Visitor Marketing

Topics covered in this section include:

Use your members to attract new visitors
Use your existing visitors to attract new visitors
What you need to know about your visitors
Marketing techniques used to acquire new visitors

Increasing visitor business

Golf clubs are facing increasing emphasis on visitor business. With more than 1 million nomadic golfers choosing to pay and play for their golf, rather than joining a club, attracting visitors and potentially new members to your club on a regular basis has never been so important.

Attracting and retaining visitor business relies on a planned and sustained approach which takes in all the aspects of marketing, customer relationship and customer care.

There are two key ways to increase visitor revenue at your club

• Attract new visitors
• Sell more to existing visitors

Visitors are also important to your business not only for the revenue they bring but also the valuable feedback and information which can help you to improve your golf club and what it offers.

Where to find more visitor business

It is far easier to generate more custom from existing customers than it is to find new ones. Therefore, any programme to encourage growth in visitor business should start with your existing customer base. This takes two forms - your members and your existing visitors.

Use your members to attract new visitors

In 'Recruiting New Members' you can see how a membership referral programme is important when recruiting new members, and the same should apply when encouraging more visitor business.

Word of mouth marketing is the best recommendation there is and your members should be the best ambassadors. This assumes that pride and satisfaction with their club is high (if it isn’t then see retaining members) and that you have properly communicated the benefits of attracting more business to your golf club in order to promote healthy future and maintain current levels of fees.

Your members need to be given the tools and the incentives to bring more customers and having built up a picture of your member profile, when and how often they play, it should be a simple process to foster those playing habits to include the opportunities to bring more guests.

Ideas include:-

Members’ invitation day: Already a regular feature at most clubs but there may be room in the schedule for more than one
Open competitions: Rather than play in their usual fourball, encourage members to promote the event to their golfing acquaintances.
Member introductions: your members will come across fellow golfers in all works of life - business, personal, other social interaction. Create a member promotion scheme which allows them to hand over a business/marketing card, signed by them which gives the recipient a special member introductory rate for them and a partner at the golf club. The cards can be timeless by referring them to the golf club website to look at the prevailing special rate and they must book in advance, quoting the introductory offer and member. This will allow your golf club to track it. The introductory rate should never be less than your member guest rate which is usually limited to a certain number per year.
Mixing business and pleasure: you will now know from your membership surveys how active your members are in business and in what type. Another successful promotion could include incentivising members to mix business with pleasure by promoting a ‘corporate programme’ to encourage them to use the golf club as a business tool. A typical example could include special rates for weekday games plus lunch; or nine holes after work plus dinner. This will already be possible of course using the member guest rate system but a simple shift in the marketing can encourage members to think completely differently about a membership benefit that is already available to them. This should also be extended to using the club for meetings, business lunches and even customer entertaining.

Don’t be frightened to ask for the business
There seems to be reluctance on the part of most golf clubs that asking their members to sell their club is somehow not the done thing. On the contrary. As discussed in our section on membership recruitment and retention, being able to introduce guests and golfing acquaintances to preferential treatment or price at their golf club is another member benefit which you should actively promote and foster its use by your members.

Use your existing visitors to attract new visitors

On the basis that it is widely regarded as between 7 and 20 more times expensive to acquire a new customer, it make sense to first concentrate on getting those you already have to spend more.

In order to do so, you first need to know who your customers and are and then what makes them buy from you.

What you need to know about your visitors

As discussed under membership recruitment and retention you need to have some basic facts about your visitors in order to build up a picture of who they are and how and why they are already existing customers:

Who they are: basic contact details, including address and email address details
How they came to buy from your golf club: were they introduced by a member, did they respond to a special promotion by mail or email; were they referred by a partner business such as a local hotel, did they find you on the internet?
How often they visit your golf club and when: tracking their playing habits will allow you to target them correctly with spare capacity and special offers at your club
How they buy: is it on the internet, by telephone, do they respond to direct mail offers
What they think about you: if they are already visiting you they could be visiting more. You need to find out what they like and dislike about your club and work to those strengths. Customer satisfaction surveys are a key tool here and are dealt with under our section on building customer relationships
What they think about your competitors: if they regularly visit other golf clubs in your area and as they are likely to be nomadic golfers they probably will, find out how you compare in key areas such as quality of golf course, welcome, accessibility, pace of play, facilities such as catering. Don’t ask about price- you should know that from your own competitor analysis.

