By David Gould
Some operators are finding the best way to market their courses is to take the game to the masses
Gathering in the clubhouse to share a pint is one of golf's time-honored traditions, but some course managers are putting a new twist on this custom-and getting a marketing jolt as they do it. Courses from Nevada to Alabama to New Jersey have begun using blood donation as a vehicle for reaching new players, luring them into the customer pool by trading a round for a pint. It's an example of golf penetrating venues where potential customers can be found rather than waiting for new golfers to show up on their own.
Ballamor Golf Club outside Atlantic City, New Jersey, recently used a blood drive to promote the fact that the club had converted from member-only to daily fee. "We wanted to make the statement that we were part of the community and people should come see us," notes Liz Norton-Scanga, marketing director for Ballamor.
Blood banks can be set up almost anywhere, and the American Red Cross was happy to roll its equipment into the Ballamor clubhouse. This on-site angle enticed WMGM-TV to cover the event, which featured prominently on the evening news.
The news director's decision was a natural, given the robust response Ballamor's free-golf offer had spurred. In fact, the original maximum of 50 donor sign-ups was quickly filled, prompting a call for more equipment and personnel to meet demand. The blood drive also made a splash in the local daily paper's lifestyle section.
Norton-Scanga considers the 72 comp rounds she dispensed a soft-cost outlay more than offset by the surge of goodwill and name recognition generated by the promotion. Helping her cause were a number of quotes in the news from blood-giving golfers who commented on how beautiful the Ballamor course and clubhouse were, as well as data gathered on potential new customers. Norton-Scanga has gone through the names and contact information of donors, and estimates that 50 of them are people who had never played the course before.
The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail and Painted Desert Golf Club in Las Vegas, Nevada, have also used blood donation to expose their courses to a wide audience. Jonathan Romeo, marketing director for the RTJ Golf Trail, says the Associated Press covered the story of his pint-for-a-round event, and television crews also came out to report on it. "I've done this a couple of times before," says Romeo, "and learned that blood donors tend to redeem their golf coupons on weekdays-they have flexible schedules, apparently."
At Painted Desert, the marketing power of United Blood Services was harnessed to reach some 7,000 people via e-mail on the UBS database. Adam Owen, manager of Painted Desert when the blood donation campaign took place last year, called the event "a big success for both parties" that generated "goodwill that was good for business."
The Power of Media
Regardless of the type or scope of the community outreach campaign, a media partner can help spread the word in many ways. Lagoon Park Golf Course and Gateway Park Executive Course, two public layouts in Montgomery, Alabama, have found that teaming up with SportsRadio AM 740 as golf's major championship season unfolds is a prime way to promote their facilities to thousands of golf aficionados.
John Sadie, manager of the two courses, partners with the radio station and its Web site to run a pick-the-champion pool that awards winners with free golf at either facility. As part of his deal with the broadcaster, Sadie conducts an hour-long preview show of each major event, during which he intersperses plenty of plugs for the golf experience at his courses. A series of standard radio ads is also part of the package.
"We get exclusive sponsorship of the contest, so we own it," says Sadie, who points out that the winner "could be an 80-year-old lady who doesn't own clubs" or an avid player. "The prize for participating is pretty minimal-we're leveraging the appeal of the bragging rights for winning, which is considerable. It stirs up a lot of sustained interest."
Measurement of the program is anecdotal, but Sadie knows it's working to promote his product. During the majors, he hears continual feedback about his appearances on the preview show, including a volume of inquiries about rate specials put together especially for those time periods.
"When you use the medium of radio, and a spokesman for the course is being interviewed on a live show, and on top of that you have a competitive contest that extends over a week's time, the impact is powerful," Sadie says.
No doubt, Sadie's use of radio to reach the general public inexpensively would get a thumbs-up from Tom Tjader, general manager of Bristol Ridge Golf Course in Somerset, Wisconsin. Bristol Ridge participates in the weekly Saturday morning auction show on KFAN 1130 AM, a Minneapolis-St. Paul sports talk station that reaches into Wisconsin. Like Sadie, Tjader manages to get his course talked about on live programming-not just in paid advertising-in exchange for a small number of tee times.
"I basically trade rounds of golf for airtime, and the auction part of it is a throw-in by the station," Tjader says. "So it's a program that works double for us."
By giving away one foursome of times at the full rack rate of $50 per player, Tjader receives $200 worth of advertising time. The radio station keeps the highest bidder's cash, which usually amounts to one-third of face value.
