Tag: sell

Will Millennials Save Golf?

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A few years ago, Time magazine published an exhaustive look at millennials titled “The Me, Me, Me Generation.”  The story took some shots at a generation characterized as “lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents,” but concluded that the world’s 80 million 18- to 34-year-olds will “save us all.”

Global Golf Advisors has done extensive research into what makes millennials tick – especially from a golf perspective – aimed at answering this question: “Will they also save golf?”

Their numbers portend their potential.  Millennials are responsible for the majority of purchases of everything from groceries to automobiles.  They’re also beginning to settle down, with careers, homes and kids of their own.  As they do, their global spending power is estimated in excess of $600 billion a year.

There are about 6.4 million millennial golfers, according to the National Golf Foundation.  That’s more than any golf cohort, other than 6.8 million Gen Xers, whose birth years are generally considered 1965 to 1984.  By contrast, there are 5.4 million baby boomers, once thought to be golf’s saviors, but now on the back nine of their golfing careers.  Here’s what else we know about millennials:

  • They are the first generation of tech natives. They practically teethed on their PCs, tablets and smartphones.  They love their phones, but hate talking on them.
  • They crave new experiences, even more than material goods.
  • They need to feel like what they’re doing is important.
  • They aren’t as willing as former generations to sacrifice their personal life to advance their careers.
  • They’re heavily influenced by product reviews, Q&A’s and photos posted by other consumers.

But what will it take to turn their potential into our reality?  Global Golf Advisors teamed up with Nextgengolf to survey millennial golfers across the U.S. Here’s what we learned:

The No. 1 reason millennials play golf is to hang out with friends.  That’s closely followed by enjoying being outdoors and athletic competition.  Interesting, business-related reasons, such as growing their network, were last on their list.  They just want to have fun.

The millennials in the survey who play at daily fee courses are frugal.  Slightly more than 80 percent want to spend $50 or less on a round of golf.  Sixty percent typically spend between $25 and $50.

Three-quarters of millennials will consider joining a private club in the future.  Twelve percent are already a private club member.  Nearly half of participating millennials plan on joining a private club within the next three to 10 years.

Factors influencing their decision to join a club also show the importance of the social side of the club experience.  The most important factor that influences a membership decision is a recommendation.  Eighty-three percent of survey respondents said encouragement from a friend, colleague or family member might cause them to join a club.  These are folks who are accustomed to reading reviews and acting on the recommendation of others.  The second most influential factor was a positive experience while attending a tournament or special event at the club.

For most, though, golf is not enough of a draw to join a club.  You must remember: millennials are social animals.  Many are involved in as many as 10 recreational activities.  That’s why a workout center, for example, is a valuable investment for clubs and golf facilities that want to increase their appeal to millennials.

Millennials like options and flexibility, and that characteristic was borne out in the portion of the survey focusing on entrance fees and dues.  Forty-one percent of millennials would prefer to pay more annually than pay an entrance fee to join a private club.  Approximately half said they would prefer an annual fee of $3,000 or less to belong to a club.

The challenge for clubs?  To create an environment that not only appeals to the new wave, but also one where members of all generations can co-exist.

This piece was authored by GGA Partner Henry DeLozier for Golf Course Industry Magazine.

On Message

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As a business, it’s important to step back at times and ask yourself the question: who am I talking to?

When it comes to local marketing, clubs can easily get caught up in getting their message out without really being aware of who they are aiming to reach. Sadly, this can amount to hurling words into the abyss in the hope that they will find someone relevant.

The fact is, it’s impossible to craft a truly compelling message if you don’t know who you are talking to. The key to effective messaging is targeting, and the key to targeting is thorough market research.

Internal Market Knowledge

Knowing your market starts with knowing your own club.

The first step in this discovery process is to build a clear picture of your current club members. Better understanding who and where your club is right now will help you to visualize who and where it could be the future, as well as tuning you in to areas of opportunity that exist around you.

This type of information from your members can be sourced from surveys, focus groups, suggestion/comment boxes, informal meetings with management or staff, or operational metrics tracked as part of a broader business plan.

What insights should you be looking for?

Member/Customer Information

  • Demographic profiles (age, gender, family composition, ethnicity, income level, other club memberships, political leanings, religious affiliations, etc.)
  • Home addresses (zip codes, secondary homes, distance from work, school districts)
  • Contact information (names of family members, email addresses, phone numbers, social media habits)

How Members Use the Club

  • Rounds played by segment and month/week/day/hour
  • Revenue by type
  • Amenity utilization metrics (fitness, dining, tennis, event attendance, etc.)

Understanding the habits, preferences, lifestyles, wants, and needs of existing members is invaluable, because it will enable your club to identify and target individuals with similar profiles to existing members.

This is the “low-hanging fruit” for clubs, and it is the first place you should invest your energies. If you have successfully sold to people of a certain demographic in the past, then there is a good chance you will have success selling to similar prospects in future. People are also prone to associate and identify with likeminded individuals, so these prospects will be drawn to your club if they see that they can relate to your existing members.

The next step is to use this data to build a picture of who is missing from your club. What market segments are you not connecting with? Is it female golfers, Millennials, fathers with young children?

Understanding who is missing at your club will teach you a lot about where your messaging may be letting you down. Depending on the demographic around your club, you may find that some of these missing segments are on your doorstep, and it is just a case of reaching out to them in the right way.

External Market Knowledge

Once you have learned all you can from within your club, it’s time to turn your eyes outward: who are your neighbors and who are your competitors?

