Have You Maxed Out Your Customers?

Marketing Cycle
The marketing cycle is the same for every business. In the most basic form it looks like this:

Create interest. We call this awareness advertising. This is where you buy traditional advertising with little to no call to actions.
Motivate golfers. We call this special offers. This is where you put out a creative offer or discount to attract new players to your golf course.
Loyalty. We call this, well, loyalty (not sure what else you can call it). This is where you need your customers to spend or play more golf.

What is Your Maximum Number of Customers?
Eventually we all need to abandon points one and two in their traditional sense and focus on point number three. One client we have been working with for the past number of years has approximately 24,000 golfers in their database and approximately the same number of golfers have downloaded their mobile App (for push notifications and geo-fencing). After a few years went by, we realized that we were not growing either the database or the App downloads at the rate we had been the first few years. That is when we asked ourselves… have we maxed out the number of customers we have? This is different from maxing out your tee times, it is maximizing the number of people who use your golf course.

What Now?
At the point of our realization we had to shift gears in our marketing strategy. We focus now almost exclusively on loyalty! We have helped clients create loyalty programs using both their POS (point of sale) systems and their mobile Apps. The objective is always the same, to get each customer to play at least one more round of golf. We’re pleased to say rounds and most importantly revenues have been on the rise.

If you feel like you have maxed out your customers or that your marketing streams are not growing your business, then it is time to change your focus. There are better ways to create interest than using traditional advertising and their are better ways to motivate than discounting. But ultimately it is customer loyalty that will help you grow your business. Feel free to connect with us for a chat about anything marketing, sales or golf business related.

We, Jeff and Tara Ciecko of CK Golf write two blogs, one is our 19th Hole Blog where we share personal experiences and the other an Industry Blog where we comment on general business and internet marketing best practices, sales strategies and give golf industry related opinions. We have owned CK Golf for 9 years and provide marketing, social media and business services to the golf and other industries. As of August 2016 our life and our business will be ‘location independent’. Our 19th Hole Blog is about the places we visit and the things we do. If you have any questions or comments, or happen to be in the same location as us please reach out and contact us anytime.