section dedicated to news and updates in the world of golf. You can write about different equipment and then reach out to those brands and ask for a link to your content about them… that’s for your off-page efforts.
Facilitate the experience of your users with easy navigation, quick loading speeds, and equally engaging on mobile devices. At Growth Hackers, we worked with a golf business from Florida struggling to grow online, and after implementing structured SEO, content clusters, and performance optimization, they significantly improved search rankings and conversions.
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2. Social media management and marketing
You mightn’t have a X/Twitter account, but how often are you redirected to a X (Twitter) thread when reading the news? Social media is inescapable and accessed by every walk of life, your ideal golfing audience included. Don’t go wild though and create an account on every platform. It’s never good to have a dead account.
Conduct market research and discover where your target audience is hanging out. Are they still on Facebook? Or have they migrated to Meta’s visually attractive Instagram? Maybe both. You might also consider the professional social media platform LinkedIn. Whichever platforms you choose you’re going to have to create different content for each.
Don’t worry about the extra work, you can repurpose your website content to suit your social media channels. Share the images on Instagram, news and updates on Twitter/X, stories on Facebook, and thought-proving leadership content on LinkedIn. Social media is also great for competitions and giveaways which are great tactics to attract more members.
To succeed in social media marketing, engagement and consistency are key. Create a schedule and stick to it. Hire a social media marketing manager and remove that pressure from your daily tasks. At Growth Hackers, we helped a gold course from the UK move from scattered, inactive social media accounts to a structured, multi-platform marketing system (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X/Twitter), resulting in a measurable improvement in engagement and brand visibility.
3. Email marketing and campaigns
On average, 67% of your revenue will come from existing customers. They will book your golf resort for their next client meeting, they’ll tell their business partners about your course, and they’ll buy your merchandise and gift cards for family and friends. You need to keep the line of communication open with your customers and the most direct form is through email.
Social media posts battle with the algorithm, yet emails land right in your customer’s hands via their smartphone. The emails can be personalized with ready-made campaigns to provide them with reading material for at least a couple of months. Thereafter you can once again repurpose your website and social media content into email newsletters.
There is quite a bit of red tape when it comes to email marketing. The setbacks of having such a direct line open with your customer.
- You can’t send multiple emails a day
- Content has to be from your company
- You can’t share or sell your email list
- You’re not allowed to spam
- The unsubscribe button needs to be clearly shown on each email sent
The onus is on nurturing an existing relationship. You can hire a specialist for this too. At Growth Hackers, when optimizing email marketing for one of the golf businesses from Australia we partnered with, we improved repeat revenue performance by 37% within 9 months by implementing structured campaigns, segmentation, and personalized content strategies.
4. Online advertising and paid ads
We’ve discussed retaining customers, now let’s get into generating new ones. Growth is both internal and external. Once your current membership list is happy, you can be confident to go and attract new members.
The internet can be difficult to navigate. When the success of your business depends on an algorithm you can’t always trust organic reach. This is where paid or sponsored ads come into play. They work on keywords too.
- You’ve written the content for your website
- You’ve added beautiful imagery to go with it
- You’ve repurposed this content and sent it out on your social media channels and in your newsletter
- However, you’re still not getting the traffic you need
The main issue: subject saturation
There are 39 golf facilities alone in the Cape Cod region. That’s a lot of competition for such a specialized sport. And with Google only showing ten results per page, you have a lot of work and website optimization ahead of you before you can hope to appear consistently on page one of the search results.
One way to beat the competition and get to the top of the list is with sponsored ads. Google Ads is the most popular and easiest to use and manage. You can directly target people who are looking for what you provide; businesspeople looking for their next client meeting location, for example.
Set a budget and pour over the results to see if paid ads are a good return on investment (ROI) for your golf resort. At Growth Hackers, we worked with a golf business owner struggling in the saturated Californian market where organic reach was no longer enough, and after implementing structured Google Ads campaigns and budget optimization systems, they improved customer acquisition and new player acquisition by 34% within 4 months.
Swing your way to success! Boost your golf business with a strong online presence!
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5. Monitoring, analyzing, and reporting
The best part of growing your business online is everything is recorded. Every choice you make, every button your push, and every post you share can be tracked and analysed. This is imperative for the following:
- Understand your choices
- Are they right for your business
- Are the times and days optimal
- Is the money spent worth it
- Are your landing pages converting
Most importantly: are you generating leads? Is all your hard work paying off with new and renewed memberships? At Growth Hackers, we helped a golf club from France move from guesswork-based marketing decisions to a fully data-driven monitoring and reporting system, resulting in a huge boost in optimization speed and campaign performance.
Your online strategy is not set in stone. If something’s not working you can easily change that. See if a particular tactic is working for a couple of quarters and shift the gear if needed. With reporting there’s no second-guessing your decision-making processes.
It also makes it easier for you to manage without having to hire a whole marketing team or outsource to an agency. You can hire a few people to manage your strategies and have them affect the changes after you’ve analyzed the results.
Monitoring your efforts and mining the results is an integral component of your online growth strategy. Track everything you do from the get-go and marvel at how your golf business is growing as the years go by. A great asset when you want to get stakeholders involved.
Ace Your Golf Business with the Perfect Online Growth Strategy
You might be a maverick at event networking and building your membership list, but the numbers will knock your cap off once you bring your efforts online. You can do all this yourself, especially at the beginning if you like to be in the knowhow. There are plenty of online courses you can take to understand the basics.
As your golf business grows online you can hire others to take over the management of your website, social media platforms, email marketing and paid advertising. Or you can reach out to us for ease of mind growth.
Growth Hackers is an award-winning sports branding agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners grow their golf business online, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