But what Tjader particularly likes is the auction because description of his course and the callers' bids are all live programming delivered to Bristol Ridge for basically no cost. Among auction-show round buyers, the break between existing customers and new customers is approximately 50-50.
"It might be more ideal if they were all new players, but you can't put restrictions on the offer-it wouldn't make a good impression," Tjader says. As for online bidders who paid for tee times on the radio's auction and come to Bristol Ridge as newbies, Tjader says "many" have been converted to regulars.
Though not a media relationship in the traditional sense, Norton-Scanga has forged a multi-year "outreach marketing" agreement between Scotland Run, Ballamor's sister course in Camden, New Jersey, and the Tweeter Center, a 25,000-seat concert venue and the official golf club of the Atlantic 10 Conference of college athletic teams.
"We did those deals in trade and got a lot out of it," says Norton-Scanga, who credits the Tweeter Center relationship for bringing in "easily $10,000 worth of corporate outing business" from companies that held luxury boxes at the stadium. "Our only out-of-pocket costs went to create and produce large-format ad posters."
Beyond the Airwaves
A growing number of operators are learning that, in lieu of a media partner, another sports organization will serve nicely. Although a Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) game is about as far from the first tee of a daily fee golf course as you can get, PGA and LPGA professionals gave no fewer than 2,700 free golf lessons at 11 WNBA games in 2009.
Billed as "Game Day Experiences," these halftime audience-participation events make use of inflatable nets to provide free lessons and various on-court contests. Eight sites from Los Angeles to Atlanta were selected for these quick clinics, which paved the way for both neophyte and more-experienced golfers to morph into customers at regulation public courses.
If basketball games are a good connection to golfers, then baseball should be just as potent. Stephen Havrilla, director of golf at the Seaview Golf Resort in Galloway, New Jersey, leverages the attraction of professional baseball with the newly launched "Take Me Out To the Golf Course" promotion. It's a simple calculation on Havrilla's part to give baseball fans a $25 discount off his rack rate to anyone who presents a ticket or ticket stub from any 2010 professional game. (Rack rate through most of the baseball season is $99 weekdays and $109 weekends; redemptions are only good in the month that the game is played.)
As the season began, activity with this promotion was light-not unexpected given that Seaview is trying to push the product without any advertising or sponsorship investment. "We put out a press release that got picked up in about a half-dozen media outlets," says Havrilla, "so the straight PR value was very good at the outset."
In addition, Havrilla receives support via no-cost (to him) e-mail blasts being put out by GolfingforYou.com. "They flag it as an exclusive offer from their Web site for a discount at Seaview," says Havrilla, who is deliberately keeping the offer off his own Web site so he can get a clean read on how well word circulates. "That's not how it's structured, but as long as no other Web site talks about it, they can reasonably say it's their exclusive."
Meanwhile, public courses that are part of a management group hold an advantage when it comes to certain new-player promotions. The 10 facilities operated by GolfVisions, a Chicago-based management firm, were in the spotlight at last winter's Chicago Golf Show because of the company's offer of a free round of golf with every admission ticket purchased over the course of the three-day event. This bit of excitement was a first for the 27-year-old show, and GolfVisions is signed up to do it again next year.
"It was an excellent way to get our name out there," says Tim Miles, Sr., president and CEO of GolfVisions. "Show attendance was up 25 percent from the prior year, primarily due to the promotion, according to the exhibition company."
In return, GolfVisions received its $1,000 booth rental at the show free-of-charge, offsetting its soft cost of supplying the rounds. The company also got its name in front of a large group of courses that may be in the market for a management deal one day. "This was a huge PR win for us," Miles says.
When you're in the mood to cast that wide of a net for new customers or extra exposure, you may find non-golf partners willing to do the heavy lifting. Last summer, producers of Dewar's Scotch whiskey, a popular spirit in many country club bars, ran a promotion in greater Chicago called "Have a Round on Dewar's." A group of area daily fee courses volunteered to participate, exchanging one free round with cart for a listing on the Web site of WSCR-AM sports radio. The complimentary round would go to a store customer who purchased Dewar's whiskey and returned the promotion coupon, having selected a course to play from the online listing at WSCR's highly visited Web site.
Though she wasn't privy to that particular contest, Ballamor's Norton-Scanga makes a nice point about offbeat promotions-one worth remembering when the buzz factor seems a bit low. "When you bring your name and image to places where people don't expect to see a golf course," she says, "you really get noticed and remembered."
David Gould is a Connecticut-based freelance writer and frequent contributor to Golf Business.