In our previous installment, we laid the groundwork for a robust social media strategy tailored for golf courses. We emphasized the importance of:
- Aligning your social media efforts with your course's business objectives,
- Understanding your target audience
- Selecting the right platforms to reach them, and
- Developing a content calendar (with the help of Grow Golf's social media calendar)
These foundational elements create a solid framework for your social media presence. Now, as we move into Part 2 of our series, we'll explore how to take this foundation and put it into action, focusing on the execution of your strategy and measuring its effectiveness. We outlined steps 1-4 in Part 1, let's keep going...
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5. Content Creation
This is the fun part. It's where you can start to attack your business goals and the needs of your audience to find unique ways to engage with them. For some posts it may be images, video, text, memes, or infographics, but what we do stress is to ensure you have a diverse content strategy.
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By crafting a varied content mix, you can showcase every aspect of your team's objectives without getting boring and predictable to your audience.
This variety allows you to highlight your course's unique features - from the challenging par 5s to the welcoming clubhouse atmosphere. You might share player testimonials one day and a time-lapse of the greens being mowed the next. By diversifying your content, you're not just promoting your course; you're telling its story, building a community, and giving potential visitors multiple reasons to book their next round with you.
Whether it's through eye-catching photos, informative videos, or interactive polls about favorite holes, a multifaceted approach ensures your social media channels remain as dynamic and inviting.
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Some quick ideas that come to mind?
- High-quality, seasonal photos of your course
- Short video tours/carousel image tours of signature holes, club amenities
- User-generated content (images, testimonials) from customers/members
- Employee spotlights
- Maintenance updates
As you think of the content that's right for your course, keep that your content should reflect your course's unique personality and brand.
Last, here are some important "Don'ts" as you being brainstorming your content:
- Keep it Cool: Don't oversaturate your feed with promotional content
- Talk to the Haters: Don't ignore negative feedback or comments, ask to take it offline to help them or learn more about their issue.
- Is it worth it? Think twice when posting low-quality or irrelevant content to your course's goals.
- Engage Back: Don't neglect to engage with your audience through comments, messages, and re-sharing UGC content.
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6. Social Media Measurement
The Grow Golf team has a wealth of experience in social media measurement working with some of the biggest brands in the world, to help them understand their audience and create actionable insights to adjust their marketing and PR strategies.
While this newsletter isn't dedicated to social media measurement, we'll provide a quick 101 to get your mind in the right place about the practice of measurement.
If you'd like us to nerd out with you over social media measurement, shoot us an email at hello@growgolf.co and we'll prioritize that newsletter for you.
To do this, here are the top four reasons why social media measurement can help your social media strategy.
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Evaluate ROI and Budget Justification: Measuring your social media performance allows you to quantify the return on investment (ROI) for your efforts. This data is crucial for justifying your social media budget to course management and demonstrating the value of your marketing initiatives. This is crucial when asking for more budget!
- Example: Did the video ($$) we created to promote our holiday events bring in new customers/members to purchase?
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Identify High-Performing Content: By analyzing engagement metrics, you can determine which types of content resonate most with your audience. This insight helps you refine your content strategy, focusing more on what works best to drive engagement and conversions.
- Example: Does course photography see higher reach than when we post course videos?
- Benchmark Against Competitors: Last, social media measurement allows you to compare your performance against other golf courses or industry standards. You can do this a few different ways - whether in your social media software, natively in Facebook/Instagram through their business suite, or manually each month through a custom spreadsheet with the metrics/competitors you care about.
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Understand Audience Behavior & Sentiment: Measurement provides valuable insights into your followers' current opinion of your, content preferences, peak activity times, and interaction patterns. This information enables you to tailor your message, your posting schedule and content to maximize reach and engagement.
- Example: Research times people most commonly use social media. This can change often, and there are a few studies and tools that can help you with this, but don't be afraid to switch up when you post to see if engagement changes.
Analyzing social media sentiment is usually reserved for the more renowned courses or resorts that get discussed organically (think Pebble Beach, TPC Sawgrass, Bandon Dunes, etc.) by people on social media. For almost every other course (which is almost everyone), consumer sentiment can be measured by Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp! reviews and customer surveys.
However way you measure your social media progress, measuring your social strategy and benchmarking it against your peers can reveal areas for improvement and help you stay competitive by knowing what content is working for you, your competitors, and courses across the industry.
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7. Measure ROI Beyond Social
As stated, keeping an eye on your social media engagement is important, but taking into consideration other metrics that your team wants to improve (through social media promotion) like monthly tee time volume, event registrations, pro shop revenue, or number of golf lessons booked, etc. Is critical to know if your social content is moving the needle.