What data should you be looking to gather?

Demographic/Psychographic Information

  • Demographic and income data
  • Details on lifestyle groups in your area (psychographics)

Supply/Demand Data

  • List of all competitors in your market area
  • Summary of service and amenity offerings at each
  • Collect data to quantify demand (golf participation rates, studies, visitor information etc.)

Local Market Data

  • Demographics on public websites like governmental or municipal agencies
  • Customer and demographic mapping through Google
  • Comprehensive reports available through sites like Tactician or Environics

Putting a ‘face’ to local market areas will provide pertinent insight to help define your targeted message. If the profile of certain local market areas doesn’t match that of club members, then you may be faced with making bigger changes to your messaging than you expected. Armed with this information you can adjust your communications strategy accordingly, or else decide that you could invest more fruitfully in membership recruitment elsewhere.

The club must also know who its competitors are – what they are offering, their strengths and weaknesses – in order to create a message that differentiates your club’s offering.

This type of external information can be sourced anecdotally from calls to neighboring club managers or through online reviews, backed up by qualitative data sourced through competitor websites.

By gathering the right market knowledge from both internal and external sources you will be equipping yourself for growth. Not only can you identify the “low hanging fruit”, but you can also target demographics that your club is missing out on. Your message will become stronger by understanding what separates you from your competitors, and also, most importantly, by knowing exactly who you are talking to.

This article was authored by GGA Senior Manager and Market Intelligence expert Michael Gregory.

Three Steps to Connect Marketing to Sales

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In theory, sales and marketing should be two of the most integrated and connected aspects of your Club’s operation.  The reality, unfortunately, is that in some businesses they are operating almost independently and singing entirely different tunes.  For the Club, what this divergence leads to is ineffective messaging and lost prospects.  The importance of connecting sales to marketing is clear, so the question is: how can we achieve it?

To understand how to improve this connection, it is first important to understand the difference between the two disciplines of marketing and sales.

Marketing is a management planning process; it is focused on the strategies and techniques of crafting goods and services, all the way from a concept to an end-product or service.

The sales process is focused on the strategies and techniques of convincing a customer to exchange their cash for that product or service.

The marketing process develops a perceived need for your product in the mind of a customer, and the sales process then allows the customer to satisfy their perceived need for your product by purchasing it.

Although separate and distinct disciplines, marketing and sales efforts must be carefully aligned to achieve their highest potential in generating a steady stream of customers for your Club.

Using this three-step procedure to connect your marketing to sales will put you on the path to generating more qualified prospects and selling more memberships.

Step One – Clearly Define Your Four P’s

Successful marketing captures your business through the lens of your customer’s needs – and the satisfaction of those perceived needs – by defining the “Four P’s” of your offering: Product, Price, Place, Promotion.

To test how well-defined your product is at this moment, ask each member of both your management and sales teams to give you their “elevator pitch”.  If those pitches are not identical, or if they are not focused on precisely what differentiates your Club from its competition, then you have work to do.

Defining your Product properly begins with your mission statement – the single sentence that describes why you exist.

Once you have that definition, you must develop your brand position – an expression of what makes your Club distinct, unique, and fills a particular consumer need in a way that none of your competitors can.

Your brand position is critical: If you do not understand what you are offering, neither will your prospects.  Even more disturbing is this reality: If you don’t define your product, someone else will, and you may not like their story.

After “product” comes Price, Place and Promotion:

Price is self-explanatory.

The definition of Place is a clear analysis and understanding of the specific target audience for your product, and the tactics you have selected and employed to reach that audience.

Your definition of Promotion is the complete list of methods you will use to broadcast your product to your audience – for example: brochures, a website, mobile apps, print or digital ads.

With your “Four P’s” clearly defined and in hand, let’s move to Step Two.

Step Two – Singing from the Same Sheet Music

Step two along the path to connecting marketing to sales is teaching your team, particularly your sales force, to “sing from the same sheet music”.

To do this you will need to train your team to:

a) be comfortable with presenting your Club according to this script

b) understand the importance of presenting a consistent image and message when promoting the Club in the marketplace

Consistently reinforce and remind your staff of its importance in all employee communications.  You could do this as part of your email signature, through a notice on employee message boards, or verbally during employee meetings.  Just as consumers are bombarded with over 3,000 messages a day, so are your employees.  Make sure it’s your message that sticks.

Constantly encourage employees to share how and when they have promoted the Club and reward them with both private and public recognition for their efforts.

With your marketing in place and your implementation team deployed, it’s on to Step Three.

Step Three – Track, Analyze and Adjust

Your Club is now positioned consistently across all communication channels and your employees are all singing from the same sheet music, but how do you know for certain that marketing is now connected to sales?

The answer is through data collection and analysis.

  • Ask consumers where they learned about you when they visit or call the club
  • Incorporate unique URLs and telephone numbers into published advertising to identify what technique connected with what specific audience
  • Google analytics provides a wealth of data about prospects who have visited your website: where they visit from, what pages they visit, how long they spend on your site and more
  • Social media sites also provide data on likes and engagement
  • Tracking pixels can also be added to emails and webpages to follow the activities of users

Review and analysis of this data will expose what is working and what needs to be adjusted to create maximum impact.

The combination of a clear and consistent Club message, the effective broadcast of that message to your target audience, your sales team singing the same song, and close attention paid to what is working and what is not will connect your marketing to sales – providing a steady stream of qualified prospects to your door and new members to your Club.

This article was authored by GGA Senior Associate and Marketing expert Linda Dillenbeck.

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