A few years ago we began working with a golf course architecture client. Our job was to improve their digital marketing presence. As with any digital marketing campaign, we had to start by defining the audience our client wanted to reach. Upon doing so we found a nice cross-reference of golf course owners, superintendents, heads of maintenance, etc. The audience itself was a bit larger than I had originally planned, but that was of course a nice surprise. Now, all we had to do was figure out what kind of content to develop to increase our clients’ brand awareness. It’s been said that people will watch anything on Facebook. I hope that’s true.
Know Your Audience
For starters (as with any good marketing) we went for the low-hanging fruit. We began posting some beautiful pictures of our clients’ incredible golf course design work. We posted, and the audience engaged by leaps and bounds. As we continued with the campaigns we knew we were going to need some more varied content to keep our audience interested. We knew people will watch anything, but would they watch videos of grass, dirt, and construction? We wanted to find out.
Grass Growing “The Movie”
Our first go at it was on a new course their lead designer was planning. The idea was to shape and install new grass on the greens to make the course more challenging and to help with water retention. After we finished the shoot I realized (to my shock) that we had just made a video about grass growing. Literally. Who the heck was going to want to watch that? We came back the next week and shot more videos of (you guessed it) grass growing. We took what we got, edited, and posted it. The results were staggering. Not only did our videos do well, but they were viewed by thousands of people in just a few days, and became very popular nationally within this tight-knit community.
Why did this work? It worked because the videos we created were made for a specific group of people – golf industry people. Not Tiger Woods fans, or weekend warriors, but people who would notice a slight change up to or down on a green, or would be able to tell you what kind of grass is planted here or there on the course. The videos worked to solve our clients’ problems because we found the right audience, and then created the right content to show that audience. If you do this right, you can literally have success by asking people to watch videos about just about anything, even grass growing. It’s true what they say, people will watch anything.
Joe Sanders
joe@relevantelephant.net
@marketingjoes
