Sports Business: How Thinking Like A Golfer Helped Our Small Business

Sports and marketing go hand in hand.  One drives the other.  Without ad revenue from TV broadcasts, the NFL would be poor. 

But sports-related marketing is often very bland... very tired.  Lacking in creativity.  "Oh look, there's a guy in that beer commercial wearing an NFL jersey—this company must really be speaking to the true fans!”  We may be living in the most unoriginal sports marketing era ever, where simply slapping your company logo on the side of a stadium counts as a stroke of advertising genius.

Our office was going to be participating in a Chamber of Commerce golf scramble, and we thought about the many different marketing/sponsorship opportunities such an event provides (the hole sponsors, cart sponsors, contest sponsors, swag sponsors, prize sponsors, etc.). 

Since we're a small business—a website development & consulting firm that caters to other small and medium businesses in our local market—we didn't have a huge budget.  But we wanted to stand out, grab attention, and be creative.  We didn’t just want to slap our company logo on a banner and call it sports marketing.

So we decided to think outside the box.  And since the fastest growing portion of our web consulting business is SEO (Search Engine Optimization—helping sites rank better on Google), we decided to feature those services in our unique marketing effort.

We bought 12 dozen custom-printed Nike Golf Balls.  One side had our company logo.  The other side had a message that read: "Finding golf balls is easy.  Finding your website on Google is hard.  We can help. FoundGolfBall.com." 

Then, two hours prior to the tournament's start, my boss and I hopped in one of the spare golf carts with our 144 custom Nike balls in hand.  We spent about 45 minutes driving all over the course "losing" the golf balls.  We "lost" some in the rough.  We "lost" some in the woods.  We "lost" some in the sand traps and near the edges of water hazards.  In all, we managed to "lose" about seven or eight of our guerrilla marketing golf balls on each hole. 

Then, we simply went and played our golf... keeping our fingers crossed that the "found golf balls" would be a hit.

They were.  Countless golfers and other sponsors spent the rest of the afternoon telling us how cool and inventive they thought our promotion was.  The course's golf pro told us it was one of the most impressive things he's ever seen.

Now, I’m not just trying to brag.  After all, most of you don’t know me or my company from Adam, so it’s not like you’re my target demographic anyway.  Rather, I write this to illustrate how effective and inexpensive a marketing campaign can be if you truly understand your audience. 

Golfers the world over are known to love stumbling upon a free golf ball.  We horde them like squirrels horde acorns.  After all, most of us have given enough golf balls to others with our horrible tee shots... it's only fair that we find one for ourselves every once in a while. 

Understanding your audience is as crucial a factor in your marketing success as any other.  We could have spent thousands sponsoring the 18th hole, shaking hands with golfers and smiling broadly.  And that would have been... okay.

Instead, we spent only a few hundred bucks and ended up with the most memorable marketing effort of the entire day.  It's the oldest lesson in the advertising book:  stop thinking like yourself (big corporate marketer) and start thinking like your audience. 

Now if we can get the beer and soft drink giants to break out of their rut a little bit, we might get some clever marketing that's more than just people in a beer commercial watching the big game.  “Those beer-drinkers love football… I love football… I should drink that beer!”

Just thought I'd share.  I was really proud of our team that put this promotion together, and thought it made for a great illustration of how sports-related marketing can be greatly enhanced with just a little bit of understanding into the mind of the sports fan.  If you want, you can read more about it here.