When a business moves, it loses something that never shows up on a balance sheet: everybody nearby knowing it is there. That was the problem Pure Swing, an indoor golf studio, had this September.
It had outgrown its unit in Surbiton and moved to a bigger studio in Hersham. Better space, but a town that had never heard of it. The grand opening weekend, 26 and 27 September, needed to be full.
The numbers
What | Result |
|---|---|
Ad spend | £330 |
Times the ads were shown | 94,970 |
Local people reached | 55,321 |
Visits to the booking page | 4,100, at 8p each |
Seats booked over the two days | 175 |
Ad spend per seat booked | £1.89 |
That is roughly 4 seats booked for every 100 visits to the booking page.
Four things any local business can copy
1. Say the town names out loud
The first advert opened with “Attention Hersham, Walton, Weybridge, Esher, Cobham and Molesey”. People stop scrolling when they see where they live. A generic “come and try indoor golf” would have blended into everything else.
2. Sell the distance, not the product
The second advert said the studio was 387 yards from Hersham station, “a driver and a chip for most of you”. For a golfer, that is a picture, not a statistic. The job of the ad was to make a new location feel close and easy, and it did.
3. Send people somewhere they can act
Every ad went straight to the booking page with a “Book now” button. We measured bookings, not likes or comments. If a campaign cannot tell you how many people did the thing you wanted, it is hard to know whether it worked.
4. Treat the weekend as the start
Everyone who booked now knows where the new studio is and has been through the door, and tens of thousands more have seen it. That is the audience the next year of the business is built on. The opening weekend was never the finish line.
The takeaway. A small local budget goes a long way when the ad speaks to a specific place and a specific moment. The hard part is usually not the ads. It is knowing that awareness is the leak in the first place.
Read the full Pure Swing story.