Premium Marketing Program fills tee sheets

For anyone attempting to fill a tee sheet, the gold standard in digital marketing is GOLF Business Solutions’ Premium Marketing Program – an enhanced-marketing program exclusive to online tee time sales. It’s been around since 2011 and continues to gain a stronghold in the marketplace.

Eligible partner courses who invest in PMP benefit from a wide array of advantageous placements and optimized positioning. The most significant advantage is top placement among the search results seen by golfers when shopping online in a particular market. That top placement has enough prominence to be a real advantage.

As an added new feature, PMP provides a newly redesigned way for participating courses to show up on the Destinations page. This top-of-page placement is sure to catch the eye of any golfer traveling outside his or her home base.

“What the golfer sees is high-res imagery and information about the property, funneling the user directly to the course’s inventory page to facilitate the booking,” says Matt Guy, Senior Manager of Sales Operations for GOLF Business Solutions. “Previously, the up-top placement of the PMP partner had a banner-ad look. We’ve moved to a tile-type design that creates a solo spotlight position above the fold.”

PMP golf courses are part of an exclusive group, with just over 1,300 enrolled in the program. Being a good fit is all about how engaged and energized an operator is, and whether his/her strategic ideas align with the concepts on which PMP is based.

The product development team at GOLFNOW has tweaked and improved the program steadily, using performance analytics along with feedback from course operators. The revenue record over that period tells a compelling tale of effectiveness.

“When you look at the before-and-after for a course that joins PMP, the average revenue increase within the GOLFNOW booking platform is 30 percent,” says Guy. “Courses in the program get seen online very prominently, as part of a rotation. At times they will be shown exclusively. The overall result is much-improved click-through to completed bookings.”

The majority of current PMP golf courses have been on the platform for multiple years without interruption, according to Guy. “When a spot opens, the GOLFNOW rep in that geographic area will generally have several courses in mind as a replacement.” A belief in optimizing revenue through effective use of dynamic pricing is a primary indicator of strong potential as a PMP partner.

PMP courses are also featured in daily emails to the platform’s golfer database, which is geo-based. A significant benefit appears in the “Best Bets” email. This email is exclusive to the PMP level of partnership, which makes you the only option that the golfer arriving with cash in hand will see.

“That’s 100 percent share of voice,” says Ryan Heaton, Director of Sales Operations for GOLF Business Solutions, with emphasis on the once-weekly email, “which by any measure is a huge value.” In addition to that exclusive Best Bets positioning, participating courses also gain access to the “Book Early” email. It spotlights PMP partners and is delivered to golfers’ inboxes based on their booking behavior and similar course interests.

Similarly, there is a “stay and play” page on GOLF Advisor for every market. Although best suited to resorts, any PMP course that finds a lodging partner can provide that information to its GOLFNOW rep. Then, package links are set up so that customers get routed directly to the hotel partner and are supplied with a code to book right then and there. “Listing yourself on the stay and play page will result in a lot of very relevant impressions,” says Heaton.

There’s also the potential to get exposure on GOLF Channel’s “Morning Drive” show as well as promotion on social media postings that reach 175,000 golfers who follow GOLFNOW on the big three platforms of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

To make a move to GOLF Business Solutions’ Premier Marketing Program, you must be well-positioned and ready to try to maximize the facility you’ve worked so hard to build and beautify. PMP is unmatched in today’s marketplace. CLICK HERE to learn more.