Carnoustie Golf Links, a regular host of The Open Championship, has been voted as the best golf course in Scotland in the Scottish Golf Tourism awards. The awards are held annually to celebrate what’s great about Scottish Golf.
Voted for by the Scottish public, Carnoustie Golf Links came out top in the courses over £100 category, overtaking other world-renowned courses that reside in the home of golf.
“Over 33,000 votes were recorded, so we’re delighted that the majority felt that our course was the best out of an extremely high caliber field,” commented Colin McLeod, Golf Services Manager at Carnoustie Golf Links.
Carnoustie Golf Links is currently in the early stages of an exciting development plan that will see a complete regeneration of the club building facilities available on site, due to be complete in time to welcome the world for the Open Championship in 2018.
How could the Carnoustie Golf Links achieve an even better reputation?
I think if the Carnoustie Golf Links really want to drive more sales and develop further a favorable image then they will have to start to think about how to use influencer marketing.
When it comes to purchasing decision we still rely on our family’s, friends’ and of course on opinion leaders’ recommendations (84% of us). So in the last couple of years, many marketers understood the power of connecting with influential social media users (like me) and started to develop relationships with them.
Who is the right influencer for the Carnoustie Golf Links?
The Carnoustie Golf Links should, first of all, define the type of influencers (see picture below) that can solve your business challenge. Although in many cases, the reach is an important KPI, but I would check the following factors as well:
- Who do we want to influence and convince?
- Does he/she fit my golf club’s brand personality? Brand personality should be part of your marketing strategy.
- What is the engagement rate on his blog/Facebook page/etc.? So the person might have millions of followers, but if there is no interaction between him and his community, then he/she is not so valuable.
- How passionate is he/she about our golf club? Pick topics that can be useful for your golf club!
- Is there potential to turn influencers into advocates?
- Our best interest is to think how can we build long term relationship.
- Can we provide real value to the influencer? (E.g. insider information, free all-inclusive weekend at the golf club, product samples etc.)
- Know the outcome you would like to measure.
I would define the budget for your influencer marketing activities based on your needs.
Here are some tools to find influencers:
- Research Hashtags,
- Google Alerts,
- Social Mention
- FohrCard
- NeoReach
- Famebit
