“Attention”. It’s a game that has been played since the beginning of time. Whether you desire it, need it, want it, avoid it or embrace it – attention is a mechanism that can be exploited to help businesses achieve their goal. In order to get someone to buy your product, attend your camp, play your course or take a lesson – you first need to have their attention.
Attention comes in all shapes and sizes. Word of mouth, referrals, content generation, social engagement, and advertising are a few examples of how we get the attention of the customer. Each business has their own ratio of how they attempt to get their potential customer’s attention, and most try to do it with as little cost as possible. If your team is great at producing content (videos, articles) you may have the chance at receiving “free attention” – in the form of your content going viral and being shared.
Most businesses we talk with don’t make the commitment to invest in producing great high quality content that will have the potential of virality – so what’s another option?
Digital Advertising. More specifically, Facebook Advertising. It is much easier, faster and cheaper than you probably think.
Most golf courses don’t budget for digital advertising, but they still advertise in magazines, mail flyers and billboards. It’s just not cost effective to do so anymore. The ROI for print media just doesn’t stack up anymore when compared to digital. The attention has shifted to the phone and desktop and the cost to reach customers through digital advertising is extremely affordable. The best advertising platform ever created is Facebook; it allows you to target the most specific audiences and maximize your advertising dollars most efficiently.
Budgeting for digital advertising is not an exact science. It will vary based on location, audience, time, and targeted demographics. So what’s a “ballpark range” of what you should budget for when it comes to Facebook Advertising? We’ve put together a sample Ad Campaign that we think an average golf course could run and broken down the costs.
The sample Ad is for our Summer Junior Camps. We are trying to fill each camp, maximize the revenue we can make and expose new people to our facility and staff. You can see what our sample Ad looks like above (the main article photo as it would appear on your desktop view – not mobile). Our demographics looked like this:
- Location: Charlotte, NC (25 mile radius)
- Age: 30 – 65+
- Gender: All
- Language: English (US)
- Target: Parents with Preteens (8 – 12 yrs old), interested in golf, golf course, PGA Tour
- Daily Budget: $5.00
For the purpose of this sample Ad we kept all other settings as “default”. Our budget is only $5 a day, but we are able to reach 470 customers potentially interested in our Summer Junior Camps. Running this Ad for 90 Days means it will cost you $450. At your current rates can you justify spending that money to fill each camp and expose new parents to the course? If you have 8 camps throughout the Summer, and charge $100 a camp, that means this Ad would need to add only about 5 juniors total, the rest would be pure profit.
This is just one example, in one location of how spending as little as $5.00 per day can reach over 40,000 potential new customers. As you can see from the sample Ad, Facebook Advertising is more affordable and can reach more customers than you probably ever thought. If you haven’t tried Facebook Advertising yet, we highly encourage you to do so. It’s simple to get started.