Pro Tip: If you're promoting something on social media, find the right measurement metric to track first. People may not like or comment, but they may click a giveaway, promotion, or registration link.
An easy way to understand if people are interested in what you are posting about is busy using trackable links in your event promotion (either on social media or email). This practice is crucial for accurate measurement. Here's why:
- Attribution of Traffic and Conversions: Trackable links allow you to precisely attribute website visits and conversions to specific social media posts or campaigns. This helps you understand which content is driving the most valuable traffic to your site, whether it's bookings, pro shop purchases, or membership inquiries.
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- Campaign Performance Evaluation: By using unique trackable links for different campaigns or posts, you can compare their performance side-by-side. This data helps you determine which marketing initiatives or marketing content are most effective, allowing you to allocate resources more efficiently.
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- Cross-Platform Insights: Trackable links provide a way to measure the effectiveness of your content across different social media platforms. You can compare how the same offer or content performs on Facebook versus Instagram or Twitter, informing your platform-specific strategies.
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- ROI Calculation: With trackable links, you can directly connect social media efforts to revenue-generating actions on your website/e-commerce store. This makes it possible to calculate a more accurate return on investment for your social media marketing spend.
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- User Journey Analysis: Trackable links allow you to follow the user's journey from social media post to final conversion, providing insights into the path your customers take. This information can help you optimize your website and marketing funnel for better conversion rates.
By implementing trackable links, you're essentially creating a clear trail from your social media efforts to your business outcomes, making your social media measurement much more precise and actionable.
8. Stay Current with Social Platforms
Last, whether its the content that drives the algorithms or brand new platforms emerging into the world, the social media landscape is always evolving.
With that said, its critical for someone in this role to stay up-to-date with everything new tools and tips hat come and go across social media.
The best way you can do this is by:
- Follow social media news sources to stay informed about platform updates (Social Media Today is a great source for information)
- Experiment with new features social platforms deploy, but be sure it makes sense for your content strategy and brand.
- Adapt your strategy to algorithm changes that may affect your content's visibility
- Consider emerging platforms that may be relevant to your audience (i.e. Should we have a TikTok account?) and think hard on whether you want to invest your time to that new platform.
βοΈ Take a quick poll
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π Download Grow Golf's 2024-2025 Social Media Calendar
This calendar is a free resource for our community that lays out the next six month of social media "holidays" (Download). We only listed the holidays that could be applied to golf course marketing, and then provided actionable marketing ideas for your course to take action on.
Cheers π₯
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π― Keeping it 100. Three Things We Loved This Week
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Fall is in full swing, and we're loving all the Fall photography and late sunrises that we're seeing each morning. The amount of FOMO at Grow Golf is at peak levels, but amongst the beauty we're seeing, here's what stood out to us this week:
1) North Coast Golf Co: While not a golf course, the way they featured their Fall Sale is noteworthy, because their creativity can be applied to how golf courses should share their gear beyond just sharing a wide photo of their pro shop (which we saw all the time).
- Why? First its not easy to have great photography and design like North Coast Golf Co, but that shouldn't stop you from bringing in the seasonal Fall vibe and dedicating individual carousel posts to specific products. It's simple - and a repeatable content idea for pro shops. Note: North Coast Golf Co did not pay me for this, they earned it!).
2) Cambridge Country Club (UK): The holidays are around the corner, and Cambridge is ahead of the game (for many) already promoting their holiday events through a nicely done seasonal video that showcases their amazing events schedule this year.
- Why? First, Cambridge obviously has a well-layed out social media strategy and content calendar to be posting in October about the holidays, but the quality of their events is what caught our eye - Wreathmaking, Cookie Design, Holiday Tea with Elsa, Caligraphy classes! Cambridge is truly thinking about ALL of their members, and creating multiple events (not just one) that target specific interests to increase engagement across their membership. A+!
3) Elevated Angles and Union League Golf Club: As a former producer at Golf Channel, I love creative video content. This week, Elevated Angles showcased the transitional progress of course improvements at the Union League Golf Club at Torresdale through time-lapse drone footage.
- Why? This is what you should expect when your hire an experienced drone videographer. If your social feed is filled with golf content like ours is, you probably see alot of drone footage - but it's usually a simple, hole flyover (which is still great). This caught our eye because they used the drone tech to follow the same route over time to showcase course improvements from the air in a way we haven't seen before. Fun to watch!
That's it for Newsletter No. 3.
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NEXT WEEK: We'll share insight into the top questions you need to have in your next customer/member survey.
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Thanks for being part of Grow Golf. See you next week.
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