Ko Olina Golf Club case study

Initial research identified several challenges for Ko Olina.  First, we found that visiting golfers tended to scope out the local courses before their trip.  That meant we needed to reach them at home.  Second, a large percentage of Ko Olina’s guests are visitors from Japan which expanded the geographical net even further.  Finally, we had to determine the right message.  There are lots of nice golf courses on Oahu.  Not as nice as Ko Olina, of course. 🙂

Suffice it to say, the club operates in a high competition market.  The problem was how to stand out amid the noise of direct competitors vying for visiting golfer dollars as well as other online advertisers going after tourist attention in general.

The approach was a multi-channel, conversion-optimized digital advertising funnel.  At the top of the funnel, we employed a brand awareness strategy to introduce Ko Olina to a cold audience (people who had never heard of the course) across the world using Programmatic Digital Display Ads.  At the mid-funnel level (a warm audience of people who are aware of the business) we employed Facebook ads and Google Display ads to showcase the multitude of unique selling points Ko Olina had to offer.  Finally, the bottom-funnel audience of golfers ready to buy were served Google search ads and Yelp ads to drive traffic to landing pages, which did the work of converting these interested leads to online customers.

The result was a 431% increase in unique visitors to the website, with 20% of ad-driven clicks resulting in online purchases. 🙂