Running Successful Corporate Golf Events

Yes we specialise in Golf gifts. We do however have more general products that you can customise - such as polo shirts and umbrellas. That extra personal touch does make a big difference on a gift. Lets face it things like ball markers and pitch repairs are the empitome of functional dullness but if you put a picture of your child or spouse on it, then it becomes something that is cherished and cared for.

Corporates and other business still love to get up close and personal with their customers and prospects. The corporate event has been under pressure like most deemed not essential marketing activities. Our view here at Spectrum Golf is that whatever business you think you are in you are wrong. You are always in the marketing business and whether you are speaking to a prospect or an existing customer you are marketing. Marketing of your business gives the life blood of sales and the corporate event is more important today than it has ever been.
Why ? Well your existing customers should almost always be your number 1 concern. In times of economic malaise getting new customers is getting more difficult and other companies will be eyeing up your existing customers to get them to abandon you.
Why would you customers abandon you? Either you offer a poor deal or most likely they have forgotten how good you are and why they chose you in the first place. There is nothing better than a face to face social event to firm up your business relations.

I'll stress again that if you let your customers drift away and not pay them 100% attention they can leave. Bind that relationship stronger and stronger with personal events and gifts like you find at Spectrum Golf and you'll go a long way to keeping a strong business.

We will be updating this lense over time with tips on how to maximise your corporate golf events.

I have to admit I am going to building up the content of this lens in a bit of a "brain dump" way. And I'll be refining and tidying as I go. I just wanted to put out there the important point that corporate events in the context of building a business' bottom line can be a somewhat vague. How do you measure the effectiveness of these events. The most important thing for any business is to define a system and process to follow that has a predefined sequence of steps and measurable results. This is essential to marketing and consider your corporate golf event to be a marketing tool.
So for now just a simple bullet point list of parts of your system and process for customer retention and growth using corporate golf events.

1) segment your customers into different grades. Those that will be buying big in the future. Ignore the rest.

This is a really important point even when thinking about social events for your business. The harsh economic reality is that you don't want
to be spending hard earned marketing cash on repeat business opportunities that are dead ends. If you can find a way of categorising your customer lists into those that are most likely to buy again against those that will not then you can laser focus on building relationships with the ones that will spend. How do you do this? Good question. Starter for ten now is this - look at those existing customers that have purchased more and look at any distinguishing features of them. What sort of business are they in, what did they buy first, maybe what sort of person runs the business in which case this is the sort of person you would be inviting to the events.

2) Set up an online campaign maybe via facebook that will be asking them what there issues and concerns are.

I like this idea as it does something very powerful. When you put on the event you need to demonstrating why the customer does business with you and why then need to continue to do so into the future. If you can find out the questions they have and answer them on the day then they will get a lot of benefit from it. A corporate golf event such as a golf day is all well and good but it is recommended that you involve some tangible business activity within it that can prime the pump for getting more business from the attendees.

Update: when I wrote this a few months back facebook was still just a idea in most people's minds but very rapidly it is becoming a mainstream business marketing tool. All businesses should be reaching out to contact with customers and potential customers using facebook fan pages and trying things back to your website.

3) tailor a theme of the day to those needs.

Facebook strategy is still only starting to take shape in what is best practice. The main mistake companies seem to make is just having a facebook version of their website and this is boring. So find an interesting topic and make the page about that and of course you can publish updates related to the topic and people will find your business indirectly.
4) drive before, during and after with the facebook site.
5) use facebook to do followup after the event.