How A Golf Course Benefits From Online Advertising

Online advertising is quickly changing from an optional form of reaching consumers with marketing messages to the dominant medium for advertisements. In fact, eMarketer, a well-known research firm, expects spending on online advertisements to surpass that of print advertisements this year and to begin to rival spending on television by 2016. However, trends aren't necessarily the most convincing arguments to a golf course owner or manager for investing in online advertising. In order to help make sense of the benefits of reallocating part of a marketing budget to online advertising, I’ll explain the opportunities it presents for courses and how they will actually benefit.

Many of the clubs we work with at IMAVEX are located in areas that are well known around the country for their spectacular golf experiences. Online advertising, or as we call it, search engine marketing (SEM), allows courses to use this type of notoriety to their advantage by reaching people who search for golf in those areas with their advertising messages. Please note that being located in an area such as Arizona, Central Florida, or Las Vegas isn’t a requirement for success, but it is a great asset courses can use to their advantage.

Prior to SEM, golf courses really only had two ways of effectively reaching golfers who lived in other parts of the country; direct mailing lists and advertisements in publications like Golf Week and Golf Digest. In most cases, that kind of advertising is cost prohibitive so many golf courses were limited to advertising to their local geographic area through billboards, phone book listings, and newspaper ads.

The nice thing about search engine marketing is that people who use Google, Bing, or Yahoo to look for golfing experiences can be reached with an advertisement for your course regardless of where they live. Furthermore, it can be done for a fraction of the cost of a listing in the local yellow pages. Consequently, a golf course will be able to reach parts of the country that were previously unreachable due to cost, they’ll save money across the board, and they’ll take advantage of a societal shift in how information about businesses is found (that being the shift from phone books to search engines).

Now you might be thinking, "I get that SEM has saved golf courses money, but I just don’t think the people who come to my course use search engines to find us." I hear this kind of feedback often and my response is actually quite simple: If you’ve never tried it before, how do you know it won’t work and don’t you want more people to come to your course? Clearly the trends in advertising spend suggest that more than a handful of companies have deemed it to be worth their money. More importantly, more people than ever before are using search engines to find information. Pew Internet reported last May that roughly 72% of all Americans use search engines to find information. 10 years ago, 52% were using search engines. That means that over 220,000,000 Americans are using search engines! Now try to tell me that none of those people could be interested in your course if they saw an ad for it online.

The real advantage to search engine marketing isn’t so much that your advertisement can be seen by a larger group of people, but that it’s seen by people who are actually looking for a golf course to play. Unlike print ads, online ads can reach people at all stages of the “buying cycle.” Since you can target people who are looking for your course and avoid people who are simply bystanders, you get more value for your advertising dollar. This is because people who are researching golf courses are more likely to book a tee time than someone who isn’t thinking about playing golf. Consequently more tee times are booked at a much lower advertising cost.

IMAVEX has already partnered with dozens of golf courses, helping them take advantage of online advertising. These courses are booking more tee times than ever before and at a cost they would have never would have gotten in any other form of advertising. If your course has never taken advantage of SEM before, we’d love to talk to you about what it can do for your business. Contact us today to start exploring this exciting opportunity.