Case Study: Golf Coaching Facebook Advert

If you're here you probably want to know how to avoid shanking & slicing it when it comes to your Facebook ads.

Well, you're in the right place. After reading this guide to Facebook Ads for Golf Pros you’ll be hitting the sweet spot in no time.

Ok John, that’s enough golf analogies from you!

Marketing can seem like some mysterious art that only a select few are blessed with. But this has never been less true. With the online world we have access to numerous guides and videos on any topic (just like this one). And Facebook even allows us to spy on our competitor’s ads (if you know how).

This article will detail the exact process you need to make your Facebook ads a success. I run a local business marketing agency in the UK called eFix Marketing and have worked with golf professionals like you to improve their marketing. Below is the process I used for one golf coach.

He didn’t have a huge budget so we couldn’t test multiple ads and find the best (as we usually do). He had a £40 (c. $50) budget for half a month’s advertising. This achieved 65 landing page views at 63 pence (78 cents) each.

Why Facebook Ads?

Unless you’re a budding Instagram influencer, Facebook ads are likely your best option when it comes to advertising golf coaching.

Here are 3 reasons why:

1. You can target locally. The problem with blog posts and platforms like Instagram and YouTube is that you could get lots of fans but many won’t ever use your services because they’re on the other side of the world!

2. Retargeting. You can get back in touch with those that have shown interest before. Maybe you have an email list or website? Facebook allows you to target those on your email list or who’ve visited you site with an ad.

3. It’s visual but you don’t need to be a pro photographer. Golf coaching is a very visual business so it makes sense to use pictures and videos (which you can’t on Google ads). But the beauty of Facebook is your photos don’t need to be top notch (in fact I’ve found again and again ‘real’ looking photos outperform ‘fake’ stock photos).

But have caution. Although Facebook paid ads can be very cheap they can also get expensive if you don’t know what you are doing. So make sure to educate yourself before jumping in. Or if you haven’t got the time you can hire someone to handle it for you (wink wink).

Read More: Why Facebook Advertising is Superior to Traditional Advertising

Creating your advert

What you’ll need:

1. A photo or video

2. Some text

That’s it!

Photos & Videos

You’ll just need one but it’s worth assembling several options and picking the best. If you have the ad budget you’d test several and see which people like best.

These are my top tips for photos:

1. Make sure the weather’s nice. A nice blue sky is much more enticing than a big black raincloud

2. Include people (but get their permission). People like pictures more if they include other people. Especially if there is someone of a similar demographic. You’ll have to be careful here though as if all those in the photo are men then this might given women the impression it’s not for them. Likewise, if it’s all young children then teenagers may be put off and think “it’s not cool”.

3. If you’re into filters or photo editing wizardry you may improve the photo slightly by upping the saturation to make it look more colourful. But don’t go overboard or it’ll look fake!

But don’t let perfectionism get in the way of action. People are very forgiving if things aren’t 100% perfect. It makes you look genuine.

With this advert we tried to think about how to make the advert stand out and also demonstrate this golf coach’s USPs. What resulted is the following photo. Being nitpicky I think the colour is a bit off. But it really does it’s job at making your ad stand out. If you don’t use tech for your coaching think about what else makes you different? Group coaching? Fun? Whatever it is your picture should show that. A picture really can tell a thousand words.

The ad copy (text)

To write a winning Facebook ad you don’t need to be a fancy advertising executive sitting behind a mahogany desk in Madison Avenue. In fact super-sales-y language is usually off-putting.

This is the basics of advertising copy structure:

1. Get the attention of your potential customers

2. Tell them what you offer

3. Tell that what you want them to do

That’s exactly what we did with our copy:

“Want to learn golf? Claim your free lesson now! Book here: www.yourgolfacademy.co.uk/golflesson”

1. “Want to learn golf?” Asking a question get attention from your potential customers. It also succinctly tells them that this advert is about golf coaching.

2. “Claim your free lesson now!” Free is the most powerful word in advertising. This is because humans are very risk averse. If it’s free there’s no risk. If you can’t offer a free lesson think about what you can offer to get them to click.

3. “Book here: LINK” This clearly tells them what to do next so there is no ambiguity. In hindsight “Learn more” may have worked better as most people who see the ad probably won’t be convinced to book before learning more about it.

Targeting your advert

The beauty of Facebook paid ads is you can precisely target the type of people you want to see you ad (this is called targeting for those of you not familiar with advertising lexicon).

You can go very detailed with Facebook targeting e.g. “mothers who are aged 25-35 that like both golf and wine.”

However, the more targeted you go the smaller your audience size. This means you’ll burn through it quickly and won’t be able to run the ad for long.

My rule of thumb is the shorter time you intend to run the ad the more targeted your ads can be. So if you intend to run them for months very little targeting will probably work better. In this case we were only running it for 20 days. Our audience was 60,000 which is about right.

This is the targeting we used:

LOCATION: We set a radius of 17m around the golf course as we felt that beyond that point people may be interested in lessons but it’d be too far to travel.

AGE RANGE: 45-65+. This range will obviously depend on your target audience. In this instance it was middle aged and up.

GENDER: Both. Men will tend to respond better but there are still women interested. Women may prefer group coaching which is more social. If you’ve found that it maybe worth just targeting men with this ad and setting up a separate ad for women. Pro Tip: Use pictures of women in ads targeted and women and vice versa.

INTERESTS: We targeted 19 interests in total. In this case we focused primarily on people who liked sports and likely had money to spend. This gave us interests such as skiing, yachting, and horse-riding.

An alternative audience you could try is a lookalike audience. It’s called a lookalike because Facebook finds people similar to your current customers. You tell Facebook your current customers by uploading an a email list or installing a Facebook tracking pixel on your site which tracks all visitors to your site from the date it was installed.

Ad spend

Facebook paid ads can be really cheap if you get them right. This is because Facebook likes good content on the platform. So if people like your ads they’ll charge you less to reach people.

We had a small budget of just £2 a day which was sufficient. However, for optimal results you’ll want to spend more, at least initially. This will allow you to test different ad copy, photos, and targeting.

Where to send the traffic

Don’t use your website! Ok, that’s an over-statement. But if there is one thing I’ve learnt over years of Facebook advertising it’s that most websites are terrible at converting visitors into customers.

I’d recommend investing in a landing page building software such as Clickfunnels. There are 3 reasons for doing this:

1. You can build a page just for the offer you use in the advert. There’s no distracting links to anything else on the site so the user only has one option- to sign up.

2. No coding: You can build the page you envision in your head rather than paying a web designer. Clickfunnels is built for non-technical people and their customer service is second to none if you do get stuck.

3. Testing: You can easily setup two pages and see which performs the best. Clickfunnels will automatically send half your traffic to one page and the other half to the other so you have a true test. Once you have a winner you can change the losing page and test again. Your landing page will just keep improving.

You can learn more about Clickfunnels here:

Conclusion

At the beginning of this post you were a Golf Pro. Now you can add Facebook Ads Pro to your resume.

So go smash it and I’ll see you at the 19th hole!

If you have any questions you’d like answered you can reach me at info@efixmarketing.com

I've also got a free guide to mini-golf marketing which you or a friend may find helpful.