Marketing is a critical business process that many Golf Clubs do very badly or not at all in some cases. With many clubs, marketing always means print advertising and indeed when speaking to some clubs, it becomes apparent that they actually refer to print advertising as “marketing”, as if this is the only way to attract customers!
During the late summer of 2009 I saw a lot of golf club adverts appearing in local papers around the country. The culprits shall remain nameless, but almost to a man they were the most desperate adverts I have ever seen…you could almost smell the fear as green fees were slashed, catering was given away and hard one reputations were ruined overnight. These were mainly adverts to try to attract the “last of the summer wine” in the form of visitors who hadn’t materialised for one reason or another. I really felt for the club managers who found themselves in the dire straits that produced this kind of desperate action. The result I would imagine in most cases was a loss on the deal, because even if they did drum up some last minute bookings they would be for small groups and they had already given all of the profit away in the advert.
Another common sight was the advert, again in local papers, again with a nice picture of the 10th, but this time offering (in some cases it looked like begging) extremely favourable terms on membership fees for new members. It might have been waiving the joining fee or giving the membership for the remainder of 2009 (this was in late summer!) away with 2010 membership or sometimes both. In a few really bad cases I saw benefit after benefit piled on top of these offers…all for free.
In Step 4 of 7 in my new book Golf Business Turnaround-the 7 Essential Steps to Success, available here from Monday 25th January, I look in depth at how golf clubs and golf facilities should be marketing themselves.
By the way…all of that desperate advertising we just looked at was invariably an attempt to get cash in to the club or business quickly as the fear of failure set in. If you had the book, you would already be past that stage, as Step 1 delivers a comprehensive, yet simple formula for getting your cashflow in order…fast!
In what is essentially a step by step blueprint for saving and turning around a struggling golf business, I will reveal many of the advanced techniques and strategies I use with paying clients; and apply the kind of thinking and business innovation that has attracted clients both at home and abroad to seek out our help here at hole18.
In this ground breaking new success manual you will discover an incredibly powerful formula that could turn your golf business from brink of failure to roaring success this year. Each day this week I will share some of what you can expect in the book when you open it next Monday.
In Step 4, I’ll be sharing the simple truth about marketing golf facilities and I’ll show you how to change the marketing mindset in your golf business by simply swapping the word “Marketing” for the word “Promises”. You’ll be blown away by how powerful this section of the book is going to be for your golf business…and you won’t even have to wait until you’ve finished reading to set improvements in motion immediately as this is essentially “painting by numbers!”
In Step 4 you’ll learn:
- How to slash or even eliminate costly advertising
- How to leverage technology to help your staff sell effortlessly.
- How to “know” your doing the right thing in marketing.
- A formula that you can use over and over again to bring all the business you ever want straight to your door.
You can pre-book your copy of Golf Business Turnaround, the 7 essential steps to success by completing the form below: Meantime I’ll be back tomorrow with more news.