Understanding Your Web Sites Audience: Potential Members
Produced by: Red Rock Partners. All Rights Reserved. Copyright ©2000.

In the golf club industry, there are four primary audiences that your web site will address. These audiences are, in no particular order of importance, existing members; potential members; potential users of club facilities; and employees of the club. In some cases a club web site will, right out of the starting gate, address completely all four audiences. In other cases, one audience will be granted more time, energy and space than the others. The decision regarding which audience(s) your site is going to address, and how completely it will address them, is based on your clubs long-term and short-term needs. This article will look at one of these four primary audiences, potential club members, showing you ways to keep content fresh, deliver helpful information, and support the long-term goals of the club.

The state of affairs over the past ten years. With the strong economy of the 1990's, and continuing growth throughout 2000, most clubs have not had an issue with maintaining a golf wait list. Certainly there are the clubs who lost membership due to the building of a new clubhouse, or dramatic increases due to course renovation. But these clubs only have to get by until the capital improvements are completed, and the membership will pick up again. This is good for the short-term, but there is change brewing in the way your future membership will expect you, their club management, to act.

Real-world example of a culture change. All of us can remember when it was a status symbol to carry around a cell phone. They cost thousands of dollars to buy, and the service fees were outrageous. Look around today - everyone has a cell phone. What happened? Two things: the cost came down, and the young adults of this world embraced a culture change. Starting in the mid-1990's, the majority of people found it de rigueur to be connected via a cell phone. The same culture change has happened with the Internet. Young adults, and other groups, have embraced this change in record numbers, with adoption rates exceeding those of the TV, telephone, radio, and automobile. What does this mean to a Country Club? It means that the club needs to take this culture change into account when valuing the effect of having a club web site.

Clubs can take advantage of the culture change. Using a web site to sell the club to potential members does not mean that management needs to scrap its' existing marketing strategy. A web site, and associated e-mail marketing programs, can support the current strategy. Have your membership director put himself or herself in the shoes of a potential member. How much information can they get over the phone? How much information can they get from the hardcopy brochures? And how expensive is it to be upgrading those glossy, full-color brochures? A better strategy is to have the membership director take ownership of the sections of the web site that are focused on attracting new members.

Using the web site as a business tool. Consider the audience we are discussing - potential members. How do they become members? They find out about the club, they learn about the club, they compare it to their other options, they request to become members, and, finally, they become members. Where does the web site fit into this process? Let's take a look.

To find out about the club, a potential member might look in local area on-line yellow pages, something like www.qwestdex.com. They will find your club listed, hopefully with a link directly to your site. If not, they will call your club. Your membership director will visit with the potential member, answer questions, and direct the potential member to the club web site. Here the potential member will find everything that the membership director talked about, with associated images, additional text, etc. Now the potential member will look for alternative options, going through the same process that they went through with your club. And what will they be comparing? In most cases, web sites. Should the potential member desire to be part of your club, they will then begin the application process. Payment is made, and they go on the waiting list. The member checks the club web site periodically to see where they are on the waiting list, and to see if there are any new benefits to them as a participant on the waiting list.

Notice that the potential member has went through the following stages: find the club; learn about the club; compare options; submit membership request; and goes on the waiting list. Of these five stages, the web site has played a role in four of them. Do you need any more reasons to reassess your web site, looking at it from a potential member's point of view?

Side Note: Maintaining the web site. The question of maintaining your web site is a sticky one. There are companies that will do it for free, based on advertising revenue they generate from your site. This can be good for a club that cannot afford the customized work available from a dedicated web design company. The drawback, of course, is that you do not have a technology partner to work with you, helping you keep abreast of the changes that are relevant to your business needs. However, in the context of what we are looking at, who actually formats, codes, implements, and publishes the changes is immaterial. The fact of the matter is that someone has to create the content, and create it on a regular basis.

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