Once I received a piece of advice on website design and development: Decide on a consistent brand message and tone, one that you’re committed to presenting consistently across.! Later I will explain it in regard to the new website of London Golf Club.
Today, sophisticated golf clubs and other marketers are seeking opportunities to engage with their website visitors. In the second half of my article, I will list some promising golf club websites for inspiration.
To engage and facilitate conversation on our website, I recommend using these two options:
- Interactive content: surveys, quizzes, interactive images, live chat (check out my live chat service!), personalized membership/service offers, etc. Such content will help you to capture more prospect/customer information, needs, goals, and expectations.
- Scrollytelling: can be thought of as visual storytelling that heightens a story and hooks you into its narrative. It is a good way to engage and actively keep your audience ‘in touch’ with the story they are consuming. It can facilitate the page navigation and simplify the user experience without compromising the interactivity of the creative and overall engagement. This is a creative way to present, for instance the 27 years of history of London Golf Club.
People now want
- responsive storytelling with full-size photographs,
- AR & VR experience (see IKEA VR experience),
- parallax scrolling, and
- maybe a few data-heavy animations to top it all off.
By using these techniques you will be able to tell a compelling and dynamic story about your golf club/resort.
London Golf Club – new website – review
I shared these with you because London Golf Club has just launched the latest version of its website. Based on the above-mentioned storytelling techniques and my 15 years of experience in online marketing I will review hereby the London Golf Club website.
This picture I saw first after typing in the URL of the London Golf Club website.
I found these to be good on the website
Psychologists have found that it’s possible to influence with videos the moods of audiences. Video content consumption is in the sky. This is why it was a great idea to show the experiences in the London Golf Club with video.
Hubspot found 54% of people want marketers to produce more video content. Cisco recently declared that by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic.
The usage of superb photos is helping to convey well the positioning and the brand values of the London Golf Club. The simplicity of the web design is also good.
The digital magazine of the club conveys much more effectively its brand values.
It is smart that they are using Google Tag Manager to manage their tags easily (for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more.).
That is about as much good I can say about the new website design.
I would change & improve these
- Align the web design with the brand values & positioning of the club. Now it does not look like as venue of high-end golf tournaments and where golfers can get impeccable services & the only Joint Venture Partner Golf Club of The European Tour. (E.g. font types, microinteractions)
- Where is the enthusiasm & pride????
- It should be obvious what are the goals of the website. What London Golf Club is expecting from visitors to do on its website. (E.g. sell more tee time, events, membership, etc.) You can also prioritize the call-to-action buttons with different colors.
- Be clear which call-to-action button is sales focused + where is the Members area.
- It would be luckier if the visitor does not have to scroll down to see the entire video box on the main page. For instance, by optimizing the size of the header.
- Social proofs are not utilized to help increasing conversions on the website + to build trust.
- Lack of VR & AR experience. See MACDONALD Portal Hotel, Golf, Spa‘s solution.
- Facilitate conversations and interactions with the website visitors by using interactive content (e.g. infographics/table to compare the various membership offers).
- When you are first time one a website you can easily get lost if you do not get online support. Hence live chat service help your visitors to get the answers to their questions and you obtain more customer information & mitigate churn rate. This can be a beginning of a beautiful relationship.
- Keep the sentences shorter. Be careful not to have a very long paragraph either.
Some golf club websites for consideration:
Here are some golf club websites that I think can be good benchmarks: