Reynolds Golf Academy is a golf school located at Reynolds Plantation, a residential golf community in Greensboro, Georgia. Reynolds Golf Academy offers golf lessons and corporate outings and is run by six employees, including four golf instructors, an administrative assistant and a corporate salesperson.
Challenge
Charlie King, golf professional and director of instruction at Reynolds Golf Academy, knew it was time to expand the organization's online marketing program. He and his small staff had been relying mainly on traditional marketing methods to reach their target audience. But magazine advertisements and direct mail were expensive and difficult to measure. And in a down economy, with many consumers cutting back on luxury expenditures, the pressure was on to make Reynolds Golf Academy stand out from its competitors.
Charlie first encountered Hubspot's tools at a seminar led by David Meerman Scott, marketing strategist and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. After evaluating the Golf Academy's website using Hubspot's Website Grader, a free search engine optimization (SEO) tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of websites, Charlie was convinced that there was more he could do to improve the organization's web presence.
Charlie knew he wanted to employ an "inbound" approach to marketing -- one that focused on creating useful, relevant content to attract qualified customers who want to be found. He just needed the tools to implement that strategy quickly, effectively and affordably.
Solution
In August 2008, Charlie began using Hubspot's inbound marketing software and was assigned an inbound marketing specialist to provide him with advice and help him utilize the powerful tools available to him.
Having a website that was more than an "online brochure" was important to Charlie. He wanted the Golf Academy's website to be an interactive destination where web visitors could learn about his "New Rules" of golf instruction through YouTube videos and his free downloadable e-books.
Charlie began publishing a blog on the website using HubSpot's blogging software and learned how to optimize the website's pages using search engine optimization tools. To get acquainted with Hubspot's methodology, Charlie and his team extensively used success.hubspot.com, an active online marketing forum where Hubspot customers and employees share ideas and strategies about online marketing and Hubspot tools.
Charlie now monitors traffic to the website using marketing analytics and uses keyword analysis tools to see which keywords are bringing in qualified sales leads. Using HubSpot's competitor analysis tool, he can see how the golf academy's website is performing against its competitors.
When visitors to the website sign up for the newsletter or download one of Charlie's three e-books on golf instruction, Charlie uses Hubspot's lead management system to track where the inbound links are coming from and determine which strategies are working. He finds that Reynolds Golf Academy now gets most of its customers via the web or word-of-mouth.
"Hubspot has helped me execute my online marketing strategy," said Charlie. "I feel like I'm on the cutting edge of where marketing is going to be into the future. I'm getting a jump on my competitors."
Results
Charlie's results since signing up with HubSpot have been impressive. "We built a website that has increased in traffic, that has increased in inbound links," said Charlie. In search engine results, "The number of keywords that we show up on has gone up dramatically."
More specifically, he has seen the following results:
- Increased traffic and lead volume by over 50x
- Accumulated over 300 blog subscribers
- Attracted 4,191 inbound links from over 230 domains
- The website's traffic rank has improved from 5.9 million to between 1 million and 2 million
Website Visitors
Blog Subscribers