The benefits of understanding your visitors

By identifying and understanding the key drivers to your existing visitor business, it will allow you both to sell more and also to target similar new customers. However, you first have to collect and manage that information and ensure it is both up to date and easily accessible. See Building a Database for more details.

If you create a database on your visitors, it will allow your club to do the following things:

Boost sales from new and existing customers by having identified their triggers and being able to market to them in a cost effective and timely fashion
Develop more effective communication with your visitors through personalised and regular contact
Ensure that by delivering the right marketing message at the right time you are increasing customer satisfaction and retention
Build on customer relationships to encourage increased business

Marketing Techniques used to acquire new visitors

This section looks at the fundamentals of each marketing technique when looking to generate new visitor business. There are 4 key areas that a golf club should use in its efforts to acquire more new business but these are not the only methods:

Advertising
Public relations
Direct marketing (promotions)
E-marketing

1. Advertising

This is the tried and tested method for most golf clubs as it's has been available for many years thanks to an increasing number of golf magazines and newspapers - free and paid for.
The disciplines surrounding advertising are discussed in our separate section on advertising and PR but it is worth repeating to top 10 tips here:

Decide what it is you are trying to achieve - don’t just run ad hoc campaigns
Know your target audience
Find the best media through which you can reach them
Decide when and how often
Be clear in your advertising brief to any agency and make sure you have good quality design materials for them to use
Create an advertising campaign that is clear, attractive and easily adaptable and test the message on golfing friends, family
Negotiate hard when spending your precious advertising budget
Make sure the campaign is measurable and that you can monitor it. Make sure you staff know about it as well
Review is periodically and never be afraid to alter it if it doesn’t appear to be working or push more money behind things that are
There is such a thing as free advertising- especially on the internet- so make sure you use all the tools available to do. Check our e-marketing section.

2. Public Relations

Public relations is probably one of the most under utilised of all marketing tools in golf club marketing. Mention PR and people immediately think of high fee agencies, glossy brochures and huge entertaining expenses.

The fact is that golf club members and their staff often create the best PR for your business and it is unlikely that the average golf club would need to employ a PR agency.

Understanding that word of mouth marketing is the most powerful weapon in any business, good editorial coverage whether its in the local media or specialist golf media can be priceless and can be relatively easy to secure if you know where to start and how to go about it.

The benefits of independent editorial are instant credibility within the market place which in turn will get people talking about you and hopefully visiting your golf course. The added bonus is that members always love it when their golf course is in the media (assuming it’s for the right reasons).

Visit public relations to see how you can make it work for your golf club

3. Direct Marketing

The success of any direct marketing campaign depends on how well it is planned and targeted. As previously discussed, it relies on access to good data whether the golf clubs’ own or acquired through a third party.

Direct marketing is very cost effective as it allows a golf club to:

Focus on a small sector of their existing customer base
Measure the success of the campaign through the responses
Test market the campaign

A successful campaign can help in all these areas:

Encourage your existing visitors to use the club more
Aid in building good customer loyalty and retention
Prompting contact with lapsed visitors
Generating new business

See direct marketing to read more tips on how to implement a successful campaign.

4. Email Marketing

This is fast becoming the marketing and communication tool of choice for most golf clubs. It is cheap and easy to implement, is timely, encourages response and is very easily trackable. Once you have built your mailing list, email marketing should be the mainstay of any visitor marketing campaign. Our section on e-marketing offers tips on how to implement a successful email marketing campaign.