Now that you know who, where and what to say to get the attention of your market it is now important to decide on the most effective affordable form of delivery for your message that will actually get seen by the prospect.
We will start with the very basics of various forms of marketing media to give you some insight to the effectiveness of the most common vehicles.
Knowing the proper vehicle to deliver your message to your target audience with the best ROI and least investment is extremely important. If you have a great message but no one gets to hear it, you are worse off than when you started because now you invested precious capital without a return.
Let us start with social media since most business owners are looking for the “least expensive” medium of marketing and therefore turn to social media and internet marketing. Although these mediums can be very productive long term, they create challenges since they are “opt-in” vehicles of marketing. In short, you are essentially marketing to your existing customer base (whom you have already targeted numerous times), but you are failing to bring in “new business” and expand your in-house list of targets.
Building a customer data base is the most important step in marketing your golf property, whether it’s your mailing list, email list, SMS list, etc.
Think of your lists as an ATM; if you continue to make deposits you will be able to continue making withdraws. But if you fail to make deposits, you will soon be overdrawn. Most owner/operators blast an email out once, twice or three times a week with the same old offers. Soon the recipients are immune to the offers and are sick of the senders.
MMC®’s team is the experts in building new quality lists for their clients. These are qualified buyers with an interest in golf.
Social media and other types of internet marketing are great support systems for full blown marketing campaigns but cannot be leveraged as the driving force.
A few things lacking in social media marketing are:
- Security & privacy issues. Most clients have blocking software for random ads.
- Dependability on technology. Most ads require customers to download and some of these ads are large in size.
- Undelivered email rate is high.
- People now change their email addresses every couple of years.
- Customers have two and three emails just for sign up offers.
- Know your audience…Do your audience open their emails regularly?
- Worldwide competition; it’s not just you competing for your local market.
- Emails that are considered non-important are more than likely being deleted.
- Some email ads are hard to read because they are now on mobile devices.
- E-marketing is not always free and buying quality lists is very difficult and expensive.
Local newspaper, radio and television all hit too broad of a demographic. Depending on your location and population your target area is between 5 and 20 miles; anything further than that is a waste of money.
I know you probably have a “small” percentage of members/customers outside of that radius but we guarantee you it is a very small percentage and when investing into a full blown marketing campaign you go for the big numbers. Although, you might want to do small niches campaign to a targeted group if you are not concerned with big numbers.
Another problem with these mediums is that there is nothing tangible. Once it has been read it is either deleted or thrown away; out of sight, out of mind.
Realize that there is a finite number of casual golfers in every market. Some can be reached through email, social media, newspaper, radio, TV, signage, etc. But the majority though, can only be reached through a “profiled” personalized direct mail campaign
MMC® facilitates all mediums of media when marketing your golf property with a strong emphasis on “profiled” personalized direct mail.
The power of personalized direct mail!
- Highly selective – specifically targets your desired market
- Allows you to be creative in your advertising campaigns through visual aids
- Ninety-nine percent of the prospects on your mailing list will receive the mail
- Achieve a higher ROI (return on investment)
- Unlimited content; write a story if you’d like
- Easy to track audience’s response effectively
- Cost-effective relative to return
- Your costs are controlled
- Full control in creativity and execution
- Full control from start to stamp
- Personalized
- Tangibility helps build a relationship and brand
- Connects more with customers
- Most engaging medium of all advertising media
- Involves essential sensory participation from a person
- Allows you to create and facilitate a profiled customer database
- Hard to track and imitate by competitors until after releasing the mail
- Positive results can be measured immediately
- You will build an enormous in-house data base for future use
There is only one challenge to direct mail and that is cost. Fortunately, MMC® has completely eliminated this challenge from the equation; because MMC®‘s CASH and EFT promotions are 100% self-funding! Now you can reap the enormous rewards of direct mail without worrying about the cost.
MMC® customizes each project to fit within the set budget and facilitates whichever vehicle can achieve the greatest ROI for the desired result. We will incorporate any and all mediums necessary to achieve your goals as long as they fit within the budget.
Below we have listed the “pros” and “cons” of various mediums of media.
